Dr. Lyman Beecher is quoted as saying:—­

     “There is a state of society to be formed by an extended
     combination of institutions, religious, civil and literary, which
     never exists without the co-operation of an educated ministry.”

Chas. Beecher, in his sermon at the dedication of the Second Presbyterian church, Ft.  Wayne, Ind., Feb. 22, 1846, said:—­

“Thus are the ministry of the evangelical Protestant denominations not only formed all the way up under a tremendous pressure of merely human fear, but they live, and move, and breathe, in a state of things radically corrupt, and appealing every hour to every baser element of their nature to hush up the truth and bow the knee to the power of apostasy.  Was not this the way things went with Rome?  Are we not living her life over again?  And what do we see just ahead?  Another general council!  A world’s convention!  Evangelical Alliance and Universal Creed.”

The Banner of Light of July 30, 1864, said:—­

“A system will be unfolded sooner or later that will embrace in its folds Church and State; for the object of the two should be one and the same.  The time is rapidly approaching when the world will be startled by a voice that shall say to every form of oppression and wrong, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.’  Old things are rapidly passing away in the religious and social, as well as in the political, world.  Behold all things must be formed anew.”

The Church Advocate, in March, 1870, speaking of the formation of an “Independent American Catholic Church,” a movement now agitated in this country, said:—­

     “There is evidently some secret power at work which may be
     preparing the world for great events in the near future.”

A Mr. Havens, in a speech delivered in New York, a few years ago, said:—­

“For my own part I wait to see the day when a Luther shall spring up in this country who shall found a great American Catholic church, instead of a great Roman Catholic church; and who shall teach men that they can be good Catholics without professing allegiance to a pontiff on the other side of the Atlantic.”

There is every indication that at no distant day such a church will be seen, not indeed, raised up through the instrumentality of a Luther, but rather through the operation of the same spirit that inspired a Fernando Nunez or a Torquemada.

Chapter Ten.

The Mark Of The Beast.