ute coalescence into
one vast system of the world's many religious systems and of the
world's commerce. The most that the Seers of God, in His church, dared
to say of the future was that the _principle_ of such a _combined_
system was suggested by the text of Rev. xiii. For the second Beast
'caused the earth and them that dwell therein to worship the first
Beast . . . . And he had power . . . to cause that as many as would
not worship the image of the Beast should be killed. And he causeth
all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a
mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and _that no man might
buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or
the number of his name_.' Here, for nearly two thousand years, was the
principle of this Hell-devised, Devil-developed combined system of
religion and commerce, prophesied, but now few even of God's choicest
saints realized all that would mean.

"The nineteenth and early twentieth century Christendom had lost the
Bible ideal of Christianity, and had substituted a very material idea
for God's idea. The two decades--last of the nineteenth, and first of
the twentieth centuries--were marked by immense religious activities,
but while a merely religious movement might manufacture a Christendom,
it could never make Christians.

"To be religious is one thing to be a Christian quite another thing.
The vast bulk of the members of the so-called Christian Churches of
those years, had never been born again from above.

"Christian in name (by virtue of membership in a Church; or by virtue
of their subscription to a creed; or by a careful attendance upon the
forms of their own particular church) they were yet _only religious_,
because God's word regards those only as _Christians_ in whom Christ
indwells, and none can be indwelt by Christ save those into whom He has
come in the birth from above. ('Born again' ones.) '_Except_ a man be
born again, he CANNOT _see_ the Kingdom of God' much more live in it.

"'That which is born of the _flesh_ is flesh,' and 'flesh and blood
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God,' but only those _spiritually_
born--born from above. We only become Christians by _re_-generation.

"In the years immediately before the 'Rapture,' _professing_
Christians, and even _professedly_ Christian ministers, men who had
taken vows before God to preach the 'whole counsel of God,' and who
received their salary avowedly fo