ver since the
Devil's lie in Eden was absorbed by, and ruined man, there has been a
proneness, a latent tendency to idolatry in the human race. And the
_manifestations_ of this tendency have not been confined to peoples who
in their recent past have been won from idol worship.

As late as the revolution days, in cultured, polished France, busts of
Marat and others, were greeted in the streets with bursts of
Hallelujahs, by the populace, and, even in the churches, all over
France, the people sang odes and Hallelujahs, and bowed themselves
before these busts, and at the mention of their names. Marat,
especially was treated as divine and "was universally deified," and
"divine" worship of his image was everywhere set up in churches.

And the "worship of the Beast" came about easily, and as the natural
transition from the world's earlier adulation of the "Man of Sin."

Millions upon millions of his image, in the form of charms, were worn
like the _eikons_ of the Greek church. In the hour of death these
_eikons_ (likenesses) "of the Beast," were held before the eyes of the
passing soul, as the crucifix was held, (in the old days before the
destruction of the older ecclesiastical systems,) before the eyes of
the dying Romanist and Ritualist.

In that first three months of the _second_ half of the seven years of
Anti-christ, much had changed in every way in the world. Under the
supreme dictation of Apleon changes commanded by him were effected
throughout the whole world, in one week, that would have occupied a
century in the old days of the nineteenth century, say.

Babylon the Great, which had long since been rebuilt, had become the
world's commercial centre. It was exclusively a _commercial_ city,
there was nothing ecclesiastical (Babylon _ecclesiastical_, the
religious system had been destroyed, when all _religious_ head-ship had
been summed up in Apleon).

There was nothing military, in the New Babylon, and though every
vileness in the form of entertainment was to be found in the great
city, all this was but the recreative side of the life of the
commercial people of the world's metropolis.

Ever increasingly, during the 19th century, and the first decade of the
20th, commerce had been growing as clamorous and as exciting as the
"horse-leech," never satisfied, ever crying "give, give." It had
clamoured for a common currency, common weights and measures, common
code of terms, and a hundred and one kindred thin