And is it not the testimony of all history, that just in proportion as any popular and extensive ecclesiastical organization loses the Spirit and power of God, it clamors for the support of the civil arm?
Let, now, an ecclesiastical organization be formed by these churches; let the government legalize such organization, and give it power (a power which it will not have till the government does grant it) to enforce upon the people the dogmas which the different denominations can all adopt as the basis of union, and what do we have?
Just what the prophecy represents: an image to the papal beast, endowed with life by the two-horned beast, to speak and act with power.
And are there any indications of such a movement?
The preliminary question, that of the grand union of all the churches, is now profoundly agitating the religious world.
In May, 1869, S.M.Manning, D.D., in a sermon in Broadway Tabernacle, New York, spoke of the recent efforts to unite all the churches in the land into co-operation on the common points of their faith, as a "_prominent and noteworthy sign of the times_" 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.