Taking away the gospel from the earth, then, is not a new thing; not a thing peculiar to the first centuries of the Christian era. It had been done before when transgression led the people to depart from its ordinances and disregard its precepts. So, too, after the introduction of the gospel by the personal ministry of the Son of God, when men transgressed its laws, and corrupted its teachings and ordinances by their vain and foolish fancies, or by their efforts to modify it to make it acceptable to a pagan nation, because of transgression, it was taken from among them. Not abruptly. Not in such a sense as that the Christians some night in the third century all laid down to sleep good, faithful saints and awoke next morning stripped of the Gospel and turned pagans. No; but as the elders and bishops who held divine authority were destroyed by persecution, or passed away by natural death, the people with each succeeding generation growing worse and worse, and less and less worthy of the gospel--false teachers without authority from God usurped power, corrupted the gospel and the church until the false displaced the true, and anti-Christ sat in the temple of God. Nothing remained but fragments of the gospel; here a doctrine and there a principle, like single stones fallen and rolled away from the ruined wall; but no one able to tell where they belonged in the structure, and so many of the stones missing that to reconstruct the wall with what remains is out of the question. The fragmentary accounts of the gospel, as recorded by some of the apostles, and their associates, is all that was left to the world. All! But this was much. It has stood to the people since the days of the great apostasy as the law of carnal commandments did to Israel after the transgression which occasioned the gospel to be taken from them. Those fragments of the truth, however disconnected, have been as the light of the moon and the stars to the night traveler; not the sunlight, indeed, which makes so clear the way, but light which, however dim, is still better than absolute darkness; and will, I trust, yet lead many of our Father's children into the sunlight of Christ's restored gospel. It will not be necessary to examine at length the Protestant argument, viz.: The gospel had been corrupted, and buried under the rubbish of idolatry for ages it is true, but the "Reformers" of the sixteenth century cleared away the rubbish and brought to light again the gospel, and restored the Church of Christ in all its simplicity of organization, and efficacy of power. Of this one need only say that the gospel having been taken from the earth, and divine authority lost, the only way for their restoration is through the re-opening of the heavens and the committing of a new dispensation thereof to men. As this answers the argument, it is only necessary to prove that Protestants admit the apostasy.