“There has been for many years a rapid decline among the Protestant churches of the spirit of revivals and of the manifestations of the power of the Holy Spirit. Not only is there great ignorance on the doctrines of the Bible, but almost universally a positive antagonism to anything like the supernatural in religious experience. “Just as Jesus was rejected and crucified by the professed church at the close of the Jewish age, so the Holy Spirit is being despised and crucified by the professed church at the close of the Gentile age. Just as Jesus was rejected from the nice homes of Bethlehem, and had to go into a stable to find a place to be born, and where he could utter his infant cries, so the Holy Spirit to-day is utterly rejected from thousands of Protestant churches, and he has to go into rented halls, slum missions, canvas tents, and woods meetings to find a place to utter his voice through the lips of those who know and feel him. Just as there were a few who had supernatural discernment to recognize and worship the infant God, so there are now a few who discern the personality and operation of the Holy Spirit, and pour out to him their gold and frankincense and myrrh. Just as the people of Bethlehem, who had turned the unborn Savior from their door were soon made to wail by the king’s order of assassination, so the thousands of nominal churches which now reject the work of the Holy Spirit from their doors will soon wail under the awful tribulation that is rapidly coming on all the earth. Oh, if the Protestant churches could only see the day of their visitation, and that the history of the way the Jews treated Jesus is being exactly repeated over and over again in the way the modern churches treat the Holy Spirit, and that the same doom that overtook the Jewish church for rejecting Christ, will speedily overtake the modern churches for rejecting the Holy Spirit! “Another feature of the present crisis is, God is working mainly through individuals, and not so much through machinery. Thousands of individuals in Europe and America have been called of the Spirit to launch out into soul-saving work along lines of personal enterprise more than ever in past ages. “There never was a time in the world’s history when Christian men and women felt so led of God not to wait for committees nor the red tape of ecclesiastical authority, but to hurry forth under a personal call from God and do what they could with their individual means and talents for the saving of souls, the sanctifying of believers, and preparing the chosen few to meet Jesus. There never seemed a time when anything like church machinery would run to seed so quick as now. Even if an enterprise that is started definitely as a holiness work gets a few officers and committees in it, in a few days or months it gets just as churchly and high-headed and dictatorial as an old popish institution. For this reason God is utilizing individuality in his kingdom as never before.