Of course, when these men talk about the church they include all that they call branches of the church. They claim that we are now living in the period symbolized by the church at Laodicea. There is not even a hint that there were any prophetic symbolisms in the condition of these churches. Of course they do not claim that the condition of the church at Ephesus was prophetic of a future period—its condition merely portrayed the condition of the churches then. That is absurd, for the six other churches mentioned were not like Ephesus—in fact, there is not a hint that the Ephesus church was like any other church of that day, and yet the theory requires that the condition of the church at Ephesus correctly represented all the churches of that period. And then the other six churches are said to represent, or symbolize, or forecast the condition of the church at certain periods. The marking off the period that each church is supposed to represent is purely arbitrary. No one can prove, even if the theory were true, that we live in the Laodicean period. But the whole theory is fantastic, absurd, and a reflection on God. Think what the theory involves. How could a church then determine the character of the whole church during a certain period hundreds of years later? Or did God by direct miraculous power make these churches to be like what he knew the whole church would be at different periods? Or did he by direct power make the periods to be like the churches of Asia? In either case people had to be what God by direct power chose to make them. Where then is there room for freedom of will, or freedom of action? Any one who can believe that each of these churches was a forecast of the whole church at a certain period can believe any foolish, fantastic, absurd thing that the wildest imagination can conceive. He does not have to have any evidence—he just lets his imagination run riot. I would like for some of its advocates to tell me when that notion was hatched out, and by whom. PHILADELPHIA AND THE HOUR OF TRIAL Foy E. Wallace, Jr., passes over to me a document which was written in Detroit with a request that I say something about it. The document would fill my page. As much of it has no special bearing on the points sought to be made, I will make liberal and fair quotations from it. The passage commented upon first is Rev. 3:10: “Because thou didst keep the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of trial, that hour which is to come upon the whole world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.” I quote: “The promise. ‘The hour of trial’ was ahead, but Philadelphia was to be kept from it. Not saved through it, but kept from it....