"Yet, for all I have just said, I feel it in my bones as Mrs. Beecher Stowe's old negress 'mammy' used to say, that this foul demonstration on this golden Sunday morning, is the unauthorized unofficial beginning of the Anti-christ movement." There was a couple of hundred yards between the tail of the actual procession, and Ralph and his companion. Hundreds of people thronged the sidewalks, but the road was fairly clear, and along the gutter-way there swept a gang of boys with coarse, raucous laughter, kicking--football fashion--two or three of the half-burned Bibles that had fallen from the cauldron-altar on the car. The church Secretary visibly shuddered at the sacrilege. A pained look shot into Ralph Bastin's face, as he said: "Such wanton, open sacrilege as that could only have become possible by the gradual decay of reverence for the word of God, brought about largely by the so-called 'Higher critics' of the last thirty years, the men who broke Spurgeon's heart, the Issachars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, those 'knowing ones' who, like Issachar, thought that they knew better than God." The two men walked on together in deep talk. Ralph learned that his companion was Robert J. Baring, principal of the great shipping firm, and of merchants and importers. Baring was an educated man, and of considerable culture, and Ralph and he found that they had very much in common. But that which perhaps constituted the closest tie between them was the fact that both had lost their nearest and dearest, and were _left_ to face the coming horrors of the Anti-christ reign, and the hideousness of the great Tribulation. "God grant," Ralph said once, as they talked, "that when the moment comes, as come it will, that we are called upon to stand for God, or die for Him, that we may witness a good confession." CHAPTER IV. FORESHADOWINGS. A month had elapsed since the translation of the church. A new order in everything had arisen--Religious, Governmental, Social. The spirit of lawlessness grew fiercer and fouler each day, it is true, yet there was a supreme authority, a governmental restriction, that prevented the fouler, the more destructive passions of the baser kind of men and women, having full scope. A curious kind of religion had been set up in many of the churches. The services were sensuous to a degree, and were a strange mixture of Romanism, Spiritism (demonology,) Theosophy, Materialism, and other kindred cults. Almost every week some new ode or hymn was produced, every sentiment of which was an applauding of man, for God was utterly ignored, and the key-note of the Harvard college "class Poem," for the year 1908, became the key-note of the Sunday Song of the "worshippers" in the churches: "_No_ God for a gift God gave us-- MANKIND ALONE must save us." It was a curious situation, since it was "man" worshipping himself. Presently, the centre of worship would shift from man, to _The_ Man of Sin--the Anti-christ.