"How often, in the old days--say from the mid-eighties--professing Christian men, when expostulated with as to the difference between their professed creed of the Sunday, and their daily practice in business, would say, 'oh, bosh! religion is one thing, business is another!' Then, as the years moved on, all kinds of trading concerns sprang up professedly religious, and conducted on professedly religious lines. But even the truest Seers in the Church of God would hardly have dared to predict that in a comparatively few years the final outcome of this trend in events would be an absolute coalescence into one vast system of the world's many religious systems and of the world's commerce. The most that the Seers of God, in His church, dared to say of the future was that the _principle_ of such a _combined_ system was suggested by the text of Rev. xiii. For the second Beast 'caused the earth and them that dwell therein to worship the first Beast . . . . And he had power . . . to cause that as many as would not worship the image of the Beast should be killed. And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads, and _that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name_.' Here, for nearly two thousand years, was the principle of this Hell-devised, Devil-developed combined system of religion and commerce, prophesied, but now few even of God's choicest saints realized all that would mean. "The nineteenth and early twentieth century Christendom had lost the Bible ideal of Christianity, and had substituted a very material idea for God's idea. The two decades--last of the nineteenth, and first of the twentieth centuries--were marked by immense religious activities, but while a merely religious movement might manufacture a Christendom, it could never make Christians. "To be religious is one thing to be a Christian quite another thing. The vast bulk of the members of the so-called Christian Churches of those years, had never been born again from above. "Christian in name (by virtue of membership in a Church; or by virtue of their subscription to a creed; or by a careful attendance upon the forms of their own particular church) they were yet _only religious_, because God's word regards those only as _Christians_ in whom Christ indwells, and none can be indwelt by Christ save those into whom He has come in the birth from above. ('Born again' ones.) '_Except_ a man be born again, he CANNOT _see_ the Kingdom of God' much more live in it. "'That which is born of the _flesh_ is flesh,' and 'flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God,' but only those _spiritually_ born--born from above. We only become Christians by _re_-generation.