"In the years immediately before the 'Rapture,' _professing_ Christians, and even _professedly_ Christian ministers, men who had taken vows before God to preach the 'whole counsel of God,' and who received their salary avowedly for this purpose, scouted, and often publicly denied the necessity of the New Birth. Blind leaders of the blind, they surely will have the greater punishment. "But to return to the other thought. "The last twenty years of the nineteenth century, and more so the first ten years of the twentieth century, was marked as an age of centralization and concentration of all kinds of interests, commercial, and religious. Each year, the trusts and monopolies in the commercial world became more and more concentrated, until it has become perfectly easy for Lucien Apleon, Emperor-Dictator of the World, to govern and control (from that beautiful, hellish city, Babylon the great,) every business interest in the world. "Two days ago, at Jerusalem, the 'Covenant Sign'--so called--but which God calls the 'Mark of the Beast'--was donned by three or four million people, in the _holiday_ spirit. But what was donned voluntarily, in a holiday spirit, forty-eight hours ago, will have to be _branded_ on every one's person in the universe in three and a half years time--or less--or else the refuser of the degradation will have to seal his or her loyalty to God by their life. "In three and a half years from now, Sir Archibald, the image of Lucien Apleon, will be set up in the Temple of Jerusalem, and, I believe, in every other great religious centre of the World--St. Peter's, Rome; St. Paul's, London; and so on in all our great cities, and world centres. I have been studying this subject naturally, and I find that one great scholar (Hengstenberg) says, that though _one_ image is spoken of, yet having regard to the sense of the original, 'a multitude of images is meant.'" "But _religiously_, Bastin, religiously?" cried the old man. "How did the condition of things in the end of the nineteenth, and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, help to make it possible for all the world presently to _worship_ the Beast, and his image?" There was an almost childish querulousness of tone in the old baronet's questioning. "All those years," began Ralph, "were marked by a wonderful activity on new lines of deliverance for the human race, from the ills that had grown up around the vast bulk of that race. God's plan was for man's _regeneration_, a change of heart and life--a working from the centre to the circumference. But the churches--_all_ denominations--of the years we are speaking about, began endless schemes of deliverance that the man, as they hoped, might be changed from the _out_side--that is to say, man's idea of benefitting man was by an _outward_ reform.