But during the Protestant era Christians the world over became identified with the various sects, hence were representing to the world the beast power instead of the true church.  Thus, during the Protestant period, the church of God, in its organic form, was not represented anywhere on earth; for its members were scattered among those who were “worshiping the beast and his image.”  Hence the two witnesses, during this era, had no place to operate in their official capacity as the Governors of God’s church and are therefore represented as slain.  The government of Protestant sects is not effected by the Word and Spirit; for the institutions themselves are of human origin, and men are their law-makers and governors.

When the two witnesses are deprived of their governing power and the rules and disciplines of men substituted in their place, a decline into worldliness is the invariable result.  This has been the case repeatedly in sectarianism.  In fact, Protestantism, as a component part of that great city Babylon, has so given herself over to “revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries,” that a voice from heaven has declared her to be “the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”  Chap. 18:2.  Witness the shows, festivals, frolics, grab-bag parties, kissing bees, cake-walk lotteries, and other abominations unnumbered, that are carried on without shame, under the guise of religion, in the high places of this modern Babylon!  If the Word of God with the full power and authority of his Spirit could be turned in upon them, it would be like the torment of fire; but no, it is dead to them, and they rejoice and make merry and continue in “the same excess of riot.”

In the description before us, this city of sectarianism in which the two witnesses are slain is “spiritually [or mystically] called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.”  It is a mystical Sodom, Egypt and Jerusalem—­a Sodom for wickedness and lewdness, an Egypt for the captivity and oppression of God’s people, and a Jerusalem for the crucifying of the Son of God afresh and putting him to an open shame.  Thus, this city mystically combines the wickedness of the three most wicked places on earth—­Sodom, Egypt, and Jerusalem.  These facts we shall notice more particularly hereafter.

But these two witnesses were not always to remain trampled under foot in the streets of great Babylon; for a time came when “the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them.”  In this is portrayed the reformation which is now taking place in the world.  About the year A.D. 1880 God began to raise up holy men and women whom he commissioned to preach the everlasting gospel of the kingdom again; and they went forth in his name calling upon God’s people everywhere to come “out of all places where they had been scattered