Said T. DeWitt Talmage:  “I simply state a fact when I say that in many places the church is surrendering, and the world is conquering....  There is a mighty host in the Christian church, positively professing Christianity, who do not believe the Bible, out and out and in and in....  Oh! we have magnificient church machinery in this country; we have sixty thousand American ministers; we have costly music; we have great Sunday-schools; and yet I give you the appalling statistics that in the last twenty-five years, laying aside last year, the statistics of which I have not yet seen,—­within the last twenty-five years the churches of God in this country have averaged less than two conversions a year each!  There has been an average of four or five deaths in the churches.  How soon, at that rate, will this world be brought to God?  We gain two; we lose four.  Eternal God! what will this come to?”

Bishop Roberts said:  “The popular religion of this country is not the religion of the New Testament.  It has some of its features but not all.  It is lacking in grand fundamental elements.  It answers many good purposes—­restrains, refines, elevates, and gives to society a high grade of civilization; but fails to secure the great end which Christianity is designed to accomplish—­the salvation of the soul.  It dazzles but to blind, it promises but to deceive; it allures by worldly considerations to a heaven of purity, which no worldling can enter; it gives to its votaries, who long to eat of forbidden fruit, the assurance of impunity from the threatened evils, and leads them on by siren strains from the Paradise of purity into the broad road which ends at last in the blackness of the darkness of an eternal night of despair!”

Says the Golden Rule:  “The Protestants are outdoing the Popes in splendid, extravagant folly in church building.  Thousands on thousands are expended in gay and costly ornaments to gratify pride and a wicked ambition, that might and should go to redeem the perishing millions!  Does the evil, the folly, and the madness of these proud, formal, fashionable worshiper, stop here?  These splendid monuments of Popish pride, upon which millions are squandered in our cities, virtually exclude the poor for whom Christ died, and for whom he came especially to preach.”

The report of the Michigan Yearly Conference, even as long ago as 1851, published in the True Wesleyan of Nov. 15, says:  “The world, commercial, political, and ecclesiastical are alike, and are together going in the broad way that leads to death.  Politics, commerce, and nominal religion, all connive at sin, reciprocally aid each other, and unite to crush the poor.  Falsehood is unblushingly uttered in the forum and in the pulpit; and sins that would shock the moral sensibilities of the heathen, go unrebuked in all the great denominations of our land.  These churches are like the Jewish church when the Savior exclaimed, ’Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.’”