The chief cause of this awful declension that has rolled back the tide of the salvation of the world a decade is that the editors and evangelists, failing to become more and more aggressive at every point against sin in the church and out, especially among holiness people, have backslidden as a class....

Brother Brooks told me he could not put radical truth into the Banner without Brother Haney and Brother Kent and other such temporizers writing and denouncing him; so Brother Brooks would yield and backslide from Holy Ghost power.

Bro. Isaiah Reid told Brother Sherman he did not want anything in his paper that would indicate that the holiness people were not all right; he was planning to have the Highway as a support for his old age. A year ago he called for a thousand "firemen" in the holiness work as the only thing needed. He has spent his energies this year in regulating the fiery come-outers from wrecking the train, and evidently wants the oaks of Bashan slashed down with a little hatchet, and not with a broadax. Rams' horns, goad sticks, and the unsectarian "jaw-bone of an ass" Philistine-killer, he evidently does not take much stock in. Brothers Inskip and Macdonald are not square on the Freemason question and are churchy. While the shell remains in part of radical holiness, that only is the real thing, much of the spirit is gone. You may call it fault-finding, sour godliness, or whatever you please, these are God's facts about your case. You know the whole batch of you are afraid to throw red-hot truth uncompromisingly everywhere. We except from this catalog Baker and Arnold of the Free Methodist, Warner of the Trumpet, Johnson of the Stumbling Stone (if he had the Holy Ghost), and the Sword, and some others.

Now Brother editors and evangelists, suffer the word of exhortation from a "jaw-bone," break up your fallow ground, do your first works, burn up Haney's chapter on dress, not resolve against it; pay your debts, or go and acknowledge them at least; cease to print such dawdle as Brother Bryant's church holiness writings; seek for and get the Holy Ghost again; and lead the people up into the land.—Vanguard.

Satanic forces were arrayed against the reformation work in every conceivable way, not only by mobs and undisguised, professional evil (though this form of attack was usually instigated by the sectarian element), but also by deception—by teachers and editors who were apparently right on some main question in order to deceive, but wrong on some other vital points. A writer in the Trumpet points out one of these destructive agencies.

A DESTRUCTIVE HERESY
By D. W. M'Laughlin

There is an eternal antagonism between true holiness and fanaticism in all its phases, and the individual possessed of the fulness of the Holy Ghost will be able to detect fanaticism in others whether it be in outward act or deportment or in the more subtle form of heretical teaching. The Spirit and the Word agree, and the Holy Spirit moves and works in harmony with the written Word and never contrary thereto.

The writer has been receiving from time to time during the last four years copies of the Stumbling Stone, and while much truth is found in its columns as to the evils of sect divisions, the destructive heresy of Count Zinzendorf (that sanctification is not subsequent to regeneration) is held with inveterate opposition to the gospel order. Consequently, from this standpoint, the holiness movement is of the devil, and the second-grace Christians are in need of the first grace. The Stumbling Stone seems to attack every movement extant, even to the Salvation Army, as well as all holiness associations and bands for the promotion of entire sanctification. Even the position of the Gospel Trumpet he calls a holiness schism, because the editor makes a distinction between justified and sanctified believers. And he proposes to "kick Brother Warner's justification cobhouse into pi," by which he exhibits his ignorance of the real plan of salvation. He might as well talk of kicking God's Word into pi as to overthrow the two distinct works of grace, justification and sanctification....