"Our best, most humble, most devoted servants of Christ are
fostering in their midst what will one day, not long hence, show
itself to be the spawn of the dragon. They shrink from any rude
word against creeds with the same sensitiveness with which those
holy fathers would have shrunk from a rude word against the rising
veneration of saints and martyrs which they were fostering.... The
Protestant evangelical denominations have so tied up one another's
hands, and their own, that, between them all, a man cannot become a
preacher at all, anywhere, without accepting some book besides the
Bible.... And is not the Protestant church apostate? Oh! remember,
the final form of apostasy shall rise, not by crosses, processions,
baubles. We understand all that. Apostasy never comes on the
outside. It develops. It is an apostasy that shall spring into life
within us; an apostasy that shall martyr a man who believes his
Bible ever so holily; yea, who may even believe what the creed
contains, but who may happen to agree with the Westminster Assembly
that, proposed as a test, it is an unwarrantable imposition. That
is the apostasy we have to fear, and is it not already formed?...
Will it be said that our fears are imaginary? Imaginary? Did not
the Rev. John M. Duncan, in the years 1825-6, or thereabouts,
sincerely believe the Bible? Did he not even believe substantially
the confession of faith? And was he not, for daring to say what the
Westminster Assembly said, that, to require the reception of that
creed as a test of ministerial qualification was an unwarrantable
imposition, brought to trial, condemned, excommunicated, and his
pulpit declared vacant? There is nothing imaginary in the statement
that the creed-power is now beginning to prohibit the Bible as
really as Rome did, though in a subtler way.

"Oh! woful day! Oh! unhappy church of Christ! fast rushing round