T. DE WITT TALMAGE, speaking of the present position of the churches, says:— I simply state a fact when I say that in many places the church is surrendering and the world is conquering. Where there is one man brought into the kingdom of God through Christian instrumentality, there are ten men dragged down by dissipations. Fifty grog-shops are built to one church established. Literary journals in different parts of the country are filled with scum, dandruff, and slag, controlled by the very scullions of society, depraving everything they put their hands on. Three hundred and ten newspapers, and journals, and magazines in New York, and more than two hundred of them depraving to the public taste, if not positively inimical to our holy Christianity. Look abroad and see the surrender, even on the part of what pretend to be Christian churches, to spiritualism and Humanitarianism and all the forms of devilism. If a man stand in his pulpit and say that unless you be born again you will be lost, do not the tight kid gloves of the Christian, diamonds bursting through, go up to their foreheads in humiliation and shame? It is not elegant. There is a mighty host in the Christian church, positively professing Christianity, who do not believe in the Bible, out and out, and in, from the first word of the first verse of the first chapter of the book of Genesis, down to the last word of the last verse of the last chapter of the book of Revelation. And when, a few Sabbaths ago, I stood in this pulpit and said, “I fear that some of this audience will be lost for the rejection of Christ,” why there were four or five of the daily papers that threw up their hands in surprise at it. Oh! we have magnificent 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 statistic 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? I tell you plainly that while here and there a regiment of the Christian soldiery is advancing, the church is falling back for the most part, and falling back, and falling back, and if you do not come to complete rout—aye, to ghastly Bull Run defeat—it will be because some individual churches hurl themselves to the front, and ministers of Christ, trampling on the favor of this world and sacrificing everything, shall snatch up the torn and shattered banner of Emanuel, and rush ahead, crying: “On! on! This is no time to run; this is the time to advance.”