ALONE WITH GOD     

  The use of the term "exclusiveness" conveys the idea that all who are not in the church that Jesus founded are excluded from salvation and the Christian's hope. If any person is not disposed to comply with the conditions of membership in God's church, he can turn aside and join some church that presents a wider door, but he can not thus obtain salvation. There is but one Savior of all men. " There is none other name under heaven given among men whereby we must be saved." Those who are saved by him are baptized, or inducted, by one Spirit into one body; so all who are outside of this one body are excluded from the grace of God.

  Christ is an exclusive Christ. There is no other besides him God is an exclusive God. He says, "I know no other." There was a time when certain people tried to compel Jehovah to fellowship and acknowledge their gods. For instance, the Philistines placed the ark of God in the house of Dagon, but Dagon could not stand before the God of heaven. The next morning when the Philistines went to their temple they found Dagon fallen down before the Lord. They set him up in his place, but the following morning he was again fallen down, and nothing was left of him but a stump. This shows that God is an exclusive God. He acknowledges no other God. In order, then, to honor God we must reject all other gods and worship the Lord of heaven alone. There is but one Holy Spirit. The world today is filled with spirits, but in the midst of them all there is but one true Spirit of God, and in order to keep clear in our souls we must reject every other spirit. The faith that Christ gave us is an exclusive faith. No other saves the soul. The truth of God is exclusive in its nature. Everything contrary to it is false. The kingdom of Christ is exclusive. It is a stone that breaks everything else to pieces. The only church that Jesus founded and named is also exclusive, for there is only one body in Christ.

  During the reign of pagan persecution the rulers offered to stop the bloody martyrdom and allow the Christians to worship God in freedom if they would concede that the pagan idols also were real gods. This they could not do, but chose rather to die. It is this very point of exclusiveness that is the present offense of the cross. People would not seriously object to our setting forth God's church as described in the Scriptures if we would only recognize their earth founded institutions as being also God's churches; but this we can not do and be honest before God and faithful to his Word. There is one household of faith. Christ does not have a plurality of wives. He has but one bride, and she has no sisters. "My dove, my undefiled,, is but one; she is the only one of her mother." S. of Sol. 6: 9. It is true that there is in these last days a sisterhood of Christian bodies calling themselves churches, but the Lamb's wife knows no kin to them. They are an entirely different family. Their mother is Mystery Babylon, the mother of harlots. As God is one, only one religion can emanate from him. As God is not the author of confusion, his church can not l e split into a confused lot of rival institutions. He recognizes no sisterhood of churches. If, therefore, there is but one church that emanates from God, whence come the rest? Martin Luther would answer, "Whatever is not of God is of the devil." Men come to us and say just what the devils besought of Christ— " 'Let us alone.' Go and preach what you believe, but let everybody else alone." This is great blindness. If the true God would reign, Dagon and all other gods must fall down and have their heads broken off. If Christ be lifted up, Antichrist must be demolished. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness can not jointly flourish nor even coexist in the same heart. As the coming of light must dispel darkness, and the preaching of the truth must vanquish error; so the church of the living God must utterly exclude and antagonize every counterfeit church. Hence in the present evening light, which reveals the true fold, " every founder is confounded by the graven images for his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. They are vanity' and the work of errors: in the time of their visitation they shall perish" (Jer. l0: 14). That time is now come, for the preaching of the pillar and ground of the truth demolishes the work of error.

  God's church is exclusive like himself; and he who is not willing to commit himself exclusively to God and the church that Jesus purchased with his own blood, but for the friendship of the world and of the masses of sectarians enters the great wicked Babel of isms and by so doing avoids persecutions, is not fit for the kingdom. Though men have held a place both in God's church and in man's sects through ignorance, yet when the true light comes, they must cut loose from one or the other. If they then refuse to walk in the light, they will go into spiritual darkness.

  The spirit of this age is to place Christ and Belial on an equality—to call everything that has a name to be religious God's church, and thus try to palm off upon the Almighty the corrupt works of the devil and insult his holiness by classifying with his heaven born church all the hypocrites and abominable characters taken into the false branches of Babylon; but "the Lord knoweth them that are his."

  The great congress of all religions held in 1893 in Chicago at the World's Fair was a perfect selling out of Christ. The representatives gathered in that congress claimed to meet in one common brotherhood, thus forcing fellowship between light and darkness, Christ and Belial, God and idols, heaven and hell. Heathen idolaters, Shintoists and worshipers of all the ridiculous gods that Satan has invented met on one common level as one great family—an act will virtually denied tile exclusiveness of the ('oaf of the Bible and placed God on the level with heathen idols. This, we say, was a slander on the name of Christ and wicked blasphemy in the sight of God. It virtually proves that Roman and Protestant Babylon have left God and gone over to the gods of Baal; for surely Christ is separate from all such, and the God of the Bible is the only God, his church is the only true and safe fold, and the faith of Christ is alone from heaven.