Laying Out the MARK OF THE BEAST

"When Protestantism shall stretch her hand across the gulf to grasp the hand of the Roman power, when she shall reach over the abyss to clasp hands with spiritualism, when, under the influence of this threefold union, our country shall repudiate every principle of its Constitution as a Protestant and republican government and shall make provision for the propagation of papal falsehoods and delusions, then we may know that the time has come for the marvelous working of Satan and that the end is near.

--The people of the United States have been a favored people,

but when they restrict religious liberty, surrender Protestantism, and give countenance to popery, the measure of their guilt will be full, and “national apostasy” will be registered in the books of heaven.
Satan puts his interpretation upon events, and they think, as he would have them, that the calamities which fill the land are a result of Sundaybreaking. 

--Thinking to appease the wrath of God these influential men make laws enforcing Sunday observance.....even in free America rulers

and legislators, in order to secure public favor, will yield to the popular demand for a law enforcing Sunday observance.  The prophecy of Revelation 13 declares that the power represented by the beast with lamblike horns shall cause “the earth and them which dwell therein” to worship the papacy—there symbolized by the beast “like unto a leopard”…. 

--This prophecy will be fulfilled when the United States  shall

enforce Sunday observance, which Rome claims as the special acknowledgment of her supremacy….The enforcement of Sundaykeeping on the part of Protestant churches is an enforcement of the worship of the papacy…. How the Roman church can clear herself from the charge of idolatry we cannot see…. 


--And this is the religion which Protestants are beginning to look upon with so much favor, and which will eventually be united with Protestantism. This union will not, however, be effected by a change in Catholicism, for Rome never changes. She claims infallibility. 
It is Protestantism that will change. 
The adoption of liberal ideas on its part will bring it where it can clasp the hand of Catholicism. 
Protestantism shall give the hand of fellowship to the Roman power. 

--Then there will be a law against the Sabbath of God’s creation, and then it is that God will do His “strange work” (Isaiah 28:21)in the earth.

Romanism in the Old World,

and apostate Protestantism in the New,

will pursue a similar course toward those

who honor all the divine precepts.

-*-In the very act of enforcing a religious duty by secular power, the churches would themselves form an image to the beast; hence the enforcement of Sundaykeeping in the United States would be an enforcement of the worship of the beast and his image.

--The Sabbath question is to be the issue in the great final

conflict in which all the world will act a part.
The first day of the week, a common working day, possessing no sanctity whatever, will be set up as was the image of Babylon. 
All nations and tongues and peoples will be commanded to worship this spurious sabbath…. The substitution of the laws of men for the law of God, the exaltation, by merely human authority, of Sunday in place of the Bible Sabbath, is the last act in the drama.
-*-The decree enforcing the worship of this day is to go forth to all the world."
E.G.W.