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(p. 11)

III.

The Indictment of Ecclesiasticism, its Threefold Basis

            Such is the indictment which this Society finds itself in a position to bring against Ecclesiasticism, and to substantiate by the threefold testimony of Revelation, Reason, and Experience. And this against Ecclesiasticism as subsisting both prior and subsequently to the Christian era.

            For, as will be shown indubitably, the history contained in the Bible is a continuous history covering a period which, commencing long anterior to the Christian era, has not yet expired, so that a considerable portion of it is prospective. This is to say, it is in part prophetic. For prophecy, when used in the sense of prediction, is prospective history. And the history concerned – while it comprises that of the individual human soul in its conflict with materiality – is that of the collective human soul, or Church. For it is the history of the conflict which has continually been in progress between the doctrine of Christ, as the representative of the soul, and Ecclesiasticism, as the representative of materiality in the Church – its bodily or sense-nature – from the period denoted by the Fall, to find its termination in the triumph of the former at a time still in the future, but now imminent. During the whole of which period – namely, some six thousand years – the doctrine represented by the term “Christ” will have sought to establish itself in the world, only to be betrayed, condemned, and slain, through its falsification

(p. 12)

by that which, under the names of Ecclesiasticism, Sacerdotalism, and Priestcraft, was itself the cause of the Fall.

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