Acts 3:18

“But those things which he proclaimed through the mouth of all his prophets that his Christ should suffer, he thus fulfilled.” We see from this verse how the Jews and the Romans in their condemnation and crucifixion of Christ were literally fulfilling prophecies so obviously that it is astonishing that they could not recognize it. The very men who stood at the head of the church, having studied the prophecies at the feet of their great theologians, and preached on them all their lives, were so blinded by Satan that they could not see them; but in the black darkness of their wicked unbelief, these great preachers went right ahead, fulfilling the prophecies to their own condemnation. Oh! how history repeats itself! Visit in the great ecclesiastical assemblies of the present day. You find the mighty men of talent and scholarship standing at the head of the popular churches, all counseling together, even different denominations, like Pilate and Herod in the crucifixion of Christ, waiving their old animosities and uniting their wisdom and power to crush out the Holiness Movement [which is simply the Holy Ghost religion in contradistinction to the devil's counterfeit, i. e., dead churchism]. They all unite their forces, take up every sanctified preacher, carry him away and set him down in a region of icebergs, sending in his place a theological refrigerator to freeze out all the holy fire. What is this but the literal fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy,

“When they shall have accomplished to scatter the power of the holy people, then shall the end come.”

The holiness people are doing their best to spread Scriptural holiness throughout the world. But it is hard to tell which party is actually doing the more to scatter the holy fire our friends or our enemies. When the latter, with the malignant rage which rankled in the carnal hearts of the great preachers who nailed Jesus to the cross, martyred Stephen and did their utmost to crush out the Nazarenes in blood, now violently interpose, reach forth the strong hand of ecclesiastical tyranny, pick up the holiness preachers, send them to the north pole and supply their places with the worst anti-holiness preachers they can command, what is the result? I am an eye-witness to what I write have seen it verified repeatedly. They simply give the sanctified preacher a new, fresh field upon untrodden virgin soil the very opportunity he needs to do a mighty work for God, preaching entire sanctification and instrumental in saving and sanctifying multitudes. Meanwhile the fire in his former field is too hot for the devil's ice carried in by the plughatted D. D. The accumulated fire of God's red-hot cranks melts all of his ice. It is a well-known fact in chemistry that a sufficient intensity of heat will not only melt ice, but decompose the water into its constituent elements, oxygen and hydrogen, the latter the most combustible in the world, and the former the great supporter of combustion. Hence all the ice imported by the new preacher is simply a supply of fuel to augment the flame. The result is he gets gloriously sanctified; the revival which they sought to freeze out takes new fire, and sweeps over the land like a cyclone. If you will read the prophecies and open your eyes to the ecclesiastical phenomena of the present day, you will be astounded at the wonderful fulfillment of prophecies. As the preachers standing at the head of a church in Jerusalem, blinded by Satan, rejected and killed the Son of God and did their utmost to exterminate His followers, we see the same tragedy at the present day going on throughout Christendom. Jesus was simply the incarnation of holiness. His disciples were nothing but simple-hearted, humble holiness people. Grace, as well as sin, is uniform and identical in all ages. Hence, at the present day, the proud, autocratic, carnal clergy in the leadership of popular religion are doing their utmost to antagonize the Holy Ghost and Spirit-filled people, thus literally fulfilling the prophecies as in the days of Christ.