We see it in our history. History is an amazing tutor to us. Think of the Reformation. Think of the period following the Reformation, the efforts to get rid of Reformation doctrine. All the schemes within the national church to put the clock back. The ruler changes and the persecution begins, and the evangelical party, the Bible-believers are out, and back in comes Rome. Then the pendulum swings again and you get the great Puritan era. That must have been marvellous. You get great names like John Owen, and he was the preacher in what you might call a country church in Coggeshall in Essex. Places now that you would regard as out in the sticks had the great preachers. They were everywhere, tender hearted pastors, wonderful ministry, who taught the deep things of God. Vast number of clergy loved the word, loved the Lord, loved the Scriptures. But the hatred of Christ is soon to be manifested and the plots begin to get the Puritan clergy out of the churches. And so there is the Restoration, and Charles II comes to the throne, and it is the opportunity of the haters of the Gospel. They bring in the Act of Uniformity, and the clergy are going to be compelled to carry out Catholic procedures in the worship; sacramentalism will be back and the errors of Rome. Well, of course, the Puritans would not be able to stay. And so there comes the Great Ejection when 2,100 Puritan-minded clergy were ejected from the Church of England, Black Bartholomew’s Day, 1662, August 24th. They were expelled from their rectories and their villages and their pulpits, and persecuted wherever they went and held house-meetings and preached. So even in a church-going age, the hatred of the world will eventually be manifested.
Now, of course, we are in an age of atheism when everything is explained in rational terms. God is man himself. There is no divine God, no personal God, no transcendent God. And they will brainwash the young to grow up with this. And if the brainwashing does not work, the devil’s next strategy is to flood the mind of the young with every kind of distraction and deviation. So you get marvellous inventions utilised by the enemy of souls. So the young are now, to a degree us oldies never knew when we were young, glued to their mobiles and their devices and their tablets, with every possible distraction. You must not think of God, everything will be materialism, everything will be rationalistic. You almost have to start from square one with young minds and hearts now.