It is strange the seasons in church history. After the Reformation you move into the great age of the Puritan teachers, and in almost every parish church in England, there was the teaching of the word of God, and vast numbers were converted. But then as time went on, because in those days you had to go to church by force of law, social convention took over. If you did not go to the church, your employer would sack you and you would have no work. There was no social security, nothing with which to feed your family. So you were more or less compelled to go to church. I am not saying that was a good thing. Coming through the 17th and 18th centuries, the growth of the cities dented this to some extent because these disciplines and social conventions could not be maintained in larger cities, and an underclass developed of non-church going people, but by and large the majority of people still went to church. Unfortunately, however, as time went by, only a minority were truly saved. When you go to church every Sunday and you are not saved, you cannot switch your mind completely off – so what do you think you do? Well, you learn the Christian faith. You are not a Christian, but you learn it. So you have got pretty well everybody in the population knows everything about the Christian faith without being saved, and that makes them very proud, and very satisfied. So you find the preachers of those days, the Puritan preachers went to great lengths to do what we hardly ever do today; they went to great lengths to prove to people that they were not really saved. And you read some of the great Puritan evangelistic sermons, they are not wooing people to come to Christ, they are in great detail explaining to people a 101 reasons and proofs why they cannot possibly be Christians. That is why sometimes earnest Christians today reading the wrong Puritan sermons can develop an assurance problem, because those sermons will painstakingly tell them what is wrong with them, not what is right with them. History repeated itself in the Victorian age. At its height, because of the Great Awakening and 19th century awakenings and the widespread preaching of the gospel in the non-conformist churches, there was a great period when vast numbers of people were saved. Unfortunately it passed, but the people were still going to church. And in the late 19th century, everybody, almost everybody goes to church and believes the Christian faith, but not with the heart. A much smaller number are truly converted. So once again you have the problem of convincing people that they are not really Christian. Well it is not difficult, because if people are not really Christian, they will be very worldly, and they will do worldly things. So they will all go to the theatre and the dancehall and the like. So you will find in the sermons of Spurgeon in that period that he is pointing to these things constantly. Now to some extent, this is true of parts of the world today. There are parts of America, for example, that are in a kind of late Victorian age. There are still enormous number of church goers attending kind-of evangelical or Bible churches. But far fewer people among them are really saved. This is not true of the East Coast and all of America, but it is true of what used to be called the Bible-belt and various other parts, where there are vastly more worshippers than say in our atheistic country. But many of them are not really saved, and that is to be seen in what they do. So when you turn on the God-channels on the TV, which I do not recommend, and you see endlessly some of these vast mega churches that are entirely entertainment based and motivational and shallow and nonsensical and worldly and theatrical in the extreme, you realise they are catering for the kind of comet’s tail of a period of blessing where far fewer people are converted and need entertaining. They think they are Christians but they are not, and their worldliness has got to be provided for. So be careful, this abounds, and in these days of communications, it is open for all to see – worldly Christianity – and it is cropping up everywhere.