#19 The Mark of the Beast, Part 2

From Meditations on the Past, Present, and Future, by G. M. Mangold.

To those houses were the priests of the high places appointed, to assist the people in their worship, after an outward prescribed form, and for money, without being of the true order of the priesthood of God’s children, who received their anointing from the Holy One, by which they are instructed and led into all truth; and those who were enrolled and received their ordination as priests by the mark of the beast, adopted the name of clergymen or ecclesiastics, while all others were briefly called "laymen," having no right to sell spiritual wares or to preach.

For also this second beast was intolerant toward all otherwise minded, even as was the first; and it applied compulsion and death unto all who would not honor this image or refused to become a co-partner in this new church communion, as the history of the anabaptists and many others from the Reformation forward attests; and thus it set itself in the place of God, whom alone it behooves to be judge over faith and conscience, and it exercised restraint of conscience as truly antichristian, for which cause it shall be cast into the lake of fire, along with the first beast, on the day of the advent of the Lord, the only and righteous judge. Through this restraint of faith and conscience it forced all to take a mark unto themselves, either on their forehead or their hand, large and small, the infants by enforced baptism and adults by their obligations toward the ritual communion in confirmation and all other benedictions of the church, also rich and poor, bond or free, without distinction, in that all were coerced into the church government, united and obligated by oath.