The Crisis of the Church
We have seen something of the human sorrows, deep and possessing, which beset the heart of the Writer of this Letter and the heart of its Receiver. The same subject must claim our attention a little longer, and now from another point of view.
The pangs of heart which we have thus far thought of have been chiefly personal. St. Paul has moved before us as the man called to taste the cup of desertion, of abominable suspicions and false charges, and of an unjust consignment to death. In Timothy we have seen the man loaded with the weight, laid upon shoulders of no heroic strength, of a great public pastoral care along with a broken heart. But with all this there was assigned to them both another and most mournful trial, the trial of the apparent failure of their sacred Cause. I mean that to every eye but that of faith it must have appeared just then as if the Gospel were on the eve of extinction. When things look black to every eye but that of faith, there comes necessarily the severest possible trial to faith, constituted as our nature is. And when faith is so tried the Christian realizes indeed how dark darkness can be.
Think what it must have seemed in those evil days when at last the forces of the Roman State, largely influenced by the worst of heathen autocrats, were
The Crisis of the Church
turned against Christianity. From one point of view no doubt the Gospel had made wonderful progress within the thirty-five years or so since it set out from Pentecost. But seen from another side, what a feeble, what a tentative cause it was! The converts were still a ‘little flock,’ very little, compared to the masses of the population. We may illustrate their position not An Illustraunfairly by what the disciples of the Reformation #°™ were in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Spanish Reformation had been a remarkable movement; it had won numerous adherents, not least among the upper classes. Yet it was relatively a small thing amidst the great mass of Spaniards. Then the dominant power, armed with the tremendous Inquisition, took its suppression in hand — and it was suppressed. In the mystery of God’s permission the dread adverse force ‘made war upon the saints, and overcame them’ (Rev. xiii. 7). The weak succumbed absolutely to the strong, and for many long generations the Gospel light in its purity was practically quenched in Spain.
There was nothing from the natural outlook to tell Paul and Timothy at the crisis before us that a suppression quite as complete as this was not awaiting the very existence of the Church of Christ. The Roman Empire was intolerant of secret societies, and it knew how to extinguish them. In its view Christianity was a very dangerous secret society, and it was a secret society with no material forces at its command. It could be suppressed; it was to be suppressed * the statesman, the despot, the fanatic, were all agreed upon it. And now the far most
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An agonising Trial to
Faith,
important leader of the society was in prison, and
would soon in fact be dead.
We are so habituated to Christianity as being, apart from its divine character, a vast factor in the modern world that it needs an effort to realize that when this Epistle was written it trembled, humanly speaking, on the verge of annihilation. Did Paul, did Timothy, never half ask themselves if. it would not be annihilated in fact? We may be sure that they did. And their only answer would be, not a calculated forecast of probabilities, but a grasp, strong as death while full of the life of faith, upon the Lord Jesus Christ. And that grasp would be no facile act of instinct. They ‘groaned, being burthened,’ while they overcame. It cost them an agony to ‘gird up their loins, and to hope to the end.’
‘Behold, we count them happy that endure.’ And we are not only to count them happy, but to follow them, by like paths, so far as God wills it for us, to the same deep and ever-living happiness. For us too, in our Christian course to-day, unless we are strangely insensible to facts around us, there hang thunder-clouds enough and to spare in the sky of the Church. Invasions by the world from without, confusionsand strifes within, doubts, heresies, superstitions, an indifference ‘heavy as frost’ — these are some of our ‘unfavourable conditions.’ It is a moment of suspense and shadows. Well, let us again remember that ‘the Bible knows all about it.’ And let us learn from the page which tells us so that it ‘knows’ also the one sure secret of victory; not clever forecasts but an invincible personal reliance : — ‘I KNOW WHOM I HAVE BELIEVED.’