The Charge

Tuat by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion. A.V

So that through me the proclamation might be made in full, and that all the Gentiles might hear; and I was rescued out of the lion’s mouth.

Ir is of course impossible to say with decision and in detail what were the crimes alleged that day against St. Paul. But knowing what we do of the general attitude of the popular mind of the period towards the Christians, the thoughts which ignorance conceived, and which a calculating malice sedulously fostered, we shall not be far astray if we say that they were almost entirely political. No doubt they carried a strong tincture of religious suspicion in them. It would be urged that the accused had spoken against the Gods, and had discouraged their worship. As a Jew, he would not be regarded as profane because he did not personally adore Jupiter or Diana; the strange faith of the Jew, who endured no image of his mysterious God, was a relligzo licita, a ‘legalized religion.’ But this Jew was a Christian also. And Christians were known not only to abstain from the worship of Jupiter but openly to preach that Jupiter was no God; which was another matter altogether. Aye, and they were known to hold also that it was wrong to adore the Emperor;

The Charge

and this was a tenet even more strange and 2 Tim. iv. formidable than the denial of the Olympian Powers. 17-

For the imperial idea at Rome had developed itself

into a religious shape in which the political elements

were inextricably woven into the mystical. To the

Emperor must now be paid not only homage but

worship. He was, as it were, the incarnate Genius

of Rome. And to refuse to own him as such, what

could it mean? What could lie behind it but a

deep disloyalty to the imperial idea itself? The The Susman who took that attitude was a dangerous etree element in society and in the State. His creed was Disloyalty. anarchism. In the phrase of a great Latin historian,

who saw Christianity only from the outside and with

a cynical suspicion, it was ‘a hatred of the human

race.’

Not least among the trials of the saints in that early A peculiar day, and in many a time of persecution since that ited d day, even till now, must have been the pain of having Feeling. to feel that they were accused and condemned, in large measure, at least as to the form of the matter, upon grounds quite alien from the real point at issue.

In their own inmost souls the whole question was one of spiritual fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ. If it were not for Him, and for all that ‘Hu was given to them to be,’ they would scarcely be there at all, standing before a persecuting tribunal, facing a sentence of death. If the accusation could only take the precise form that they were worshippers of ‘ one JESuS,’ and that He was evil — the issue would have been absolutely clear; it would have been a simple thing, however awful in its sequel, to reply that He was infinitely good, and that they would readily die

17.
Polycarp.

China.

A Supreme Fidelity. to affirm His infinite goodness. Thus it sometimes was, as when, about a century after St. Paul, holy Polycarp at Smyrna was asked point blank to ‘rail at Christ,’ and then made that immortal answer; ‘ Highty and six years I have served Him, and He never did me wrong; how shall I rail at my King who saved me?’ But much more often the martyrs soul was perplexed and troubled by having to meet death upon, nominally, quite other grounds; social, political, or what not. Just so it was in China, in the year of Christ 1900. Saint upon saint was murdered in that time of terror not, upon the surface, for holiness’ sake but for the sake of a supposed unpatriotic complicity with ‘the foreigner,’ a treachery to China.

Great and wonderful was the victory, because a victory won amidst so complicated a ‘fiery trial,’ when the confessor of the name of Jesus was true to his Lord, even to the endurance of a terrible death, without the uplifting consciousness in his soul that the world perfectly understood that he was dying to seal his spiritual faith in a sinless Saviour, whom the world might hate, but before whom also it must stand in awe. To refuse, for Christ’s sake, the small concession that would send the man away unscathed, while he knew all the while that ‘the Gentiles’ regarded him as a mere social peril — this was fidelity indeed.

Such probably was the pain present to the heart of St. Paul as he stood that day in the Basilica. But wait awhile, and we shall hear him, as his unseen Master uplifts him, mind and soul, telling the thronging audience what is, after all, the fact of his position. 172