You have now seen the two pictures. Those who heard the solemn warning of Paul could scarcely have imagined such things as these.
But to this was the little meeting in the upper room at Troas now transformed. For a servant who knew his Master’s will, was there not indeed a work to do? A work very sad and sorrowful, but very bright and glorious also. For God who looked in wrath and in hatred upon all these abominations done in His holy name, looked still, in His endless love and patience, with compassion on these poor blinded men and women, and would gather out of them those who should witness for His name a people who should glorify Him as lights shining in this dark Christendom, how dark He alone could know. For I have described to you not one church alone, nor one country alone. Alas! in every country where the name of Christ was named, this, or something as dark and as evil as this, was all that you would find. All, everywhere, unless you were to climb up to some lonely places here and there in the great Alps, where in dens and caves of the earth there were a few persecuted men and women who still remembered something of that which Paul had taught, and who therefore witnessed here and there for God, and refused to worship any but Himself. And there had been others in various places, who had found their way to some Bible, in spite of the care with which Bibles were kept out of sight and out of mind. These few men and women had learned to believe that there is one Savior who has died for sinners, who has offered one sacrifice for sins forever, and is therefore now set down at the right hand of God. But when they had thus confessed the Lord Jesus, they had been burnt alive, they had been slain with the sword, they had been “persecuted, afflicted, and tormented,” till their witness was silenced, and their names cast out as evil. Some of you who live in London, will remember a large brick building near the Thames, nearly opposite to the Houses of Parliament. It is Lambeth Palace, the old palace where, for hundreds of years, the archbishops of Canterbury have lived when in London. The tall tower, built not very long before the birth of William Farel, is called the Lollard’s Tower. Why so? Because at the bottom of this tower is a gateway, through which the Lollards were brought when found by the spies of the archbishop. They were taken up the long winding stone stairs to the top of the tower. All this you still may see just as it was four hundred years ago and more. You may go up the winding stairs, and you find at the top two small rooms. In one is a fireplace without a chimney; in the other is a trap-door in the floor. Round the walls of the first room are strong iron rings, three or four feet from the ground, fastened firmly into the wooden walls. You see upon the walls, and upon the floor below these rings, fresh as if done yesterday, the black streaks that have been burnt into the wood with red-hot irons; you see the marks of heavy blows upon the walls. You are told that this was the torture-room and that in “that corner” must have been a “terrible scuffle.” You are told that there is no chimney, in order that the smoke might stifle the prisoners. You are told that the trap-door opens into a shaft, down which their bodies could be thrown into a drain and carried away into the Thames. There is yet something more to see in these awful “upper chambers”; there has been Another there, besides the tortured Lollards, and the archbishop and his tormentors. You read upon the wall, cut into the wood, the words of a Lollard prisoner: “Jesus is my love, He is with me now.” Yes, it was for the testimony of Jesus that these Lollards were there murdered, and murdered by the man who took the first place in England, as there set over the “Holy Catholic Church.” He has set his mark, and the Lollards have set theirs, upon the walls of Lambeth Palace. Go into an English Cathedral, perhaps into more than one, you will still see, preserved for five hundred years, a rack used for torture; you will be told that the bishops kept it to rack the Lollards. Go anywhere and everywhere over the countries called Christian, and you will find memorials of those awful days, when darkness covered the earth, and a deluge of wickedness such as “would not be named amongst the heathen,” had overspread town and country, but was deepest and darkest where the priests and monks and nuns were putting on the form of godliness, and taking the name of Christ upon their lips.
The reason given why monks and nuns should live in convents, was, that they might thus find a safe refuge from the wickedness of the world around. But hear the account that is given of their lives, by one whom the Roman Catholics cannot call a liar, for to this day they worship her by the name of St. Teresa; she was a Spanish nun, living at the same time as William Farel. She wrote an account of her life in the convent. She tells us that the condition of a monk or nun is one “of the very greatest danger—yea more, I think it is, for those who will be wicked, a road to hell rather than a help to their weakness.” She advises parents “to marry their daughters to persons of a much lower degree,” rather than place them in such monasteries as those she had known by her own experience, “unless,” she adds, “the daughters be of extremely good inclinations; and God grant that these inclinations may come to good!” Many of the nuns and monks “are to be pitied, for they wished to withdraw from the world, and thinking to escape from the dangers of it, and that they were going to serve our Lord, have found themselves in ten worlds at once, without knowing what to do or how to help themselves; the friars and the nuns who would really begin to follow their vocation, have reason to fear the members of their communities more than all the devils together.” Such is the witness of the nun Teresa. “But,” you will say, “this also proves that there were people like Teresa who were grieved at the wickedness around them, and wished for something better; “this is true. No doubt there were not a few who were alarmed and shocked at the awful sins which were committed, and committed openly and shamelessly, by the priests in the first place, and afterward by the people. It would be difficult to live amongst murders, thefts, blasphemies, and vice of every sort, without some sense of the evil, even were one a heathen; and therefore we find those, who, like Teresa, owned it, and would have liked to make things better. But there are two ways of dealing with evil — God’s way, and man’s way.
I would ask you to look for a moment at the beginning of the 5th chapter of the gospel of Mark. You there see an example of these two ways. It was very clear to the people of Gadara that there was something terribly wrong about the man with the unclean spirit. They had their own remedy for his case. They had “often bound him with fetters and chains.” And what then? “The chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces, neither could any man tame him.” And thus did Teresa and others seek to make matters better. They would have convents with stricter rules; they would have harder penances, and vows of greater self-denial; they would have stronger “fetters and chains,” and they had them.
But the devil is not changed since those days at Gadara. It is still true now, as then, “neither could any man tame him.” This is man’s way. Then the blessed Lord Jesus comes in upon the scene. He speaks the word: and what then? “They come to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil, and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind.” No need now for fetters and chains. No need now for convents and vows. No, let you who know such grace now, go each one and “tell how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.” This is God’s way; and it is a story of this blessed way of compassion, of grace, and of power, that I now have to tell you. It was needful first to tell you something of the darkness and the wickedness.
Something! It would be a terrible thing to know more than something of it, for such depths of awful crime against God and man, as one must needs find in every page of the history of those black ages, are better left with only a glance. We should know something, that we may see what God’s grace has been, and leave the rest till the day when all will have to be manifested before the great white throne of judgment.
Let us now turn to the story of William Farel.
But stay—even after this long preface I would still add a few words of warning, lest you learn a wrong lesson from the story that is to follow. Do not think that I wish to tell it you in order to show you how ignorant and how wicked Roman Catholics have been and are. No; I wish to tell it you that you may see, in the first place, how ignorant and wicked we all are, till God, in His mercy, saves us. The heart of a Protestant and the heart of a Roman Catholic are in no way different. “As in water face answereth to face, so the heart of man to man.”
Therefore, when you read of these poor men and women in Roman Catholic France, and hear how ignorant they were of God, how they tried to get to heaven, if they thought about it at all, by their own works, or by any number of wrong roads; how they would not hear of the one road which leads to life; how they turned away from the blessed gospel of grace, and hated those who told it to them—when you read all this, do not think, “How bad Roman Catholics are!” but think rather “How bad am I.”
For in these sad histories of Adam’s sinful children, we learn what our own hearts are, and must be, without the grace of God and the light of the Spirit. You may not be as ignorant as these poor people, but if you are still holding back your heart from Christ, it is so much the worse for you that you are less ignorant. It may be many of them will receive but the few stripes, whilst you, if you go out of this world unsaved, will receive the many.
Believe me, or rather believe God, that there is no more love of Christ, no more delight in the gospel, in the natural heart of a Protestant than in the natural heart of a Papist.
Have you never slipped out of the way lest anyone should speak to you about Christ?
Have you never felt displeased that you were taken to hear the gospel preached, rather than left to go to some church or chapel, where you could hear good music, or see beautiful painted windows?
Have you never felt in your heart dislike and contempt for “those people who are always talking about the Bible”?
Have you never sneered at the thought of “being converted”?
I used to do all these things at a time when I had no doubt that I was right and that Roman Catholics were wrong. I did not know that, in the sight of God, I was the greater sinner of the two; for I had a Bible, and I had heard the gospel of Christ. I was refusing and rejecting the living Christ in heaven.
The poor Roman Catholics, most of them, knew no Christ except the images of wood and stone, and the painted pictures which had the name of Christ given to them.
Therefore I would have you to remember, in the first place, that in these histories of man’s enmity to God, you read of yourself; you see your own picture, unless God in His mercy has saved you. In the second place, I would have you to remark, in the story that I shall tell you, how wonderful is the love and goodness and patience of God. We feel sometimes quite proud of living in a “land of Bibles,” as though this were a merit of ours, and as though God looked upon us with special favor on account of it; but let me remind you, that when God sees you reading your Bible, He sees in that circumstance, not your love to Him, but His love to you. It is because of His great love to you, that you have that Bible in your hand, and “to whom much is given, of him much will be required.” And God looked down also in His great love upon those Popish churches of which I have been speaking, upon the idolaters, and the persecutors, upon the lands where Bibles were never seen, and He called out His own sheep from amongst them, and made them to know His voice and to follow Him.
The Jews thought they were better in the sight of God than the heathen, because they had the Bible, and did not worship idols. But see what God says as to that. He gives us, in the 1st chapter of Romans, a description of the awful wickedness of the heathen; He gives us in the 2nd chapter, the reasons why the Jews thought themselves better; He then, in the 3rd chapter, puts these words into the mouth of Paul the Jew. “What then? are we" (the Jews) "better than they?" (the Gentiles). “No, in no wise; they are all under sin; there is none righteous, no, not one.” And He then gives that awful description of the heart of man, which applies alike to those who have Bibles, and those who have none, those who profess a sound belief, and those who are ignorant idolaters. “There is no difference,” He says, “for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”
And then, in His wonderful love and grace, there follow the blessed words which are for all alike, Jews and heathen, Protestants and Roman Catholics, all who will believe the good news which God has told concerning His Son, “Being justified freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” All alike sinners; all alike welcome to the Savior of the ungodly; all alike lost without Him. You will see therefore, in the story that follows, two things—your badness, and the goodness of God; the dark, evil heart of man, and the loving heart of God—the ruin man has made, the remedy God has found. All shame to man, all glory to God.