THE entrance of God’s word gives light (Psa. 119:130130The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple. (Psalm 119:130)), while such as have not God’s word “sit in darkness and in the shadow of death.” (Luke 1:7979To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. (Luke 1:79)). The countries now called Christian were without the knowledge of God before the gospel came to them, and the only true thoughts men have of God reach them through His word. In the early years of Christianity “the rulers of the darkness of this world” fought against the entrance of the light of truth into the domain of heathenism by fire and sword. The early Christians, who proclaimed the word of God in a variety of ways, were tortured and slain by thousands, and the greatest efforts were made to destroy every Christian from off the face of the earth. What gave them their courage? What enabled them to conquer, even through blood and fire? The word of God! They had received that word into their hearts, and by God’s Spirit in them they uttered its truths, and they became more than conquerors through Him who loved them.
The heathen themselves testified to the manner of life of the early Christians, though they despised them as the worshippers of the One who had been crucified, and regarded with contempt the belief of His coming again. When the aged Ignatius was brought before the Emperor Trajan, Ignatius spoke of having Christ in his heart. “Dost thou mean Him who was crucified under Pontius Pilate?” asked the emperor. “Yes,” Ignatius replied, “I mean Him who crucified my sin, and who has cast all the deceit and malice of the devil under the feet of those who carry Him in their hearts.”
The end was, Trajan pronounced this sentence: “We command that Ignatius, who affirms that he carries within him, Him who was crucified, be put in chains and taken by soldiers to great Rome, there to be devoured by the beasts for the gratification of the people.” And, being taken to Rome, the aged man—for he was one hundred and twenty years old—found his grave in the jaws of the wild beasts. Some eighty thousand heathen people, seated, tier above tier, in the Coliseum, saw the Christian die, or, should we not rather say, pass out of this world into paradise! The small remnant of the martyr’s bones were carefully gathered up and buried by faithful men, who looked for the resurrection, and who knew that Christ was as truly in the heart of Ignatius, absent from the body but present with the Lord, as He had been when Ignatius was in the body but absent from the Lord.
The truth of God is almighty. When it enters the heart of man in the power of God’s Spirit, it makes men greater than death, and fills them with the realizations of the unseen and eternal.
As we read in the Acts of the Apostles, very much of the early teaching had been utterances of men sent by God, with direct messages from Himself. The inspired writings were addressed to individuals, to churches in particular, or, to the church generally, and as time rolled on the Christians began to collect together these various inspired writings, and, early in the second century, they were collected together as a whole.
The writings of the teachers in the different localities were also highly valued, but their character is so entirely unlike the Scriptures, that it would seem as though God Himself had built a wall around His own word, to mark off the inspired writings from mere human teaching, and to let all see without hesitation the difference between His truth and the exposition of it.
The Old Testament came to the hands of the early Christians from the Jewish synagogues, and, together with the writings which compose the New Testament, was recognized in the church at large as the Book of Authority—the Word of God.
Part of the religious service of the early Christians consisted in reading, and hearing the Scriptures read; “We meet to read our sacred writings... with the sacred words we nourish in faith,” says Tertullian.
Before the second century closed, there were various spurious gospels and epistles in the Church, but we know, even in the apostles’ days, such were to be found! Paul refers to a forged epistle to the Thessalonians—a “letter as from us,” written to shake their minds and to trouble them (2 Thess. 2:22That ye be not soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand. (2 Thessalonians 2:2)), and thus we can see how, from the very first, Satan has assailed the truth of God from all sides, destroying where he could, and where unable to destroy it, undermining its authority.
About the year 300 a supreme effort was made by the heathen to get rid of Christianity. Seeing that tortures and death did but rather increase the number of Christians than diminish them, a determined attack was made upon their writings. The Emperor Diocletian decreed the destruction of the Christian religion, and the rooting out of their books, in consequence of which, over a very large portion of the Roman empire, the command went forth for the burning of the Scriptures. Numbers of Christian writings were destroyed, and so thoroughly was the work done that to this day the most ancient copies of the New Testament Scriptures cannot be found. So fierce was this persecution, and such multitudes of Christians were slain, that the heathen thought they had gained their end. A medal was struck in honor of the victory, one side of which has the image of the god Jupiter with his thunderbolt, trampling upon a kneeling figure representing Christianity However, a few years later proved that neither the Christians nor their writings were destroyed.
After this the enemy commenced a fresh mode of attack upon the truth, which proved far more successful than the first. Diocletian being dead, Constantine became emperor, and he, instead of persecuting, allied himself and heathenism with Christianity. He made laws in favor of the Christian religion, and presided over Christian bishops in council, being still a heathen by profession, for he was not baptized until the illness which ended in his death!
One of the effects of allowing this Roman emperor to manage the affairs of God’s Church was, that those who bore the name of Christ began to practice the cruelties of the heathen, and speedily wielded the sword against each other! It had been said of the early believers, “See how these Christians love one another,” but under the new laws and rules which Rome had introduced into the Church—all so different from those of the Scripture—violent men, in the name of God, and with “Praises to God” for their war cry, tortured and slaughtered, and with fire and sword forced into submission such as disagreed with them. Alas, from those dark days till now, “Obey the Church” is often heard, where the voice should be, “Obey the Scriptures”; and, “Persecute the enemies of the Church” is shouted by such as arrogate to themselves that they are the Church of Christ.
The Church of Christ should certainly represent Christ to the world, and should by walk and ways demonstrate to the world what is the Christianity of the Bible.
We leave the strifes and divisions which tore the Church so sorely in those old days, and come down to the times that followed the gift of the Bible to the people of our own country in their mother tongue, to which we referred in our two previous numbers. We find precisely the same principles at work which wrought in the early centuries of Christianity—on the one hand, the enemy seeking to snatch the Scriptures from men, and destroying such as would read God’s word; on the other, martyrs and confessors of the truth standing up for the word of God, and having, like old Ignatius, Christ in their hearts. One way or another, by destruction or corruption, by force or by fraud, by open war or by insidious alliance, Satan to the very end will do his utmost to hinder the entrance of God’s word into the heart, and to reduce men to sit in darkness and the shadow of death.
It was not the “great Rome” of the heathen Emperor Diocletian who commanded the burning of the Bibles, which our picture illustrates, but servants of the great Church of Christian Rome! The flames which consumed the written words of God and of Christ, were not lighted in a heathen city, but in the streets of Christian London, and at the command of Christian rulers! It was a Christian bishop who supervised the casting of the Holy Scriptures into the fire, and professedly Christian men whose hands flung God’s words into the flames. These things happened in the days of Henry the Eighth. Is it possible to conceive the Church of God doing what the heathen did in their hatred against the Scriptures? Can we imagine the Church of God seeking to destroy the word of God from off the face of the earth? or, at least, destroying it and burning it, though keeping in museums some hidden copies of it? Yet such is the case! Can we conceive the Church burning Christians for reading the Bible, as the heathen had burned Christians for the same offense? Yet such is the case. Numbers of men and women have perished at the hands of the Church for the crime of reading God’s word! Wherein then in relation to the Scriptures, and to those who read them, does great Rome of Christian name differ from great Rome of heathen name?
We will put side by side two instances of suffering, even to most bitter death, for the sake of Christ and the Scriptures. In the time of the pagan persecutor, Diocletian, a band of Christians was seized in the house of a church reader, where they had assembled together to hear the word of God read. The proconsul demanded of the reader if he had any sacred writings in his house. “I have such,” he replied, “but they are in my heart.” The Christians were subjected to most awful tortures, and one of them crying out, the proconsul reviled him, “Thou art now beginning to taste the suffering due to thy crime.”
The sufferer thereupon replied “To glory! I thank the God of the Kingdoms! It appears—the eternal, the imperishable kingdom! O Lord Jesus Christ, we are Christians; we are Thy servants, Thou art our hope! O God, most holy, most high, almighty, we praise Thee, for Thy name’s sake!”
“Thou shouldest have obeyed the law of the emperor,” retorted the proconsul, to whom the dying martyr answered, “I reverence no law but the law of God, which I have learned. This law I keep, for it I am willing to die. By this law I am made perfect; there is no other.”
In the reign of Queen Mary, a young man, nineteen years of age, William Hunter, one day entered the chapel in his town, and began to read in the English Bible, which lay upon the desk there. “Sirrah,” cried the priest, “who gave thee liberty to read the Bible, and to expound it?” From the priests he at length had to appear before the bishop, who sent him to the convict prison, and commanded the keeper to lay upon him as many irons as he could bear, and there Hunter was kept for nine months.
On one occasion the bishop sent for him, and offered him reward if he would recant, but Hunter answered: “I thank you for your great offer; notwithstanding, my lord, if you cannot persuade my conscience with the Scriptures, I cannot find it in my heart to turn from God for the love of the world.” Then said the bishop, “If thou diest in this mind thou art condemned forever.”
His father and mother and his faithful brother saw him in the prison, and his mother declared her joy in having such a son, who could find it in his heart to lose his life for Christ’s sake.
“For the little pain I shall suffer, which will soon be at an end, Christ hath promised me, mother,” he answered, “a crown of joy. Should you not be glad of that?”
The godly parents kneeled down with their son, and, with tears, the mother said, “I pray God strengthen thee, my son, to the end.”
When he was at the stake, a letter arrived from the Queen, and the sheriff said, “If thou wilt recant, thou shalt live; if not, thou shalt be burned.”
A priest, who also sought his recantation, but in vain, cried to him, “Look how thou burnest here: so shalt thou burn in hell.” As the flames gathered around him, he cast his psalter to his brother, and said, “I am not afraid;” then, lifting up his hands to heaven, said, “Lord, Lord, Lord, receive my spirit.”
Surely Pagan Rome and Catholic Rome, are marvelously alike in their hatred to the Bible and to those who read it, and strangely alike is the grace of God to the martyrs, whether of Rome Pagan or Rome Catholic.
Do we Protestants think that Rome has changed because we live in the nineteenth century and not in the fifteenth century, or the third? Rome hates the Bible now as bitterly as ever, and she persecutes, when it is possible to do so, as in the olden times.
The strange story of the translation by Lasserre into French of the four gospels in the year 1886 bears out what we say of the undying hatred of Rome against the truth of God. This translation has a preface, in which Lasserre deplores the fact that the gospels are scarcely ever read by those who profess to be fervent Catholics, and never by the multitude of the faithful. “The gospel,” says he, “the most illustrious book in the world, is become an unknown book,” yet, he continues, all the fathers of the Church urged the people to read both the Old and New Testaments; and he most earnestly declares the necessity of leading back the faithful to the great fountain of living water which flows from the inspired book.
Strange to say, Lasserre’s translation was commended by the Archbishop of Paris, and received the approval and benediction of the Pope! It became most popular in France, was read by thousands, passed most rapidly through many editions, when suddenly it was proscribed as a book of degraded doctrine, which no one was to read or possess! All the copies for sale have been recalled. The book is no longer to he had. The author has submitted to the voice of the Church! Rome once more has trampled out the truth of God from her fields in Christian France. Let all who would hear more of this strange story read the pamphlet, “The power behind the Pope,” by Dr. Wright, price sixpence, published by Nisbet & Co., London.