THE

CHRISTIAN LADY'S MAGAZINE.

DECEMBER, 1844.

WAR WITH THE SAINTS.

CHAPTER II.

THERE is yet a needful caution to be observed, when investing any community with the name and character of the Lord's witnessing Church. We must not lose sight of the cautionary parable which instructs us, that when a field has been sown with pure wheat by the hand of the divine husbandman, the enemy will watch his opportunity to mingle as plentifully as he can, the worthless and deceptive tares that equally grieve and perplex the Lord's faithful servants. These are not, in the general course of God's providential dealings, rooted up at once, but are left to the great day of separation. And not only in the parable but in other parts of scripture, we are warned of the existence of such incongruities in the composition of what, as a distinct body, we are justified in calling a truly spiritual church, with a pointed reference too to the prominent position to DECEMBER, 1844.

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be occupied by that protesting and suffering congregation. Thus in Daniel, "And they that understand among the people shall instruct many; yet they shall fall by the sword, and by flame, by captivity and by spoil, many days. Now when they fall, they shall be holpen with a little help, but many shall cleave to them with flatteries. And some of them of understanding shall fall, to try them, and to purge, and to make them white, even to the time of the end."

And again, our Lord repeats the warning: "Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you; and ye shall be hated of all nations for my Name's sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another. And many false prophets shall arise, and shall deceive many: and because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold."

Such, alas! has been, and such ever will be the case while Satan remains at large, with power to exercise his subtle craft, by transforming himself into the semblance of an angel of light, and his ministers into ministers of righteousness. Is there a congregation among ourselves that would not, if individually called over, and examined with the keen eye of a scrutinizing foe, furnish some instance of unholy living, accompanied with a practical denial of truths formally confessed by the lips, and affording a sample sufficient to condemn the whole company if it could but be proved that all his fellowworshippers resembled him? When the faithful preacher addresses himself to impenitent sinners, hardened rebels, or hypocritical pretenders, who yield a lip-service in which their hearts have no

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part, is he ever able to persuade himself that even amid the limited numbers then present before him, no conscience will bear secret testimony to the justness of such description? If it be thus in a land of full spiritual freedom, and where the light of revelation encounters no intercepting clouds to bar its free course, what must we expect to meet with, in records penned by adverse hands, purporting to be those of a poor limited company of witnesses against the wicked spirits who then ruled in all the high places of the earth? Even a child may discern at a glance that the policy of Satan was obviously to put forward some rank tares in the field of wheat, and to obtain a judgment of his own suggesting, not only on their individual quality, but on their perfect resemblance to all that grew around them; as a justification of the sentence that doomed them to be all cut down together in one premature, indiscriminate harvest of death. A vast deal of learning and laborious research have been expended in controversial investigations of this subject: which is, after all, only to be rightly apprehended by admitting freely the pure light of divine truth into an arena where the respective combatants are too ready to assail each other in the dark, with weapons as carnal as the hottest forge of persecuting cruelty could make them: what else are the annals of superstitious monks, mercenary apostates, and sanguinary inquisitors, from which are drawn the particulars of this fearful epoch?

From such doubtful disputations we, however, mean to stand aloof. Our business is to deal with facts. We find a nominally ecclesiastical ruler, sitting in the seat, and invested with the power and

great authority that once belonged to the pagan emperors of ancient Rome, the unquestionable instruments of Satanic cruelty, fraud, violence, and blasphemy. We recognise in him every mark with which the spirit of prophecy has branded the great Apostacy that was to work dire havoc among the flock of Christ, and to make war with the saints, to wear them out, to persevere for a long course of time, even to the actual silencing, for a limited space, their public testimony. We find the same ruler suddenly gathering his forces, and investing with the character of a holy war the merciless enterprise, insomuch that to take part in it was to purchase pardon for all the sins of a long life at the hand of this impious pretender to divine authority; we behold him precipitating them upon a province belonging to one of his ten vassal kings, carrying utter desolation through it, "by the sword and by flame, by captivity and by spoil," for "many days;" even until there was none left of those who had provoked the visitation by professing a faith consistent with what was once delivered to the saints, and therefore necessarily opposed to his own most blasphemous perversion of that faith by means of such doctrines and such practices as turned the truth of God into a lie. Moreover, we find the people so "persecuted" unto the death, uniformly "reviled " by writers on the adverse side; their names "cast out as evil,” and a sustained attempt made to render them "hated of all nations even to remote posterity, by bringing against them accusations similar to those brought against their Divine Master, who was denounced as gluttonous and a wine-bibber; and accused of having a devil: who was arraigned

on a charge of combined sedition and blasphemy, and put to death by the Roman power, on such testimony as could not even wear a semblance of agreement with itself, much less of criminating weight against the innocent victim. In all this we trace an accumulation of predicted signs, not to be brought together by any ingenuity of man; nor by such ingenuity at its utmost stretch to be explained away. Men who, either to protect a secret ally, or to uphold some favorite scheme of interpretation peculiar to themselves, would draw a veil over the great papal apostacy, concealing from; our sight its most unmistakable features, in order to prepare us for a different manifestation of the long-doomed Man of Sin, may be tempted to avail themselves of the railing accusations brought against our martyred brethren by men more daring than angels are; (Jude 9,) nay, gravely to adduce and to adopt the flagitious records of the murderous Inquisition, noted down from the delirious exclamations of victims lying on the rack, and echoing unconsciously, or alike unconsciously assenting to, the wily promptings of their diabolical torturers; or else duly coined, to meet any possible emergency of future investigation, if, peradventure, God should raise up an avenger of innocent blood, with power to call them to account for their tremendous enormities. Into no such track are we in danger of straying: we have no human system to uphold, or historical evidence to explain away; but simply adhering to the fact that "thus it was written," and thus it behoved the people of Christ to suffer with him, preparatory to their future participation in his glorious reign, we would pursue the story; not unmindful of the farther analogy,