men have stumbled at this sacred impartiality. They have mistaken the
nature of inspiration, and have busied themselves to clear the
character of men like David and the holy Apostles, explaining away the
plainest facts,--the lie of Abraham, the adultery of David, the
weaknesses and infirmities of the Apostles. They have forgotten the
principle involved in the declaration, "Elijah was a man of like
passions with ourselves;" and have been so jealous for the honour of
scriptural characters that they have made their history unreal,
worthless as a living example. St. Jerome, to take but one instance,
was a commentator upon Scripture whose expositions are of the greatest
value, specially because he lived and worked amid the scenes where
Scripture history was written, and while yet living tradition could be
used to illustrate the sacred narrative. St. Jerome applied this
deceptive method to the dissimulation of St. Peter at Antioch of which
St. Paul tells us in the Galatians; maintaining, in opposition to St.
Augustine,[96] that St. Peter was not a dissembler at all, and that
the whole scene at Antioch was a piece of pious acting, got up between
the Apostles in order that St. Paul might have the opportunity of
condemning Judaizing practices. This is an illustration of the
tendency to which I am referring. Men will uphold, not merely the
character of the Scriptures, but the characters of the writers of
Scripture. Yet how clearly do the Sacred Writings distinguish between
these things; how clearly they show that God imparted His treasures in
earthen vessels, vessels that were sometimes very earthy indeed, for
while in one place they give us the Psalms of David, with all their
treasures of spiritual joy, hope, penitence, they in another place
give us the very words of the letter written by King David ordering
the murder of Uriah the Hittite. This jealousy, which refuses to admit
the fallibility and weakness of scriptural personages, has been
applied to the doctrine of the community of goods which finds place in
the passage under review. Some expositors will not allow that it was a
mistake at all; they view the Church at Jerusalem as divinely guided
by the Holy Spirit even in matters of temporal policy; they ascribe to
it an infallibility greater and wider than any claimed for the Roman
Pontiff. He claims infallibility in matters pertaining to faith and
morals, when speaking as universal doctor and teacher of the Universal
Church; but those writers invest the Church at Jerusalem with
infallibility on every question, whether spiritual or temporal, sacred
or secular, because the Holy Ghost had been poured out upon the
twelve Apostles on the day of Pentecost. Now it is quite evident that
neither the Church of Jerusalem nor the Apostles themselves were
guided by an inspiration which rendered them infallible upon all
questions. The indwelling of the Holy Spirit which was granted to them
was a gift which left all their faculties in precisely the same state
as they were before the descent of the Spirit. The Apostles could make
moral mistakes, as Peter did at Antioch; they were not infallible in
forecasting the future, as St. Paul proved when at Ephesus he told the
Ephesian elders that he should not again visit their Church,[97]
while, indeed, he spent much time there in after years. The whole
early Church was mistaken on the important questions of the calling of
the Gentiles, the binding nature of the Levitical law, and the time of
Christ's second coming. The Church of Jerusalem, till the conversion
of Cornelius, was completely mistaken as to the true nature of the
Christian dispensation. They regarded it, not as the new and final
revelation which was to supersede all others; they thought of it
merely as a new sect within the bounds of Judaism.

  [96] See an interesting letter from St. Augustine to St. Jerome on
  this question in the _Letters_ of St. Augustine (Clark's edition),
  vol. i., pp. 30-2. With which compare Bishop Lightfoot on
  _Galatians_, p. 128.

  [97] _Cf._ Acts xx. 25; 1 Tim. i. 3, iii. 14, iv. 13; 2 Tim. i.
  18. St. Paul's address to the Ephesian elder was delivered in the
  spring of 58 A.D. He twice revisited Ephesus, six years later, in
  64 A.D. See Lewin's _Fasti Sacri_, pp. 314, 334,--a book of
  marvellous learning and research, which every critical student of
  the Acts should possess, together with the same author's _Life of
  St. Paul_.

It was a similar mistake which led to the community of goods. We can
trace the genesis and upgrowth of the idea. It cannot be denied that
the earliest Christians expected the immediate return of Christ. This
expectation brought with it a very natural paralysis of business life
and activity. We have seen the same result happening again and again.
At Thessalonica St. Paul had to deal with it, as we have already noted
in the second of these lectures. Some of the Thessalonians laboured
under a misunderstanding as to St. Paul's true teaching: they thought
that Jesus Christ was immediately about to appear, and they gave up
work and labour under the pretence of preparing for His second coming.
Then St. Paul comes sharply down upon this false practical deduction
which they had drawn from his teaching, and proclaims the law, "If any
man will not work, neither shall he eat." We have already spoken of
the danger which might attend such a time. Here we behold another
danger which did practically ensue and bring forth evil fruit. The
first Christian Pentecost and the days succeeding it were a period of
strained expectation, a season of intense religious excitement, which
naturally led to the community of goods. There was no apostolic rule
or law laid down in the matter. It seems to have been a course of
action to which the converts spontaneously resorted, as the logical
deduction from two principles which they held; first, their
brotherhood and union in Christ; secondly, the nearness of Christ's
second advent. The time was short. The Master had passed into the
invisible world whence He would shortly reappear. Why should they not
then, as brethren in Christ, have one common purse, and spend the
whole time in waiting and watching for that loved presence? This seems
a natural explanation of the origin of a line of policy which has been
often appealed to in the practical life of modern Europe as an example
for modern Christians; and yet, when we examine it more closely, we
can see that this book of the Acts of the Apostles, while it tells of
their mistake, carries with it the correction of the error into which
these earliest disciples fell.[98] The community of goods was adopted
in no other Church. At Corinth, Ephesus, Rome, we hear nothing of it
in those primitive times. No Christian sect or Church has ever tried
to revive it, save the monastic orders, who adopted it for the special
purpose of completely cutting their members off from any connection
with the world of life and action; and, in later times still, the wild
fanatical Anabaptists at the Reformation period, who thought, like the
Christians of Jerusalem, that the kingdom of God, as they fancied it,
was immediately about to appear.[99] The Church of Jerusalem, as the
apostolic history shows us, reaped the natural results of this false
step. They adopted the principles of communism; they lost hold of that
principle of individual life and exertion which lies at the very root
of all civilisation and all advancement, and they fell, as the natural
result, into the direst poverty. There was no reason in the nature of
its composition why the Jerusalem Church should have been more
poverty-stricken than the Churches of Ephesus, Philippi, or Corinth.
Slaves and very humble folk constituted the staple of these Churches.
At Jerusalem a great company of the priests were obedient to the
faith, and the priests were, as a class, in easy circumstances. Slaves
cannot at Jerusalem have constituted that large element of the Church
which they did in the great Greek and Roman cities, simply because
slavery never reached among the Jews the same development as in the
Gentile world. The Jews, as a nation, were a people among whom there
was a widely diffused comfort, and the earliest Church at Jerusalem
must have fairly represented the nation. There was nothing to make the
mother Church of Christendom that pauper community we find it to have
been all through St. Paul's ministry, save the one initial mistake,
which doubtless the Church authorities found it very hard afterwards
to retrieve; for when men get into the habit of living upon alms it is
very difficult to restore the habits of healthy independence.

  [98] The communism of the early Christians was not a novel notion.
  The Essenes, a curious Jewish sect of that time, had long
  practised it; see Bishop Lightfoot's essay on the Essenes in his
  commentary on Colossians, 3rd ed., p. 416. Josephus, in his
  _Antiqq._, XVIII., i., 5, and in his _Wars_, II., viii., 3,
  describes the communism of the Essenes in language that would
  exactly apply to that of the early Christians. Thus in the latter
  place he says: "These men are despisers of riches, and so very
  communicative as raises our admiration. Nor is there to be found
  any one among them who hath more than another; for it is a law
  among them, that those who come to them must let what they have be
  common to the whole order; insomuch that among them all there is
  no appearance of poverty or excess of riches, but every one's
  possessions are intermingled with every other's possessions, and
  so there is, as it were, one patrimony among all the brethren."

  [99] The thirty-eighth Article of the Church of England is
  directed against the Anabaptist theory. A paralysis of ordinary
  life and action was temporarily produced at Jerusalem after the
  day of Pentecost. This quickly led to the community of goods, with
  its evil results. The paralysis produced at Jerusalem by the
  excitement and expectation of those early days was reproduced in
  this century at the time when Irvingism and Plymouthism took their
  first rise, some sixty years ago. The best illustration of the
  practical effects of such one-sided spiritual expectation will be
  found in a book forgotten by this generation, _The Letters and
  Papers of Lady Powerscourt_, published in 1838. She was eminent in
  the religious world of her day, and was intimately mixed up with
  the prophetical movement out of which Irvingism and Plymouthism
  were developed. The fundamental doctrine of both these sects was
  the immediate personal appearance and reign of Christ on earth.
  Lady Powerscourt's correspondence shows the results on an ardent
  mind of such an idea. She gave up society, separated herself from
  the world in a hermit's cottage at Lough Bray in the deepest
  recesses of the Wicklow Mountains, and there occupied herself in
  writing to her friends exhortations to cease from life's work,
  such as the following, which we find on p. 235: "There is much
  seemingly to be said for the things of this world being sanctified
  to heavenly uses; yet I cannot help feeling more and more assured
  every day that a divorce must take place,--that God and the world
  cannot be joined,--that it behoves us to make plain that we are
  the risen ones by our portion not being in any degree from
  hence,--that we are not struggling upwards through mire and dirt,
  but we are as let down from heaven. We take our stand in the
  kingdom of heaven, looking from above at earth, not from earth at
  heaven." When people begin to "look from above at earth," the step
  to communism is not a long one. Vast numbers of persons never
  recovered themselves from the strain of that time (A. D. 1830),
  but remained all their lives in a state of dreamy disappointment.
  I have enlarged on this subject in an article on J. N. Darby in
  the _Contemporary Review_ for 1885.

II. This incident is, however, rich in teaching for the Church of
every age, and that in very various directions. It is a significant
warning for the mission field. Missionary Churches should strive after
a healthy independence amongst their members. It is, of course,
absolutely necessary that missionaries should strive to supply
temporal employment to their converts in places and under
circumstances where a profession of Christianity cuts them off at once
from all communication with their old friends and neighbours. The
primitive Church found it necessary to give such temporal relief, and
yet had to guard against its abuse; and we have been far too remiss in
looking for guidance to those early centuries when the whole Church
was necessarily one great missionary organization. The Apostolic
Canons and Constitutions are documents which throw much light on many
questions which now press for solution in the mission field. They
pretend to be the exact words of the Apostles, but are evidently the
work of a later age. They date back in their present shape, at latest,
to the third or fourth centuries, as is evident from the fact that
they contain elaborate rules for the treatment of martyrs and
confessors,--and there were no martyrs after that time,--directing
that every effort should be made to render them comfort, support, and
sympathy. These Constitutions prove that the Church in the third
century was one mighty co-operative institution, and an important
function of the bishop was the direction of that co-operation. The
second chapter of the fourth book of the Apostolic Constitution lays
down, "Do you therefore, O bishops, be solicitous about the
maintenance of orphans, being in nothing wanting to them; exhibiting
to the orphans the care of parents; to the widows the care of
husbands; to the artificer, work; to the stranger, an house; to the
hungry, food; to the thirsty, drink; to the naked, clothing; to the
sick, visitation, to the prisoners, assistance." But these same
Constitutions recognise equally clearly the danger involved in such a
course. The wisdom of the early Church saw and knew how easily alms
promiscuously bestowed sap the roots of independence, and taught
therefore, with equal explicitness, the absolute necessity for
individual exertion, the duty of Christian toil and labour; urging the
example of the Apostles themselves, as in the sixty-third Constitution
of the second book, where they are represented as exhorting, "Let the
young persons of the Church endeavour to minister diligently in all
necessaries; mind your business with all becoming seriousness, that so
you may always have sufficient to support yourselves and those that
are needy, and not burden the Church of God. For we ourselves, besides
our attention to the Word of the Gospel, do not neglect our inferior
employments; for some of us are fishermen, some tent-makers, some
husbandmen, that so we may never be idle." In the modern mission field
there will often be occasions when, as in ancient times, the
profession of Christianity and the submission of the converts to
baptism will involve the loss of all things.[100] And, under such
circumstances, Christian love, such as burned of old in the hearts of
God's people and led them to enact the rules we have now quoted, will
still lead and compel the Church in its organized capacity to lend
temporal assistance to those that are in danger of starvation for
Christ's sake; but no missionary effort can be in a healthy condition
where all, or the greater portion, of the converts are so dependent
upon the funds of the mission that if the funds were withdrawn the
apparent results would vanish into thin air. Such missions are utterly
unlike the missions of the apostolic Church; for the converts of the
apostolic age were made by men who went forth without purse or scrip,
who could not give temporal assistance even had they desired to do so,
and whose great object ever was to develop in their followers a
healthy spirit of Christian manliness and honest independence.

  [100] An interesting illustration of ancient missionary work and
  its likeness to modern efforts turned up a few years ago among the
  Fayûm papyri. It was a document containing the curse pronounced by
  a pagan mother upon her son who had turned Christian, solemnly
  cutting him off from his kith and kin. It will be found in a
  translated shape in the _Transactions_ of the Society of Biblical
  Archæology for 1884, Part I. Modern converts, too, just like the
  ancient, have often to suffer the loss of all things for Christ's
  sake.

III. Then, again, this passage teaches a much-needed lesson to the
Church at home about the methods of poor relief and almsgiving.
"Blessed," says the Psalmist, "is he that considereth the poor." He
does not say, "Blessed is he that giveth money to the poor," but,
"Blessed is he that considereth the poor." Well-directed, wise,
prudent almsgiving is a good and beneficial thing, but indiscriminate
almsgiving, almsgiving bestowed without care, thought, and
consideration such as the Psalmist suggests, brings with it far more
evil than it prevents. The Church of Jerusalem very soon had
experience of these evils. Jealousies and quarrels soon sprang up even
where Apostles were ministering and the supernatural gifts of the
Spirit were present,--"There arose a murmuring of the Grecians against
the Hebrews because their widows were neglected in the daily
ministrations;" and it has been ever since the experience of those
called to deal with questions of temporal relief and the distribution
of alms, that no classes are more suspicious and more quarrelsome than
those who are in receipt of such assistance. The chaplains and
managers of almshouses, asylums, charitable funds, and workhouses know
this to their cost, and ofttimes make a bitter acquaintance with that
evil spirit which burst forth even in the mother Church of Jerusalem.
Time necessarily hangs heavy upon the recipients' hands, forethought
and care are removed and cease to engage the mind, and people having
nothing else to do begin to quarrel. But this was not the only evil
which arose: hypocrisy and ostentation, as in the case of Ananias and
Sapphira, deceit, thriftlessness, and idleness showed themselves at
Jerusalem, Thessalonica, and other places, as the Epistles of St. Paul
amply testify. And so it has been in the experience of the modern
Church. I know myself of whole districts where almsgiving has quite
demoralised the poor and eaten the heart out of their religion, so
that they value religious ministrations, not for the sake of the
religion that is taught, but solely for the sake of the temporal
relief that accompanies it. I know of a district where, owing to the
want of organization in religious effort and the shattered and broken
character of Protestant Christianity, the poor people are visited and
relieved by six or seven competing religious communities, so that a
clever person can make a very fair income by a judicious manipulation
of the different visitors. It is evident that such visitations are
doing evil instead of good, and the labour and money expended are
worse than useless. The proper organization of charitable relief is
one of the desirable objects the Church should set before it. The
great point to be aimed at should be not so much the ministration of
direct assistance to the people as the development of the spirit of
self-help. And here comes in the action of the Christian State. The
institution of the Post Office Savings Bank, where the State
guarantees the safety of the depositor's money, seems a direct
exposition and embodiment of the principle which underlay the
community of goods in the apostolic Church. That principle was a
generous, unselfish, Christlike principle. The principle was right,
though the particular shape which the principle took was a mistaken
one. Experience has taught the Church of Christ a wiser course, and
now the system of State-guaranteed Savings Banks enables the Church to
lead the poor committed to her care into wiser courses. Parochial and
congregational Savings Banks ought to be attached to all Christian
organizations, so as to teach the poor the industrial lessons which
they need. We have known a district in a most thriftless
neighbourhood, where immense sums used to be wasted in indiscriminate
almsgiving, and yet where the people, like the woman in the Gospels,
were never one whit the better, but rather grew worse. We have seen
such a district, in the course of a few years, quite regenerated in
temporal matters, simply by the action of what is called a parochial
Penny Savings Bank. Previously to its institution the slightest fall
of snow brought heart-rending appeals for coal funds, blankets, and
food; while a few years of its operation banished coal funds and
pauperism in every shape, simply by teaching the people the magic law
of thrift, and by developing within them the love and the power of
self-respecting and industrious independence. And yet efforts in this
direction will not be destructive of Christian charity. They tend not
to dry up the springs of Christian love. Charity is indeed a blessing
to the giver, and we should never desire to see the opportunity
wanting for its display. Ill indeed would be the world's state if we
had no longer the poor, the sick, the needy with us. Our sinful human
nature requires its unselfish powers to be kept in action, or else it
quickly subsides into a state of unwholesome stagnation. Poor people
need to be taught habits of saving, and this teaching will require
time, and trouble, and expense. The clergy and their congregations may
teach the poor thrift by offering a much higher interest than the Post
Office supplies, while, at the same time, the funds are all deposited
in the State Savings Bank. That higher interest will often demand as
much money as the doles previously bestowed in the shape of mere gifts
of coal and food. But then what a difference in the result! The mere
dole has, for the most part, a demoralising tendency, while the money
spent in the other direction permanently elevates and blesses.[101]

  [101] It is not generally known that the Post Office offers
  special facilities for the establishment of such Penny Savings
  Banks as I advocate. The Post Office will supply books for
  depositors and permit a deposit account to be opened without any
  limit. I have seen in my own parish the beneficial working of such
  an institution, increasing annually in its results for the last
  twenty years.

IV. But there is a more important lesson still to be derived from this
incident in the apostolic Church. The community of goods failed in
that Church when tried under the most favourable circumstances,
terminating in the permanent degradation of the Christian community at
Jerusalem; just as similar efforts must ever fail, no matter how broad
the field on which they may be tried or how powerful the forces which
may be arrayed on their behalf. Christian legislatures of our own age
may learn a lesson of warning against perilous experiments in a
communistic direction from the disastrous failure in Jerusalem; and
there is a real danger in this respect from the tendency of human
nature to rush to extremes. Protestantism and the Reformation
accentuated the individual and individual independence. The feeling
thus taught in religion reacted on the world of life and action,
developing an intensity of individualism in the political world which
paralysed the efforts which the State alone could make in the various
matters of sanitary education and social reform. In the last
generation Maurice and Kingsley and men of their school raised in
opposition the banner of Christian socialism, because they saw clearly
that men had run too far in the direction of individualism,--so far,
indeed, that they were inclined to forget the great lesson taught by
Christianity, that under the new law we are members one of another,
and that all members belong to one body, and that body is Christ. Men
are so narrow that they can for the most part take only one view at a
time, and so now they are inclined to push Christian socialism to the
same extreme as at Jerusalem, and to forget that there is a great
truth in individualism as there is another great truth in Christian
socialism. Dr. Newman in his valuable but almost forgotten work on
the Prophetical Office of the Church defined the position of the
English Church as being a _Media Via_, a mean between two extremes.
Whatever may be said upon other topics, the office of the Christian
Church is most certainly a _Via Media_, a mean between the two
opposite extremes of socialism and individualism. Much good has been
effected of late years by legislation based upon essentially
socialistic ideas. Reformatory and industrial schools, to take but one
instance, are socialistic in their foundations and in their
tendencies. The whole body of the State undertakes in them
responsibilities and duties which God intended individuals to
discharge, but which individuals persistently neglect, to the injury
of their innocent offspring, and of society at large. Yet even in this
simple experiment we can see the germs of the same evils which sprang
up at Jerusalem. We have seen this tendency appearing in connection
with the Industrial School system, and have known parents who could
educate and train their children in family life encouraged by this
well-intentioned legislation to fling their responsibilities over upon
the State, and neglecting their offspring because they were convinced
that in doing so they were not only saving their own pockets but also
doing better for their children than they themselves could. It is just
the same, and has ever been the same, with all similar legislation. It
requires to be most narrowly watched. Human nature is intensely lazy
and intensely selfish. God has laid down the law of individual effort
and individual responsibility, and while we should strive against the
abuses of that law, we should watch with equal care against the
opposite abuses. Foundling hospitals as they were worked in the last
century, for instance, form an object-lesson of the dangers inherent
in such methods of action. Benevolent persons in the last century
pitied the condition of poor children left as foundlings. There was,
some sixty years ago, an institution in Dublin of this kind, which was
supported by the State. There was a box into which an infant could be
placed at any hour of the day or night; a bell was rung, and by the
action of a turn-stile the infant was received into the institution.
But experience soon taught the same lesson as at Jerusalem. The
Foundling Hospital may have temporarily relieved some deserving cases
and occasionally prevented some very painful scenes, but the broad
results upon society at large were so bad, immorality was so
increased, the sense of parental responsibility was so weakened, that
the State was compelled to terminate its existence at a very large
expense. Socialism when pushed to an extreme must necessarily work out
in bad results, and that because there is one constant and fixed
quantity which the socialist forgets. Human nature changes not; human
nature is corrupt and must remain corrupt until the end, and so long
as the corruption of human nature remains the best-conceived plans of
socialism must necessarily fail.

Yet the Jerusalem idea of a voluntary community of goods was a noble
one, and sprang from an unselfish root. It was purely voluntary
indeed. There was no compulsion upon any to adopt it. "Not one of them
said that aught that he possessed was his own," is St. Luke's
testimony on the point. "While it remained, did it not remain thine
own? And after it was sold, was it not in thy power?" are St. Peter's
words, clearly testifying that this Christian communism was simply the
result and outcome of loving hearts who, under the influence of an
overmastering emotion, had cast prudence to the winds. The communism
of Jerusalem may have been unwise, but it was the proof of generous
and devout spirits. It was an attempt, too, to realize the conditions
of the new life in the new heaven and the new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness, while still the old heaven and the old earth remained.
It was an enthusiasm, a high, a holy, and a noble enthusiasm; and
though it failed in some respects, still the enthusiasm begotten of
fervent Christian love succeeded in another direction, for it enabled
the Apostles "with great power to give witness to the resurrection of
the Lord Jesus." The union of these two points in the sacred narrative
has profound spiritual teaching for the Church of Christ.
Unselfishness in worldly things, enthusiasm about the kingdom of
Christ, fervent love to the brethren, are brought into nearest contact
and united in closest bonds with the possession of special spiritual
power over the hearts of the unbelievers. And then, again, the
unselfishness existed amongst the body of the Church, the mass of the
people at large. We are sure that the Apostles were leaders in the
acts of self-denial. No great work is carried out where the natural
and divinely-sent leaders hang back. But it is the love and enthusiasm
of the mass of the people which excite St. Luke's notice, and which he
illustrates by the contrasted cases of Barnabas and Ananias; and he
connects this unselfish enthusiasm of the people with the possession
of great power by the Apostles. Surely we can read a lesson suitable
for the Church of all ages in this collocation. The law of interaction
prevails between clergy and people still as it did between the
Apostles and people of old. The true minister of Christ will
frequently bear before the throne of God those souls with whom the
Holy Ghost has entrusted him, and without such personal intercession
he cannot expect real success in his work. But then, on the other
hand, this passage suggests to us that enthusiasm, fervent faith,
unselfish love on the people's part are the conditions of ministerial
power with human souls. A people filled with Christ's love, and
abounding in enthusiasm, even by a mere natural process produce power
in their leaders, for the hearts of the same leaders beat quicker and
their tongues speak more forcibly because they feel behind them the
immense motive power of hallowed faith and sacred zeal. But we believe
in a still higher blessing. When people are unselfish, brimming over
with generous Christian love, it calls down a supernatural, a Divine
power. The Pentecostal Spirit of love again descends, and in roused
hearts and converted souls and purified and consecrated intellects
rewards with a blessing such as they desire the men and women who long
for the salvation of their brethren, and are willing, like these
apostolic Christians, to sacrifice their dearest and their best for
it.

CHAPTER XI.

_HONESTY AND PRETENCE IN THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH._

     "And Joseph, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas (which is,
     being interpreted, Son of exhortation), a Levite, a man of Cyprus
     by race, having a field, sold it, and brought the money, and laid
     it at the apostles' feet."--ACTS iv. 36, 37.

     "But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a
     possession, and kept back part of the price, his wife also being
     privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the
     apostles' feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled
     thy heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the
     price of the land? Whiles it remained, did it not remain thine
     own? and after it was sold, was it not in thy power? How is it
     that thou hast conceived this thing in thy heart? thou hast not
     lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell
     down and gave up the ghost; and great fear came upon all that
     heard it. And the young men arose and wrapped him round, and they
     carried him out and buried him."--ACTS v. 1-6.

The exact period in the history of the apostolic Church at which we
have now arrived is a most interesting one. We stand at the very first
origin of a new development in Christian life and thought. Let us
observe it well, for the whole future of the Church is bound up with
it. Christianity was at the beginning simply a sect of Judaism. It is
plain that the Apostles at first thus regarded it. They observed
Jewish rites, they joined in the temple and synagogue worship, they
restricted salvation and God's favour to the children of Abraham, and
merely added belief in Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah to
the common Jewish faith. The Spirit of God was indeed speaking through
the Apostles, leading them, as it led St. Peter on the day of
Pentecost, to speak words with a meaning and scope far beyond their
thoughts. They, like the prophets of old, knew not as yet what manner
of things the Spirit which was in them did signify.

    "As little children lisp, and tell of Heaven,
    So thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given."

Their speech had a grander and wider application than they themselves
dreamt of; but the power of prejudice and education was far too great
even for the Apostles, and so, though the nobility and profuseness of
God's mercy were revealed and the plenteousness of His grace was
announced by St. Peter himself, yet the glory of the Divine gift was
still unrecognised. Jerusalem, the Temple, the Old Covenant, Israel
after the flesh,--these things as yet bounded and limited the horizon
of Christ's Church. How were the new ideas to gain an entrance? How
was the Church to rise to a sense of the magnificence and universality
of its mission? Joseph, who by the Apostles was surnamed Barnabas,
emerges upon the scene and supplies the answer, proving himself in
very deed a son of consolation, because he became the occasion of
consoling the masses of mankind with that truest comfort, the peace of
God which passes all understanding. Let us see how this came about.

I. The Christian leaders belonged originally to the extreme party in
Judaism. The Jews were at this time divided into two sections. There
was the Hebrew party on the one hand; extreme Nationalists as we might
call them. They hated everything foreign. They clung to the soil of
Palestine, to its language and to its customs. They trained up their
children in an abhorrence of Greek civilisation, and could see nothing
good in it. This party was very unprogressive, very narrow-minded,
and, therefore, unfit to recognise the developments of God's purposes.
The Galileans were very prominent among them. They lived in a
provincial district, remote from the influences of the great centres
of thought and life, and missed, therefore, the revelations of God's
mind which He is evermore making through the course of His
providential dealings with mankind. The Galileans furnished the
majority of the earliest Christian leaders, and they were not fitted
from their narrowness to grasp the Divine intentions with respect to
Christianity and its mission. What a lesson for every age do we behold
in this intellectual and spiritual defect of the Galileans. They were
conscientious, earnest, devout, spiritually-minded men. Christ loved
them as such, and devoted Himself to their instruction. But they were
one-sided and illiberal. Their very provincialism, which had sheltered
them from Sadduceism and unbelief, had filled them with blind
prejudices, and as the result had rendered them unable to read aright
the mind of God and the development of His purposes. Man, alas! is a
very weak creature, and human nature is very narrow. Piety is no
guarantee for wisdom and breadth, and strong faith in God's dealings
in the past often hinders men from realizing and obeying the Divine
guidance and the evolution of His purposes amid the changed
circumstances of the present. The Galilean leaders were best fitted to
testify with unfaltering zeal to the miracles and resurrection of
Christ. They were not best fitted to lead the Church into the
possession of the Gentiles.

There was another party among the Jews whom God had trained by the
guidance of His Providence for this purpose. The Acts of the Apostles
casts a strong and comforting light back upon the history of the
Lord's dealings with the Jews ever since the days of the Babylonish
Captivity. We can see in the story told in the Acts the reason why God
permitted the overthrow of Jerusalem by the hands of Nebuchadnezzar,
and the apparent defeat for the time of His own designs towards the
chosen people. The story of the dispersion is a standing example how
wonderfully God evolves good out of seeming ill, making all things
work together for the good of His Church. The dispersion prepared a
section of the Jews, by travel, by foreign civilization, by culture,
and by that breadth of mind and sympathy which is thereby produced, to
be mediators between the Hebrew party with all their narrowness, and
the masses of the Gentile world whom the strict Jews would fain have
shut out from the hope of God's mercy. This liberal and progressive
party is called in the Acts of the Apostles the Hellenists. They were
looked at askance by the more old-fashioned Hebrews. They were Jews,
children of Abraham indeed, of the genuine stock of Israel. As such
they had a true standing-ground within the Jewish fold, and as true
Jews could exercise their influence from within much more effectually
than if they stood without; for it has been well remarked by a shrewd
observer, that every party, religious or political, is much more
powerfully affected by movements springing from within than by attacks
directed from without. An explosive operates with much more
destructive force when acting from within or underneath a
fortification than when brought into play from outside. Such was the
Hellenistic party. No one could deny their true Jewish character, but
they had been liberalized by their heaven-sent contact with foreigners
and foreign lands; and hence it is that we discern in the Hellenistic
party, and specially in Joseph who by the Apostle was surnamed
Barnabas, the beginnings of the glorious ingathering of the Gentiles,
the very first rift in the thick dark cloud of prejudice which as yet
kept back even the Apostles themselves from realizing the great object
of the gospel dispensation. The Hellenists, with their wealth, their
culture, their new ideas, their sense and value of Greek thought, were
the bridge by which the spiritual life, hitherto wrapped in Jewish
swaddling clothes, was to pass over to the masses of the Gentile
world. The community of goods led Joseph Barnabas to dedicate his
substance to the same noble cause of unselfishness. That dedication
led to disputes between Hellenists and Hebrews, and these disputes
occasioned the election of the seven deacons, who, in part, at least,
belonged to the more liberal section. Among these deacons we find St.
Stephen, whose teaching and martyrdom were directly followed by St.
Paul and his conversion, and St. Paul was the Apostle of the Gentiles
and the vindicator of Christian freedom and Christian liberty. St.
Barnabas and his act of self-denial and self-sacrifice in surrendering
his landed estate are thus immediately connected with St. Paul by
direct historic contact, even if they had not been subsequently
associated as joint Apostles and messengers of the Churches in their
first missionary journeys; while again the mistaken policy of
communism is overruled to the world's abiding benefit and blessing.
How wonderful, indeed, are the Lord's doings towards the children of
men!

II. We have thus suggested one of the main lines of thought which run
through the first half of this book of the Acts. Let us now look a
little more particularly at this Joseph Barnabas who was the occasion
of this great, this new departure. We learn then, upon consulting the
sacred text, that Joseph was a Levite, a man of Cyprus by race; he
belonged, that is, to the class among the Jews whose interests were
bound up with the maintenance of the existing order of things; and yet
he had become a convert to the belief proclaimed by the Apostles. At
the same time, while we give full credit to this Levite for his
action, we must not imagine that either priests or Levites or Jews at
that period fully realized all the consequences of their decisions. We
find that men at every age take steps blindly, without thoroughly
realizing all the results which logically and necessarily flow forth
from them. Men in religious, political, social matters are blind and
cannot see afar off. It is only step by step that the purposes of God
dawn upon them, and Joseph Barnabas, the Levite of Cyprus, was no
exception to this universal rule. He was not only a Levite, but a
native of Cyprus, for Cyprus was then a great stronghold and resort of
the Jewish race. It continued to be a great centre of Jewish influence
for long afterwards. In the next century, for instance, a great Jewish
rebellion burst forth wherever the Jews were strong enough. They rose
in Palestine against the power of the Emperor Hadrian, and under their
leader Barcochba vindicated the ancient reputation of the nation for
desperate and daring courage; while, in sympathy with their brethren
on the mainland, the Jews in Cyprus seized their arms and massacred a
vast multitude of the Greek and Roman settlers, numbering, it is said,
two hundred and forty thousand persons. The concourse of Jews to
Cyprus in the time of the Apostles is easily explained. Augustus Cæsar
was a great friend and patron of Herod the Great, and he leased the
celebrated copper mines of the island to that Herod, exacting a
royalty upon their produce, as we learn from Josephus, the well-known
Jewish historian (_Antiqq._, xvi. iv. 5). It was only to be expected,
then, that when a Jewish monarch was leaseholder and manager of the
great mining industry of the island, his Jewish subjects should flock
thither, and it was very natural that amongst the crowds who sought
Cyprus there should be found a minister of the Jewish faith whose
tribal descent as a Levite reminded them of Palestine, and of the City
of God, and of the Temple of Jehovah and of its solemn, stately
worship.[102] This residence of Barnabas in Cyprus accounts for his
landed property which he had the right to sell just as he liked. A
Levite in Palestine could not, according to the law of Moses when
strictly construed, possess any private landed estate save in a
Levitical city. Meyer, a German commentator of great reputation, has
indeed suggested that Jer. xxxii. 7, where Jeremiah is asked to redeem
his cousin's field in the suburbs of Anathoth, proves that a member of
the tribe of Levi could possess landed estate in Palestine. He
therefore concludes that the old explanation that the landed property
of Barnabas was in Cyprus, not in Palestine, could not stand. But the
simple fact is that even the cleverest German expositors are not
familiar with the text of their Bibles, for had Meyer been thus
familiar he would have remembered that Anathoth was a city belonging
to the priests and the tribe of Levi, and that the circumstance of
Jeremiah the priest possessing a right to landed property in Anathoth
was no proof whatsoever that he could hold landed property anywhere
else, and, above all, affords no ground for the conclusion that he
could dispose of it in the absolute style which Barnabas here
displayed.[103] We conclude then that the action of Barnabas on this
occasion dealt with his landed estate in Cyprus, the country where he
was born, where he was well known, and where his memory is even still
cherished on account of the work he there performed in conjunction
with St. Paul.

  [102] Philo was a contemporary of the Apostles. He has left us
  many works dealing with this period. He speaks of the Jews of
  Cyprus in the account of his embassy to the Emperor Caius
  Caligula. See Milman's _History of Jews_, iii., 111, 112, and
  Conybeare and Howson's _Life of St. Paul_, chap. v.

  [103] See Lightfoot's _Horæ Heb._, Acts iv. 36; _cf._ Josh. xxi.
  18.

III. Let us see what else we can glean concerning this personage thus
prominent in the early Church, first for his generosity, and then for
his missionary character and success. It is indeed one of the most
fruitful and interesting lines upon which Bible study can be pursued,
thus to trace the scattered features of the less known and less
prominent characters of Scripture, and see wherein God's grace
specially abounded in them.

The very personal appearance of Barnabas can be recalled by the
careful student of this book.[104] Though it lies a little out of our
way, we shall note the circumstance, as it will help us to form a
more lively image of Barnabas, the Son of Consolation. The two
Apostles, Paul and Barnabas, were on their first missionary tour when
they came to the city of Lystra in Lycaonia. There the multitude,
astonished at the miracle wrought upon the cripple by St. Paul,
attempted to pay divine honours to the two Christian missionaries.
"They called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul Mercurius, because he was the
chief speaker." It must have been their physical characteristics as
well as the mode of address used by the Apostles which led to these
names; and from the extant records of antiquity we know that Jupiter
was always depicted as a man with a fine commanding presence, while
Mercury, the god of eloquent speech, was a more insignificant figure.
Jupiter, therefore, struck the Lycaonian people as the fittest name
for the taller and more imposing-looking Apostle, while St. Paul, who
was in bodily presence contemptible, was designated by the name of the
active and restless Mercury. His character again shines through every
recorded action of St. Barnabas. He was a thoroughly sympathetic man,
and, like all such characters, he was ever swept along by the
prevailing wave of thought or action, without allowing that supreme
place to the judgment and the natural powers which they should always
hold if the feelings and sympathies are not to land us in positions
involving dire ruin and loss. He was carried away by the enthusiasm
for Christian communism which now seized upon the Jerusalem Church.
He was influenced by the Judaizing movement at Antioch, so that "even
Barnabas was carried away with the Petrine dissimulation." His
sympathies got the better of his judgment in the matter of St. Mark's
conduct in abandoning the ministry to which St. Paul had called him.
His heart was stronger, in fact, than his head. And yet this very
weakness qualified him to be the Son of Consolation. A question has,
indeed, been raised whether he should be called the Son of Consolation
or the Son of Exhortation, but, practically, there is no difference.
His consolations were administered through his exhortations. His
speech and his advice were of a consoling, healing, comforting kind.
There are still such men to be found in the Church. Just as all other
apostolic graces and characteristics are still manifested,--the
eloquence of a Paul, the courage of a Peter, the speculative flights
of a John,--so the sympathetic power of a Barnabas is granted to some.
And a very precious gift it is. There are some good men whose very
tone of voice and bodily attitudes--their heads thrown back and their
arms akimbo, and their aggressive walk--at once provoke opposition.
They are pugnacious Christians, ever on the look out for some topic of
blame and controversy. There are others, like this Barnabas, whose
voices bring consolation, and whose words, even when not the clearest
or the most practical, speak counsels of peace, and come to us
thick-laden with the blessed dews of charity. Their advice is not,
indeed, always the wisest. Their ardent cry is always, Peace, peace.
Such a man on the political stage was the celebrated Lucius Carey,
Lord Falkland, in the days of the great civil war, who, though he
adhered to the Royalist cause, seemed, as the historian tells us, to
have utterly lost all heart once that active hostilities commenced.
Men of this type appear in times of great religious strife. Erasmus,
for instance, at the time of the Reformation, possessed a good deal of
this spirit which is devoted to compromise, and ever inclined to place
the interests of peace and charity above those of truth and principle,
just as Barnabas would have done at Antioch were it not for the
protest of his stronger and sterner friend St. Paul. And yet such men,
with their sympathetic hearts and speech, have their own great use,
infusing a healing, consoling tone into seasons of strife, when others
are only too apt to lose sight of the sweet image of Christian love in
pursuit of what they consider the supreme interests of religious or
political truth. Such a man was Barnabas all his life, and such we
behold him on his first visible entrance upon the stage of Church
history, when his sympathies and his generosity led him to consecrate
his independent property in Cyprus to his brethren's support, and to
bring the money and lay it down at the Apostles' feet.

  [104] The early history of Barnabas is thus described by
  Metaphrastes, an ancient Greek writer. Barnabas was born in
  Cyprus, of rich parents, who sent him to be trained at Jerusalem
  under Gamaliel. There he formed an early friendship with St. Paul.
  He was a witness of our Lord's miracles, and was converted by the
  healing of the impotent man at Bethesda. He then was the means of
  converting his sister Mary and her son Mark, who was the young man
  with the pitcher of water whom our Lord commanded His disciples to
  follow when He was sending them to prepare the Passover. Mary's
  house was the place where the upper room was situated, and
  continued to be the meeting-place of the Christians, as we find
  from Acts xii. Metaphrastes had formerly a very bad reputation as
  regards truthfulness, but modern investigation has shown that his
  _Lives_ contain some very ancient documents, going back to the
  second century at least. See Bishop Lightfoot's address to the
  Carlisle Church Congress in _Expositor_ 1885, vol. i., p. 3; Prof.
  Ramsay in _Expositor_ 1889, vol. ix., p. 265 and refs., and Cave's
  _Lives of the Primitive Fathers_, p. 35.

IV. Now for the contrast drawn for us by the inspired pen of St. Luke,
a contrast we find oft repeating itself in Church history. Here we
have the generous sympathetic Son of Consolation on the one side, and
here, too, we have a warning and a type for all time that the tares
must evermore be mingled with the wheat, the false with the true, the
hypocrites with real servants of God, even until the final separation.
The accidental division of the book into chapters hinders casual
readers from noticing that the action of Ananias and his wife is set
by the writer over against that of Barnabas. Barnabas sold his estate
and brought the price, the whole price, and surrendered it as an
offering to the Church. The spirit of enthusiastic giving was abroad,
and had seized upon the community; and Barnabas sympathized with it.
Ananias and Sapphira were carried away too, but their spirits were
meaner. They desired to have all the credit the Church would give them
for acting as generously as Barnabas did, and yet, while getting
credit for unselfish and unstinting liberality, to be able to enjoy in
private somewhat of that which they were believed to have surrendered.
And their calculations were terribly disappointed. They tried to play
the hypocrite's part on most dangerous ground just when the Divine
Spirit of purity, sincerity, and truth had been abundantly poured out,
and when the spirit of deceit and hypocrisy was therefore at once
recognised. It was with the Apostles and their spiritual natures then
as it is with ourselves and our physical natures still. When we are
living in a crowded city we notice not strange scents and ill-odours
and foul gases: our senses are dulled, and our perceptive powers are
rendered obtuse because the whole atmosphere is a tainted one. But
when we dwell in the pure air of the country, and the glorious breezes
from mountain and moor blow round us fresh and free, then we detect at
once, and at a long distance, the slightest ill-odour or the least
trace of offensive gas. The outpoured presence of the Spirit, and the
abounding love which was produced thereby, quickened the perception of
St. Peter. He recognised the hypocrisy, characterized the sin of
Ananias as a lie against the Holy Ghost; and then the Spirit and Giver
of life, seconding and supporting the words of St. Peter, withdrew His
support from the human frame of the sinner, and Ananias ceased to
live, just as Sapphira, his partner in deceit, ceased to live a few
hours later. The death of Ananias and Sapphira have been ofttimes the
subject of much criticism and objection, on the part of persons who
do not realize the awfulness of their position, the full depths of
their hypocrisy, and the importance of the lesson taught by their
punishment to the Church of every age. Their position was a specially
awful one, for they were brought into closest contact, as no Christian
can now be brought, with the powers of the world to come. The Spirit
was vouchsafed during those earliest days of the Church in a manner
and style which we hear nothing of during the later years of the
Apostles. He proved His presence by physical manifestations, as when
the whole house was shaken where the Apostles were assembled; a
phenomenon of which we read nothing in the latter portion of the Acts.
By the gift of tongues, by miracles of healing, by abounding spiritual
life and discernment, by physical manifestations, the most careless
and thoughtless in the Christian community were compelled to feel that
a supernatural power was present in their midst and specially resting
upon the Apostles. Yet it was into such an atmosphere that the spirit
of hypocrisy and of covetousness, the two vices to which Christianity
was specially opposed, and which the great Master had specially
denounced, obtruded itself as Satan gained entrance into Eden, to
defile with their foul presence the chosen dwelling-place of the Holy
Ghost. The Holy Ghost vindicated His authority therefore, because, as
it must be observed, it was not St. Peter sentenced Ananias to death.
No one may have been more surprised than St. Peter himself at the
consequences which followed his stern rebuke. St. Peter merely
declared his sin, "Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God;" and
then it is expressly said, "Ananias hearing these words fell down, and
gave up the ghost." It was a stern action indeed; but then all God's
judgments have a stern side. Ananias and Sapphira were cut off in
their sins, but men are every day summoned into eternity in precisely
the same state and the same way, and the only difference is that in
the case of Ananias we see the sin which provoked the punishment and
then we see the punishment immediately following. Men object to this
narrative simply because they have a one-sided conception of
Christianity such as this period of the world's history delights in.
They would make it a religion of pure unmitigated love; they would
eliminate from it every trace of sternness, and would thus leave it a
poor weak flabby thing, without backbone or earnestness, and utterly
unlike all other dispensations of the Lord, which have their stern
sides and aspects as well as their loving.

It may well have been that this incident was inserted in this typical
Church history to correct a false idea which would otherwise have
grown up. The Jews were quite well accustomed to regard the Almighty
as a God of judgment as well as a God of love. Perhaps we might even
say that they viewed Him more in the former light than in the latter.
Our Lord was obliged, in fact, to direct some of His most searching
discourses to rebuke this very tendency. The Galileans, whose blood
Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, the men upon whom the tower of
Siloam fell,--neither party were sinners above all that were at
Jerusalem, or were punished as such. Such was his teaching in
opposition to the popular idea. The Apostles were once quite ready to
ascribe the infirmity of the man born blind to the direct judgment of
the Almighty upon himself or upon his parents. But men are apt to rush
from one extreme to another. The Apostles and their followers were
now realizing their freedom in the Spirit; and some were inclined to
run into licentiousness as the result of that same freedom. They were
realizing, too, their relationship to God as one of pure filial love,
and they were in great danger of forgetting that God was a God of
justice and judgment as well, till this stern dispensation recalled
them to a sense of the fact that eternal love is also eternal purity
and eternal truth, and will by no means clear the guilty. This is a
lesson very necessary for every age of the Church. Men are always
inclined, and never, perhaps, so much as at the present time, to look
away from the severe side of religion, or even to deny that religion
can have a severe side at all. This tendency in religious matters is
indeed simply an exhibition of the spirit of the age. It is a time of
great material prosperity and comfort, when pain is regarded as the
greatest possible evil, softness, ease, and enjoyment the greatest
possible good. Men shrink from the infliction of pain even upon the
greatest criminals; and this spirit infects their religion, which they
would fain turn into a mere matter of weakly sentiment. Against such a
notion the judicial action of the Holy Ghost in this case raises an
eternal protest, warning the Church against one-sided and partial
views of truth, and bidding her never to lower her standard at the
world's call. Men may ignore the fact that God has His severe aspect
and His stern dispensations in nature, but yet the fact remains. And
as it is in nature so is it in grace: God is merciful and loving to
the penitent, but towards the hypocritical and covetous He is a stern
judge, as the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira proved.

V. This seems one of the great permanent lessons for the Church of
every age which this passage embodies, but it is not the only one.
There are many others, and they most important. An eminent modern
commentator and expositor[105] has drawn out at great length, and with
many modern applications and illustrations, four great lessons which
may be derived from this transaction. We shall just note them, giving
a brief analysis of each. (1) There is such a thing as acting as well
as telling a falsehood. Ananias did not say that the money he brought
was the whole price of his land; he simply allowed men to draw this
conclusion for themselves, suggesting merely by his conduct that he
was doing exactly the same as Barnabas. There was no science of
casuistry in the apostolic Church, teaching how near to the borders of
a lie a man may go without actually being guilty of lying. The lie of
Ananias was a spiritual act, a piece of deception attempted in the
abyss of the human soul, and perpetrated, or attempted rather, upon
the Holy Spirit. How often men lie after the same example. They do not
speak a lie, but they act a lie, throwing dust into the eyes of others
as to their real motives and objects, as Ananias did here. He sold his
estate, brought the money to the Apostles, and would fain have got the
character of a man of extraordinary liberality and unselfishness, just
like others who truly sacrificed their all, while he enjoyed in
private the portion which he had kept back. Ananias wished to make the
best of both worlds, and failed in his object. He sought to obtain a
great reputation among men, but had no regard to the secret eye and
judgment of the Almighty. Alas! how many of our actions, how much of
our piety and of our almsgiving, is tainted by precisely the same
vice. Our good works are done with a view to man's approbation, and
not as in the sight of the Eternal God.

  [105] C. J. Vaughan, D.D., _The Church of the First Days_, pp.
  105-12.

(2) What an illustration we find in this passage of the saying of the
Apostle, "The love of money is the root of all evil; which while some
coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves
with many sorrows!" The other scriptures are full of warnings against
this vice of covetousness; and so this typical history does not leave
the Church without an illustration of its power and danger. Surely if
at a time when the supernatural forces of the unseen life were
specially manifested, this vice intruded into the special sphere of
their influence, the Church of every age should be on its perpetual
guard against this spirit of covetousness which the Bible
characterises as idolatry.

(3) What a responsibility is involved in being brought near to God as
members of His Son's Church below! There were hypocrites in abundance
at Jerusalem at that time, but they had not been blessed as Ananias
had been, and therefore were not punished as he. There is a reality in
our connection with Christ which must tell upon us, if not for good,
then inevitably for evil. Christ is either the savour of life unto
life or else the savour of death unto death unto all brought into
contact with Him. In a far more awful sense than for the Jews the
words of the prophet Ezekiel are true, "That which cometh into your
mind shall not be at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen, as
the families of the countries, to serve wood and stone;"[106] or as
the poet of the _Christian Year_ has well put it in his hymn for the
eighteenth Sunday after Trinity:--

    "Fain would our lawless hearts escape,
        And with the heathen be,
    To worship every monstrous shape
        In fancied darkness free.

    Vain thought, that shall not be at all,
        Refuse we or obey;
    Our ears have heard th' Almighty's call,
        We cannot be as they.

    We cannot hope the heathen's doom
        To whom God's Son is given,
    Whose eyes have seen beyond the tomb,
        Who have the key of Heaven."

  [106] Ezek. xx. 32.

(4) Lastly, let us learn from this history how to cast out the fear of
one another by the greater and more awful fear of God. The fear of man
is a good thing in a degree. We should have respect to the opinion of
our fellows, and strive to win it in a legitimate way. But Ananias and
his consort desired the good opinion of the Christian community
regardless of the approval or the watchful eye of the Supreme Judge,
who interposed to teach His people by an awful example that in the new
dispensation of Love, as well as in the old dispensation of Law, the
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that they and they
alone have a good understanding who order their lives according to
that fear, whether in their secret thoughts or in their public
actions.

CHAPTER XII.

_GAMALIEL AND HIS PRUDENT ADVICE._

     "And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them
     alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be
     overthrown: but if it is of God, ye will not be able to overthrow
     them; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God. And
     to him they agreed: and when they had called the Apostles unto
     them, they beat them and charged them not to speak in the name of
     Jesus, and let them go."--ACTS v. 38-40.

We have set forth in these verses an incident in the second appearance
before the council of the Apostle Peter and the other Apostles,
conspicuous among whom must have been James the brother of John. It is
almost certain that James the son of Zebedee was at this time very
prominent in the public work of the Church, for we are told in the
opening of the twelfth chapter that when Herod would vex and harass
and specially weaken the Church, it was neither Peter nor John he
first arrested, but he laid hands on James, and placed on him the
honour of being the earliest martyr from amongst the sacred band of
the Apostles. Peter we may, however, be sure was the centre of
Sadducean hate at this period, and one of the most conspicuous members
of the Church. We should at the same time beware of exaggeration, and
strive to estimate the events of these earliest days of the Church,
not as we behold them now, but as they must have then appeared unto
the members of the Sanhedrin. The deaths of Ananias and Sapphira seem
now to us extraordinary and awe-inspiring, and sufficient to strike
terror into the hearts of all unbelievers; but probably the story of
them had never reached the ears of the authorities. Human life was but
little accounted of among the Romans who ruled Palestine. A Roman
master might slay or torture his slaves just as he pleased; and the
Romans, scorning the Jews as a conquered race, would trouble
themselves but little concerning quarrels or deaths among them, so
long as public order and the stated business of society were not
interfered with. The public miracles which St. Peter wrought, these
were the things which brought matters to a crisis, and called afresh
the attention of the Sanhedrin, charged as they were with all
religious authority, as the miracle of healing wrought upon the
impotent man had led to the arrest of the Apostles on a previous
occasion.[107] It is a mistake often made, in studying the history of
the past, to imagine that events which we now see to have been
important and epoch-making must have been so regarded by persons
living at the time when they happened. Men are never worse judges of
the true value of current history than when they are placed in the
midst of it. It is always the on-lookers who see most of the play. Our
minds are so limited, our thoughts are so completely filled up with
the present, that it is not till we have got away from the events, and
can view them in their due proportion and symmetry, surrounded with
all their circumstances, that we can hope to form a just appreciation
of their relative importance. I have often seen a hill of a few
hundred feet in height occupying a far more commanding position in
men's eyes than a really lofty mountain, simply because the one was
near, the other far off. The deaths of Ananias and Sapphira are
recorded therefore at full length, because they bring eternal lessons
of justice, judgment, and truth along with them. The numerous public
miracles wrought by Peter when "multitudes came together from the
cities round about Jerusalem, bringing sick folk and them that were
vexed with unclean spirits, and they were healed every one," seemed to
the Sanhedrin and the religious public of Jerusalem the all-important
topics, though they are passed wholly over in the Scriptures as
matters of no spiritual interest. If it requires a vast exercise of
patience and wisdom to estimate events aright in their mere worldly
aspect, it requires the operation and guidance of the Holy Ghost to
form a sound judgment upon the relative spiritual value of events
falling within the sphere of Church history; and there indeed it is
most true that matters which seem all-important and striking to man
are judged by God as insignificant and unworthy of notice. So
contradictory are ofttimes the ways of God and the opinions of man.

  [107] Acts v. 12-16 states that St. Peter wrought many miracles,
  and further that men sought to place their sick in such a position
  that even his shadow might fall upon them, thinking that it
  brought healing with it. This statement has been spoken of as a
  demonstrative proof of legendary growth by Zeller in his work on
  the Acts, and is weakly apologised for by Meyer. But the analogy
  of hypnotism at the present time, when cures are wrought and
  extraordinary influence exercised without corporeal contact, is
  quite sufficient to vindicate St. Luke's account from the charge
  of legend. If moderns can produce marvellous results without
  immediate touch; if, for instance, hypnotised patients when
  blindfolded can read a book by means of their stomachs or their
  noses (Moll, p. 366, already quoted), or blisters can be raised by
  a piece of white paper merely by suggestion, as stated by Moll,
  pp. 114-22, surely the statement of St. Luke is no necessary proof
  of legend and old wives' fables. See my remarks on p. 100 above.

The public miracles wrought by St. Peter had this effect,--the only
one noted at length by the sacred writer: they led to the fresh arrest
of Peter and the other Apostles by the High Priest and the sect of the
Sadducees, and to their incarceration in the public prison attached to
the temple. Thence they were delivered by an angel and sent to speak
publicly in the temple, where their adversaries officially assembled;
just as on a later occasion Peter, when imprisoned by himself, was
released by angelic interference. Men looking back upon the history of
the primitive Church, and judging of it as if it were the history of
an ordinary time and age, have objected to the angelic interventions
narrated here and in a few other places in the New Testament. They
object because they do not realize the circumstances of the time. Dr.
Jortin was a shrewd writer of the last century, now too much
neglected. He remarked in one place that, suppose we admit that a
special revelation of the good powers of the heavenly world was made
in Christ, it was natural and fair that a special manifestation of the
powers of evil should have been permitted at the time of Christ's
Incarnation, in order that the triumph of good might be the greater;
and thus he would account for the diabolical possessions which play
such an important part in the New Testament. The principle thus laid
down extends much farther indeed. The great miracle of the
Incarnation, the great manifestation of God in Christ, naturally
brought with it lesser heavenly manifestations in its train. The
Incarnation raises for a believer the whole level of the age when it
occurred, and makes it an exceptional time. The eternal gates were for
a moment lifted up, and angels went in and out for a little; and
therefore we accept without endeavouring to explain the words of the
narrative which tells us that an angel opened the prison doors for the
Apostles, bidding them go and speak in the temple all the words of
this life. And then from the temple, where they were teaching early in
the morning, about daybreak of the day following their arrest, they
are led by the officers before the Sanhedrin which was sitting in the
city. Here let us pause to note the marvellous accuracy of detail in
St. Luke's narrative. The Sanhedrin used to sit in the temple, but a
few years before the period at which we have arrived, four or five at
most, they removed from the temple into the city, a fact which is just
hinted at in the fifth verse of the fourth chapter, where we are told
that the rulers, and elders, and scribes were gathered together in
Jerusalem, that is, in the city, not in the temple; while again in
this passage we read that when the High Priest came and convened the
council and all the senate of the children of Israel, they sent their
officers to bring the prisoners before them. These officers after a
while returned with the information that the Apostles were preaching
in the temple. If the Sanhedrin were meeting in the temple, they would
doubtless have learned this fact as soon as they assembled, especially
as they did not sit till after the morning sacrifice, several hours
after the Apostles appeared in the temple.[108] When brought before
the council the Apostles boldly proclaimed their intention to
disregard all human threats, and persevere in preaching the death and
resurrection of Christ. The majority would then have proceeded to
extreme measures against the Apostles, and in doing so would only
have acted after their usual manner.

  [108] See Dr. John Lightfoot, _Horæ Hebraicæ_, on the Acts, iv. 5.
  _Cf._ his remarks on St. Mark xv. 1, where that learned Hebraist
  seems to support this view, though admitting that there is
  something to be said on the other side, viz., that the council met
  in the temple as of old.

The greater part of the Sanhedrin were Sadducees, and they, as
Josephus tells us, were men of a bloodthirsty character, ever ready to
proceed to punish in the most cruel manner. The simple fact is this,
the Sadducees were materialists. They looked upon man as a mere
animated machine, and therefore, like the pagans of the same period,
they were utterly regardless of human sufferings or of the value of
human life. We little recognise, reared up as we have been in an
atmosphere saturated with Christian principles, how much of our
merciful spirit, of our tender care for human suffering, of our
reverent respect for human life, is owing to the spiritual ideas of
the New Testament, teaching as it does the awful importance of time,
the sanctity of the body, and the tremendous issues which depend upon
life. Sadducees and pagans knew nothing of these things, because they
knew nothing of the inestimable treasure lodged in every human form.
Life and time would have been very different for mankind had not the
spiritual principles inculcated by Pharisee and by Christian alike
triumphed over the cold stern creed which strove on this occasion to
stifle the religion of the Cross in its very infancy. When the
Sadducees would have adopted extreme measures, the words of one man
restrained them and saved the Apostles, and that one man was Gamaliel,
whose name and career will again come before us. Now let us apply
ourselves to the consideration of his address to the Sanhedrin.
Gamaliel saw that the large public gathering to whom he was speaking
were thoroughly excited and full of cruel purposes. He therefore, like
a true orator, adopts the historical method as the fittest one for
dealing with them. He points out how other pretenders had arisen,
trading on the Messianic expectations which then existed all over
Palestine, and specially in Galilee, and how they had been all
destroyed without any action on the part of the Sanhedrin. He
instances two cases: Judas, who lived in the days of Cyrenius and the
taxing under Augustus Cæsar; and Theudas, who some time previous to
that event had arisen, working upon the religious and national hopes
of the Jews, as the persons now accused before them seemed also to be
doing. He points to the fate of the pretenders he had mentioned, and
advises the Sanhedrin to leave the Apostles to the same test of Divine
Providence, confident that if mere impostors, like the others, they
will meet with the same death at the hands of the Romans, without any
interference on their part.

It is evident that Gamaliel must have had some special reason for
selecting the risings of Theudas and Judas, beyond the fact that they
were rebels against established authority. The closing years of the
kingdom of Herod the Great were times when numberless rebellions took
place. Josephus gives us the names of several leaders who took part in
them, but, as he tells us (_Antiqq._, XVII. x. 4), there were then
"ten thousand other disorders," into the details of which he did not
enter. All these risings had, however, these distinguishing features,
they were all unsuccessful, and they were all quenched in blood.
Gamaliel must have seen some feature common to the Christian movement
and to those headed by Theudas and Judas some thirty years earlier,
leading him to adduce these examples. That common feature was their
Messianic character. They all alike proclaimed new hopes for Israel,
and appealed to the religious expectations which then excited the
people, and still are embodied in works like the book of Enoch,
produced about that period; while all the other attempts were animated
by a mere spirit of plunder or of personal ambition. But here we are
met with a difficulty. The rationalistic commentators of Germany have
urged that St. Luke composed a fancy speech and put it into the mouth
of Gamaliel, and in doing so made a great historic mistake. They
appeal to Josephus as their authority. He states that a Theudas arose
about A.D. 44, some ten years later than this meeting of the
Sanhedrin, and drew a large number of adherents after him, but was
defeated by the Roman governor. On the other hand, the words of
Gamaliel refer to the case of a Theudas who lived half a century
earlier, and preceded Judas the Galilean. To put the matter plainly,
St. Luke is accused of having composed a speech for Gamaliel, and,
when doing so, of having committed a great blunder, representing
Gamaliel as appealing to an incident which did not happen till ten
years later.[109]

  [109] See, for instance, Zeller on the Acts of the Apostles, vol.
  i., p. 228 (Norgate and Williams: London, 1875), where he says:
  "We must therefore maintain the possibility that our author, after
  the fashion of ancient historians, freely invented Gamaliel's
  speech; and it is a question how much of it belongs to history at
  all, and especially whether Gamaliel delivered the discourse in
  favour of the Christian cause;" with which statement the whole
  context, pp. 223-32, should be compared. The report of Gamaliel's
  speech is due of course to St. Paul, who was doubtless present
  during its delivery.

This circumstance has long attracted the notice of commentators, and
has been explained in different ways. Some maintain that there was an
older Theudas, who headed an abortive Messianic rebellion previous to
the time of Cyrenius and the days of the taxing. This is a very
possible explanation, and the identity of names constitutes no valid
objection. The same names often occur in connection with the same
movements, political or religious. In the third century, for instance,
the Novatian heresy arose at Carthage, and thence was transferred to
Rome. It was headed by two men, Novatus and Novatian, the former a
Carthaginian, the latter a Roman presbyter. What a fine subject for a
mythical theory, were not the facts too indisputably historical! How a
German critic would revel in depicting the impossibility of two men
with names so like holding precisely the same office and supporting
exactly the same views in two cities so widely separated as Rome and
Carthage! Or let us take two modern instances. The Tractarian movement
is not yet quite sixty years old. It has not therefore yet passed out
of the sphere of personal experience. It started in Oxford during the
thirties, and there in Oxford we find at that very period two divines
named William Palmer, both favouring the Tractarian views, both
eminent writers and scholars, but yet tending finally in different
directions, for one William Palmer became a Roman Catholic, while the
other remained a devoted son of the Reformation. Or to come to still
more modern times. There was an Irish movement in 1848 which numbered
amongst its most prominent leaders a William Smith O'Brien, and there
is now an Irish movement of the same character, and it also numbers a
William O'Brien amongst its most prominent leaders. A Parnell leads
the movement for repeal of the Union in 1890. Ninety years earlier, a
Parnell resigned high office sooner than consent to the consummation
of the same legislative union of Great Britain and Ireland. We might
indeed produce parallel cases without number from the range of
history, specially of English history, showing how political and
religious tendencies run in families, and reproduce exactly the same
names, and that at no distant intervals. But the very passage before
us, the speech of Gamaliel and its historical argument, affords a
sufficient instance. Gamaliel adduced the case of Judas the Galilean
as an illustration of an unsuccessful religious movement. Every one
admits that here at least Josephus and the Acts of the Apostles are at
one. Judas the Gaulonite, as Josephus styles him in one place, or the
Galilean as he calls him in another place, was the founder of the sect
of the Zealots, who "have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say
that God is to be their only ruler and Lord" (Josephus, _Antiqq._,
XVIII., i. 6). Judas was defeated at the time of the taxing under
Cyrenius, and yet more than forty-five years later we find his sons
Simon and James suffering crucifixion under the Romans because they
were following their father's example.[110]

  [110] The family of Gamaliel himself illustrates the principle for
  which we are contending, viz., that families have a tendency to
  reproduce exactly the same political and religious tendencies.
  Gamaliel himself was grandson of the Jewish patriarch Hillel I.,
  who presided over the Sanhedrin long before the Christian era.
  Gamaliel's grandson, Gamaliel II., was president of the Sanhedrin
  during the first twenty years of the second century. He was
  distinguished by the same liberal principles as characterised his
  grandfather. Gamaliel II. was succeeded by his son Simon. So that
  the presidency of the Sanhedrin continued in the same family for
  nearly two centuries. It is a notable fact, and not without its
  bearing on some modern controversies, that the Jewish canon of the
  Old Testament was not finally closed till the time of the
  presidency of Gamaliel II., that is, about the year 117 A.D. "Up
  to this time the members of the Sanhedrin themselves, in whom was
  vested the power to fix the canon, disputed the canonicity of
  certain portions of the Hebrew Scriptures. Thus the school of
  Shammai excluded Ecclesiastes and the Canticles from the text of
  Holy Writ, declaring that they proceeded from Solomon's uninspired
  wisdom. It was the Sanhedrin at Zabne which decided that these
  books are inspired, and that they form part of the canon."--See
  Mr. Ginsburg's article on Gamaliel II. in the _Dictionary of
  Christian Biography_, vol. ii., p. 607.

Another explanation has also been offered. It has been suggested that
Theudas was simply another name for one of the many rebels whom
Josephus mentions,--for Simon, for instance, who had been a slave of
Herod the Great, and had upon his death headed a revolt against
authority. Either explanation is quite tenable, as opposed to the view
which represents St. Luke as committing a gross historical error. And
we are the more justified in offering these suggestions when we
reflect upon the numberless instances where modern research has
confirmed, and is every year confirming, the minute accuracy of this
writer, who doubtless derived his information concerning what passed
in the Sanhedrin, on this occasion, from St. Paul, who either as a
member of the council or a favourite pupil of Gamaliel may have been
present listening to the debates, or even sharing in the final
decisions.[111]

  [111] Upon the question of the historical accuracy of the Acts of
  the Apostles, the appendix to the late Bishop Lightfoot's
  collected essays on _Supernatural Religion_ (London, 1889) should
  be consulted. The opening paragraph bears directly upon our point.
  "In a former volume M. Renan declared his opinion that the author
  of the third Gospel and the Acts was verily and indeed (_bien
  réellement_) a disciple of St. Paul.... Such an expression of
  opinion, proceeding from a not too conservative critic, is
  significant; and this view of the authorship, I cannot doubt, will
  be the final verdict of the future, as it has been the unbroken
  tradition of the past. But at a time when attacks on the
  genuineness of the work have been renewed, it may not be out of
  place to call attention to some illustrations of the narrative
  which recent discoveries have brought to light. No ancient work
  affords so many tests of veracity, for no other has such numerous
  points of contact in all directions with contemporary history,
  politics, topography, whether Jewish, or Greek, or Roman."

Let us now turn from the purely historical side of Gamaliel's speech,
and view it from a spiritual standpoint.

The address of Gamaliel was so favourable to the Apostles that it has
helped to surround his name and memory with much legendary lore. It
was the tradition of the ancient Greek Church from the fifth century
that he was converted to Christianity and baptized, along with his son
Abibus and Nicodemus, by St. Peter and St. John.[112] This story of
Gamaliel's secret adherence to Christianity goes even much farther
back. There is a curious Christian novel or romance, which dates back
to close upon the year 200, called the _Clementine Recognitions_. We
find the same tradition in the sixty-fifth chapter of the first book
of these _Recognitions_.[113] But the sacred narrative itself gives us
no hint of all this, contenting itself with setting forth the prudent
advice which Gamaliel gave to the assembled council. It was wise
advice, and well would it have been for the world if influential
religious and political teachers in all ages had given similar
counsel. Gamaliel was a man of large scholarship, combined with a wide
mind, and he had learned that time is a great solvent, and the
greatest of tests. Beneath its influence the most pretentious
schemes, the most promising of structures, fade away if built upon the
sand of human wisdom, while opposition only tends to consolidate and
develop those that are built upon the foundation of Divine strength
and power. The policy of patience recommended by Gamaliel is a wise
one, either for the Church or for the state, in things spiritual and
things secular alike. And yet it is one from which the natural man
recoils with an instinctive repugnance. It speaks well for the Jewish
Sanhedrin that on this occasion they yielded accord to the advice of
their president. We are glad to recognise this spirit in these men,
where we so often have to find matter for blame. Well would it have
been for the Church and for the credit of Christianity had the spirit
which moved even the Sadducean majority in the Jewish council been
allowed to prevail; and yet how little have the men of tolerant mind
been regarded in moments of temporary triumph such as the Sanhedrin
just then enjoyed. Gamaliel's advice, "Refrain from these men and let
them alone. If the work be of man it will be overthrown; if of God, ye
will not be able to overthrow them," strikes a blow at the policy of
persecution, which is essentially a policy of impatience. The
intolerant man is an impatient man, not willing to imitate the Divine
gentleness and long-suffering, which waits, endures, and bears with
the sins and ignorance of the children of men. And the Church of
Christ, when she became intolerant, as she did as soon as ever
Constantine placed within her reach the sword of human power, forgot
the lesson of the Divine patience, and reaped within herself, in a
shallow religion, in a poorer life, in a restrained intellectual and
spiritual grasp, the due reward of those who had fallen away from an
imitation of the Divine example to a mere human level. It is sad to
see, for instance, in the case of a man so thoroughly spiritual as St.
Augustine was, how easily he fell into this human infirmity, how
quickly he became intolerant when the secular arm was ranged on the
side of his own opinions. The Church in his own boyhood, during the
days of Julian, had to strive against the intolerance of the pagans;
the orthodox, who upheld the Catholic view of the nature of the
Godhead and the scriptural doctrine of the Holy Trinity, had to
struggle against the intolerance of the Arians. Yet as soon as power
was placed in St. Augustine's own hand he thought it right to exercise
compulsion against those who differed from him.

  [112] We learn this from the _Bibliotheca_ of Photius, Cod. 171.
  Photius was a very learned Greek patriarch of the ninth century.
  He was a diligent student, and made an analysis of every book he
  read. These extracts have been gathered into one volume called his
  _Bibliotheca_ or _Library_, and can now be consulted in any
  collection of the Greek fathers. Photius reports his story about
  Gamaliel and Nicodemus from two earlier writers, Chrysippus and
  Lucian, presbyters of Jerusalem.

  [113] For an account of the Clementine _Recognitions_ see Dr.
  Salmon's Introduction to the N. T., 4th ed., pp. 14-19, 373-75.
  Translations, both of the _Recognitions_ and _Homilies_, can be
  consulted in Clark's Ante-Nicene Library.

It was exactly the same in later days. Men may take up commentators of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Protestant and Roman Catholic
alike. There they will find many remarks, acute, devout,
heart-searching, but very few of them will be found to have arrived at
the mental fairness and balance involved in those words, "Refrain from
these men, and let them alone." Cornelius a Lapide was a Jesuit
commentator of those times. He wrote many valuable expositions of Holy
Scripture, including one dealing with this book of the Acts, filled
with thoughts suggestive and stimulating. It is, however, almost
ludicrous to notice how he strives to evade the force of Gamaliel's
words, and to escape the application of them to his own Protestant
opponents. The Sanhedrin were quite right, he thinks, in adopting
Gamaliel's advice, and in showing themselves tolerant of the apostolic
preaching because the Apostles worked miracles; and so, though they
were unconvinced, still they had just reason to suspend their
judgment. But as for the Protestants of his time, they were heretics;
they were the opponents of the Church, the bride of Christ, and
therefore Gamaliel's words had no application to them; as if the very
question that was raised by the Protestants was not this--whether
Cornelius a Lapide himself and his Jesuit brethren did not represent
Antichrist, and whether the Protestants were not the true Church of
God, who therefore on his own principles were quite justified in
persecuting their Romish opponents. It is very difficult to get men to
acknowledge their own fallibility. Every party, when triumphant,
believes that it has a monopoly of truth, and has a Divine right of
persecution; and every party when downcast and in adversity sees and
admires the beauties of toleration. Verily societies, churches,
families, as well as individuals, have good right diligently to pray,
"In all time of our wealth, good Lord, deliver us," for never are men
in greater spiritual danger than when prosperity leads them to vote
themselves infallible, and to practise intolerance towards their
fellow-men on account of their intellectual or religious opinions.

The sentiment of Gamaliel on this occasion may however be pushed to a
mischievous extreme. He advised the Sanhedrin to exercise patience and
self-control, but he did not apparently go any farther. He did not
recommend them to adopt the noblest course, which would have been
unprejudiced examination into the claims put forward by the Christian
teachers. Gamaliel's advice was good, it was perhaps the best he could
have given, or at least which could have been expected under the
circumstances, but it was not the highest or noblest conceivable. It
was the kind of advice always given by men who do not wish to commit
themselves untimely, but who are waiters upon Providence, postponing
their decision as to which side they shall join until they first see
which side will win. Opportunists, the French call them; men who are
sitting upon the fence, we in homelier phrase designate them. It is
well to be prudent in our actions, because true prudence is only
Christian wisdom, and such wisdom will always lead us to take the most
effectual ways of doing good. But then prudence may be pushed to the
extreme of moral cowardice, or at least the name of prudence may be
used as a cloak for a contemptible desire to stand well with all
parties, and thereby advance our own selfish interests. Prudence
should be united with moral courage; it should be ready to take the
unpopular side, and to champion truth and righteousness even when in a
depressed and lowly condition. It was easy enough to side with Christ
when the multitude cried, "Hosanna in the Highest." But the test of
deepest love and unfailing devotion was when the women stood by the
cross, and when the Magdalen sought out the grave in the garden that
she might anoint the dead body of her loved Lord.

Finally, let us just notice the conduct of the Apostles under those
circumstances. The Apostles were freed from the pressing danger of
death, but they did not entirely escape. The Sanhedrin were logically
inconsistent. They refrained from putting the Apostles to death, as
Gamaliel advised, but they flogged them as Roman laws permitted; and a
Jewish disciplinary flogging, when forty stripes save one were
inflicted, was so severe that death sometimes resulted from it.[114]
Man is a curiously inconsistent being, and the Sanhedrin showed on
this occasion that they had their own share of this weakness. Gamaliel
advised not to kill the Apostles, but let time work out the Divine
purposes either of success or failure. They adopt the first part of
his advice, but are not willing to allow Providence to develop His
designs without their interference, and so by their stripes endeavour
to secure that failure shall attend the apostolic efforts. But it was
all in vain. The Apostles were living under a realized sense of
heavenly things. The love of Christ, and communion with Christ and the
Spirit of Christ, so raised them above all earthly surroundings that
what things seemed loss and shame and grief to others were by them
counted highest joy, because they looked at them from the side of God
and eternity. Human threats availed nothing with men animated by such
a spirit,--nay, rather as proofs of the opposition of the evil one,
they only quickened their zeal, so that "every day, in the temple and
at home, they ceased not to teach and to preach Jesus as the Christ."
How wondrously life would be transformed for us all did we view its
changes and chances, its sorrows and its pains, as the Apostles
regarded them. Poverty and disgrace, undeserved loss and suffering,
all alike would be transfigured into surpassing glory when endured for
Christ's sake, while our powers of labour and work, and our active
zeal in the holiest of causes, would be quickened, because, like them,
we should walk and live and toil in the loved presence of One who is
invisible.

  [114] St. Paul, as he tells us in 2 Cor. xi. 24, was five times
  flogged by the Jews. When the Jews inflicted this punishment the
  culprit was tied to a pillar in the synagogue; the executioner,
  armed with a scourge of three distinct lashes, inflicted the
  punishment; while an official standing by read selected portions
  of the law between each stroke. Thirteen strokes of the threefold
  scourge was equivalent to the thirty-nine stripes. This was the
  flogging the Apostles suffered on this occasion.

CHAPTER XIII.

_PRIMITIVE DISSENSIONS AND APOSTOLIC PRECAUTIONS._

     "Now in these days, when the number of the disciples was
     multiplying, there arose a murmuring of the Grecian Jews against
     the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily
     ministration. And the twelve called the multitude of the
     disciples unto them, and said, It is not fit that we should
     forsake the word of God, and serve tables. Look ye out therefore,
     brethren, from among you seven men of good report, full of the
     Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. But
     we will continue stedfastly in prayer, and in the ministry of the
     word."--ACTS vi. 1-4.

The sixth chapter of the Acts, and the election of the Seven, mark a
distinct advance in the career of the early Church. This sixth chapter
is like the twelfth of Genesis and the introduction of Abraham upon
the stage of sacred history. We feel at once as if the narrative of
Genesis had come into contact with modern times, leaving the
mysterious period of darkness all behind. So is it with the Acts of
the Apostles. The earliest days of the primitive Church were quite
unlike all modern experience. The Church had received a great blessing
and a wondrous revelation, and had been enriched with marvellous
powers. But just as men act when they have experienced a surpassing
joy or a tremendous calamity,--they are upset for a time, they do not
realize their position, they do not take all the circumstances in at
once, nor can they quite settle what their future course shall be;
they must get a little way distant from the joy or the sorrow before
they make their future arrangements,--so was it with the Apostles
during that space of time which elapsed from the Pentecostal
outpouring down to the election of the Seven. We are so accustomed to
think of the Apostles as inspired men, that we forget that inspiration
did not destroy their natural powers or infirmities, but rather must
have acted in consonance with the laws of their constitution. The
Apostles must, to a certain extent, have been upset by the
extraordinary events they had witnessed. They sought and found daily
guidance in the power of the Spirit; but they had made no settled
plans, had not compared or arranged their ideas, had formed no scheme
of doctrine or teaching, had realized nothing concerning the future of
the society they were unconsciously building up under the Divine
leading. God had His plans; the ascended Lord had spoken to the
Apostles concerning the future of the Kingdom of Heaven; but it would
be making the Apostles more than men of like passions and like
infirmities with ourselves to imagine that during those stirring and
eventful days they had consciously realized the whole scheme of
Christian doctrine and government. That period of a few months--for it
could not have been more--was a period of Divine chaos, out of which
the final settlement of the Church of God began slowly to evolve
itself under the direction of God the Holy Ghost. How long, it may be
asked, did this period of unsettlement last? A question which resolves
itself into the further one bearing directly on our present
subject,--what was the date of the election and subsequent martyrdom
of Stephen? The answer to this throws much light on the apostolic
history and the events recorded in the first five chapters of this
book.

I. St. Stephen was put to death some time in the year 37 A.D., after
Pontius Pilate had been recalled from the government of Palestine, and
before his successor had arrived to take up the reins of power.[115]
The Jewish authorities took advantage of the interregnum in order to
gratify their spite against the eminent orator who was doing so much
damage to their cause. Under ordinary circumstances the Jewish
Sanhedrin could not put a man to death unless they had received the
fiat of the Roman authorities. Now, however, during this interval,
there was no supreme authority from whom this fiat could be secured,
and so they seized the opportunity and executed Stephen as a
blasphemer, according to the method prescribed in the law of Moses.
This happened in the year 37 A.D., about four years after the
Crucifixion. We must, however, observe another point. During the
latter years of his administration, Pontius Pilate had been acting in
a most tyrannical manner. This fact explains a circumstance which must
strike the most casual reader of the Acts. We there read that the
supreme Jewish council made two attempts to restrain the Apostles; the
first after the healing of the cripple at the Temple Gate, and the
second when Gamaliel dissuaded them from their purposes of blood.
After that they allowed the Apostles to pursue their course without
any hostility. This appears to the casual reader more striking, more
difficult to understand, than it was in reality. We are now obliged to
think of Judaism and Christianity as opposed and mutually exclusive
religions; we cannot conceive of a man being a Jew and a Christian at
the same time. But it was not so with the Apostles and their followers
at the period of which we are writing. This may seem contradictory to
what I have elsewhere stated as to the antagonistic character of the
two religions. But the apparent inconsistency is easily explained. As
full-blown and realized systems, Judaism and Christianity are
inconsistent. The one was a bud, the other an expanded flower. The
same individual bulb cannot be at the same moment a bud and a flower.
But the Apostles had not as yet realized Christianity as a full-blown
system, nor grasped all its consequences. There was no inconsistency
when they made a conjoint profession of Judaism and Christianity. The
Apostles and their followers were all scrupulous observers of the law
of Moses; and no dwellers in Jerusalem were more regular attendants at
the Temple worship than the persons who had as yet no distinct name,
and were known only as followers of the Prophet of Nazareth. To take
an illustration from modern ecclesiastical history, the Apostles and
the early Jerusalem Church must have been simply known to the Jewish
authorities, just as the first Methodists at Oxford were known to the
Church authorities of John Wesley's earlier days, as stricter members
of the Church of England than the usual run of people were. This fact
alone lessens the difficulty we might find in accounting for the
statements made as to the continued activity of the Apostles, and the
freedom they enjoyed even after they had been solemnly warned by the
Sanhedrin. Neither the Apostles themselves nor the Jewish council
recognised as yet any religious opposition in the teaching of Peter
and his brethren. The Apostles themselves had not yet formulated
their ideas nor perceived whither their principles would ultimately
lead them. No one indeed would have been more surprised than
themselves had they foreseen the antagonistic position into which they
would be ultimately forced; and as for the Sanhedrin, the only charge
they brought against the Apostles was not a religious one at all, but
merely that they were challenging the conduct and decision of the
authorities concerning the execution of Jesus Christ, and, as the High
Priest put it, "intend to bring this Man's blood upon us."[116] But
then history reveals to us some other facts which completely explain
the difficulty and vindicate the historical accuracy of the sacred
narrative. St. Stephen was put to death in the year 37. At that time
he may have been acting as a deacon for two, or even three, years,
during which Christian teaching and views made very rapid progress,
all unopposed by the Jewish authorities, simply because their
attention was concentrated on other topics of much more pressing
interest. Pilate was appointed governor of Palestine in 26 A.D. He
ruled it for ten years, till the end of 36 A.D., when he was recalled.
God causes all things to work together for good, and overrules even
state changes to the development of His purposes. Pilate's whole
period of rule was, as I have already said, marked by tyranny; but the
concluding years were the worst. The members of the Sanhedrin were
then specially excited by two actions which touched themselves most
keenly. He seized on the accumulated proceeds of the Temple-tax of
two drachmas, about eighteen pence, paid by every Jew throughout the
world, which then amounted to a vast sum, expending it in making an
aqueduct for the supply of Jerusalem. This action affected the
pecuniary resources of the Jewish authorities. But he attacked them on
a dearer point still, for he set up the images of the emperor in the
Holy City, and thus wounded them in their religious feelings,
introducing the abomination of desolation into the most sacred
places.[117]

  [115] See the authorities for the chronology of this period as
  given in Lewin's _Fasti Sacri_, pp. 247-53.

  [116] The Church during its earliest years called itself merely
  the Way, not recognising the term Christian at all. This is
  brought out clearly in the Revised Version, as in Acts ix. 2, xix.
  9, 23, xxiv. 14. The adoption of the name Christian probably
  marked the more distinct separation of the Church from the
  synagogue.

  [117] See Josephus, _Antiqq._, XVIII., iii., 1, 2.

All the attention of the priests, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and
the people, was concentrated upon the violent deeds of Pilate. They
had no time to think of the Apostles,--who, indeed, must themselves
have shared in the national enthusiasm and universal hostility which
Pilate's attempts excited. A common opposition stilled, for the time,
the internal strife and controversy about the prophet of Nazareth
which had, for a little, rent asunder the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
Let us now repeat the dates to which we have attained. St. Stephen was
executed in 37 A.D.; his election took place probably in 34 A.D. The
first seven chapters of the Acts set before us, then, all we know of
the history of the earliest four years of the Church's life and work;
and yet though very briefly told, that history tallies with what we
learn from writers like Josephus and Philo.

II. Let us now return to the text of our narrative. This sixth chapter
offers a very useful glimpse into the inner life of the primitive
Church. It shows us what led up to the election of the Seven in these
words: "Now in these days, when the number of the disciples was
multiplying, there arose a murmuring of the Grecian Jews against the
Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily
ministration."

(_a_) The election sprang out of the multiplying, and the multiplying
begat a murmuring among the disciples. There is here teaching for the
Church of all time, plain and evident to every reader, a lesson which
history has repeated from age to age. Increase of numbers does not
always mean increase of happiness, increase of devotion, increase of
true spiritual life, but has often brought increase of trouble and
discontent alone. What a lesson of patient submission under present
trials the wise man may here read. God has made all things double one
against another; and when He bestows such notable increase as He
granted to the apostolic Church, He adds thereto some counter-balancing
disadvantage to keep His people low and make them humble. Undiluted
joy, unmitigated success, is not to be the portion of God's people
while tabernacling here below. How often has the lesson been repeated
in their experience of the past as in our own personal experience as
well!

The trial of the apostolic Church was typical of the trials which
awaited future ages. The Church in the Diocletian persecution, for
instance, was wasted and torn. The records of that last great trial
through which the Church passed, just prior to her final triumph over
Paganism, are lighted up by the fires of the most determined attempt
ever made to crush the faith of the Crucified One. How often during
that last persecution God's faithful ones must have wept in secret
over the ruin of the holy places and the threatened destruction of the
faith! Yet the trials of the hours of adversity were as nothing
compared with the dangers which beset the Church when the faith
triumphed under Constantine, and the multitude of the disciples was
increased and multiplied by the power of imperial patronage. The
trials of the day of persecution were external, and utterly powerless
to affect the spiritual life of Christ's mystical body. The trials of
a multiplying and enlarging Church were internal; they arose from
unbelief, and hypocrisy, and want of Christian love, and were
destructive of the life of God in the human soul. The dangers of
success, the subtle temptations of prosperity, making us proud,
contemptuous of others, self-conscious, dependent wholly upon man and
independent of God, are the lessons, ecclesiastical, social, and
personal, pressed upon us by the opening words of this sixth chapter.

(_b_) These words, again, correct a popular mistake, and reproduce a
warning of our Master too often forgotten. When the disciples were
increasing, and the hearts of the Apostles all aglow with the success
vouchsafed them, "a murmuring arose between the Grecian Jews and the
Hebrews." What a glimpse we get here into the very heart and centre of
early Christian social life. It is often the hardest task in
historical researches to get such a glimpse as here is given. We know
the outer life of societies, of families, of dynasties. We see them in
their external form and symmetry: we behold them in their company
dress and in their public appearances; but till we get to know and
realize their common every-day life, how they ate, drank, slept, how
their social intercourse was maintained, we fail to grasp the most
important side of their existence. The primitive Church is often
thought of and spoken of as if its social and spiritual life were
wholly unlike our own; as if sin and infirmity were entirely absent,
and perfect holiness there prevailed. This expression, "Now in these
days there arose a murmuring," shows us that the presence of
supernatural gifts, the power of working miracles and speaking with
other tongues, did not raise the spiritual level of individual
believers above that we find in the Church of the present day. The
distribution of alms is always attended by jealousies and disputes,
rendering the work one of the most unpleasant tasks which can be
undertaken by any man. No matter how earnestly one strives to be fair
and just, no matter how diligently one may seek to balance claim
against claim and righteously to satisfy the wants of those who seek
relief, still there will always be minds that will never be content,
and will strive to detect injustice and wrong and favouritism, no
matter how upright the intention may be. What a comfort to God's
servant striving to do his duty is the study of this sixth chapter of
the Acts! Fretting and worry, weary days and sleepless nights, are
often the only reward which the Christian philanthropist receives in
return for his exertions. But here comes in the Acts of the Apostles
to cheer. It was just the same with the Apostles, for they must have
been the chief almoners or distributers of the Church's common fund
prior to the election of the Seven. The Apostles themselves did not
escape the accusation of favouritism, and we may be well content to
bear and suffer what the Apostles were compelled to endure. Let us
only take heed that like them we suffer wrongfully, and that our
conscience testify that we have striven to do everything in the sight
of the Lord Jesus Christ; and then, disregarding all human murmuring
and criticism, we should calmly proceed upon our work, in no way
discouraged because the recipients of Christian bounty still act as
even the primitive Christians did. This is one important lesson we
gain from this passage.

(_c_) We may, again, learn another great truth from this incident, and
that is, that the primitive Church was no ideal communion, but a
society with failings and weaknesses and discontent, exactly like
those which exist in the Church of our own times. The favourite
argument with controversialists of the Church of Rome, when trying to
draw proselytes from among Protestants, is, as logicians say, of an _à
priori_ type. They will enlarge upon the importance of religion and
religious truth, and upon the awful consequences which will result
from a mistake on such a vital question, and then they will argue that
God must have constituted a living infallible guide on such an
important topic, and that guide is in their opinion the Pope, as the
head of the Catholic Church. The Scriptures are full of
warnings--unnoticed warnings they often are, but still they are full
of them--as to the untrustworthy character of all such kind of
arguments. In this sixth chapter, for instance, the thoughtful and
meditative student can see a specimen of these providential
admonitions, and a reason for its insertion in the sacred story.
Christ came to establish the Christian Church upon earth. For this
purpose He lived and suffered and rose again. For this purpose He sent
forth the Third Person of the Holy Trinity to lead and guide and dwell
in His Church; and surely, _à priori_, we might as well conclude that
in the Church so founded, so guided, so ruled by Peter and the rest of
the Apostles, there would have been found no such thing as
favouritism, or murmuring, or discontent,--sentiments which might
exist in the unregenerate world, but which should find no place in the
kingdom of the Spirit. But, when we turn to the sacred record of
Christ's sayings, and the inspired history of Christ's Church, we find
that all our _à priori_ presumptions and all our logical anticipations
are put to flight, for the Master warns us in the thirteenth of St.
Matthew, when speaking His wondrous parables concerning the Kingdom of
Heaven, that sin and imperfection will ever find their place in His
Church; and then the history of the Acts of the Apostles comes in to
confirm the inspired prophecy, and we see from this chapter how the
primitive Church of Christ was torn and racked with mere earthly
feelings and mere human infirmities, like the ordinary worldly
societies which existed all around; "there arose a murmuring" even in
the Church where Apostles taught, where the Holy Ghost dwelt, and
where the Pentecostal gifts were displayed. The occasion of the
murmuring, too, is noteworthy and prophetic. It was like the trial
under which man fell and by which Christ was tempted. It was a mere
material temptation. Even in the primitive Church, living as it did in
the region and presence of the supernatural, expecting every day and
hour the return of the ascended Lord, even there material
considerations entered, and the world and the things thereof found a
place, and caused divisions where they would seem to have been
strictly excluded by the very conditions of the Church's existence.
The Church and the world there touched and influenced one another; and
so it must be always. There is a world indeed against which the Church
must ever protest--the world of impure lusts and wicked desires, the
world of which Paganism was the presiding genius; but then there is a
world in which the Church must exist and with which it must deal, the
world which God has created and ordained, the world of human society
and human wants, feelings, desires, appetites. With these the Church
must ever come in contact. Monasticism and asceticism have endeavoured
indeed in the past to get rid of this world. They cut men and women
off from marriage and separated them from society, and reduced human
wants to a minimum; and yet nature asserted itself, and the
corruptions of monasticism have been a divinely-ordered protest
against foolish attempts to separate between things spiritual and
things secular, between the Church founded by Christ and the world
created by God.[118] The murmuring arose on this occasion because the
Apostles made no such mistake, but recognised fearlessly that the
Church of Christ took cognizance of such a question as the daily
distribution and the temporal wants of its disciples. The apostolic
Church did not disdain a mere economic question, and yet the Church of
our own time has been slow enough to follow its example; but, thank
God, it is learning more and more of its duty in this respect. The
time has been when nothing was considered worthy of the notice of the
Christian pulpit or of Church synods and Church courts save purely
spiritual and doctrinal questions. The vast subjects of education, of
the social life, of the amusements of the people, the methods of
legislation or statesmanship, were thought outside the region of
Christian activity, and were utterly neglected or else left wholly to
those who made no profession at least of being guided by Christian
principle. But now we have learned the important truth that the Church
is a Divine leaven placed in the mass of human society to permeate it
through and through; and perhaps the present danger is that the clergy
should forget the apostolic warning, true for every age, that while
the Church in its totality, priests and people, should take an active
interest in these questions, and strive to mould the whole life of man
on Christian principles, it is not at the same time "fit that the
ministry should forsake the word of God and serve tables."

  [118] The term world is one that has very various meanings in
  Scripture, and good people have often made serious practical
  mistakes by confounding these meanings. I once met a serious young
  man disposed to the views of the "Brethren," who gravely told me
  that he thought it wrong to admire beautiful scenery because it
  was written, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in
  the world." There are three distinct uses of the term "world" in
  Scripture: as expressing, (1) the material earth, Psalm xxiv. 1,
  "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and
  they that dwell therein;" (2) the people on the earth, John iii.
  16, "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son"
  for it; (3) the impure lusts and desires which found full scope
  under paganism, and still intrude themselves into the kingdom of
  Christ, 1 John ii. 15, 16, "Love not the world, neither the things
  that are in the world.... For all that is in the world, the lust
  of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life,
  is not of the Father, but is of the world." It is evident that if
  we take the bad meaning of world in this last passage and apply it
  to the other two we shall end in the old Manichean view that the
  material world and the men on it are the handiwork of a bad or
  inferior deity, and therefore should be entirely rejected. I know
  that some very grave and serious people have fallen into this
  confusion, and have thus banished all sweetness and light from
  their own lives and from those of their families. It is a curious
  circumstance, too, that we read in ancient writers that the
  Manichean heresy always recommended itself to persons of a similar
  temperament, who in consequence led lives of a very strict and
  puritanical type. They looked upon the world and all that was in
  it as the devil's creation. How then could they smile upon, love,
  or enjoy anything therein? See the article "Manicheans" in the
  _Dict. Christ. Biog._

III. But we have not yet done with this murmuring or with the lessons
it furnishes for the Church of the future. What lay at the basis of
this murmuring, and of the jealousy thereby indicated? "There arose a
murmuring of the Grecian Jews against the Hebrews;" a racial question
developed itself, and racial, or perhaps we should rather say, in this
case, social and linguistic, differences found place in the apostolic
Church, and gave rise to serious quarrels even where the Spirit in
fullest measure and in extraordinary power was enjoyed. There was
bitter dissension between Jews and Samaritans, though they believed in
the same God and reverenced the same revelation. Political
circumstances in the past sufficiently explain that quarrel. There was
almost, if not quite, as bitter hostility between the Grecians and the
Hebrews, because they spoke different languages and practised diverse
customs, and that though they worshipped in the same temple and
belonged to the same nation. The origin of these differences in the
Christian Church of Jerusalem goes back to a very distant period. Here
comes in the use of the Apocrypha, "which the Church doth read for
example of life and instruction of manners." If we wish to understand
the course of events in the Acts we must refer to the books of
Maccabees, where is told the romantic story of the struggle of the
Jews against the Greek kings of Syria, who tried to force them into
conformity with the religion of Greece, which then was counted the
religion of civilization and of culture. The result was that the
intensely national party became bitterly hostile to everything
pertaining to Greece and its civilization. The Jews of Palestine of
that period became like the purely Celtic Irish of the Reformation
epoch. The Irish identified the Reformation with England and English
influence, just as the Jews identified Paganism with Greece and Syria,
and Greek influence; and the result was that the Irish became the most
intensely ultramontane nation, and the Palestinian Jews became the
most intensely narrow and prejudiced nation of their time. The
Palestinian or Hebrew Jews, speaking the Aramaeic or Chaldee tongue,
scorned Greek language and all traces of Greek civilization, while
the Jews of the Dispersion, specially those of Alexandria, strove to
recommend the Jewish religion to the Gentile world, whose civilization
and culture they appreciated, and whose language they used. The
opposition of the Hebrew to the Grecian Jews was very bitter, and
expressed itself in language which has come down to us in the Talmudic
writings. "Cursed be he who teacheth his son the learning of the
Greeks," was a saying among the Hebrews; while again, we hear of
Rabban Simeon, the son of Gamaliel, St. Paul's teacher, who used to
embody his hatred of the Grecians in the following story: "There were
a thousand boys in my father's school, of whom five hundred learned
the law and five hundred the wisdom of the Greeks; and there is not
one of the latter now alive, excepting myself here and my uncle's son
in Asia."[119] Heaven itself was supposed by the Hebrews to have
plainly declared its hostility against their Grecian opponents. Hence,
naturally, arose the same divisions at Jerusalem. There were in that
city nearly five hundred synagogues, a considerable proportion of
which belonged to the Grecian Jews. All classes and all the
synagogues, Hebrew and Grecian alike, contributed their quota to the
earliest converts won by the Apostles; and these converts brought
their old jealousies and oppositions with them into the Church of
Christ. The Hebrew or the Grecian Jew of yesterday could not forget,
to-day, because he had embraced a belief in Jesus of Nazareth as the
Messiah, all his old feelings and his old hereditary quarrels, and
hence sprang the Christian dissensions of which we read, prophetic of
so many similar racial and social and linguistic dissensions in the
Church down to the present time. The Acts of the Apostles is a kind of
magic mirror for Church history. In the olden times men dreamt of a
magic mirror into which one could look and see the course of their
future life depicted. We can see something of the same in this
inspired book. The bitter dissensions which racial and linguistic
differences have made in the Church of every age are here depicted in
miniature. The quarrels between East and West, between Greeks and
Latins, between Latins and Teutons, between Teuton and Celt, between
Roman Catholic and Protestant, between the Whites and Negroes, between
European Christians and Hindoo converts; the scandalous scenes still
enacted round the Holy Place at Jerusalem, where peace is kept between
nominal Christians only by the intervention of Mahometan
soldiers,--all turn upon the same points and embody the same
principles, and may best find solution upon the lines laid down by the
Apostles. And what were these lines? They laid down that there are
diversities of functions and of work in the Church of Christ; there is
a ministry of the word, and there is a serving of tables. One class
should not absorb every function; for if it does, the highest function
of all, the ministry of the word and prayer, will inevitably suffer.
Well, indeed, would it have been had this lesson been far more laid to
heart. How many a schism and rent in the visible Church of Christ has
been caused because no work, no spiritual function, was found for a
newly-awakened layman anxious to do something for Him who had done so
much for his soul. The principle here laid down in germ is a very
fruitful one, suitable for every age. A new crisis, a fresh
departure, an unexpected need, has arisen, and a new organization is
therefore at once devised by the Apostles; and well would it have been
had their example found closer imitation. We have been too much in the
habit of looking upon the Church of Christ as if it were once for all
stereotyped in apostolic times, and as if there were nothing to be
done in the living present save to adapt these ancient institutions to
our modern needs. The Roman Catholic Church has been in many respects
more true to apostolic principles than the children of the
Reformation. With all her intense conservatism Rome has never
hesitated to develop new organizations as new needs have arisen, and
that in the boldest manner. It has often been remarked that the Church
of Rome would never have lost John Wesley and the Wesleyans as the
Church of England did. She would have put a brown cassock upon him,
and girded him with a rope, and sent him forth as the head of a new
order, to do the work to which he felt impelled and for which God had
qualified him. Experience has taught us, however, that we cannot
safely neglect apostolic precedent; and the warning implied in the
words of the Apostles, "it is not fit that we should forsake the word
of God and serve tables," has been amply fulfilled. The highest
ministry of the word has been injured by the accumulation of all
public work in the Church on one class alone. What minister of Jesus
Christ does not feel that, even with the wider and more apostolic
views now prevalent, with all the recognition of the service which
godly Christian laymen render, the old tradition is still strong, and
clergymen are too absorbed in the mere serving of tables, to the
neglect of their higher functions? The laity often complain of the
poor, thin, meagre character of the preaching to which they are
compelled to listen; but how can it be otherwise when they demand so
much purely secular service, so much serving of tables from those
whose great work is to teach? The Church of England, in her service
for the ordination of priests, demands from the candidates whether
they will devote themselves to the study of the Word of God, and such
other studies as bear upon the same. I often wonder how her clergy are
now to fulfil this solemn vow, when frequently they have not a night
in the week at home, save perhaps Saturday evening, and when, from
early morning to late at night, all their energies are swallowed up in
the work of schools, and clubs, and charitable organizations, and
parochial visitation, leaving little time and still less energy for
the work of meditation and thought and study. The clergy are the
Lord's prophets, watchmen upon the walls of Zion. It is their great
business to explain the Lord's will, to translate the ideas of the
Bible into the language of modern life, to apply the Divine principles
of doctrine and discipline laid down in the Bible to the ever-varying
wants of our complex modern civilization; and how can this function be
discharged unless there be time for reading and for thinking, so as to
gain a true notion of what are these modern wants, and to find out how
the eternal principles of the Scriptures are to be applied to them? We
require a great deal more organized assistance in the work of the
Church, and then, when that assistance is forthcoming, we may expect
and demand that the highest ministry of all, "the ministry of the Word
and prayer," shall be discharged with greater efficiency and blessing.
The Apostles in meeting this crisis, laid down a law of true
development and living growth in the divine society. The Church of
Christ is ever to have the power to organize herself in face of new
departures, while at the same time they proclaim the absolute
necessity and the perpetual obligation of the Christian ministry in
its highest aspect; for surely if even for Apostles it was needful
that their whole time should be devoted to the ministry of the word of
God and prayer, and the Church of that time, with all its wondrous
gifts, demanded such a ministry, there ought to exist in the modern
Church also an order of men wholly separated unto those solemn duties.

  [119] Lightfoot's _Horæ Heb._, Acts vi. 1, where there is a long