July 23

Ye shall he hated of all men for my name’s sake. - Matthew 10:22.

HENCE our Saviour also said to his followers, “Marvel not if the world hate you. If ye were of the world the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you.” And the apostle says, “If any man will live godly in Christ Jesus, he must suffer persecution.” What were the sufferings of the pious Jews under their enemies! What were the sufferings of the first Christians! What were the sufferings of our forefathers! We do well to call to remembrance former times, and to compare them with those in which we live, and in which we sit under our own fig-tree and our own vine, none daring to make us afraid legally, and under the justice and mildness of the laws of the land.

But what cannot be done legally may be done really. Few know what wives, children, servants, and dependants of various kinds suffer, even at this hour, in some parts of our own country, from this quarter; for, though the law ties the hand of persecution, yet the carnal mind is enmity against God, and the tongue can no man tame; the warmest ties of life are found to relax, and at last all the cords of love are broken asunder; and when persons become Christians indeed, what was before warm friendship is degenerated into mere civility; yea, it may become open malignity. There is no going forth to him without the camp, without bearing his reproach in some form or other.

The people of the world never did, and never will, act kindly and justly towards real religion. They will magnify the Christian’s infirmities, and will take the miscarriages of a few professors, and, like a filthy garment, throw them over the whole body of the Christian church. If they find nothing in the behaviour of Christian people that is remarkable, then they will go motive-hunting, and ascribe to them every thing that is vile, and which seems congenial with their own views and feelings, from which in this case they judge. Therefore they always consider real religion either as something really ridiculous or pitiable: it is impertinence, or it is enthusiasm, or it is hypocrisy, or it is mercenariness, or selfishness. We sometimes think that the reflection or the reproach so thrown upon the professors of religion by the people of the world arises from themselves; that, if they were more free from certain inconsistencies and unamiableness; (and they ought to he free from this,) the people of the world would be rather reconciled to them, and admire them.

But there comes a difficulty in the way: we go back to our Saviour himself, and ask, Was not he free from every inconsistency, every infirmity, every unamiableness? and did the world then admire him and love him? Alas! It opposed him more than it has ever opposed us; and the Saviour may well say to many modern temporizing professors what he said to the Jews:-“The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil.”

They who love darkness will always hate the approach of light, and they who wish to continue asleep will be offended with any noise that would awaken them; and Christians cannot go on with, their work without making some noise.