Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History (67 page)

There are some, however, who are ashamed of the cross of Jesus Christ, and say, “If we should believe that, we should be despised everywhere, especially by the wisest.” But if you would know the truth, look only on the lives of those who would have to cry woe on their unbelief if they should be measured by deeds. If you are ashamed of the cross, the
Lord was not ashamed to bear that cross for you, and to die on that cross for you. Be not ashamed of his service and of the defense of the truth. Look at the servants of the devil who are not ashamed in the open places, in the palaces, and everywhere to speak evil and to revile us. Bear then a little shame only for your Lord; for whoever follows him will, according to our Gospel, in his name drive out the devil; that is, he will drive out his sins and lead a virtuous life; he will drive out serpents; he will throw out the lazy who come into the houses, and say evil things under the pretense of righteousness, and so are like poisonous serpents. You will see how children can withstand them with the truth of God and drive them away. If a believer drinks anything deadly it will not hurt him: this deadly drink is the false doctrines of the lazy, from whom, as you contend with them, a little comes also to you. But he who stands unharmed in the faith, cries to you, “See that you do good; seek God’s glory, not your own.” He that does that is of the truth, and remains unharmed. The Lord says further of the faithful, “They shall lay their hands on the sick and shall heal them.” The hands are the works, and the good lay such hands on the weak that they may support them when they totter. Do I not teach you according to the Gospel? Why do you hesitate and go not into the service of the Lord? Do you ask me still what you ought to do? I will, in conclusion, tell you.

Look to Christ, and you will find that all he says concerns faith. Ask the Apostle; he speaks of nothing else than of faith. If you have the ground of all, if you have faith, you will always do what is good. Without faith man always falls into sin. You must seek faith in order to be good, or else your faith will become false. Christ commanded his disciples to preach the Gospel to all the world, and your wise men call a man a little world, a microcosm. So then, preach to yourself, O man, woman, and child. Three parts the world has in you also. Preach first of all to your knowledge, and say to it, “If you draw near this truth, you will have much faith; wherefore do you hesitate to use it?” To your will, say, “Thou seest that everything passes away; therefore love not the world, love Christ.” Thereupon turn to the second part of your world, and say to it, “Be thankful, O my memory, for the mercies God has shown thee, that thou thinkest not of the things of this world but of the mercy of thy creation, and thy redemption through the blood of the Son of God.” Then go to the third part, to thy imagination, and proclaim to it, “Set nothing before my eyes but my death, bring nothing before me but the Crucified, embrace him, fly to him.” Then go through all the cities of thy world, and preach to them.

First say to thine eyes, “Look not on vanity.” To thy ears say, “Listen
not to the words of the lazy, but only to the words of Jesus.” To thy tongue say, “Speak no more evil.” For thy tongue is as a great rock that rolls from the summit of a mountain, and at first falls slowly, then ever faster and more furiously. It begins with gentle murmuring, then it utters small sins, and then greater, until it finally breaks forth in open blasphemy. To thy palate say, “It is necessary that we do a little penance.” In all thy senses be clean, and turn to the Lord, for he it is who will give you correction and purity. To thy hands say, “Do good and give alms”; and let thy feet go in the good way.

Our reformation has begun in the Spirit of God, if you take it to heart that each one has to preach to himself. Then will we in the name of Jesus drive out the devils of temptation. Yes, call upon Jesus as often as temptation approaches: call upon him a hundred times and believe firmly, and the temptation will depart. Then will we speak with new tongues; we will speak with God. We shall drive away serpents; the enticement of the senses are these serpents. If we drink anything deadly, it will not hurt us; if anger and lust arise in us, at the name of Jesus they will have to give way. We shall lay our hands upon the sick and heal them; with good deeds shall we strengthen the weak soul. If thou feelest thy weakness, flee to God, and he will strengthen; therefore he is thy only refuge. He is thy Savior and thy Lord, who went into the heavens to prepare a place for thee, and to wait thee there. What do you intend to do? Go and follow Jesus, who is praised from everlasting to everlasting. Amen.

A stern moral code is the basis of Calvinism, the eponymous term for the doctrines espoused by John Calvin and his followers. The French-born leader of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century supported ideas of predestination (salvation or damnation of souls foreordained by God), the controlling power of grace, and the supreme authority of the Scriptures.

Such rigor in religious thought, however, was not widely welcomed, and Calvin was essentially banished from Paris in 1533 and from Geneva in 1538. He was called back to Geneva in 1541, and that city became the center of his labors to establish a rigid moral discipline and to spread the faith. Strictly enforced laws against drunkenness, gambling, and even disrespectful singing and dancing caused the opposition to Calvin to grow.

Among Calvin’s most significant sermons is his message on suffering persecution. Recalling the words of the apostle Paul (“We are called and appointed to suffer”), Calvin argues against values based in worldly pleasures. Instead, he upholds, through a series of rhetorical questions and parallel phrases (“no toil, no pain, no trouble”), the necessity of enduring earthly persecutions and trials to be deserving of God’s grace.

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THE APOSTLE SAYS
, “Let us go forth from the city after the Lord Jesus, bearing his reproach.” In the first place he reminds us, although the swords should not be drawn over us nor the fires kindled to burn us, that we cannot be truly united to the Son of God while we are rooted in this world. Wherefore, a Christian, even in repose, must always have one foot lifted to march to battle, and not only so, but he must have his affections withdrawn from the world although his body is dwelling in it. Grant that this at first sight seems to us hard; still, we must be satisfied with the words of Saint Paul “We are called and appointed to suffer.” As
if he had said, Such is our condition as Christians; this is the road by which we must go if we would follow Christ.

Meanwhile, to solace our infirmity and mitigate the vexation and sorrow which persecution might cause us, a good reward is held forth: in suffering for the cause of God, we are walking step by step after the Son of God and have him for our guide. Were it simply said that to be Christians we must pass through all the insults of the world boldly, to meet death at all times and in whatever way God may be pleased to appoint, we might apparently have some pretext for replying, It is a strange road to go at a peradventure. But when we are commanded to follow the Lord Jesus, his guidance is too good and honorable to be refused.

Are we so delicate as to be unwilling to endure anything? Then we must renounce the grace of God by which he has called us to the hope of salvation. For there are two things which cannot be separated—to be members of Christ, and to be tried by many afflictions. We certainly ought to prize such a conformity to the Son of God much more than we do. It is true that in the world’s judgment there is disgrace in suffering for the Gospel. But since we know that unbelievers are blind, ought we not to have better eyes than they? It is ignominy to suffer from those who occupy the seat of justice, but Saint Paul shows us by his example that we have to glory in scourgings for Jesus Christ, as marks by which God recognizes us and avows us for his own. And we know what Saint Luke narrates of Peter and John; namely, that they rejoiced to have been “counted worthy to suffer infamy and reproach for the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Ignominy and dignity are two opposites: so says the world, which. being infatuated, judges against all reason, and in this way converts the glory of God into dishonor. But, on our part, let us not refuse to be vilified as concerns the world, in order to be honored before God and his angels. We see what pains the ambitious take to receive the commands of a king, and what a boast they make of it. The Son of God presents his commands to us, and everyone stands back! Tell me, pray, whether in so doing are we worthy of having anything in common with him? There is nothing here to attract our sensual nature, but such, notwithstanding, are the true escutcheons of nobility in the heavens. Imprisonment, exile, evil report, imply in men’s imagination whatever is to be vituperated; but what hinders us from viewing things as God judges and declares them, save our unbelief? Wherefore let the name of the Son of God have all the weight with us which it deserves, that we may learn to count it honor when he stamps his marks upon us. If we act otherwise, our ingratitude is insupportable.

Were God to deal with us according to our deserts, would he not have
just cause to chastise us daily in a thousand ways? Nay, more, a hundred thousand deaths would not suffice for a small portion of our misdeeds! Now, if in his infinite goodness he puts all our faults under his foot and abolishes them and, instead of punishing us according to our demerit, devises an admirable means to convert our afflictions into honor and a special privilege, inasmuch as through them we are taken into partnership with his Son, must it not be said, when we disdain such a happy state, that we have indeed made little progress in Christian doctrine?

It were easy indeed for God to crown us at once without requiring us to sustain any combats; but as it is his pleasure that until the end of the world Christ shall reign in the midst of his enemies, so it is also his pleasure that we, being placed in the midst of them, shall suffer their oppression and violence till he deliver us. I know, indeed, that the flesh kicks when it is to be brought to this point, but still the will of God must have the mastery. If we feel some repugnance in ourselves it need not surprise us; for it is only too natural for us to shun the cross. Still, let us not fail to surmount it, knowing that God accepts our obedience, provided we bring all our feelings and wishes into captivity and make them subject to him.

In ancient times vast numbers of people, to obtain a simple crown of leaves, refused no toil, no pain, no trouble; nay, it even cost them nothing to die, and yet every one of them fought for a peradventure, not knowing whether he was to gain or lose the prize. God holds forth to us the immortal crown by which we may become partakers of his glory. He does not mean us to fight a haphazard, but all of us have a promise of the prize for which we strive. Have we any cause, then, to decline the struggle? Do we think it has been said in vain, “If we die with Jesus Christ we shall also live with him?” Our triumph is prepared, and yet we do all we can to shun the combat.

The Great Awakening sparked a revival of religious fervor throughout New England in 1740, after a dormant period in American religion. Lasting several years, the Great Awakening was marked by fanaticism in religious activity, with shrieking and violent trembling during religious services and direct personal visions of God and Satan.

Jonathan Edwards was the most powerful of the preachers of this movement. A forceful Calvinist, he drew word pictures of the torments of hell to attack materialism and earthly sin. Although a biographer once described his voice as “feeble,” the impact of his words could not be denied: “It was a kind of moral inquisition; and sinners were put upon argumentative racks, and beneath screws, and, with an awful revolution of the great truth in hand, evenly and steadily screwed down and crushed.”

“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is the best-known of the sermons to come out of Puritan New England. Preached at Enfield, Connecticut, on July 8, 1741, this sermon was based on Deuteronomy 32:35 (“To me belongeth vengeance, and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste”).

Central to this sermon is his comparison of the sinner to a spider, hanging “by a slender thread” and being dangled over the pit of hell. Edwards uses the initial repetition of anaphora to warn of the coming destruction: “nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you have ever done, nothing that you can do….” His reliance on retribution theology, and his unconcern with the more sophisticated “wisdom” literature of Job and Ecclesiastes, is underscored by the concluding analogy between New England and the biblical city of Sodom.

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THE GOD THAT
holds you over the pit of hell much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear you in his sight; you are ten thousand times as abominable in his eyes as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince, and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; it is abscribed to nothing else that you did not go to hell the last night that you were suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep; and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up; there is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God provoking his pure eye by your sinful. wicked manner of attending his solemn worship; yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.