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It is, then, no freak of fancy to see in this narrative an acted parable, if you will, an acted prophecy. Again and again the Church of Christ has been all but engulfed, as men might have deemed, in the billows; again and again the storm has been calmed by the Master, who had seemed for awhile to sleep.

I. OFTEN HAS CHRISTIANITY PASSED THROUGH THE TROUBLED WATERS OF POLITICAL OPPOSITION. During the first three centuries, and finally under Julian, the heathen State made repeated and desperate attempts to suppress it by force. Statesmen and philosophers undertook the task of eradicating it, not passionately, but in the same temper of calm resolution with which they would have approached any other well-considered social problem. More than once they drove it from the army, from the professions, from the public thoroughfares, into secrecy; they pursued it into the vaults beneath the palaces of Rome, into the catacombs, into the deserts. It seemed as if the faith would be trodden out with the life of so many of the faithful: but he who would persecute with effect must leave none alive. The Church passed through these fearful storms into the calm of an ascertained supremacy; but she had scarcely done so, when the vast political and social system which had so long oppressed her, and which by her persistent suffering she had at length made in some sense her own, itself began to break up beneath and around her. The barbarian invasions followed one upon another with merciless rapidity; and St. s lamentations upon the sack of Rome express the feelings with which the higher minds in the Church must have beheld the completed humiliation of the Empire. Christianity had now to face, not merely a change of civil rulers, but a fundamental reconstruction of society. It might have been predicted with great appearance of probability that a religious system which had suited the enervated provincials of the decaying empire would never make its way among the free and strong races that, amid scenes of fire and blood, were laying the foundations of feudalism. In the event it was otherwise. The hordes which shattered the work of the Caesars learnt to repeat the Catholic Creed, and a new order of things had formed itself, when the tempest of Mahomedanism broke upon Christendom. Politically speaking, this was perhaps the most threatening storm through which the Christian Church has passed. There was a time when the soldiers of that stunted and immoral caricature of the Revelation of the One True God, which was set forth by the false prophet, had already expelled the very Name of Christ from the country of and Augustine; they were masters of the Mediterranean; they had desolated Spain, were encamped in the heart of France, were ravaging the seaboard of Italy. It was as if the knell of Christendom had sounded. But Christ, "if asleep on a pillow in the hinder part of the ship," was not insensible to the terrors of His servants. He rose to rebuke those winds and waves, as by Charles Martel in one age, and by Sobieski in another; it is now more than two centuries since Islam inspired its ancient dread. The last like trial of the Church was the first French Revolution. In that vast convulsion Christianity had to encounter forces which for awhile seemed to threaten its total suppression. Yet the men of the Terror have passed, as the Caesars had passed before them; and like the Caesars, they have only proved to the world that the Church carries within her One who rules the fierce tempests in which human institutions are wont to perish.

II. Political dangers, however, do but touch the Church of Christ outwardly; but she rests upon the intelligent assent of her children, AND SHE HAS PASSED AGAIN AND AGAIN THROUGH THE STORMS OF INTELLECTUAL OPPOSITION OR REVOLT. Scarcely had she steered forth from the comparatively still waters of Galilean and Hellenistic devotion than she had to encounter the pitiless dialectic, the subtle solvents, of the Alexandrian philosophy. It was as if in anticipation of this danger that St. John had already baptized the Alexandrian modification of the Platonic Logos, moulding it so as to express the sublimest and most central truth of the Christian Creed; while, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Alexandrian methods of interpretation had been adopted in vindication of the gospel. But to many a timid believer it may well have seemed that Alexandrianism would prove the grave of Christianity, when, combining the Platonic dialectics with an Eclectic Philosophy, it endeavoured in the form of to break up the Unity of the Godhead by making Christ a separate and inferior Deity. There was a day when Arianism seemed to be triumphant; but even Arianism was a less formidable foe than the subtle strain of infidel speculation which penetrated the Christian intellect in the very heart of the Middle Ages, that is to say, at a time when the sense of the supernatural had diffused itself throughout the whole atmosphere of human thought. This unbelief was the product sometimes of a rude sensuality rebelling against the precepts of the gospel; sometimes of the culture divorced from faith which made its appearance in the twelfth century; sometimes, specifically, of the influence of the Arabian philosophy from Spain; sometimes of the vast and penetrating activity of the Jewish teachers. It revealed itself constantly under the most unexpected circumstances. We need not suppose that the great Order of the Templars was guilty of the infidelity that along with crimes of the gravest character, was laid to their charge; a study of their processes is their best acquittal, while it is the condemnation of their persecutors. But unbelief must; have been widespread in days when a prominent soldier, , could declare that "all that was preached concerning Christ's Passion and Resurrection was a mere farce;" when a pious bishop of Paris left it on record that he "died believing in the Resurrection, with the hope that some of his educated but sceptical friends would reconsider their doubts;" when that keen observer, as Neander terms him, , remarks the existence of a large class of men whose faith consisted in nothing else than merely taking care not to contradict the faith — "quibus credere est solum fidei non contradicere, qui consuetudine vivendi magis, quam virtute credendi fideles nominantur." The prevalence of such unbelief is attested at once by the fundamental nature of many of the questions discussed at the greatest length by the Schoolmen, and by the unconcealed anxieties of the great spiritual leaders of the time. After the Middle Ages came the . This is not the time or place to deny the services which the Renaissance has rendered to the cause of human education, and indirectly, it may be, to that of Christianity. But the Renaissance was at first, as it appeared in Italy, a pure enthusiasm for Paganism, for Pagan thought, as well as for Pagan art and Pagan literature. And the Reformation, viewed on its positive and devotional side, was, at least in the South of Europe, a reaction against the spirit of the Renaissance: it was the Paganism, even more than the indulgences of Leo X, which alienated the Germans. The reaction against this Paganism was not less vigorous within the Church of Rome than without it; Ranke has told us the story of its disappearance. Lastly, there was the rise of Deism in England, and of the Encyclopedist School in France, followed by the pure Atheism which preceded the Revolution. It might well have seemed to fearful men of that day that Christ was indeed asleep to wake no more, that the surging waters of an infidel philosophy had well-nigh filled the ship, and that the Church had only to sink with dignity.

III. Worse than the storms of political violence or of intellectual rebellion, have been THE TEMPESTS OF INSURGENT IMMORALITY THROUGH WHICH THE CHURCH HAS PASSED. In the ages of persecution there was less risk of this, although even then there were scandals. The Epistles to the Corinthians reveal beneath the very eyes of the Apostle a state of moral corruption, which, in one respect at least, he himself tells us, had fallen below the Pagan standard. But when entire populations pressed within the fold, and social or political motives for conformity took the place of serious and strong conviction in the minds of multitudes, these dangers became formidable. What must have been the agony of devout Christians in the tenth century, when appointments to the Roman Chair itself were in the hands of three unprincipled and licentious women; and when the life of the first Christian bishop was accounted such that a pilgrimage to Rome involved a loss of character. Well might the austere Bruno exclaim of that age that "Simon Magus lorded it over a Church in which bishops and priests were given to luxury and fornication:" well might Cardinal Baronius suspend the generally laudatory or apologetic tone of his Annals, to observe that Christ must have in this age been asleep in the ship of the Church to permit such enormities. It was a dark time in the moral life of Christendom: but there have been dark times since. Such was that when St. Bernard could allow himself to describe the Roman Curia as he does in addressing Pope Eugenius III; such again was the epoch which provoked the work of Nicholas de Cleangis, "On the Ruin of the Church." The passions, the ambitions, the worldly and political interests which surged around the Papal throne, had at length issued in the schism of ; and the writer passionately exclaims that the Church had fallen proportionately to her corruptions, which he enumerates with an unsparing precision. During the century which preceded the Reformation, the state of clerical discipline in London was such as to explain the vehemence of popular reaction; and if in the last century there was an absence of grossness, such as had prevailed in previous ages, there was a greater absence of spirituality. Says Bishop Butler, charging the clergy of the Diocese of Durham in 1751 — "As different ages have been distinguished by different sorts of particular errors and vices, the deplorable distinction of ours is an avowed scorn of religion in some, and a growing disregard to it in the generality." That disregard, being in its essence moral, would hardly have been arrested by the cultivated reasoners, who were obliged to content themselves with deistic premises in their defenses of Christianity: it did yield to the fervid appeals of Whitefield and of Wesley. With an imperfect idea of the real contents and genius of the Christian Creed, and with almost no idea at all of its majestic relations to history and to thought, these men struck a chord for which we may well be grateful. They awoke Christ, sleeping in the conscience of England; they were the real harbingers of a day brighter than their own.

IV. For if the question be asked, how the Church of Christ has surmounted these successive dangers, the answer is, BY THE APPEAL OF PRAYER. She has cried to her Master, who is ever in the ship, though, as it may seem, asleep upon a pillow. The appeal has often been made impatiently, even violently, as on the waves of Gennesaret, but it has not been made in vain. It has not been by policy, or good sense, or considerations of worldly prudence, but by a renewal in very various ways of the first fresh Christian enthusiasm which flows from the felt presence of Christ, that political enemies have been baffled, and intellectual difficulties reduced to their true dimensions, and moral sores extirpated or healed. Christianity does thus contain within itself the secret of its perpetual youth, the certificate of its indestructible vitality; because it centres in, it is inseparable from, devotion to a living Person. No ideal lacking a counterpart in fact could have guided the Chinch across the centuries. Imagination may do much in quiet and prosperous times; but amid the storms of hostile prejudice and passion, in presence of political vicissitudes or of intellectual onslaughts, or of moral rebel. lion or decay, an unreal Saviour must be found out. A Christ upon paper, though it were the sacred pages of the gospel, would have been as powerless to save Christendom as a Christ in fresco; not less feeble than the Countenance which, in the last stages of its decay, may be traced on the wall of the Refectory at Milan. A living Christ is the key to the phenomenon of Christian history. The subject suggests, among others, two reflections in particular. And, first, it is a duty to be on our guard against, panics. Panics are the last infirmity of believing souls. But panics are to be deprecated, not because they imply a keen interest in the fortunes of religion, but because they betray a certain distrust of the power and living presence of our Lord. Science may for the moment be hostile; in the long run it cannot but befriend us. And He who is with us in the storm is most assuredly beyond the reach of harm: to be panic stricken is to dishonour Him. A second reflection is this: a time of trouble and danger is the natural season for generous devotion. To generous minds a time of trouble has its own attractions. It enables a man to hope, with less risk of presumption, that his motives are sincere; it fortifies courage; it suggests self-distrust; it enriches character; it invigorates faith.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: And the same day, when the even was come, he saith unto them, Let us pass over unto the other side.

WEB: On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, "Let's go over to the other side."