Isaiah 9:6-7 For to us a child is born, to us a son is given: and the government shall be on his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful… When we receive this prediction of our Lord, and reflect upon it, we are met with some contradictions to it, which are both apparent and most effectual. Our Lord, when He was upon earth, declared on the contrary — "I came not to send peace on earth, but a sword." Accordingly, He further told His disciples that they must expect to be "hated of all men," and to be "hated of all nations." He warned them, that the feuds that should arise through His doctrine, would poison the peace of families; "the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child." He warned them, that there should be public persecution as well as private, and that they should be dragged before governors and kings for His sake, and scourged in public. Universal war, then, rather than peace, seemed to be predicted as the result of the doctrine of Christ. And have not facts, up to this day, answered to these predictions? Ten imperial persecutions, extended over the most civilised parts of the world, threatened through three centuries the extermination of the Church of Christ: in which every atrocity was committed, and the barbarous ingenuity of man taxed to the utmost extent to devise new torments to make the servants of Jesus Christ suffer, And when heathenism was subdued by the power of the Gospel, and ceased to reign, it was only that this other prediction might be accomplished fearfully in the earth; so that the saints of Jesus Christ became His martyrs throughout Europe. Papal Rome succeeded to the enmity of pagan Rome: in the valleys of Piedmont, and along the plains of France, and throughout the Low Countries, and in England also, as well as, in the time of the Reformation, throughout Italy and Spain, everywhere accomplishing what Christ by His apostle had predicted, and bringing myriads of the saints of Jesus to public martyrdom; massacring without mercy the feeblest and the strongest, young and old, and threatening the extermination of the Church of Christ. And this led to still more extensive offerings to the sanguinary dispositions of man; great and long protracted wars following these massacres. Witness the wars of the Hussites in Bohemia, the wars of the Huguenots in France, to mention no other civil commotions, to which the doctrine of Christ has seemed to lead. And then, when the sword was sheathed, and nation was not imbruing its hands in the blood of other nations for the sake of theology, even then the different Churches of Christ raged in enmity one towards the other: factions that have not ceased to this day, so that the governments of the world find questions of theology and ecclesiastical rivalry still mingling with the counsels of senates, and embarrassing all their decisions. Is this the peace which Christ came to produce? In what sense is He "the Prince of Peace"? (B. W. Noel, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. |
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