Luke 18:9-14 And he spoke this parable to certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others:… "God, I thank Thee" — such in spirit, and almost in word, was the expression of the great Roman historian, Tacitus — "I thank Thee I am not as the miserable sect called by the infamous name of Christians, odious to all mankind." "God, we thank Thee," said the philosopher of France, "that we are not like those benighted men who converted the barbarous tribes, or erected the Gothic cathedrals." "I thank Thee," said the splendid Pope Leo X., "that I am not as this ignorant monk, Martin Luther." "God, we thank Thee," said the great movers of the political and social revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England, "that we are not as those fanatics," the blind poet of Bunhill Row, and the wandering tinker of Bedford, or the scrupulous bishop who could not accept the Act of Settlement, or the Lincolnshire pastor who spent his long life in itinerant preaching; and yet those early Christian martyrs, those mediaeval missionaries and monk of Wittenberg, were mightier in the long run even than Tacitus, or the encyclopaedists of France, or the philosophers of the Renaissance. And those wayward Christians in England, as they seemed to be, John Milton, the author of "Paradise Lost," John Bunyan, the author of "The Pilgrim's Progress," Bishop Ken, author of the Morning and Evening Hymns, John Wesley, the author of the religious revival in England, went down to their graves as much deserving of the praise of true statesmen and philosophers, even as Clarendon and Bolingbroke, as Walpole and Hume. (Dean Stanley.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: |
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