So that there is no difficulty in understanding the surpassing value of sufferings as a very part of "my work for God,” and a most precious witness for Him and His truth, while we utterly abhor the idea that they have any such value as the sufferings of Christ have, to put away sin, or justify us before God. The more clearly that I see, as St. Paul did, the utter impossibility of the one, the more fully shall I appreciate the value, even before God, of the other.

CHAPTER VII.

CAUSES OF THESE SUFFERINGS.

It will, however, be profitable to consider some of the reasons which make it certain that my work for God, whenever it is really a continuance of Christ's own work, will be through suffering. In the case of our Blessed Redeemer, there was a reason for His sufferings which does not apply to us. He was "a man of

»* because,

sorrows and acquainted with grief," as the prophet Isaiah reminds us, “He bore our griefs and carried our sorrows;"" for the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all." We shall consider in a following chapter in what sense we have fellowship even with these sufferings of Christ in our work for God. But at present let us examine those causes of Christ's sufferings in His work of bearing witness for the truth, which apply to all who follow Him therein.

I. Of these the first and most obvious, and one to which our Lord Himself most frequently refers, is this, that testimony to the truth does of itself excite the hostility of the world. "This," He Himself said, † "is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their works were evil. For every one that doeth ill hateth the light, and cometh not to the light, lest his works should be reproved."

That this would equally be the case as regards all who should follow Him in His work + John iii. 19.

* Isai. liii.

for God, Jesus distinctly and repeatedly declares: "If the world hateth you, ye know that it hath hated me before it hated you."+ And the presence of the Holy Spirit in those who know and follow Christ, instead of removing the enmity, as might be expected from the fruits of that Spirit being such as even the natural conscience might appreciate, is the very cause of the alienation, because He is "the Spirit of truth, whom," Jesus forewarned His disciples, "the world cannot receive." And, therefore, Jesus elsewhere said to the Jews, "Because I say the truth ye believe me not." §

In applying to our own trials in witnessing for God's truth such warnings of our Blessed Lord, we must remember, on the one hand, that it is not for us to judge who are of the world and who are of God, except so far as men themselves make it clearly manifest; and on the

* John xv. 19.

+ Compare also Matt. x. 22, xxiv. 9, Mark xiii. 13, Luke xxi. 17.

John xiv. 16, 17.

§ John viii. 45.

other, that the hostility of the world to the truth, and to those that witness for it, may be much modified and change its form from age to age. In different ages, very different portions and aspects of the same truth are the particular objects of hostility; at one time it will be some fundamental article of the Catholic faith, at another some doctrine of the Gospel derived from that faith; at one time it will be the forms that embody and set forth the truth that are hated, at another it will be the worship of God in spirit and in truth that is the object of contempt. But that which St. John said* of those who, in his time, denied the fundamental truth of the Incarnation, is fulfilled in all, even to the present hour, who in any degree, or in any direction, pervert, obscure, or explain away to suit the fleshly reason of man the truth which God has revealed. "They are of the world, therefore speak they as of the world, and the world heareth them."

2. But Holy Scripture teaches me to look

beyond the hostility of the world for the cause of those who bear witness for the truth being exposed to suffering as their Lord Himself was. "For our wrestling," St. Paul reminds us, * "is not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual hosts of wickedness." The history of our Blessed Lord, who, as soon as He was anointed by the Spirit of God for His work on earth, was assailed by the Evil One at all points at which human nature is capable of temptation, is a warning to us who are called to the same work, as to the trials to which we are exposed from the same source. God's servants are

All the persecutions of attributed-in the Book example t-to the malice

of Revelation, for of this great adversary; and the various temptations to which we are liable, as well as the outward hindrances to the work of the Gospel, are traced by the Apostle Paul to the same And certainly, in regard to the deceits

cause.

* Ephes. vi. 12.

ii. 18.

Rom. xvi. 20, 1 Cor. vii. 5, 2 Cor. ii. 11, xii. 7, 1 Thess.