Chapter 15 | Table of Contents | Chapter 17

To this melancholy truth all Christendom, both at home and abroad, bears full witness. Who needs to be told that there is not a corruption or depravity of human nature; no kinds of pride, wrath, envy, malice and self-love; no sorts of hypocrisy, falseness, cursing, swearing, perjury and cheating; no wantonness of lust in every kind of debauchery that are not common all over Christendom in towns and villages? But to pass these by, I will show in two or three particulars that, though little observed and less condemned, fully show that the beast, the whore and the fiery dragon are in possession of Protestant as well as popish churches.

First can it be said that Mammon is less served by Christians than by Jews and infidels? Or can there be a fuller proof that Christians, Jews and infidels are equally fallen from God and all divine worship, since Truth itself has told us that we cannot serve God and Mammon? Is not this as unalterable a truth as if it had been said, You cannot serve God and Baal? Or can it with any truth or sense be affirmed that the Mammonist has more of Christ in him than the Baalist or is more or less an idolator, because he is called a Christian, a Jew or an infidel? Look now at all those particulars that Christ charged upon the Jewish priests, scribes and Pharisees and you will see them all present again in the fallen state of Christendom. If God's prophets were again in the world, they would have just the same complaints against the fallen Christian church as they had against the old carnal, stiff-necked Jews, namely, "that of their silver and gold they had made themselves idols" (Hosea 8:4).

Though golden figures of idol-gods are not now worshipped either by Jews or Christians, silver and gold and what belongs to them is the Mammon god that sits and reigns in their hearts. How else could there be that universal strife through all Christendom over who should stand in the richest and highest place to preach about the humility of Christ and offer spiritual sacrifices unto God? What god but Mammon could put into the hearts of Christ's ambassador a desire to make a gain of the gospel, that from the beginning to the end, means nothing else but death to self and separation from every view, temper and affection that has any connection with the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life? Our blessed Lord spoke something to the Jews that might well have made their ears tingle when he told them that they "had made His Father's house a den of thieves," because sheep and oxen were sold there with the money-changers sitting in the outer court of the temple. If you will say that Mammon has brought forth no profanation like this in our Christian church, your best proof must be this, because our church-sale is not oxen and sheep, but holy things, cures of souls, parsonages, vicarages, etc., and our money-changers, our buyers and sellers are chiefly consecrated persons. Look at both the things that are spiritual and things temporal and you will see the same arts, the same passions and worldly wisdom visibly active in the one as in the other. If Christ as He was leaving the world had said to His disciples, "Labor to be rich; Make full provision for the flesh; Be conformed to the world; Court the favor and interest of great men; Clothe yourselves with all the worldly honors, distinctions and powers you can get"; could these commands have been more fully followed by either Roman or Protestant churches as a proof of their loyalty to their real master? What is all this in truth and reality except the same whore riding upon the same beast, not here or there, but through all fallen Christendom where God has always had His seven thousand that have refused to bow their knee to Mammon?

The Evil of "Holy Wars"

In the darkest ages of Rome-ish superstition a martial spirit of zeal and glory for the gospel broke forth in kings, cardinals, bishops, monks and friars to lead the sheep of Christ, saints, pilgrims, penitents and sinners of all kinds, to proceed in battle array to kill, devour and drive the Turks from the land of Palestine and the old earthly Jerusalem. These bloodthirsty expeditions were called a holy war because it was fighting for the holy land; they were also called a "crusade," because crosses and crucifixes made the greatest glitter among the sharpened instruments of human murder. Thus under the banner of the cross, an army of church wolves went forth to destroy the lives of those whom the Lamb of God died on the cross to save.

The light that broke out at the reformation abhorred the bloody superstitious zeal of these catholic heroes. But what followed from this new risen reforming light that came forth instead of these holy crusades? Wars followed that were even more diabolical. Christian kingdoms with bloodthirsty piety started destroying, devouring and burning one another for the sake of what was called popery and what was called Protestantism.

Who can help but see that Satan, the prince of the powers of darkness, had found a much greater triumph over Christendom than in all the holy wars and crusades that went before? Everything that was once done by such high-spirited fighters for old Jerusalem's earth could not have done as much damage against the gospel-light, because not one in a thousand of those holy warriors were allowed to see what was in the gospel. But now with the gospel opened in everyone's hands, papists and Protestants make open war against every divine virtue that belongs to Christ or that can unite them with that Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world. I say against every divine redeeming virtue of the Lamb of God, because these are the targets that "Christian" warfare seeks to conquer. There is not a virtue of gospel-goodness that has not known a death-blow in this new war. No virtue has any gospel-goodness in it, any further than it has its birth and growth in and from the Spirit of Christ. When His nature and Spirit are not there, nothing but the heathen can be found. This is the same truth as when the apostle said that "he who has not or is not led by the Spirit of Christ is none of His."

Imagine Christ, the Lamb of God, after His divine sermon on the mount, putting Himself at the head of a blood- thirsty army, or St. Paul going forth with a squadron of fire and brimstone to make more havoc in human lives than a devouring earthquake. But if this be too blasphemous an absurdity to be supposed, one must conclude that the Christian who acts in the destroying fury of war, acts in full contrariety to the whole nature and Spirit of Christ and can no more be said to be led by His Spirit or be one with Him, than those Christ's enemies who came forth, "with swords and staves to take Him."

Blinded Protestants think they have the glory of slaughtering blind papists; and the victorious papist claims the merit of having conquered the troops of heretics. But alas! The conquest is equally great on both sides, both are entitled to the same victory, and the glorious victory on both sides is only that of having the good of the gospel ground down by both of their feet.

When a Most Christian Majesty with his catholic church sings a Te Deum at the high altar for the rivers of Protestant blood poured out, or an evangelic church sings praise and glory to the Lamb of God for helping them from His holy throne in heaven to make popish towns like Sodom and Gomorrah, they blaspheme God as much as Cain would have done, had he offered a sacrifice of praise to God for helping him to murder his brother Let such worshippers of God be told this, that the field of blood gives all its glory to Satan, who was a murderer from the beginning and will to the end of his reign be the only receiver of all the glory that can come from it. A glorious Alexander in the heathen world is a shame and reproach to the human nature and does more mischief to mankind in a few years than all the wild beasts in every wilderness upon the earth have ever done from the beginning of the world to this day. But the same hero, making the same ravage from country to country with Christian soldiers, has more thanks from the devil than twenty pagan Alexanders would ever have had. To make men kill other men is meat and drink to that roaring adversary of mankind who goes about seeking whom he may devour. To make Christians kill Christians for the sake of Christ's church is his highest triumph over the highest mark that Christ has set upon those whom he has purchased by His blood. "This commandment," says he, "I give unto you, that you love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another as I have loved you."

Can the duelist who had rather sheathe his sword in the bowels of his brother than abide what he calls an affront, be said to have this mark of belonging to Christ? And may not he that is called his "second," more justly be said to be second to none in the love of human murder? Now what difference is there between the haughty duelist with his provided second, meeting his adversary with sword and pistol behind a hedge or a house, than two kingdoms with their high-spirited regiments, slaughtering one another in the field of battle? It is only the difference that is between the murder of one man as opposed to the murder of an hundred thousand.

Now imagine the duelist fasting and confessing his sins to God today because he is engaged to fight his brother tomorrow. Or fancy again the conqueror who went into his closet and on bended knees lifts up hands and heart to God for blessing his weapons with the death of his brother. Now you have a picture of the great piety that begins and ends the wars all over heavenly Christendom. How could there be any greater blindness than to think that a Christian kingdom, as such, can have any other goodness or union with Christ other than the same goodness which makes the private Christian to be one with Him and a partaker of the divine nature? Or that pride, wrath, ambition, envy, covetousness, rapine, resentment, revenge, hatred, mischief and murder are only the works of the devil, while they are committed by individuals, but when carried on by all the strength and authority, all the hearts, hands, and voices of a whole nation--that the devil is then quite driven out of them, loses all his right and power in them and they become a holy matter given for church thanksgivings and the sacred oratory of pulpits.

Look at what the individual Christian must do to his neighbor or his enemy and you will see the very thing that one Christian kingdom is to do to another. Look at what proves a man is not led by the Spirit of Christ and you will see what proves a kingdom is under the dominion and power of Satan. Wherever pride is, there the devil is riding in his finest fiery chariot. And wherever wrath is, there he has his finest murdering sword at work. What is it that fallen man wants to be redeemed from except pride and wrath envy and covetousness? He can have no higher separation or apostasy from God, no fuller union with Satan and his angels, than he has by the spirit of these tempers. They constitute that evil, whether you call it self or Satan in him, the meaning is the same. If man had not fallen into this self or Satan, then there could be no more war or fighting in him than there was in the Word made man in our flesh. Or suppose him redeemed from his fallen nature by a new birth of the Lamb of God, born in his soul, and then he can no more be hired to kill men gloriously in the field, than to carry a dark lantern by night to a powder house.

Love, goodness and communication of good is the immutable glory and perfection of the divine nature and nothing can have union with God, except what partakes of this goodness. The love that brought forth the existence of all things, does not change through the fall of its creatures, but is continually at work to bring back every fallen nature and creature to their first state of goodness. Everything that passes for a time between God and His fallen creature is the same thing working for the same end. Though this is called wrath that called for punishment, curse and death, it is all from the beginning to the end, nothing but the work of the first creating love. It means nothing else and does nothing else but those works of purifying fire that must and alone can burn away all the dark evil that separates the creature from its first created union with God. God's providence from the fall to the restitution of all things is doing the same thing as when he said to the dark chaos of fallen nature, "Let there be light." He still says and will continue saying the same thing until there is no evil of darkness left in all that is nature and creature. God creating, God illuminating, God sanctifying, God threatening and punishing, and God forgiving and redeeming is only one and the same essential, immutable, never ceasing, working of the divine nature. What in God illuminates and glorifies saints and angels in heaven is that very same working of the divine nature that wounds, pains, punishes, and purifies sinners upon earth.

If long, long ages of fiery pain and tormenting darkness fall upon many or most of God's apostate creatures, they will last no longer than until the great fire of God has melted all arrogance into humility and everything that is self has died in the long agonies and bloody sweat of a lost God, that is that all-saving cross of Christ that will never give up its redeeming power until sin and sinners have no more a name among the creatures of God. If long ages hereafter can only do that for a soul departing this life under a load of sins that days and nights might have done for a most hardened pharaoh or a most wicked Nero while in the body, it is because while the soul is in the body it has only the nature and state of fallen Adam, but when flesh and blood are taken from it, the strong apostate nature of fallen angels is found in it that must have its state and place in that blackness of darkness of a fiery wrath that burns in them and their kingdom.

O poor sinner, whoever you are, repent and turn to God while you have Adam's flesh upon you, for as long as that lasts, the kingdom of God is nigh at hand. But if you die without Adam's repentance, black lakes, bottomless pits, ages of a gnawing worm and fire that never ceases to burn will stand between you and a kingdom of heaven afar off. To prevent all this and make you a child of the first resurrection, Jesus Christ, God and man, the only begotten Son of this infinite love came into the world in the name and under the character of infinite pity, boundless compassion, inexpressible meekness, bleeding love, nameless humility, never ending patience, long suffering and bowels of redeeming mercy, also called the Lamb of God, who with all these supernatural virtues takes away the sins of the world.

Now from this view of God's infinite love and mercy in Christ Jesus, willing nothing, seeking nothing, through all the regions of His providence, except that sinners of all kinds, the boldest rebels against all His goodness, may have their proper remedy and their necessary means of being fully delivered from all that hurt, mischief and destruction, that in full opposition to their God and creator they had brought upon themselves. God and Christ using every miracle of love and wisdom to give recovery of life, health and salvation to all that have rebelled against them, look at the murdering monster called war. And what can its name or nature be but a fiery great dragon, a full figure of Satan, broke loose and fighting against every redeeming virtue of the Lamb of God?

The temporal miseries and wrongs that war carries along with it, wherever it goes, are neither to be numbered or expressed. What thievery bears any proportion to what, with the boldness of drum and trumpet, plunders the innocent of everything that they have? And if themselves are left alive with all their limbs or their daughters unravished, they in many cases have only the ashes of their consumed houses to lie down upon. What honor has war not gotten from its tens and tens of hundreds or thousands of men, slaughtered on heaps with as little regret or concern as for loads of rubbish thrown into a pit? Who but the fiery dragon, would put wreaths of laurel on such heroes' heads? Who but he could say unto them, "Well done good and faithful servants"?

But there is still an evil of war, much greater, though less regarded, which reflects how many hundreds of thousands, no millions of young men born into this world for no other end but that they may be born again of Christ from sons of Adam's misery, become sons of God and fellow heirs with Christ in everlasting glory--what nameless numbers of these are robbed of God's precious gift of life to them before they have known the one sole benefit of living. They are not allowed to stay in this world until age and experience have done their best for them, have helped them to know the inward voice and operation of God's Spirit, helped them to find and feel that evil curse and sting of sin and death that must be taken from within them before they can die the death of the righteous. Instead of all this, they have been either violently forced or tempted in the fire of hell and full strength of sinful lusts to forget God's eternity and their own souls and rush into a kill or be killed situation with as much furious haste and goodness of spirit as tiger kills a tiger for the sake of his prey. God's providence over His fallen creatures is nothing else but a providence of love and salvation turning through ways of infinite wisdom. Sooner or later, He turns all kinds of evil into a new good, making what was lost to be found, what was dead to be alive again; not willing that one single sinner should lack what can save him from eternal death. This is a truth as certain as that God's Name is I AM that I AM.

Among unfallen creatures in heaven, God's Name and nature is Love, Light and Glory. To the fallen sons of Adam what was love light and glory in heaven becomes infinite pity and compassion on earth in a God clothed with the nature of His fallen creature, bearing all its infirmities, entering into all its troubles and in the meek innocence of a Lamb of God, living a life and dying a death of all the sufferings due to sin. Hence it was that when this Divine Pity suffered its own life-giving blood to be poured on the ground, all outward nature made full declaration of its atoning and redeeming power. The strength of the earth did quake, the hardness of rocks was forced to split and long-covered graves to give up their dead. By this all that came by the curse into nature and creature must give up its power, that all kinds of hellish wrath, hardened malice, fiery pride, selfish wills, tormenting envy, and earthly passions that kept men under the power of Satan must receive their fullness of death and fullness of a new life from that all-powerful, all-purifying blood of the Lamb. It will never cease washing red into white, until the earth is washed into the crystal purity of that glassy sea that is before the throne of God and all the sons of Adam are clothed in such white as fits them for their several mansions in their heavenly Father's house.

Sing, O you heavens, and shout all you lower parts of the earth. This is our God that varies not, whose first creating love knows no change from a redeeming pity towards all His fallen creatures.

Look now at warring Christendom. What smallest drop of pity towards sinners is to be found in it? How could a hellish spirit more fully contrive and hasten their destruction? It stirs up and kindles every passion of the fallen nature that is contrary to the all-humble, all-meek, all-loving, all-forgiving and all-saving Spirit of Christ. It unites, it drives and compels nameless numbers of unconverted sinners to fall, murdering and murdered, among flashes of fire, with the wrath and swiftness of lightning into a fire infinitely worse than that in which they died. What a sad subject for thanksgiving days whether in popish or Protestant churches! For if there is a joy of all the angels in heaven for one sinner that repents, what a joy must there be in hell over such multitudes of sinners not suffered to repent? And if they who have "converted many to righteousness shall shine as the stars in the firmament for ever," what Chorazin's woe may they not justly fear whose proud wrath and vain glory have robbed such numberless troops of poor wretches, over all times and places, of knowing what righteousness they needed for the salvation of their immortal souls.

Here my pen trembles in my hand; but when, O when, will one single Christian church, people or language tremble at the share they have in this death of sinners!

"For the glory of his majesty's arms," said once a most Christian king. Now if at that time his catholic church had called a solemn assembly to unite hearts and voices in this pious prayer, "O blessed Jesus, dear redeeming Lamb of God who came down from heaven to save men's lives and not destroy them, go along, we humbly pray, with our bomb-vessels and fire-ships, suffer not our thundering cannon to roar in vain, but let your tender hand of love and mercy direct their balls to more heads and hearts of your own redeemed creatures, than the poor skill of man is able of itself to do." Have not such prayers had more of the man of the earth and more of the son of perdition in them than the Most Christian king's glorying in his arms?

Again we see the fall of the universal church from being led by the Spirit of Christ to be guided by the inspiration of the great fiery dragon. Look at all European Christendom sailing around the globe with fire and sword and every murdering art of war, to seize the possessions and kill the inhabitants of both the Indies. What natural right of man, what supernatural virtue which Christ brought down from heaven, was not here trodden under foot? All that you ever read or heard of heathen barbarity was here outdone by Christian conquerors. And to this day what wars of Christians against Christians blended with scalping heathens, still keep staining the earth and the seas with human blood for a miserable share in the spoils of a plundered heathen world! A world that should have heard or seen or felt nothing from the followers of Christ but a divine love that had forced them, from distant lands and through the perils of long seas, to visit strangers with those glad tidings of peace and salvation to all the world, the same love which angels from heaven and shepherds on earth proclaimed at the birth of Christ.

Let the wisdom of this world be as wise as ever it will from its learned throne condemn all this as "fanaticism." It should not be troubling to anyone to be condemned by that "wisdom" that God Himself has condemned as foolishness with Him. For the wisdom of this world has all that is contrary to salvation-wisdom, that the flesh has to the Spirit, earth to heaven or damnation to salvation. It is a wisdom whose spirit and breath keeps alive all the evil that is in fallen man and, which in its highest excellence, has only the full grown nature of the carnal mind that is enmity against God. It is a wisdom that is sensual and devilish, that hinders man from knowing about, yet dying all those deaths without which there can be no new life. It is a wisdom that turns all salvation-truths into empty, learned tales that, instead of helping the sinner to confess his sins and feel the misery that is hid under them, helps him to an art of hiding, even defending them. What the lusts and passions do against the wisdom that is from above is considered to be "right reason" by this wisdom from below. Its greatest skill is shown in keeping all the powers and passions of the natural man in peace and prosperity, and so the poor blinded sinner lives and dies in a total ignorance of that light, blessing and salvation that could only be had by a broken and contrite heart.

With respect to conscience this is the chief office of worldly wisdom;--to keep all things quiet in the old man that, whether busied in things spiritual or temporal, he may keep up the lusts of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life. That they may remain without any disturbance from religious phantoms and dreams of mystic idiots, who for want of sober sense and sound learning, think that Christ really meant what he said in these words, "Except a man be born again of the Spirit or from above he cannot enter into the kingdom of God." This fallen wisdom in its highest perfection is a classic, moral painter that, though it cannot alter the nature, can change the colors of everything. It can give to the most heavenly virtue such an outward form and color as will force the stoutest of aged and learned men to run away from it. To a vice of the greatest deformity it can pencil such charming features as will make every child of this world wish to live and die with it. Its next perfection is that of a flattering orator who has praise and dispraise at his own free disposal, for as they are all of his own making, so he can dispose them on whom and on what he will, not only as outward, interesting occasions call for them, but also as the inward whims of his own ups and downs desire them. Self, however willing to always be strong, has its weak hours and would always be tottering unless this elbow-orator kept him every day (though perhaps not every night), free from the disturbing whispers of a seed of God in his soul. Now join (if you please) learning and religion to act in fellowship with this worldly wisdom to make their best of it, and then you will have a depravity of craft and subtlety as high as flesh and blood can carry it, that will bring forth a glittering Pharisee with a hardness of heart greater than that of the sinner and publican.

"Demas," says St. Paul, "has forsaken me, having loved this present world." Here you see all the good and blessing that is inseparable from the wisdom of this world--it always does the same thing and has the same effect wherever it is. It will do the same to high and low, learned or unlearned, clergy or laity that same unavoidability that it did to Demas. It will make them forsake Christ and turn their backs on every grace and virtue of His Holy Spirit as certainly as the love of the world made Demas to forsake Paul.

This wisdom has asked me how it is possible for Christian kingdoms in the neighborhood of one another to preserve themselves. This wisdom sees the strength and weapons of war as everyone's defense against such invasions, encroachments and robberies as would otherwise be the fate of Christian kingdoms from one another. This question is so far from needing to be answered by me, that it is wholly on my side. It confesses all and proves all that I have said of the fallen state of Christendom, to be strictly true. For if it is the governing spirit of Christian kingdoms that no one of them can subsist in safety from its neighboring Christian kingdoms but by its weapons of war, are not all Christian kingdoms equally in the same unchristian state as two neighboring bloody knaves who cannot be safe from one another but as each other's murdering arms preserve and protect them? This plea therefore for Christendom's wars, proves nothing else but the want of Christianity all over the Christian world. They stand upon no better a foundation of righteousness and goodness than when one murdering knave kills another that would have killed him.

But to know whether Christianity wants or joins in a war, Christianity is to be considered as in its right state. Now the true state of the world turned Christian is thus described by the great gospel-prophet who showed what a change it was to make in the fallen state of the world saying, "It shall come to pass in the last days (that is, in the days of Christendom) that the mountain of the Lord's house (His Christian kingdom) shall be established in the top of the mountains and all nations shall flow into it and many people shall say, 'Let us go up to the mountain of the Lord's house and he will teach us of His ways and we will walk in His paths'" (Isaiah 2:2).

What follows from this going up of the nations to the mountain of the Lord's house from His teaching them of His ways and their walking in His paths? The holy prophet expressly tells you in his following words, "They shall beat their swords into plow-shares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up its sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." This is the prophet's true Christendom with one and the same essential divine mark set upon it as when the Lamb of God said, "By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you love one another as I have loved you." Christ's kingdom of God has come nowhere but where the works of the devil are destroyed and men are turned from the power of Satan unto God. God is only another name for the highest and only good, and the highest and only good means nothing else but love with all its resulting works. Satan is only another name for the whole of evil and the whole of evil is nothing else but what is contrary to love. The sum total of all contrariety to love is contained in pride, wrath, strife, self, envy, hatred, revenge, mischief and murder. Look at these with all the fruits that belong to them and then you will see all the princely power that Satan is and has in this fallen world.

To see when and where the kingdoms of this fallen world are become a kingdom of God, the gospel prophet tells us that it is when and where that all enmity ceases. "The wolf," says he, "shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. The calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed and their young ones shall lie down together and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The suckling child shall put his hand on the cockatrice's den." For "they shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain (that is through all holy Christendom)" (Isaiah 11:6).

See here the kingdom of God on the earth. It is nothing else but a kingdom of mere love where all hurt and destruction is done away with and every work of enmity changed into one united power of heavenly love. But observe again and again when and where this comes to pass, that God's kingdom on earth is and can be nothing else but the power of reigning love. The prophet tells you it is, because in the day of His kingdom, "the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." Therefore, O Christendom, your wars are certain proofs that you are as full of an ignorance of God as the waters cover the sea.