Revelation ii. 18-28.
The morning star is the symbol of promise, the sign that the dawn is not far away. Thyatira was a little place, with a weak church, with small hopes and great discouragements, much troubled by the work of a false prophetess, tempted by "the deep things of Satan," as the message says, and yet to it the promise is committed, that it shall have authority over the nations, and receive "the morning star." It was the same great promise that had been already given to the early Christians: "Fear not, little flock, for it is my Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." It was the same amazing optimism which made Jesus look about him, as he stood with a dozen humble followers, and say: "Lift up your eyes and look at the fields, they are white already to my harvest."
There is certainly passing over the world in our day a great wave of intellectual and {100} spiritual discouragement and despondency. What with philosophical pessimism and social agitations and literary decadence and political corruption and moral looseness, a great many persons are beginning to feel that the end of the century is an end of faith, and are not able to discern in the darkness of the time any morning star. As one distinguished author has said: "This is not a time of the eclipse of faith, but a time of the collapse of faith." It was much the same in the times of Thyatira. There was the same luxury and self-indulgence in the Roman world, the same social restlessness, the same intellectual despondency. Now, who is it that can view these perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist, not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with the sober optimism which believes that—
"Step by step, since time began,
We see the steady gain of man."
It may be dark as pitch in the world of speculative thought, but religion discerns the {101} morning star. It believes in its own time. It believes that somehow "good will be the final goal of ill." Even in the perplexities and disasters of its own experience it is not overwhelmed. It is cast down, but not destroyed. It is saved by hope. It lifts its eyes and beholds through the clouds the gleam of the morning star.
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XLI
LIVING AS DEAD
Revelation iii. 1.
Was there ever a message of sterner irony than this to the Church of Sardis: "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead"! We may suppose that it was a church of apparent prosperity, with all the machinery of church life, its ritual, and officers, and committees, all in working order; and yet, when one got at the heart of it, there was no vitality. It was a dead church. It could show—as the passage says—no works fulfilled before God. It was like a tree which seems all vigorous, but which, when one thrusts into the heart of it, proves to be pervaded by dry-rot. There are plenty of such churches still,—churches which have a name that they are living, but are dead. They are counted in the denominational year-book; they go through the motions of life; but where is their quickening, communicating, vitalizing power? What are they but mechanical, formal, institutional things, and how sudden sometimes, like {103} the falling of a dead tree, is the collapse of a dead church!