Yet it pleased God, in this distressful state of his church, to provide for its continuance, and even integrity, in due time, by making the cloystered ignorance of the Monks serve to the preservation of the sacred canon; and the enslaving projects of a tyrannical hierarchy, to the restoration of religious and civil liberty.
And thus, though the powers of hell had been successively let loose against the church of Christ in the terrible shapes, first, of Jewish and Gentile persecution; then, of heresy, in the church itself; next, of Mahometan enthusiasm; and, lastly, of Antichristian superstition; yet have they not prevailed against this sacred structure, founded on a rock, guarded, as we believe, by heaven itself, and therefore destined to be eternal.
I have touched these several particulars slightly and rapidly, just to put you in mind of what the Christian religion has endured, since its appearance in the world; and to let you see how unlikely it is that this religion should have kept its ground against these various and multiplied attacks, if it had not been divinely protected.
But of all the trials, to which it has been exposed, the greatest by far, if this religion had been an imposture, is ONE, which I have not yet mentioned; and that is, the examination of severe, enlightened Reason.
And this trial, to complete its honour, our divine faith hath TWICE undergone: once, in the very season of its birth; and now, again, for two or three centuries, since the revival of letters, in our Western world: periods, both of them, distinguished, in the annals of mankind, by a more than common degree of light and knowledge; which must, in the nature of things, have been fatal to any scheme of religion, pretending only to a divine original, and not really so descended.
But this part of the argument is too large, as well as too important, for me to enter upon at present. Let me therefore conclude with a short and interesting reflexion on so much of it, as we have been considering.
It was natural, no doubt, for the author of a new religion, full of his scheme, and impressed with the importance of it, to promise to himself the perpetuity of his work. But a wise man might easily conjecture that a religion, like the Christian, would meet with the fiercest opposition: and, though this be not a proper time to shew it, it might be shewn, that the spirit of Christ[293] distinctly foresaw the several species of opposition, which his religion had to encounter[294].
Yet, in the face of all these perils, our Lord predicts, in the most direct and positive terms, that his church should brave them all, and subsist for ever. It has subsisted to this day, after encountering such storms of persecution and distress, as must, in all likelihood, have overturned any human fabrick. Is not the true solution of the fact, this, that it was founded on the word of God, which endureth for ever[295]? The rest, then, follows of course. The wise master-builder (to use his own words on another occasion, near akin to this) had built his house upon a ROCK: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house: and it FELL NOT, for it was founded upon a ROCK[296].