_HONESTY AND PRETENCE IN THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH._
"And Joseph, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas (which is,
being interpreted, Son of exhortation), a Levite, a man of Cyprus
by race, having a field, sold it, and brought the money, and laid
it at the apostles' feet."--ACTS iv. 36, 37.
"But a certain man named Ananias, with Sapphira his wife, sold a
possession, and kept back part of the price, his wife also being
privy to it, and brought a certain part, and laid it at the
apostles' feet. But Peter said, Ananias, why hath Satan filled
thy heart to lie to the Holy Ghost, and to keep back part of the
price of the land? Whiles it remained, did it not remain thine
own? and after it was sold, was it not in thy power? How is it
that thou hast conceived this thing in thy heart? thou hast not
lied unto men, but unto God. And Ananias hearing these words fell
down and gave up the ghost; and great fear came upon all that
heard it. And the young men arose and wrapped him round, and they
carried him out and buried him."--ACTS v. 1-6.
The exact period in the history of the apostolic Church at which we
have now arrived is a most interesting one. We stand at the very first
origin of a new development in Christian life and thought. Let us
observe it well, for the whole future of the Church is bound up with
it. Christianity was at the beginning simply a sect of Judaism. It is
plain that the Apostles at first thus regarded it. They observed
Jewish rites, they joined in the temple and synagogue worship, they
restricted salvation and God's favour to the children of Abraham, and
merely added belief in Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah to
the common Jewish faith. The Spirit of God was indeed speaking through
the Apostles, leading them, as it led St. Peter on the day of
Pentecost, to speak words with a meaning and scope far beyond their
thoughts. They, like the prophets of old, knew not as yet what manner
of things the Spirit which was in them did signify.
"As little children lisp, and tell of Heaven,
So thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given."
Their speech had a grander and wider application than they themselves
dreamt of; but the power of prejudice and education was far too great
even for the Apostles, and so, though the nobility and profuseness of
God's mercy were revealed and the plenteousness of His grace was
announced by St. Peter himself, yet the glory of the Divine gift was
still unrecognised. Jerusalem, the Temple, the Old Covenant, Israel
after the flesh,--these things as yet bounded and limited the horizon
of Christ's Church. How were the new ideas to gain an entrance? How
was the Church to rise to a sense of the magnificence and universality
of its mission? Joseph, who by the Apostles was surnamed Barnabas,
emerges upon the scene and supplies the answer, proving himself in
very deed a son of consolation, because he became the occasion of
consoling the masses of mankind with that truest comfort, the peace of
God which passes all understanding. Let us see how this came about.
I. The Christian leaders belonged originally to the extreme party in
Judaism. The Jews were at this time divided into two sections. There
was the Hebrew party on the one hand; extreme Nationalists as we might
call them. They hated everything foreign. They clung to the soil of
Palestine, to its language and to its customs. They trained up their
children in an abhorrence of Greek civilisation, and could see nothing
good in it. This party was very unprogressive, very narrow-minded,
and, therefore, unfit to recognise the developments of God's purposes.
The Galileans were very prominent among them. They lived in a
provincial district, remote from the influences of the great centres
of thought and life, and missed, therefore, the revelations of God's
mind which He is evermore making through the course of His
providential dealings with mankind. The Galileans furnished the
majority of the earliest Christian leaders, and they were not fitted
from their narrowness to grasp the Divine intentions with respect to
Christianity and its mission. What a lesson for every age do we behold
in this intellectual and spiritual defect of the Galileans. They were
conscientious, earnest, devout, spiritually-minded men. Christ loved
them as such, and devoted Himself to their instruction. But they were
one-sided and illiberal. Their very provincialism, which had sheltered
them from Sadduceism and unbelief, had filled them with blind
prejudices, and as the result had rendered them unable to read aright
the mind of God and the development of His purposes. Man, alas! is a
very weak creature, and human nature is very narrow. Piety is no
guarantee for wisdom and breadth, and strong faith in God's dealings
in the past often hinders men from realizing and obeying the Divine
guidance and the evolution of His purposes amid the changed
circumstances of the present. The Galilean leaders were best fitted to
testify with unfaltering zeal to the miracles and resurrection of
Christ. They were not best fitted to lead the Church into the
possession of the Gentiles.
There was another party among the Jews whom God had trained by the
guidance of His Providence for this purpose. The Acts of the Apostles
casts a strong and comforting light back upon the history of the
Lord's dealings with the Jews ever since the days of the Babylonish
Captivity. We can see in the story told in the Acts the reason why God
permitted the overthrow of Jerusalem by the hands of Nebuchadnezzar,
and the apparent defeat for the time of His own designs towards the
chosen people. The story of the dispersion is a standing example how
wonderfully God evolves good out of seeming ill, making all things
work together for the good of His Church. The dispersion prepared a
section of the Jews, by travel, by foreign civilization, by culture,
and by that breadth of mind and sympathy which is thereby produced, to
be mediators between the Hebrew party with all their narrowness, and
the masses of the Gentile world whom the strict Jews would fain have
shut out from the hope of God's mercy. This liberal and progressive
party is called in the Acts of the Apostles the Hellenists. They were
looked at askance by the more old-fashioned Hebrews. They were Jews,
children of Abraham indeed, of the genuine stock of Israel. As such
they had a true standing-ground within the Jewish fold, and as true
Jews could exercise their influence from within much more effectually
than if they stood without; for it has been well remarked by a shrewd
observer, that every party, religious or political, is much more
powerfully affected by movements springing from within than by attacks
directed from without. An explosive operates with much more
destructive force when acting from within or underneath a
fortification than when brought into play from outside. Such was the
Hellenistic party. No one could deny their true Jewish character, but
they had been liberalized by their heaven-sent contact with foreigners
and foreign lands; and hence it is that we discern in the Hellenistic
party, and specially in Joseph who by the Apostle was surnamed
Barnabas, the beginnings of the glorious ingathering of the Gentiles,
the very first rift in the thick dark cloud of prejudice which as yet
kept back even the Apostles themselves from realizing the great object
of the gospel dispensation. The Hellenists, with their wealth, their
culture, their new ideas, their sense and value of Greek thought, were
the bridge by which the spiritual life, hitherto wrapped in Jewish
swaddling clothes, was to pass over to the masses of the Gentile
world. The community of goods led Joseph Barnabas to dedicate his
substance to the same noble cause of unselfishness. That dedication
led to disputes between Hellenists and Hebrews, and these disputes
occasioned the election of the seven deacons, who, in part, at least,
belonged to the more liberal section. Among these deacons we find St.
Stephen, whose teaching and martyrdom were directly followed by St.
Paul and his conversion, and St. Paul was the Apostle of the Gentiles
and the vindicator of Christian freedom and Christian liberty. St.
Barnabas and his act of self-denial and self-sacrifice in surrendering
his landed estate are thus immediately connected with St. Paul by
direct historic contact, even if they had not been subsequently
associated as joint Apostles and messengers of the Churches in their
first missionary journeys; while again the mistaken policy of
communism is overruled to the world's abiding benefit and blessing.
How wonderful, indeed, are the Lord's doings towards the children of
men!
II. We have thus suggested one of the main lines of thought which run
through the first half of this book of the Acts. Let us now look a
little more particularly at this Joseph Barnabas who was the occasion
of this great, this new departure. We learn then, upon consulting the
sacred text, that Joseph was a Levite, a man of Cyprus by race; he
belonged, that is, to the class among the Jews whose interests were
bound up with the maintenance of the existing order of things; and yet
he had become a convert to the belief proclaimed by the Apostles. At
the same time, while we give full credit to this Levite for his
action, we must not imagine that either priests or Levites or Jews at
that period fully realized all the consequences of their decisions. We
find that men at every age take steps blindly, without thoroughly
realizing all the results which logically and necessarily flow forth
from them. Men in religious, political, social matters are blind and
cannot see afar off. It is only step by step that the purposes of God
dawn upon them, and Joseph Barnabas, the Levite of Cyprus, was no
exception to this universal rule. He was not only a Levite, but a
native of Cyprus, for Cyprus was then a great stronghold and resort of
the Jewish race. It continued to be a great centre of Jewish influence
for long afterwards. In the next century, for instance, a great Jewish
rebellion burst forth wherever the Jews were strong enough. They rose
in Palestine against the power of the Emperor Hadrian, and under their
leader Barcochba vindicated the ancient reputation of the nation for
desperate and daring courage; while, in sympathy with their brethren
on the mainland, the Jews in Cyprus seized their arms and massacred a
vast multitude of the Greek and Roman settlers, numbering, it is said,
two hundred and forty thousand persons. The concourse of Jews to
Cyprus in the time of the Apostles is easily explained. Augustus Cæsar
was a great friend and patron of Herod the Great, and he leased the
celebrated copper mines of the island to that Herod, exacting a
royalty upon their produce, as we learn from Josephus, the well-known
Jewish historian (_Antiqq._, xvi. iv. 5). It was only to be expected,
then, that when a Jewish monarch was leaseholder and manager of the
great mining industry of the island, his Jewish subjects should flock
thither, and it was very natural that amongst the crowds who sought
Cyprus there should be found a minister of the Jewish faith whose
tribal descent as a Levite reminded them of Palestine, and of the City
of God, and of the Temple of Jehovah and of its solemn, stately
worship.[102] This residence of Barnabas in Cyprus accounts for his
landed property which he had the right to sell just as he liked. A
Levite in Palestine could not, according to the law of Moses when
strictly construed, possess any private landed estate save in a
Levitical city. Meyer, a German commentator of great reputation, has
indeed suggested that Jer. xxxii. 7, where Jeremiah is asked to redeem
his cousin's field in the suburbs of Anathoth, proves that a member of
the tribe of Levi could possess landed estate in Palestine. He
therefore concludes that the old explanation that the landed property
of Barnabas was in Cyprus, not in Palestine, could not stand. But the
simple fact is that even the cleverest German expositors are not
familiar with the text of their Bibles, for had Meyer been thus
familiar he would have remembered that Anathoth was a city belonging
to the priests and the tribe of Levi, and that the circumstance of
Jeremiah the priest possessing a right to landed property in Anathoth
was no proof whatsoever that he could hold landed property anywhere
else, and, above all, affords no ground for the conclusion that he
could dispose of it in the absolute style which Barnabas here
displayed.[103] We conclude then that the action of Barnabas on this
occasion dealt with his landed estate in Cyprus, the country where he
was born, where he was well known, and where his memory is even still
cherished on account of the work he there performed in conjunction
with St. Paul.
[102] Philo was a contemporary of the Apostles. He has left us
many works dealing with this period. He speaks of the Jews of
Cyprus in the account of his embassy to the Emperor Caius
Caligula. See Milman's _History of Jews_, iii., 111, 112, and
Conybeare and Howson's _Life of St. Paul_, chap. v.
[103] See Lightfoot's _Horæ Heb._, Acts iv. 36; _cf._ Josh. xxi.
18.
III. Let us see what else we can glean concerning this personage thus
prominent in the early Church, first for his generosity, and then for
his missionary character and success. It is indeed one of the most
fruitful and interesting lines upon which Bible study can be pursued,
thus to trace the scattered features of the less known and less
prominent characters of Scripture, and see wherein God's grace
specially abounded in them.
The very personal appearance of Barnabas can be recalled by the
careful student of this book.[104] Though it lies a little out of our
way, we shall note the circumstance, as it will help us to form a
more lively image of Barnabas, the Son of Consolation. The two
Apostles, Paul and Barnabas, were on their first missionary tour when
they came to the city of Lystra in Lycaonia. There the multitude,
astonished at the miracle wrought upon the cripple by St. Paul,
attempted to pay divine honours to the two Christian missionaries.
"They called Barnabas Jupiter, and Paul Mercurius, because he was the
chief speaker." It must have been their physical characteristics as
well as the mode of address used by the Apostles which led to these
names; and from the extant records of antiquity we know that Jupiter
was always depicted as a man with a fine commanding presence, while
Mercury, the god of eloquent speech, was a more insignificant figure.
Jupiter, therefore, struck the Lycaonian people as the fittest name
for the taller and more imposing-looking Apostle, while St. Paul, who
was in bodily presence contemptible, was designated by the name of the
active and restless Mercury. His character again shines through every
recorded action of St. Barnabas. He was a thoroughly sympathetic man,
and, like all such characters, he was ever swept along by the
prevailing wave of thought or action, without allowing that supreme
place to the judgment and the natural powers which they should always
hold if the feelings and sympathies are not to land us in positions
involving dire ruin and loss. He was carried away by the enthusiasm
for Christian communism which now seized upon the Jerusalem Church.
He was influenced by the Judaizing movement at Antioch, so that "even
Barnabas was carried away with the Petrine dissimulation." His
sympathies got the better of his judgment in the matter of St. Mark's
conduct in abandoning the ministry to which St. Paul had called him.
His heart was stronger, in fact, than his head. And yet this very
weakness qualified him to be the Son of Consolation. A question has,
indeed, been raised whether he should be called the Son of Consolation
or the Son of Exhortation, but, practically, there is no difference.
His consolations were administered through his exhortations. His
speech and his advice were of a consoling, healing, comforting kind.
There are still such men to be found in the Church. Just as all other
apostolic graces and characteristics are still manifested,--the
eloquence of a Paul, the courage of a Peter, the speculative flights
of a John,--so the sympathetic power of a Barnabas is granted to some.
And a very precious gift it is. There are some good men whose very
tone of voice and bodily attitudes--their heads thrown back and their
arms akimbo, and their aggressive walk--at once provoke opposition.
They are pugnacious Christians, ever on the look out for some topic of
blame and controversy. There are others, like this Barnabas, whose
voices bring consolation, and whose words, even when not the clearest
or the most practical, speak counsels of peace, and come to us
thick-laden with the blessed dews of charity. Their advice is not,
indeed, always the wisest. Their ardent cry is always, Peace, peace.
Such a man on the political stage was the celebrated Lucius Carey,
Lord Falkland, in the days of the great civil war, who, though he
adhered to the Royalist cause, seemed, as the historian tells us, to
have utterly lost all heart once that active hostilities commenced.
Men of this type appear in times of great religious strife. Erasmus,
for instance, at the time of the Reformation, possessed a good deal of
this spirit which is devoted to compromise, and ever inclined to place
the interests of peace and charity above those of truth and principle,
just as Barnabas would have done at Antioch were it not for the
protest of his stronger and sterner friend St. Paul. And yet such men,
with their sympathetic hearts and speech, have their own great use,
infusing a healing, consoling tone into seasons of strife, when others
are only too apt to lose sight of the sweet image of Christian love in
pursuit of what they consider the supreme interests of religious or
political truth. Such a man was Barnabas all his life, and such we
behold him on his first visible entrance upon the stage of Church
history, when his sympathies and his generosity led him to consecrate
his independent property in Cyprus to his brethren's support, and to
bring the money and lay it down at the Apostles' feet.
[104] The early history of Barnabas is thus described by
Metaphrastes, an ancient Greek writer. Barnabas was born in
Cyprus, of rich parents, who sent him to be trained at Jerusalem
under Gamaliel. There he formed an early friendship with St. Paul.
He was a witness of our Lord's miracles, and was converted by the
healing of the impotent man at Bethesda. He then was the means of
converting his sister Mary and her son Mark, who was the young man
with the pitcher of water whom our Lord commanded His disciples to
follow when He was sending them to prepare the Passover. Mary's
house was the place where the upper room was situated, and
continued to be the meeting-place of the Christians, as we find
from Acts xii. Metaphrastes had formerly a very bad reputation as
regards truthfulness, but modern investigation has shown that his
_Lives_ contain some very ancient documents, going back to the
second century at least. See Bishop Lightfoot's address to the
Carlisle Church Congress in _Expositor_ 1885, vol. i., p. 3; Prof.
Ramsay in _Expositor_ 1889, vol. ix., p. 265 and refs., and Cave's
_Lives of the Primitive Fathers_, p. 35.
IV. Now for the contrast drawn for us by the inspired pen of St. Luke,
a contrast we find oft repeating itself in Church history. Here we
have the generous sympathetic Son of Consolation on the one side, and
here, too, we have a warning and a type for all time that the tares
must evermore be mingled with the wheat, the false with the true, the
hypocrites with real servants of God, even until the final separation.
The accidental division of the book into chapters hinders casual
readers from noticing that the action of Ananias and his wife is set
by the writer over against that of Barnabas. Barnabas sold his estate
and brought the price, the whole price, and surrendered it as an
offering to the Church. The spirit of enthusiastic giving was abroad,
and had seized upon the community; and Barnabas sympathized with it.
Ananias and Sapphira were carried away too, but their spirits were
meaner. They desired to have all the credit the Church would give them
for acting as generously as Barnabas did, and yet, while getting
credit for unselfish and unstinting liberality, to be able to enjoy in
private somewhat of that which they were believed to have surrendered.
And their calculations were terribly disappointed. They tried to play
the hypocrite's part on most dangerous ground just when the Divine
Spirit of purity, sincerity, and truth had been abundantly poured out,
and when the spirit of deceit and hypocrisy was therefore at once
recognised. It was with the Apostles and their spiritual natures then
as it is with ourselves and our physical natures still. When we are
living in a crowded city we notice not strange scents and ill-odours
and foul gases: our senses are dulled, and our perceptive powers are
rendered obtuse because the whole atmosphere is a tainted one. But
when we dwell in the pure air of the country, and the glorious breezes
from mountain and moor blow round us fresh and free, then we detect at
once, and at a long distance, the slightest ill-odour or the least
trace of offensive gas. The outpoured presence of the Spirit, and the
abounding love which was produced thereby, quickened the perception of
St. Peter. He recognised the hypocrisy, characterized the sin of
Ananias as a lie against the Holy Ghost; and then the Spirit and Giver
of life, seconding and supporting the words of St. Peter, withdrew His
support from the human frame of the sinner, and Ananias ceased to
live, just as Sapphira, his partner in deceit, ceased to live a few
hours later. The death of Ananias and Sapphira have been ofttimes the
subject of much criticism and objection, on the part of persons who
do not realize the awfulness of their position, the full depths of
their hypocrisy, and the importance of the lesson taught by their
punishment to the Church of every age. Their position was a specially
awful one, for they were brought into closest contact, as no Christian
can now be brought, with the powers of the world to come. The Spirit
was vouchsafed during those earliest days of the Church in a manner
and style which we hear nothing of during the later years of the
Apostles. He proved His presence by physical manifestations, as when
the whole house was shaken where the Apostles were assembled; a
phenomenon of which we read nothing in the latter portion of the Acts.
By the gift of tongues, by miracles of healing, by abounding spiritual
life and discernment, by physical manifestations, the most careless
and thoughtless in the Christian community were compelled to feel that
a supernatural power was present in their midst and specially resting
upon the Apostles. Yet it was into such an atmosphere that the spirit
of hypocrisy and of covetousness, the two vices to which Christianity
was specially opposed, and which the great Master had specially
denounced, obtruded itself as Satan gained entrance into Eden, to
defile with their foul presence the chosen dwelling-place of the Holy
Ghost. The Holy Ghost vindicated His authority therefore, because, as
it must be observed, it was not St. Peter sentenced Ananias to death.
No one may have been more surprised than St. Peter himself at the
consequences which followed his stern rebuke. St. Peter merely
declared his sin, "Thou hast not lied unto men, but unto God;" and
then it is expressly said, "Ananias hearing these words fell down, and
gave up the ghost." It was a stern action indeed; but then all God's
judgments have a stern side. Ananias and Sapphira were cut off in
their sins, but men are every day summoned into eternity in precisely
the same state and the same way, and the only difference is that in
the case of Ananias we see the sin which provoked the punishment and
then we see the punishment immediately following. Men object to this
narrative simply because they have a one-sided conception of
Christianity such as this period of the world's history delights in.
They would make it a religion of pure unmitigated love; they would
eliminate from it every trace of sternness, and would thus leave it a
poor weak flabby thing, without backbone or earnestness, and utterly
unlike all other dispensations of the Lord, which have their stern
sides and aspects as well as their loving.
It may well have been that this incident was inserted in this typical
Church history to correct a false idea which would otherwise have
grown up. The Jews were quite well accustomed to regard the Almighty
as a God of judgment as well as a God of love. Perhaps we might even
say that they viewed Him more in the former light than in the latter.
Our Lord was obliged, in fact, to direct some of His most searching
discourses to rebuke this very tendency. The Galileans, whose blood
Pilate mingled with their sacrifices, the men upon whom the tower of
Siloam fell,--neither party were sinners above all that were at
Jerusalem, or were punished as such. Such was his teaching in
opposition to the popular idea. The Apostles were once quite ready to
ascribe the infirmity of the man born blind to the direct judgment of
the Almighty upon himself or upon his parents. But men are apt to rush
from one extreme to another. The Apostles and their followers were
now realizing their freedom in the Spirit; and some were inclined to
run into licentiousness as the result of that same freedom. They were
realizing, too, their relationship to God as one of pure filial love,
and they were in great danger of forgetting that God was a God of
justice and judgment as well, till this stern dispensation recalled
them to a sense of the fact that eternal love is also eternal purity
and eternal truth, and will by no means clear the guilty. This is a
lesson very necessary for every age of the Church. Men are always
inclined, and never, perhaps, so much as at the present time, to look
away from the severe side of religion, or even to deny that religion
can have a severe side at all. This tendency in religious matters is
indeed simply an exhibition of the spirit of the age. It is a time of
great material prosperity and comfort, when pain is regarded as the
greatest possible evil, softness, ease, and enjoyment the greatest
possible good. Men shrink from the infliction of pain even upon the
greatest criminals; and this spirit infects their religion, which they
would fain turn into a mere matter of weakly sentiment. Against such a
notion the judicial action of the Holy Ghost in this case raises an
eternal protest, warning the Church against one-sided and partial
views of truth, and bidding her never to lower her standard at the
world's call. Men may ignore the fact that God has His severe aspect
and His stern dispensations in nature, but yet the fact remains. And
as it is in nature so is it in grace: God is merciful and loving to
the penitent, but towards the hypocritical and covetous He is a stern
judge, as the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira proved.
V. This seems one of the great permanent lessons for the Church of
every age which this passage embodies, but it is not the only one.
There are many others, and they most important. An eminent modern
commentator and expositor[105] has drawn out at great length, and with
many modern applications and illustrations, four great lessons which
may be derived from this transaction. We shall just note them, giving
a brief analysis of each. (1) There is such a thing as acting as well
as telling a falsehood. Ananias did not say that the money he brought
was the whole price of his land; he simply allowed men to draw this
conclusion for themselves, suggesting merely by his conduct that he
was doing exactly the same as Barnabas. There was no science of
casuistry in the apostolic Church, teaching how near to the borders of
a lie a man may go without actually being guilty of lying. The lie of
Ananias was a spiritual act, a piece of deception attempted in the
abyss of the human soul, and perpetrated, or attempted rather, upon
the Holy Spirit. How often men lie after the same example. They do not
speak a lie, but they act a lie, throwing dust into the eyes of others
as to their real motives and objects, as Ananias did here. He sold his
estate, brought the money to the Apostles, and would fain have got the
character of a man of extraordinary liberality and unselfishness, just
like others who truly sacrificed their all, while he enjoyed in
private the portion which he had kept back. Ananias wished to make the
best of both worlds, and failed in his object. He sought to obtain a
great reputation among men, but had no regard to the secret eye and
judgment of the Almighty. Alas! how many of our actions, how much of
our piety and of our almsgiving, is tainted by precisely the same
vice. Our good works are done with a view to man's approbation, and
not as in the sight of the Eternal God.
[105] C. J. Vaughan, D.D., _The Church of the First Days_, pp.
105-12.
(2) What an illustration we find in this passage of the saying of the
Apostle, "The love of money is the root of all evil; which while some
coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves
with many sorrows!" The other scriptures are full of warnings against
this vice of covetousness; and so this typical history does not leave
the Church without an illustration of its power and danger. Surely if
at a time when the supernatural forces of the unseen life were
specially manifested, this vice intruded into the special sphere of
their influence, the Church of every age should be on its perpetual
guard against this spirit of covetousness which the Bible
characterises as idolatry.
(3) What a responsibility is involved in being brought near to God as
members of His Son's Church below! There were hypocrites in abundance
at Jerusalem at that time, but they had not been blessed as Ananias
had been, and therefore were not punished as he. There is a reality in
our connection with Christ which must tell upon us, if not for good,
then inevitably for evil. Christ is either the savour of life unto
life or else the savour of death unto death unto all brought into
contact with Him. In a far more awful sense than for the Jews the
words of the prophet Ezekiel are true, "That which cometh into your
mind shall not be at all, that ye say, We will be as the heathen, as
the families of the countries, to serve wood and stone;"[106] or as
the poet of the _Christian Year_ has well put it in his hymn for the
eighteenth Sunday after Trinity:--
"Fain would our lawless hearts escape,
And with the heathen be,
To worship every monstrous shape
In fancied darkness free.
Vain thought, that shall not be at all,
Refuse we or obey;
Our ears have heard th' Almighty's call,
We cannot be as they.
We cannot hope the heathen's doom
To whom God's Son is given,
Whose eyes have seen beyond the tomb,
Who have the key of Heaven."
[106] Ezek. xx. 32.
(4) Lastly, let us learn from this history how to cast out the fear of
one another by the greater and more awful fear of God. The fear of man
is a good thing in a degree. We should have respect to the opinion of
our fellows, and strive to win it in a legitimate way. But Ananias and
his consort desired the good opinion of the Christian community
regardless of the approval or the watchful eye of the Supreme Judge,
who interposed to teach His people by an awful example that in the new
dispensation of Love, as well as in the old dispensation of Law, the
fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and that they and they
alone have a good understanding who order their lives according to
that fear, whether in their secret thoughts or in their public
actions.