THE PERSECUTED.

THE EIGHTH BEATITUDE.

"Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." — St. Matt. v. 10.

It is the difficulty of all expositors of the Beatitudes that any exposition seems unnecessary.

"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,

To throw a perfume on the violet,

To smooth the ice, or add another hue

Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,

Is wasteful and ridiculous excess."

Some such feeling gives pause to the homilist who ventures to make more plain and convincing the Master’s words: "Blessed are the merciful,” or “Blessed are the pure.” The eighth Beatitude, however — the blessing on the persecuted — makes no such immediate and obvious appeal. For that reason, as well as for the reason that it is not so plainly spiritual as the others, it is not always reckoned in the number of those sayings of Jesus which we call His Beatitudes.

Yet it well deserves a place beside the other seven. It is really as spiritual as the rest Though it seems to refer to outward condition rather than to character, it must not be supposed to teach that persecution itself makes a man blessed: everything depends upon the motive for which the suffering is met and the spirit in which the suffering is borne. "It is the cause,” said St. Augustine once, "which makes the martyr.” Our Lord would have uttered no benediction on those servants of His who provoked a useless persecution, and, in the pride of a self-conscious virtue, threw away their lives in vain. The blessing on the persecuted is a blessing on the inward and spiritual graces of wisdom and fortitude and faith.

If there be some truth in the criticism that this Beatitude does not so immediately as the others convince with the clear-cut simplicity of an aphorism, and our Lord Himself needed to amplify and explain it, yet, when it does reach the mind and the heart, it is as characteristic of the Master’s teaching as any of the rest.

This is a word of Jesus which our distance from His time and His surroundings makes less vivid in its appeal to our imagination. When we say "persecution" we think of an unpleasant letter in the newspapers, or the rudeness of some acquaintance, or the petty spitefulness of society. When Jesus said "persecution,” He spoke to twelve men of whom only one was to die in his bed. If we would understand what being "persecuted" meant when Jesus spoke of it, we should read the eleventh chapter of 2 Corinthians, with its breathless record of the sufferings of St. Paul. It was in view of such penalties of their discipleship that Jesus pronounced His followers blessed, and exhorted them to "Rejoice.”

Here is the great wonder of it. Every other leader of men, who has had a heart at all, has grieved over the distress which he was bringing upon his friends even in a good cause. Mazzini deplored the desolation and sorrow which the glorious struggle for freedom was to spread over Italy. But Jesus saw the torturer and the executioner stand beside His well-beloved, and He said, "Rejoice, and be exceeding glad.” "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” Far from being unworthy of a place among the Beatitudes, this blessing on the righteous sufferer is one of the most startling pronouncements as to the meaning of the Gospel.

Those who read the great evangelic prophecy which runs through the fortieth to the sixty-sixth chapters of Isaiah have ever been accustomed to find in it a subtle interpretation of the sacrifice of Jesus. These chapters might almost be summarised in the saying, "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.” When Jesus Himself said, "If any man will come after Me, let him take up his cross and follow Me,” He showed that persecution in some sense was the normal condition of the Christian. St. Timothy was told the same truth by his leader in later days, "All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.” There is not a note of depression in one of these utterances. To suffer for righteousness’ sake, and to be glad of it, is the account of Christian experience which seems to them all the natural and the happy lot.

How shall we bring this down to the conditions of modern life, when the martyr fires are no longer kindled, and museums hold the iron boot and the thumb-screws? Do men, as a matter of fact, still suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake, and find it blessed?

There is no more certain fact of life than that they do. There are some sections of society, at the top and at the bottom, where every condition is antagonistic to what is altruistic, generous, refined. No one doubts that there are large circles of society where it is difficult to be a Christian, and where the man or woman who tries to be a Christian suffers for it. Even the very presence of an unworldly piety excites dislike in certain bosoms. When it proceeds to be aggressive, as it must when it is genuine, a fierce and deadly hatred is aroused.

The forms of persecution change: its essence remains unchanged. "The honourable and religious gentleman,” a slaveholding member of Parliament nicknamed William Wilberforce. Innuendo and all the arts of the traducer and defamer are wielded still by the enemies of righteousness when their vested interests are attacked and their selfish or vicious pleasures are denounced. Such opposition is the lot of every reformer. The weak and the unprincipled yield before it The dread of unpopularity breaks their will. There is nothing sadder in the public life of our country than the haunting note which runs through the speeches of many politicians in all parties — the note of fear. These men speak, not as men who are thinking out great questions and telling the result of their thought in plain speech, but as men who have an eye on the ballot-box and will risk anything rather than the loss of a vote.

If the Church also has to some extent forfeited the confidence of the country, it is because she also has been afraid of persecution, because for fear of causing alarm, or of making good people angry, her ministers and her teachers have kept silent over matters which every educated man knows have seriously affected her attitude to the Bible and to other solemn matters of the faith. “The fear of man bringeth a snare.” And in every department of life it is one of the commonest enemies of righteousness.

That is one fact of experience. The other is this: that the men who are able to overcome such fear and to suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake enjoy a satisfaction, an exhilaration, a zest of life well worthy of being called Blessedness. Paul and Silas singing in the prison-house — their limbs in chains and the hard floor for their bed, yet with the joy in their hearts of being on the right side and fighting for it — they are, for ever the type of that highest happiness of which this Beatitude tells. Our human nature has sorrowful features in it, and there are many indulgence seekers and shirkers and cowards. But there is also something heroic in human nature which responds to the call to hardship.

What is the best appeal to win men to be missionaries to the heathen? Shall we tell them of a good salary, and a warm climate, and frequent furloughs? We shall never get a man worth sending by such an appeal. But bid them think of a lonely life amid fever and squalidness, and of a slow disheartening struggle to bring to Christ a native people sunk in superstitions and bound by horrible customs, and we shall get the right men to seek such a life of hardship.

Thank God, the Church has got them. Hard work and unpleasant surroundings and opposition are not real deterrents to any profession, to any demand upon human energy. Often, indeed, they are the opposite: and a man is never more himself, and never happier, than when he is fighting with his back to the wall against heavy odds.

“Come one, come all, this rock shall fly

From its firm base as soon as I.”

There are, perhaps, few of us who have not had some such exhilarating experience and who do not know how true the Lord’s words are: "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.”

The fuller elaboration of this Beatitude makes it easier than in the case of the other seven to trace the elements of gladness and satisfaction which are promised.

I. First: theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Once more, as to the poor in spirit, the assurance is given that the most precious rewards of life are not a distant gleam of glory, but the present possession of a faithful soul. "The way to heaven is through heaven, and all the way to heaven is heaven, and only the heavenly shi.ll enter heaven.” The man who is persecuted for righteousness’ sake knows himself as in alliance with the spiritual forces which are the redemption of the world.

His very persecution tells him that; for it makes him recognise that he is making something of it and winning his way. As a ship passes out from the harbour heads, and meets the open sea, she tosses and rolls amid the great ocean billows; but every buffet of them is a message of her conquest over obstacles, every strain and pitch and plunge tell of her triumphal march towards her goal. As St. Paul saw the furious mob at Ephesus or the murderous Jews at Antioch or Iconium, he must have taken a quiet comfort from their rage. It told him that, whether they liked his teaching or not, at least they were thinking of it, and studying it, and had the sense to see that it was revolutionary, and that he was "turning the world upside down.” Their persecution made him a hundred times happier than the polite insouciance of the Athenian crowd.

There are two kinds of opposition — the opposition of the stone wall which the cannon shot knocks to splinters when it strikes, and the opposition of the earth redoubt into which the balls sink with a dull thud and against which they make hardly any impression at all. It is the second kind of opposition which is the more formidable. If a man sees himself hated and reviled and persecuted, he knows at least that the power of the truth he holds dear is being felt and understood; and, since he cares for nothing so much as for that, a happy man is he. There is no experience better described as being in K the Kingdom of Heaven.”

II. Our Lord goes on to say, "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake": and surely He suggests a very deep source of human joy by the thought that we are privileged to suffer something for Him. All love wants to sacrifice, and looks for an opportunity to delight itself by suffering. The awkward lad who spends a week’s wages on a gift to his sweetheart; the mother who sits up all night beside her sick and peevish child, seeking no more than the opportunity of lavishing care and affection on the unresponsive creature: these are on the ascending scale of love, which, when it reached the highest, gave a well-beloved Son for a world of sinful men. The purest happiness is in this. "Remember,” said St. Paul, reporting words of the Master which the evangelists somehow had strangely missed — "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how He said, It is more blessed to give than to receive.” It is such a blessedness which the persecuted know: they have the opportunity of doing something — or bearing something — for Christ’s sake, and it is the proudest privilege which mortals know.

III. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, the Master went on to say, "For so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” Every sufferer for righteousness’ sake is set in a great line — the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the noble army of martyrs, the saints of all ages (as of our own) who have seen that active goodness awakens the animosity of worldly men and brings trouble back to brave and faithful souls. The story of the world’s ingratitude is a black page; and in it there is one spot, the blackest, where the name of the Crucified is written. But the letters on it are all of gold. "He loved His race: He tried to teach and help and save it; and He suffered for it" — that is the record of some of the world’s best. "Look back along the great names of history,” wrote Mr. Froude in one of those Short Studies which will remain, in the judgment of the wise, among the foremost essays in the English language; "there is none whose lot has been other than this. They to whom has been given the really highest work on earth to do — whoever they were, warrior, philosopher, legislator, poet, priest, slave — one and all their lot has been the same: the same bitter cup has been given to them all to drink.” As humble men and women meet petty persecution, and are called by foolish nicknames, and feel the multitudinous pin-pricks of social disagreeablenesses, is it not something for them to feel that they also are of the company of the world’s greatest? “So persecuted they the prophets which were before you.”

Such reverence for the holy and brave who have gone before us, such loyalty to their memory, such comradeship with their aims, is one of the loftiest incentives to the Christian life.

"O the way sometimes is low,

And the waters dark and deep,

And I stumble as I go.

 

But I have a tryst to keep;

It was plighted long ago,

With some who lie asleep.

 

And though days go dragging slow,

And the sad hours gravewards creep,

And the world is hushed in woe,

 

I neither wail nor weep,

For He would not have it so,

And I have a tryst to keep.”

IV. They little know the mind of the Master, who shut out from His teaching the last element of blessedness which this Beatitude contains — a promise for the future. "Great,” said He, "is your reward in heaven.” Not in the Sermon on the Mount only, but often in other discourses, he called His disciples’ thought beyond the scene of our earthly striving to a serene land where a throne is set for the conqueror and a crown is brought for his brow, and a glory not of earth is his everlasting portion. We know not what outward conditions are represented by language so figurative, so deeply tinged with the colours of earth: but it is idle to banish from the message of Jesus the hope for the righteous of a reward.

His best and most unselfish servants gloried in it. “If we suffer,” wrote St. Paul to his pupil and associate — "if we suffer we shall also reign with Him.” Those who understand the human heart at all, see nothing sordid in the dream. For what is the reward — what is the crown of glory — which such holy souls have believed was waiting them beyond the grave? They can but express it in terms of material things, and hint at it vaguely in the gorgeous imagery of the senses: but it was no selfish enjoyment they were looking for: no "enjoyment" in any sense which ordinary thought attaches to the word. It was to be with Christ: in some way, which even fancy refuses to outline, to see His blessed face, to dwell in the presence of the ineffably Good and Fair. Because Jesus was the despised and rejected of men, because men reviled Him and persecuted Him, and spoke all manner of evil against Him falsely, therefore all who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake feel that, in such an experience, they are being disciplined into His likeness, and they rejoice at their hard lot, not because one day it is to be made easier, but only because it is the way which leads them nearer Him.

Does a student love less the profession he has chosen, and for which he is being trained, because he hopes some day to exercise it nobly for the good of his fellows, and to make some mark in the world through it before he dies? Does a man love less his promised wife because he looks with eager and happy expectancy to the marriage day when he can claim her for his own? Shall we be such bloodless servants and followers of Christ that we are stirred by no vision of the home country of His saints, and find no alleviation of the hardships and self-denials which His service may entail in His own assured promise of a reward, "a hundredfold now in this present time, and in -the world to come life everlasting.”

Those moralists deal with other creatures than with men, who bid us banish from our minds even a beautiful and unselfish conception of heavenly happiness. The Lord Himself knew man’s nature, and He animated faith and hope by His benediction on the persecuted, "Rejoice and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven.”