CHURCH HAS WITHSTOOD MANY HARD, DIFFICULT TIMES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 41, 8 May 1950, Page 5

CHURCH HAS WITHSTOOD MANY HARD , DIFFICULT TIMES

Speaking in Knox Church, Whakatane, last night the Rev. R. T. Dodds said that in the consideration of Church history there was a tonic for the present time. Difficulties confronting Christian folk today seemed to be overwhelming—but through turmoil and danger in all the past God had brought His Church! It had been said that the Church was an anvil that had worn out many- hammers: while the unchanging God continued to love His Church as He is pledged to do this would continue.

“It is our distinct loss,” the speaker said, “that all the tract of time and events between the Reformation and the close of Bible times is to so great an extent, unknown country. Ordinary People

“One result of this is that in our minds the men and women who followed Christ and served Him are pictured as wearing haloes and in some vague way as being of a somewhat different order of humanity from our own. Actually they were men and women of like passion with ourselves —alike in their strengths and their weaknesses.” Mr Dodds indicated the circumstances that facilitated the spread of the Christian cause beyond the days described in Luke’s unfinished book of ‘Acts’. As speedily as men could travel up to the time of Napoleon, the bearer of the “Good News” could move over the world of that day—a world centred round Mediterranean. Greek language and culture, Roman colonising pol-r icy, her language and her roads; these things provided a wide range of movement within which it became at some points easier to preach the gospel to every creature. Jewish prejudice made some early Christians reluctant to go out to the Gentiles but the persecution that arose over Stephen, the first Christian martyr, drove them forth to spread far and near the dynamic new faith.

At the fall of Jerusalem i in 64 A.D. this movement was accentuated and the centre of Christian influence moved for a time to Antwich in Asia Minor. Imperial Persecution

Imperial persecution came upon the early church when Rome discovered. that the Christian faith was hot the Jewish national religion and it was on the grounds of being an illicit religion that it was opposed. There was persecutipn then, under rulers who were themselves worthy men, but other persecution harried the Church in the vicious cruelty of men like Nero. All the refinements of cruelty reduced the ranks of the Chris* tians grieviously, but it purified and intensified the spirit of the Church. It was truly said “The blood, of the martyrs is the seed of the “Church,” the Rev Dodds concluded. •»