The Confessors and the Fallen

… the confessors and those who had stood firm in the faith. Then, with the deepest grief, having pointed out the fall of the lapsed and set out the causes of the persecution now past — the neglect of discipline and the sins of the faithful — our author sharply rebukes the lapsed for sacrificing to idols at the enemy’s very first threatening words, instead of withdrawing, as Christ advised. Last of all he warns his readers to keep away from the Novatians, refuting their heresy out of many Scriptures.

Look, dear brothers and sisters: peace has been given back to the church. Not long ago that seemed hard to people who would not believe it, and impossible to the treacherous; yet by God’s help, and by God’s repayment, our safety is restored. Our minds come back to gladness. The season of affliction is over, the cloud has broken up, and calm and clear weather have shone out again. God must be praised, and his kindnesses and his gifts celebrated with thanksgiving — though even in the time of persecution our voice never stopped giving thanks. No enemy has power enough to stop those of us who love the Lord with our whole heart and life and strength from proclaiming his blessings and his praises gloriously, always and everywhere. The day everyone longed for in prayer has come. After the dreadful, sickening darkness of a long night, the world has been lit up and shines with the light of the Lord. [d]

We look with glad faces on confessors made famous by the good name they earned, glorious in the praise of their courage and their faith. We hold on to them with holy kisses; we have missed them so long that our eagerness to embrace them cannot be satisfied. Here is the white-robed cohort of Christ’s soldiers, who in the thick of the fight broke the savage fury of a persecution bearing down on them, ready for the suffering of the prison and armed to endure death. You stood up to the world bravely. You put on a glorious show in the sight of God, and you have been an example to the brothers and sisters who come after you. That voice of faith named the name of Christ, the one it had already confessed it believed in. Those famous hands, used only to the work of God, refused the sacrilegious sacrifices. Those lips, made holy by heavenly food after the body and blood of the Lord, rejected the unclean touch and the leavings of the idols. Your head stayed free of the ungodly, wicked veil that covered the captive heads of the people who sacrificed there. Your forehead, clean, with the mark of God on it, could not carry the devil’s crown; it kept itself for the crown of the Lord. [f]

How joyfully your mother the church takes you back into her arms as you come home from the battle! How happily, how gladly she opens her gates, so that you can come in in close ranks, carrying the trophies of a beaten enemy! Women come triumphing along with the men — women who, while fighting the world, have overcome their own sex as well. Virgins come too, with a double glory in their warfare, and boys whose courage runs well ahead of their years.

And behind your glory comes the rest of the crowd who stood firm. They follow in your footsteps carrying their own marks of honor, close behind you, almost level with you. In them is the same honest heart, the same soundness of a faith that holds on. They rest on the unshakable roots of the commands from heaven, and they are made strong by what the good news has handed down. The banishment ordered for them, the tortures set aside for them, the loss of their property, the punishments on their bodies — none of it frightened them. The days for testing their faith had been fixed in advance; but a man who remembers that he has renounced the world knows nothing of any day the world appoints, and a man who hopes for eternity from God no longer counts up the seasons of earth.

Let no one, my dear brothers and sisters, let no one belittle this glory; let no one’s spiteful criticism take anything away from the untouched steadiness of those who stood. When the appointed day for denying Christ had gone by, everyone who had not declared within that time that he was not a Christian had confessed that he was one. To confess the Lord under the violence of pagan hands is the first claim to victory. To be taken out of the way by a careful withdrawal, and kept in reserve for the Lord, is the second step to glory. The first is a public confession, the second a private one. The first defeats the judge of this world; the second is content with God as its judge and keeps a clean conscience with an honest heart. In the first there is a readier courage; in the second the anxiety is safer. The first man, when his hour came, was already found ripe; the second was perhaps put off — he left his estate and withdrew for a while, because he would not deny Christ, and he would certainly have confessed him if he too had been arrested.

One cause of grief saddens these heavenly crowns of the martyrs, these glorious spiritual confessions, these very great and shining virtues of the brothers and sisters who stood: the enemy’s violence has torn away a part of our own flesh and thrown it away in its own destroying cruelty. What am I to do about this, dear brothers and sisters? Tossed one way and another by feeling, what am I to say, and how? I need tears more than words to say the sorrow in which the wound in our body ought to be mourned, in which the many losses of a people once so numerous ought to be wept over. Whose heart is so hard, so cruel, so forgetful of brotherly love, that he could stand among the scattered ruins of his friends and the pitiful remains disfigured with every kind of shame, and keep his eyes dry, and not have his grief break out in groans spoken with tears rather than with words?

I grieve, brothers and sisters, I grieve with you; and my own soundness, my own untouched standing, does not talk me out of my grief, since it is the shepherd who is wounded most in the wound of his flock. I put my heart alongside each one of them; I take my share of the heavy load of sorrow and mourning. I wail with those who wail, I weep with those who weep, I count myself thrown down along with those who are thrown down. My own limbs were struck by the same spears of the raging enemy; their cruel swords went through my body; my mind could not stay untouched and free of the persecution’s invasion while my brothers and sisters were going down. Fellow feeling has laid me low too.

Still, dear brothers and sisters, the truth of the case has to be kept in view. The gloom and darkness of that terrible persecution should not have blinded our minds and our feelings so completely that no light is left to see God’s commands by. Once the cause of the disaster is recognized, the cure for the wound is found at once. The Lord wanted his household tested; and because a long peace had corrupted the discipline handed down to us from God, the rebuke from heaven roused our faith, which was giving way — I almost said, asleep. And although we deserved more for our sins, the Lord in his great mercy has measured everything out so carefully that what happened has looked more like a testing than a persecution. [i]

Every one of them wanted to increase his estate. They forgot what believers had done back in the time of the apostles, and what they ought always to do; with a greed nothing could satisfy they gave themselves to enlarging their property. Among the priests there was no devotion to religion, among the ministers no sound faith. There was no mercy in what they did, no discipline in the way they lived. Men spoiled their beards, women dyed their faces; eyes were falsified from what God’s hand had made them, and hair was stained with a lie. Clever frauds were used to take in the hearts of simple people, and sly meanings to get around a brother. They tied themselves in marriage to unbelievers; they prostituted the members of Christ to the pagans. They would swear rashly, and worse, they would swear falsely. They looked down on those set over them with swollen pride, they spoke evil of one another with poisoned tongues, they quarreled with one another in stubborn hatred. [j]

Quite a few overseers, who ought to supply other people with both encouragement and an example, threw over the charge God had given them and became agents in worldly business. They left their chair, deserted their people, wandered off through other provinces hunting the markets for goods that would turn a profit — while their brothers and sisters in the church went hungry. They wanted money piled up in hoards. They grabbed estates by sly deceit. They multiplied their gains by lending at interest. What do people like us not deserve to suffer for sins of this kind, when God’s rebuke has already warned us in advance and said: “If they abandon my law and do not walk in my judgments, if they profane my statutes and do not keep my commands, I will punish their offenses with a rod and their sins with whips”?

These things were told us beforehand; they were foretold. But we forgot the law and the obedience required of us, and by our sins we have brought it about that, despising the Lord’s commands, we have come to sterner remedies for the correcting of our sin and the testing of our faith. And even then we were not turned back to the fear of the Lord, so as to go through this correction and this proof from God patiently and bravely. At the enemy’s very first threatening words most of the brothers and sisters gave up their faith at once. They were not thrown down by the onset of persecution; they threw themselves down by lapsing of their own accord. What unheard-of thing, I ask you, what new thing had happened, that the oath sworn to Christ should be dissolved in headlong rashness, as though something unknown and unexpected had come along? Did not the prophets long ago, and the apostles after them, tell of these things? Did they not, full of the Holy Spirit, foretell the afflictions of the righteous and always the injuries done by the pagans? Does not the holy Scripture, which is always arming our faith and strengthening the servants of God with a voice from heaven, say: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve”? Does it not again show the anger of God’s indignation, and warn beforehand of the fear of punishment, when it says: “They worshiped what their own fingers made; the common man bows down and the great man humbles himself — and I will not forgive them”? And again God speaks and says: “Anyone who sacrifices to any gods except the Lord alone shall be destroyed.” [n]

And afterward, in the Gospel too, the Lord — who teaches by his words and carries it out by his deeds, teaching what should be done and doing everything he had taught — did he not warn us beforehand of everything that is happening now and everything still to come? Did he not lay down in advance both eternal punishment for those who deny him and the rewards of salvation for those who confess him?

From some of them — what misery! — all of this had dropped away and gone out of memory. They did not wait to be arrested before they went up, or to be questioned before they denied. Many were beaten before the battle, thrown down before the attack. They did not even leave room for it to be said on their behalf that they had seemed to sacrifice to the idols unwillingly. They ran to the marketplace of their own accord; they hurried freely to their death, as if this was what they had wanted all along, as if they were seizing an opportunity they had always been waiting for. How many did the magistrates put off at the time, because evening was coming on! How many actually begged that their own ruin should not be delayed! What violence can a man like that plead as an excuse? How can he clear himself of the crime, when he was the one using force — on himself, to bring about his own ruin? [q]

When they came to the Capitol of their own free will, when they walked up freely to obey that terrible wickedness, did their step not falter? Did their sight not go dark, their heart not shake, their arms not drop helpless at their sides? Did their senses not fail, their tongue not stick in their mouth, their speech not go weak? Could a servant of God stand there and speak and renounce Christ, when he had already renounced the devil and the world? Was that altar he came up to in order to perish not a funeral pyre to him? Should he not have shuddered at the devil’s altar and run from it — an altar he had seen smoking and stinking with a foul reek, as though it were the pyre and the grave of his own life? Why bring a sacrifice with you, you poor wretch? Why kill a victim? You have come to the altar as the offering yourself; you have come as the victim yourself. There you killed your own salvation and your hope; there you burned up your faith in those deadly fires.

But for many, ruining themselves was not enough. People urged each other on to their destruction; death was pledged back and forth in the deadly cup. And so that nothing should be missing to make the crime worse, infants too, in their parents’ arms, carried there or led there, lost while they were still tiny what they had gained at the very beginning of their life. When the day of judgment comes, will they not say: “We did nothing. We did not leave the Lord’s bread and cup of our own accord and rush off to an unclean contact. Other people’s faithlessness has ruined us. We found our parents were our murderers. They denied us the church as a mother; they denied us God as a Father. So while we were small, and could not see what was ahead, and knew nothing about a crime like this, we were made partners in wickedness by others, and we were trapped by other people’s deceit.” [r]

And sadly there is no just or weighty reason that excuses a crime like this. Yes, a man’s country had to be left behind, and the loss of his estate had to be borne. But for anyone who is born and dies, is there not a time when he has to leave his country in any case and lose his estate? Only let Christ not be abandoned, or what he will have to fear is the loss of salvation and of an eternal home. Look, the Holy Spirit cries out through the prophet: “Leave, leave, go out from there; touch nothing unclean. Go out from the middle of her and be separate, you who carry the vessels of the Lord.” Yet the people who are the vessels of the Lord and the temple of God do not go out from the middle of her, do not leave, so that they will not be forced to touch the unclean thing and be polluted and ruined with deadly food. Somewhere else, too, a voice is heard from heaven, warning God’s servants beforehand what they ought to do: “Come out of her, my people, so that you do not share in her sins, and do not receive her plagues.” The man who goes out and leaves does not become a sharer in the guilt; but the man found to be a companion in the crime will be struck by the plagues. And that is why the Lord commanded us to leave and to flee in a persecution: he both taught that this should be done and did it himself. The crown is given by God’s own kindness, and it cannot be received until the hour comes for accepting it; so whoever stays in Christ and goes away for a time does not deny his faith — he waits for the time. But the man who fell, after refusing to leave, stayed on in order to deny. [s]

The truth must not be dressed up, brothers and sisters; the cause of our wound, and what it is, must not be hidden. A blind love of their own property has fooled many of them. They could not get ready to leave, or be easy about leaving, when their wealth held them like a chain. Those were the chains on the ones who stayed; those were the bonds that held back their courage and weighed down their faith and tied up their spirit and hindered their soul — so that people caught up in earthly things became prey and food for the serpent, which by God’s sentence feeds on earth. And so the Lord, the teacher of good things, warning us for the time to come, says: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” If rich men had done this, they would not be destroyed by their riches. If they had stored up treasure in heaven, they would not now have an enemy and an attacker inside their own house. Heart and mind and feeling would be in heaven if the treasure were in heaven; and a man could not be beaten by the world if he had nothing in the world by which he could be beaten. He would follow the Lord untied and free, as the apostles did, and many in the time of the apostles, and many who gave up both their property and their relatives and held on to Christ with nothing else pulling at them. [u]

But how can they follow Christ when they are held back by the chain of their wealth? Or how can they look for heaven and climb to those high and lofty places when they are weighed down by earthly desires? They think they own things, when in fact they are owned. They are slaves to their profit; they are not lords over their own money but the bond-slaves of their money. These are the times, and these are the men, that the apostle points to when he says: “Those who want to be rich fall into temptation and a trap, and into many foolish and harmful cravings, which drown people in ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all evil, and some, in their craving for it, have wandered away from the faith and run themselves through with many sorrows.” [w]

And with what rewards does the Lord invite us to think little of the world’s wealth? What does he give in return to make up for the small, trifling losses of this present time? He says: “There is no one who leaves house, or land, or parents, or brothers, or wife, or children for the sake of the kingdom of God who will not receive seven times as much even in this present time, and in the age to come everlasting life.” If we know these things, and have learned them from the truth of the Lord who makes the promise, then a loss of that kind is not merely not to be feared — it is to be wanted, just as the Lord himself announces again and warns us: “Blessed are you when people persecute you, and when they cut you off from their company, and throw you out, and speak of your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. Be glad on that day and jump for joy; look, your reward is great in heaven.”