Chapter 5.
CHAPTER 5.
A third objection replied to.
THEY who will allow neither believers nor pastors to become imitators of St. Paul, very rarely forget to propose a third objection against such imitation. “If you pretend,” say they, “to be the apostles’ successors, then prove your mission by the performance of miracles equal to theirs.” To this objection we reply:—
1. That no mention is made of the miracles of Andronicus, Junia, and Barnabas, who were real apostles; nor any miracles attributed to Titus or Timothy, though they were undoubted successors of the apostles. Farther: it is expressly said that John the Baptist, though he was greater than the prophets, did no miracle, John 10:41. On the other hand, some miraculous gifts were common in the Church of Corinth, even among those who were neither apostles nor evangelists; and these gifts were so far from being essential to apostolic zeal, that many unworthy brethren, and many false apostles, as well as the traitor Judas. were endued with them. This we are taught, in the most express terms, by our Lord himself, Matthew 7:22.
2. If any of those pastors who make a profession of following St. Paul, are observed to publish another Gospel, or to depart from the order established by the apostles, the world has then reason to require miracles at their hands as a demonstration that their doctrines are Divine, and that their recent customs are preferable to those which were formerly adopted in the Church of Christ. But if they simply proclaim that glorious Gospel which has been already confirmed by a thousand miracles, and are observed to adopt no other method than that of the apostles; it is absurd, in the highest degree, to insist upon miracles as the only sufficient evidences of their mission. From worldly pastors such attestations of their sacred commission might, with propriety, be required. These are the persons who turn aside from the beaten track of Christ and his disciples, both with respect to doctrine and discipline; and these should be required by the Church to give incontestable proofs that their novel customs are better than those of St. Paul and the ancient evangelists.
3. No sufficient reason can be given why the humble imitators of St. Paul should be required to evidence their spiritual mission by extraordinary actions. On the one hand, they do but simply declare those religious truths of which they have had the most convincing experience: and on the other, they earnestly solicit the wicked to become partakers of the same invaluable blessings with themselves. Now the certainty of such declaration, and the sincerity of such invitation, may be solidly established upon two kinds of proofs; the first upon those proofs which support the Gospel in general, and the second upon the holy conduct of those who bear this testimony, and repeat these invitations, by which they demonstrate the efficacy of their doctrine, and indisputably prove that true Christians are dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God, Romans 6:11. That pastor who is unable to produce the former proofs, cannot possibly be regarded as a true successor of the great apostle; and he whose uniform conduct is insufficient to supply the latter, is no other than a false apostle.
4. External miracles, which effect no change in the heart, nor rescue the soul from a state of spiritual blindness and death; miracles which serve only to repair the organs of a body that must shortly be consigned to the grave; miracles which tend merely to modify matter, such as causing green trees to wither, withered trees to spring, and waters to gush out of the flinty rock: miracles of this nature are far less important than those which cause the thorns of vice to wither, the seeds of grace to spring, and streams of sacred consolation to flow through those very hearts which were formerly barren as a desert, and hard as the rock that Moses smote.
5. “If you wish for miracles,” says a Christian writer, “if you are anxious to experience them in yourselves; if, in the secret of your heart, you would become witnesses of his almighty power by whom that heart was formed, then ask of him that sublime virtue [that charity] from which all your inclinations and habits detain you at so vast a distance that you are in no situation to form any just idea of it, nor even to conceive the possibility of its existence.” (Professor Crousaz’s Sermon upon 1 Corinthians 13:13.)
6. That Divine charity, and those sacred consolations, which were as “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” in the hearts of Christ’s first disciples, may be made to abound even in ours, since the source of these inestimable graces can never be exhausted, Hebrews 13:8, and the faithful, who experience in themselves this gracious miracle, stand in need of no other prodigy to establish them in the faith of the Gospel.
7. The most important miracles were those which were wrought by the apostles when, as fellow workers together with God, they opened the eyes of sinners, turning them “from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God,” Acts 26:18. True miracles of mercy these, and memorable conversions, which the word of God, in the mouths of his ministers, is continually operating in every age!
8. The charity which is discovered by a faithful pastor who humbly co-operates with God in the conversion of his inveterate enemies, should be regarded by the world as the truest test of his apostleship. “Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; but charity never faileth. And though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains,” and perform the most unheard of prodigies, “if I have not CHARITY, I am nothing,” 1 Corinthians 13.
The preceding replies are abundantly sufficient to demonstrate the weakness of their third objection, who are the professed enemies of apostolic zeal.