In South Carolina. 501 



perial robe was a scarlet of mockery, and whose throne was the 

 cross, you must serve him in sufferings, in poverty of spirit, in hu-. 

 mility and mortification, and for your reward have persecution and 

 all its blessed consequences. 



Of all his apostles not one died a natural death but St. John 

 only, and he escaped by a miracle the caldron of scalding lead and 

 oil before the Port Latin, in Rome, only to live long in banishment, 

 and to die at length an exile in Patmos, full of days and full of 

 suffering. When St. Paul was taken into the apostolate, his com- 

 mission was signed in these words of suffering : "I will show unto 

 him how great things he must suffer for my name;" and ''I die 

 daily," was the motto of his ever-afflicted life. For three hundred 

 years together the Church was nourished by the blood of her own 

 children. Thirty-three bishops of Rome in succession were put to 

 violent and unnatural deaths, and all the Churches in the East and 

 West were "baptized into the death of Christ." Their very pro- 

 fession and institution was to live like him, and when he required 

 it to die for him — this was the very formality and essence of Chris- 

 tianity, insomuch that when Ignatius was newly tied in a chain to be 

 led forth to his martyrdom he cried out, Nunc incipio esse Chris- 

 tianus — "Now I begin to be a Christian." Of prosperous vice, on 

 the other hand, the record is voluminous. The thirty-seventh and 

 the seventy-third Psalms give a large description of the success and 

 pride of bad men, many of whom spend their lives and end their 

 days prosperously. "The prosperity of bad men, and the miseries 

 and afflictions of the good were in those days a great difficulty in 

 providence, and were so to the psalmist himself, and therefore it is 

 certain that whatever he says of the righteousness of God, and his 

 care of righteous men, and his abhorrence of all wickedness and 

 injustice, cannot signify that God will always defend men in their 

 just rights — that he will always prosper a righteous cause and 

 righteous men — for this was against plain matter of fact, and we 

 cannot suppose the psalmist so inconsistent with himself as in the 

 same breath to complain that wicked men were prosperous and good 

 men afflicted, and to affirm that the just and righteous Judge of the 

 world would always punish unjust oppressors and protect the inno- 

 cent. Nay, indeed, the very nature of the thing proves the con- 

 trary, for there can be no unjust oppressors if nobody can be 

 oppressed in their just rights; and therefore it is certain the Divine 

 Providence docs, at least for a time, suffer some men to be very 

 prosperous in their oppressions, and does not always defend a just 



