SECULAR CONTEST BETWEEN COx\SCIENC;E AND POWER. 127 



The latter part of the Book of Isaiah's prophecy contains 

 the account of two separate controversies of Jehovah with Israel, 

 one in respect of their idolatry (Chapters xl. to xlviii.), and the 

 other in respect of their treatment of His Servant (Chapters xlix. 

 to Ivii). The faith of these three Hebrew youths appears to have 

 purged the nation from idolatry, but it is not without significance 

 that the men, who escaped from the Babylonish captivity and 

 refused all the blandishments of Antiochus the Great and endured 

 his persecutions, in their zeal for the exclusive worship of 

 Jehovah, had as their lineal descendants the Pharisees who 

 crucified our Lord. So surely does true religion turn to hypocrisy 

 when left in human hands. 



n. 



In the next Scene I bring before you the witnesses for con- 

 science stand on more difficult ground. Peter and the Apostles 

 had been brought up to regard the great Council of the nation 

 with its High Priest and doctors of the law as entitled to unques- 

 tioning obedience, for they sat in Moses' seat. Yet the apostles 

 stand up before that Council, their very speech betraying that they 

 were ignorant peasants, and give utterance to that magnificent 

 asseveration of freedom of conscience, " We ought to obey God 

 rather than men." They were not setting up any right of inde- 

 pendent action, for they say, " We ought to obey," and then they 

 add " God rather than men," in order to meet the claims of that 

 venerable religion which they had ever been taught to reverence, 

 but which, by its rejection of their Master, had lost all claim to 

 divine authority over them. 



We have here the conscience of man in obedience to faith in the 

 new Eevelation disowning the claim of a religious system 

 originally established by God. 



There is no more convincing proof of the Eesurrection of our 

 Lord than that these men who had fled like timid hares a few 

 weeks before, when He was arrested, could now brave the Council 

 who had done Him to death and charge them with His murder. 

 Nothing but the fact that they had actually seen Him alive again 

 and thus triumphant over His enemies could have nerved them 

 thus to bear witness to Him. 



Here we trace the beginning of that loyalty to Christ 

 which was to fill the annals of the world with innumer- 

 able examples of a nobility of spirit in slaves and other 

 depressed classes that incomparably transcend all the much 

 vaunted heroic virtue and public spirit of Greece and Eome. 

 Compare, for example, with Stephen praying for those who were 

 in the act of stoning him to death; Brutus, generally acclaimed 

 as the most patriotic and commonly called the last of the Eomans, 

 imprecating punishment on his enemies, when about to commit 



