"Endure hardness," said one of its greatest
apostles and martyrs, "as good soldiers of Christ." And to the endurance
of hardness; to the recognition of something in humanity to which what we
ordinarily call life and all its joys are of no account; to the
abnegation of mere happiness as aim or end,--to this the world of
Christendom thenceforth became pledged, if it would not deny its Head and
trample on His cross.
In no age has the truth been a popular one: when it becomes so, the
triumph of the Cross--and in it the practical redemption of humanity--will
be near at hand. Yet in no age--not the darkest and most corrupt
Christendom has yet seen--have God and His Christ been without their
witnesses to the higher truth,--witnesses, if not by speech and doctrine,
yet by life and death. Even monasticism, harshly as we may now judge it,
arose, in part at least, through the desire to "endure hardness;" only it
turned aside from the hardness appointed in the world without, to choose,
and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, self-seeking, and
therefore anti-Christian, it fell.
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