We look back through the ages and think upon our brethren and sisters who have been before us and now rest from their struggles awaiting the trump of God We need little imagination to see them being cast out of the synagogues and hauled to prison We may see a Roman arena lit with their bodies rolled in tar; furtive fugitives in catacombs, hiding away precious copies of the Holy Word; a lonely man living in a pestiferous cell translating that Word into a living tongue that men may read thereof and live. We may see the ambitious and arrogant ‘reformers’ of Zurich drowning their more faithful fellow-citizens in their lovely lake; the charred cinders of “heritics” in a Suffolk market place; the smug and calloused clergy of Scotland gloating as they disembowel a young man daring to believe as we believe. Those of whom the world was not worthy.
We are the inheritors of their witness, we who live in an age—perhaps brief in contrast with the centuries of oppression—when we have opportunities wider and resources greater than ever before. We have freedom—most of us. Is it to be for us freedom for comforts and leisure and prosperity, or freedom to adorn and promulgate wider than ever before the Faith for which those before us have suffered and died? ‘For I thought that no man had been so blind as to ask why light should be showed to them that walk in darkness.’
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One