Now it does not matter how much or how little you know about Jesus Christ. There was in it no penitence, no self-abandonment, no fruit in holy desires or in other words, there was no heart. So it is reasonable to suppose that he had so much of head knowledge. We are not to suppose, I think, that he merely believed in Philip as a miracle-worker he must have had some notion about Philip's Master, and we know that it was belief in Jesus as the Christ that qualified in the Apostolic age for baptism. How subordinate then, their place at the most! And the one thing which avails is a living contact of heart and soul with Jesus Christ.Īgain, Simon's belief was purely an affair of the understanding. A faith may be founded on them, but, on the other hand, the impressions which they produce may be evanescent. The true place of miracles is to attract attention, to prepare to listen to the word. Such a disposition is shown in the Samaritans, who make a contrast with Simon in that they believed Philip preaching, while Simon believed him working miracles. The very beginning of the story points to the one bond that unites to God, as being the sense of need and the acceptance with heart and will of the testimony of Jesus Christ. Of course, miracles were meant to lead to faith but if they did not lead on to a deeper sense of one's own evil and need, and so to a spiritual apprehension, then they were of no use. It rested wholly on the miracles and signs he 'wondered' when he saw them. What was it which made his faith thus unreal? It is worth noting, in passing, how the profession of faith without anything more was considered by the Early Church sufficient. 'He believed,' says the narrative, and believing was baptized. It presents for our purpose now mainly three points to which I proceed to refer.Īn instance of a wholly unreal, because inoperative, faith. The story of Simon Magus in his attitude to the Gospel is a very striking and instructive one. To the city thus moved comes no Apostle, but a Christian man who begins to preach, and by miracles and teaching draws many souls to Christ. Established in Samaria, he had been juggling and conjuring and seeing visions, and professing to be a great mysterious personality, and had more than permitted the half-heathen Samaritans, who seem to have had more religious susceptibility and less religious knowledge than the Jews, and so were a prepared field for all such pretenders, to think of him as in some sense an incarnation of God, and perhaps to set him up as a rival or caricature of Him who in the neighbouring Judaea was being spoken of as the power of God, God manifest in the flesh. Of such a sort were Elymas, the sorcerer whom Paul found squatting at the ear of the Roman Governor of Cyprus the magicians at Ephesus the vagabond Jews exorcists, who with profitable eclecticism, as they thought, tried to add the name of Jesus as one more spell to their conjurations and, finally, this Simon the sorcerer. What a fall from Israel's destination, and what a lesson for the stewards of the 'oracles of God'! Sadly enough, they were mostly Jews, who prostituted their clearer knowledge to personal ends, and having tacked on to it some theosophic rubbish which they had learned from Alexandria, or mysticism which had filtered to them from the East, or magic arts from Phrygia, went forth, the only missionaries that Judaism sent out, to bewilder and torture men's minds. So we find the early preachers of Christianity coming into frequent contact with pretenders to magical powers. Partly deceived and partly deceiving, he is as sure a sign of the lack of profound religious conviction and of the presence of unsatisfied religious aspirations in men's souls, as the stormy petrel or the floating seaweed is of a tempest on the seas. Demand creates supply, and the magician and miracle-worker, the possessor of mysterious ways into the Unknown, is never far off at such a time. The one true bond which unites God and man being obscured, and to the consciousness of many snapped, men's minds become the prey of visionary terrors. Such a period is ever one of predisposition to superstition. Then, as now, men's minds were seething and unsettled, and that unrest which is the precursor of great changes in intellectual and spiritual habitudes affected the civilised world. The era of the birth of Christianity was one of fermenting opinion and decaying faith. 'Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God.'- Acts 8:21.
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