Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 030:118 (Apr 1873)
Article: St. Elizabeth
Author: John P. Lacroix

St. Elizabeth1

Prof. John P. Lacroix

The age we live in is not fond of saints. It is too self-conscious for that. It is so bedazzled with the glories of the great present as to be but blear-eyed for the shining places of the past. And it is too intensely democratic to be very apt in perceiving the exceptional worth of any that break in upon the monotony of its own dead-level. It scarcely even believes in saints at all. At least, so far as it believes in them, it is not in saints of the stumbling past, nor of the working present, but only of a certain ill-defined, longed-for future. And the church, in its vital (Protestant) phase, is similarly disposed. It has so vehemently protested against its former (Catholic) self as to have damaged its sense for history — as to have obscured its consciousness of the continuity of its own self-development. Having too largely isolated itself from its past, it is in no slight danger of super-self-exaltation; that is, in view of the unquestionably great work yet before it, and in forgetfulness of the fact that it is itself simply a fruit of its own much-disdained past,—simply a single link in the great chain of divine, world-regenerative influence, handing to the future the good it receives from

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the long past, augmented by the (exceptionally great, it may be) momentum of one additional factor, — it is in danger, in each present generation, of exalting its mission above measure, and of losing sight of its simply coordinate relation to the generations of the past, into whose accumulative fruit it has in its turn entered. And this tendency involves not merely the danger of a temptation, but also the actuality of injustice and ingratitude. If the extensive Christian activity of the present generation should result in the ushering in of millennial time, it would, in fact, not be simply we who should have been instrumental in this great work; but this work would be the composite result of the accumulative Christian development of all the ages of the past plus the increment of one generation.

Bat the whole Protestant church is not guilty of this characteristic sin of inexperienced youth. And the revival of an interest in sound historical criticism, now so extensively prevalent, will do much toward awakening the whole church both to its obligations to, and to the instruction it may derive from, its own past. And precisely here will be one of the happiest results of this form of study, namely, not merely that abstract justice will be done to the past, but also that the church itself will rise out of the sin of historical injustice — that it will be brought to a thorough consciousness of the truth that its own past history and the lives of its long-departed saints can be judged justly, not in the reflected light of our own advanced stand-point, but solely and simply in that of the stand-point to which the church had, in the particular age in question, attained.

The application of this solely just criterion of history leads to some admirable results. It is a wonderful equalizer. The man who by the aid of a press prints a thousand pages in an hour is not necessarily more thorough in the virtue of work than the monk of the past, who with his single pen could prepare but a single page. The virtue is not in the material result, but in the obstacles overcome in accomplishing it. Given an equally sincere conscientiousness in working for

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the honor of God, and we cannot less admire the Christian knight of the Middle Ages, who, forsaking home and goods, staked his life for the rescue of the holy sepulchre, than the modern missionary, who, taking wife and money ...