THE QUARTERLY

JOURNAL OF PROPHECY.

JANUARY 1871.

ART. I. EPHESUS AND ITS DECLENSION.

REV. ii. 4.

THERE are words which smite like a hammer, or rend like a thunderbolt;-words of mere power and terror; words like those which broke forth in fire from Sinai. Such are not these. There are words which drop as the rain and distil as the dew; words which pierce, yet soften; which rouse, yet soothe; which wound, yet bind up; which combine the biting north wind and the healing south. Such are these. They are not the earthquake, nor the fire, nor the whirlwind, but the still small voice; more resistless than all these together, mingling the rebuke and the consolation, the severity and the love, the father's rod and the mother's tears.

There are words which lead you away from the speaker, and absorb you in themselves. These are not such. There are others which carry you wholly past themselves to the speaker. Neither are these such. There are yet other words which divide you between themselves and the speaker, or rather which so engross your whole man with both, that you feel yourself passing continually from the one to the other, as if the eye could not be satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. Such are these. You have both the picture and the artist, the poem and the poet, so interwoven, that each recalls the other; nay, each is seen and heard in the other. No sooner do we hear these words of the Son of God,-so searching, so alarming,—than we are carried up to Him who uttered them, and

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our souls are absorbed in the mingled majesty and grace of the only-begotten of the Father; and while they send us down into the depths, to learn one of the most humbling lessons that was ever taught concerning the weakness, the fickleness, the faithlessness of a Christian man's heart, they carry us upward irresistibly, far above all heavens, to gaze upon the surpassing glory, and meditate on the matchless love, of Him who died for us and who rose again.

The words are those of complaint;-some would call it faultfinding;—and as such, might have repelled us from the Complainer; but, such is the nature and tone of the complaint, that we feel attracted, not repelled; humbled, but not hurt nor affronted; made to blush, and yet not chilled nor estranged, nay rather drawn more closely to a friend so affectionate and faithful. The reproof is keen, yet it casts no shadow on the grace of the reprover. Rather does it magnify that grace into sevenfold brightness by embodying in the expostulation an utterance of the most generous, the most profound, yet, as we may call it, the most sorrowful affection that the world has ever seen. Next in tenderness to the tears shed over Jerusalem by the Son of God in the days of His flesh, is this outflow of disappointed love, over the estrangement of Ephesus, given vent to upon His throne above. It is not weeping. No; that cannot be now, when from His face all tears have been for ever wiped away. But it is akin to this; it is the nearest thing to it that we can imagine; it is that which would have been tears anywhere else than in this heaven of heavens.

But the preface to the complaint claims special notice; for that complaint does not stand alone; it is a gem set in fine gold; and the verses which introduce it are as marvellous as itself. And what strikes us most in it is the minute enumeration of services performed by this church, as if the speaker were most unwilling to come to the matter of complaint, to touch the painful point; being desirous of recounting all the good deeds and faithful services of the Church, ere He speak the word of censure. "I know thy works, and thy labour, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them that are evil, and thou hast tried them which say they are apostles and are not, and hast found them liars; and hast borne, and hast patience, and for my name's sake hast laboured, and hast not fainted." What an introduction to the "nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love!" How fitted to disarm all risings of anger; to anticipate and smooth down the offence-taking that might have been stirred; to make Ephesus feel that He who was complaining was complaining in

love; not exaggerating the evil, but much more disposed to dwell upon the good; that He was no austere man, no hard master, no censorious fault-finder, but loving, and generous, possessed to the uttermost of that "charity which suffereth long and is kind; which seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things, and never faileth."

But it is not the mere recital of His servant's good deeds that so strikes us ; it is His manifest appreciation of these, His delight in them, His grateful sense of the service rendered. Faults there would be in these labours, but He sees none; imperfections in the endurances of trial, but He makes mention of none. He speaks as one full of gratitude for favours conferred. He weighs the works and finds them not wanting. He names His servant's name, and is not ashamed to confess him. He points not merely to the cup of cold water, but to the toil and the testimony, and the faithful discipline; commending them, rejoicing in them, thanking His servant for them. And not till He has done all this, and shown how well He remembers and appreciates each act of happy service, does He come in with the complaint, "Nevertheless, I have somewhat against thee, because thou hast left thy first love." What tenderness, what delicacy, what nobleness of love, what divine courtesy is here! What an honour is put upon our poor doings and endurings for Him, when they are thus so gratefully recounted and so generously commended by the Son of God! What an importance, what a dignity, what a value is thus affixed to every act, even of the simplest, commonest service for Him !

But our text goes beyond all this. It teaches us His desire for our love, and His disappointment at losing it, or any part of it. It is not so much our labour as our love that He asks; and with nothing less than love can He be satisfied. As God He claims it; as man He desires it; as the God-man He presents to us this mingled claim and longing for love, as that without which He is robbed of His desire and His due. He has not left His true humanity behind Him here in the tomb. He has carried up into heaven His human heart with its yearning affections and cravings for love. Neither the Godhead to which that humanity is united, nor His high throne at the Father's right hand, has, in the least, altered that humanity, or made it less susceptible of love and fellowship. And it is this unchanged and unchangeable manhood that is giving vent to itself in the tender expostulation of our text-"Thou hast left thy first love."

It is the language of wounded friendship, complaining of undeserved estrangement. It is the utterance of unrequited love, mourning over the loss of an affection which was better than life. He wants not merely to love, but to be loved. He seemed to have found this at Ephesus,-that noble Church for which the apostle prayed, that it might be rooted and grounded in love, and might know the love that passeth knowledge. But the kindness of their youth, the love of their espousals, had passed away. The star grew dim, the flower faded, warm love had cooled, and the Ephesus of this second generation was not the Ephesus of the first. Over this lost first love He mourns, as the gem which of all others He had prized the most; and the voice which we hear sounds like that of Rachel in Ramah, weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted because they are

not.

It is not of slothful service, or waning zeal, or failing liberality, or slackening warfare, that He complains. His remonstrance rather assumes the existence of much Christian fruitfulness; and even though there had been some failure in labour or endurance, that might have been more easily remedied; nor were these such a necessity to Him who filleth all in all. But it is over lost love that He laments; lost love, for which there can be no compensation and no substitute, even to Him; lost love, which cuts so keenly even into the callous heart of man, and leaves such life-long blanks even in common and inferior souls.

Yet it is not love altogether lost, nor love turned into hatred. The failure has not got so far as this, nor descended to such a depth. It is of ebbing love He speaks, not love dried up wholly; it is love that has lost the freshness and the edge of other days; love that has sunk below the temperature at which it once stood. This is the substance of the complaint, the burden of the disappointment-the loss of half a heart! So that it would almost seem as if the total drying up would have been more endurable than this ebbing; as if the entire withholding would have been less painful than the stinted giving; as if complete and downright cessation would have been, as in the case of Laodicea, so in that of Ephesus, less hateful than this diminution, this declining to a lower range of feeling, this grudging gift of a divided heart where once there was love entire.

Strange that the risen Christ, the ascended King, should feel so much the loss of a creature-love; that He should be, as one may say, so dependent on our affection; that He should treat this failure, not so much as an affront or a crime, but as a