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| Chapter XV.
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Chapter XV.
Keep for God His own property untainted; He will
crown it if He choose. Nay, then, He does even choose. He calls us to
it. To him who conquers He says, “I will give a crown of
life.”441
Be you, too,
faithful unto death,
and fight you, too, the good fight, whose crown the
apostle442
feels so justly confident has been laid up
for him. The angel443
also, as he goes
forth on a white horse, conquering and to conquer, receives a crown of
victory; and another444
is adorned with an
encircling rainbow (as it were in its fair colours)—a celestial
meadow. In like manner, the elders sit crowned around, crowned too with
a crown of gold, and the Son of Man Himself flashes out above the
clouds. If such are the appearances in the vision of the seer, of what
sort will be the realities in the actual manifestation? Look at
those crowns. Inhale those odours. Why condemn you to a little chaplet,
or a twisted headband, the brow which has been destined for a diadem?
For Christ Jesus has made us even kings to God and His Father. What
have you in common with the flower which is to die? You have a flower
in the Branch of Jesse, upon which the grace of the Divine Spirit in
all its fulness rested—a flower undefiled, unfading, everlasting,
by choosing which the good soldier, too, has got promotion in the
heavenly ranks. Blush, ye fellow-soldiers of his, henceforth not
to be condemned even by him, but by some soldier of Mithras, who, at
his initiation in the gloomy cavern, in the camp, it may well be said,
of darkness, when at the sword’s point a crown is presented to
him, as though in mimicry of martyrdom, and thereupon put upon his
head, is admonished to resist and cast it off, and, if you like,
transfer it to his shoulder, saying that Mithras is his crown. And
thenceforth he is never crowned; and he has that for a mark to show who
he is, if anywhere he be subjected to trial in respect of his religion;
and he is at once believed to be a soldier of Mithras if he throws the
crown away—if he say that in his god he has his crown. Let us
take note of the devices of the devil, who is wont to ape some of
God’s things with no other design than, by the faithfulness of
his servants, to put us to shame, and to condemn us.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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