storm before it bursts, lest, when it bursts, it should sweep them
away from their moorings. Of course, there could be nothing more
productive of intellectual bewilderment, and more likely to lead to
doubt as to one's own convictions, than to find oneself at odds with
the synagogue about the question of the Messiah. A modest man might
naturally say, 'Perhaps I am wrong and they are right.' A coward
would be sure to say, 'I will sink my convictions and fall in with
the majority.' The stumbling-block for these first Jewish converts,
in the attitude of the whole mass of the nation towards Christ and
His pretensions, is one of such a magnitude as we cannot, by any
exercise of our imagination, realise. 'And,' says Christ, 'the only
way by which you will ever get over the temptation to intellectual
doubt or to cowardly apostasy that arises from your being thrown out
of sympathy with the whole mass of your people, and the traditions of
the generations, is to reflect that I told you it would be so, before
it came to pass.'

Of course all that has a special bearing upon those to whom it was
originally addressed, and then it has a secondary bearing upon
Christians, whose lot it is to live in a time of actual persecution.
But that does not in the slightest degree destroy the fact that it
also has a bearing upon every one of us. For if you and I are
Christian people, and trying to live like our Master, and to do as He
would have us to do, we too shall often have to stand in such a very
small minority, and be surrounded by people who take such an entirely
opposite view of duty and of truth, as that we shall be only too much
disposed to give up and falter in the clearness, fullness, and
braveness of our utterance, and think, 'Well, perhaps after all it is
better for me to hold my tongue.'