Church, Safety of the – Charles Spurgeon

I STOOD this week by the side of a church which once was a considerable distance inland, but now it stands just by the ocean side. Almost every year a great mass of the clay cliff falls into the sea, and in a year or two this parish church must fall. It stands now in quietude and peace, but on a certain day it will all be swallowed up into the sea, as certainly as the elements still work according to their ordinary laws. I could not help thinking that the edifice was a type of certain ecclesiastical bodies, which stand upon the clay cliff of statecraft, or superstition. The tide of public enlightenment, and above all the ocean tide of God’s Spirit, is advancing and wearing away their foundation until at last down the whole fabric must go. What then? Will you hold up your hands and cry, “The church of God is gone?” Forbear the foolish utterance; God’s church is safe enough. Look yonder, there stands the church of God upon a stormy promontory, where the sea always dashes and perpetually rages on all sides, and yet she fears no undermining, because she is built on no clay cliff, but on a rock against which the waves of Hell shall not prevail. There, let your earthborn, state-propped churches go! Swallow them up, O sea of time, swallow them all up, and leave no wreck behind! But the church of the living God shall stand all the more glorious, because of the ruin which has overtaken her rivals and discovered their human origin.