Persecution Sifting the Church – Charles Spurgeon

SURELY the blood of saints, shed for the testimony of Jesus, might have filled the Mediterranean to its brim. I know not whether every drop of the Atlantic ocean might not have been incarminated if the warm blood of all the martyrs had been poured into its all but boundless deeps. So many were the saints of God that were offered, that arithmetic can scarcely compute their number, and time would fail us to narrate their torments and their triumphs. The church was sifted by these persecutions: the vain and light, the formal and the insincere, went off from her, too glad to earn inglorious safety by dastardly apostasy; they could not afford to lose their lives for truth’s sake; the cross was too heavy for their galled shoulder, and they turned aside. Yet not the least true grain fell to the ground; the church was never the worse for her fiercest persecution; in fact, she seemed to derive new vigor from her baptism of blood, and her voice was never so piercing and so potent as when it was uplifted from the rack and the stake. Her soldiers never fought so well as when the martyr’s ruby crown hung visibly before their eyes. Sifted she has been, but never injured: she has been a grand gainer through the grace of God by all her tribulations and afflictions.