REVELATION iii. i 121
^ In Staffordshire it is interesting and amusing to mark the contrast between the names of the places and their actual character; Eoseville, Swan Village, Daisy Bank, Bloomfield, Tividale, and so forth. Eoseville is utterly innocent of the garden queen ; Daisy Bank is a cinder heap ; the last creature you would expect to see on the inky canal of Swan Village is the bird of snow; Tividale is a realm of furnaces and dirt; and many a summer has come and gone since Bloomfield smiled a field of flowers. Once it was a region of beauty, gardens, orchards, and dells ; now slag, soot, and desolation mock its old poetic names. So it is sometimes with a Church. There is a startling, mournful contrast between its grand history, heroic workers, marked achievements, and its present poverty and deadness ! Yet it lives on its splendid past, and flatters itself in the life and work of vanished generations.^
2. Sardis was renowned among men. The world looked, and beheld with admiration what was to it the splendour of her worship ; it listened, and heard with enthusiasm the music of her praise. And the Church was pleased that it should be so. Not in humility, lowliness, and deeds of self-sacrificing love did she seek her "name," but in what the world would have been equally delighted with, though the inspiring soul of it all had been folly or sin. The fact that this Church should have had the name and fame of life is very startling, and may well summon each and all to an earnest heart-searching. There would be nothing nearly so startling, if Sardis had been counted by the Churches round about as a Church fallen into lethargy and hastening to death. But there is no appearance of the kind. Laodicea, we know, deceived herself, but nothing implies that she deceived others. She counted herself rich, when she was most poor; but there is no hint to make us think that others counted her so as well. Sardis, on the other hand, had a name that she lived, was well spoken of, regarded, we may well believe, as a model Church, and can therefore have been by no means wanting in the outer manifestations of spiritual life ; while yet all these shows of life did but conceal the realities of death.
^ The order of Discretion's questions [to Christian at the House Beautiful] is significant. First come those about his experience, and last that about his name. There are many people
1 W. L. Watkiiiaon.
122 A DEAD AND ALIVE CHURCH
whose first question is that of names. This is what they judge by and are interested in. A famous name telling of old family, or influence, or wealth is all that is needed for entrance to many a house of good society on earth. Here it is good to find in regard to all such matters the grand equality of the Church. Of lord and labourer alike it asks first — or ought to ask — not " What is thy name ? " but " What has been thine experience ? " and " What is the direction in which thy life is moving ? " ^
^ It is quite possible that a Church may enjoy a high reputa- tion for purity, spirituality, and efficiency — a reputation gained through years of faithfulness — and yet have entirely lost the attributes which once gained it credit. Some firms in the city are known throughout the world. They have been in existence for a century or more. They once brought out a valuable article, and forthwith did a large business ; only their goods would do ; they were known everywhere and realized immense fortunes. But to-day the old partners are dead, and the firm is a shadow of its old self. They no longer produce the superlative article ; they simply trade on the old name. It is much the same sometimes with a religious community. Churches rise into being in conviction, faith, devotion, enthusiasm, and sacrifice ; they attain a worthy fame; and their degenerate successors too often trade on the reputation enjoyed by a worldly and languishing denomination. So an individual may acquire in early years a high reputation for character and service, and then continue to live on such reputation, no longer doing the first works.^
^ How men may become dead to the spirit of Christ's teaching while engaged in the holiest ofiices, and betray His cause while outwardly reverencing His name, is illustrated in a picture by the Hon. John Collier, which was exhibited in the Academy of 1896. The picture illustrates an incident in the life of Pope Urban vi., related in Lea's History of the Inquisition. Hearing of a conspiracy among his cardinals, the Pope invited the ringleaders to his country residence, the Castle of Nocera, when he put them to excruciating tortures to extract from them the details of the conspiracy. Urban vi. walked to and fro in the garden beneath the window of the torture-chamber reciting his breviary aloud to encourage the torturers in their work. The artist has depicted him walking beneath, clad in the garments of his holy office, reading earnestly from his manual of devotion, and using it for such diabolic ends as to encourage the fiendish cruelty going on above. With keen irony the painter has filled the little side-walk alongside of which the Pope treads with white lilies — emblem of