The visit of the Savior of the world, his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead, the proclamation of the gospel through the nations by his disciples and apostles brought the subject to the attention of a great portion of the world. The Savior, himself, is represented as going to his own—to his own nation, to His own people, and they received Him not. He came to them with the words of life, light and salvation, but they could not appreciate them. They conspired against Him and put Him to death. He says in relation to this that it must needs be that offences come, but woe to him through whom they come, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and be cast into the depths of the sea. The offences did come. His servants went forth and preached, and, according to the histories that have come down to us, they were all martyred with but one exception, that is John, who is represented to have been cast into a cauldron of oil. We find, however, in the New Testament, that the writings of John are the last that are handed down to us by King James' translators as inspired writings. His three epistles, written almost a hundred years after the birth of the Savior, are the last books that King James' translators would give to us as inspired writings. Perhaps you have reflected upon this matter. King James' translators were learned men selected by the King to translate the Scriptures. They translated the writings of the various apostles and prophets, and then took a vote among themselves to decide which were inspired and which were not. You will remember that not one among this body of learned divines even professed to have the inspiration of God upon him. They were learned in the languages, sciences and the opinions of men, and their vote was the only test by which they decided which of these books were given by revelation and which were not. And it was perhaps only a single vote that saved the books of James, and perhaps only a single vote that cast out the books of the Apocrypha.
Now, this is calculated to make men reflect upon the position of a church without an inspired leader, without a man at its head who can ask the Lord for guidance and obtain an answer. The Church of England made no pretensions to inspiration. It had protested against the Church of Rome as being the "beast," the "false prophet," the "mother of harlots and abominations of the earth," and everything that was corrupt, and had inaugurated a reformation, and established the Protestant Church of England, with the King for its head; but it had no inspiration. And this body of learned men passed their votes on these sacred books without any pretense whatever to inspiration from the Almighty. Yet "no man knoweth the things of God but by the Spirit of God."
Soon after the death of the apostles, divisions occurred in the Christian churches on a variety of topics. They had commenced to engraft into the religion of Jesus idolatrous ideas, after the similitude of an idolatrous worship. These ideas gradually crept in for some three or four hundred years, the Christian religion being held in a subordinate position by the State; and several times the whole power of the Roman Empire was exerted to exterminate it from the earth. This course of things finally terminated in a political change, during which the first Christian Emperor arose and stopped the persecution of the Christians. This was Constantine the Great. He was, by no means, the most pious of Christian Sovereigns, but he was the first Christian Emperor, and by means of the cross for his banner he had been able to wade through the blood of his competitors and set himself on the throne of the Roman world. In the year 306 he established the Christian religion as the religion of the State, and suppressed the time-honored rites of Pagan temples and heathen modes of worship.
This change produced a tremendous influence, not only upon the Pagan, but also upon the Christian portion of the Empire. Up to that period the Christians had been oppressed and trampled down, and had even been under the necessity or burying their dead in secret. Many portions of the city of Rome are honey-combed with subterraneous catacombs excavated in the rock where thousands of Christians were secretly entombed during the time that to bury after the Christian manner was a violation of the laws of the Roman Empire; and when to adhere to this mode of burial or to acknowledge themselves Christians was liable to cost them their lives, the confiscation of their property, or liberty.