The Divine Lamp

(To see the first post on this dialogue click here)
Vincent: O, my good uncle, even the words by which you prove that we cannot be left comfortless because of God’s gracious presence make me see and feel how much comfort we shall miss once you are gone. For, although you tell me this , good uncle, and though I know it to be true, if you had not told it to me just now I would not have remembered it, nor would it have fallen to my mind. Moreover, as our tribulations increase in weight and number we shall need not just one or two good words, but a great heap of them to stable and strengthen the walls of our hearts the great surge of this tempestuous sea.

Anthony: Good cousin, trust well in God and he shall provide you outward teachers suitable for every time, or else he shall himself shall teach you inwardly.

God supplies teachers to his people: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you (Moses) form among their own kinsmen, and I will put my own words into his mouth; he shall tell them all that I command (see Deut 19:9-20).

All power has been given me in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations…teaching them to observe all that I have commanded (see Matt 28:18-20. Jesus spoke these words in Galilee after he had been raised up-see also Matt 26:31-32).

Outward teaching, which takes place through the ministry of the Church in the Holy Spirit, is the primary way in which God teaches his people. Inward teaching can accompany, support and clarify the outward teaching (see Phil 3:15).

Vincent: Very well, good uncle, but if we leave off seeking the outward teaching when it is available to us and turn instead to be inwardly taught by God alone, we thereby tempt God and displease him. And since I now see that when you are gone it is highly likely that we shall be destitute of any teacher like you. I therefore think that it is my God-bound duty to ask you now, good uncle, in the short span of time we have, to teach me concerning good counsel and comfort against these great storms of tribulation with which I and all mine are already being sorely beaten; for, on top of all this, the coming of the cruel Turk causes me fear that we may suffer far more. Do this, that I may, remembering your counsel, govern and stay the ship of our family and keep it afloat, free from the peril of spiritual drowning.

The troubles facing the family of Vincent and Anthony were twofold: (1) King Henry VIII was in open rebellion against the Church and persecuting its faithful, like St Thomas, mercilessly. Almost all of the Bishops of England, the outward teachers mentioned above, had deserted the faith and sided with Henry. (2) The coming of the Turk refers to the threat of Muslim invasion under the leadership of Selim the Grim who was building the Turkish Empire. Not since Charles Martel had defeated the Saracen (Muslim) attack on France eight centuries earlier had Europe faced such a threat. More’s generation saw fall to the Turks two bastions of Eastern Europe: Rhodes, bastion of the sea, and Belgrade, bastion of the land. It saw the army of Hungary slaughtered on the fields of Mohacz. St Thomas considered the reformers to be a worse threat than the Turk. They had caused the disintegration of Christendom, deformed its doctrines, and confiscated the monasteries and abbeys. This confiscation was most intolerable to More since it brought to and end the financial, nutritional, bodily and educational aid being given to the poor. (See THOMAS MORE by R.W. Chambers, pgs 261-262)

Vincent continues: You are not ignorant, good uncle, concerning the heaps of heaviness that have fallen upon the people, including some of our own poor family, who have fallen into such despair that scarcely any comfort my poor wit can give cann assuage their sorrow. And now, since the tidings have come to us concerning the Turks excursion into these parts, we can hardly talk nor think of anything else than his might and our danger. There comes continually before the eyes of our hearts a fearful imagination of this terrible thing: his mighty strength and power, his high malice and hatred, and his incomparable cruelty, with robbing, spoiling, burning, and laying waste all that lays before his army; his killing or carrying away of the people, far from their homes, thereby severing couples and sundering kindred, everyone far from the other, some kept in thraldom and some kept in prison and some for a triumph tormented and killed in his presence; then, he sends his people forth and his false faith too, into the midst of those few Christians who remain, so that they might lose all, or be forced to forsake the faith of our Saviour Christ and fall to the false sect of Mahomet. Indeed, no small part of those who dwell around us are, we fear, fallen to him already, or at least confederated with him. If such be the case, then perhaps this part of the country will be spared the Turks invasion. Yet, if many have turned to his law, will they not leave us, their neighbors, destitute of belongings? Will they not have our belongings and our bodies too, unless we turn and forsake our Saviour as they did? And then-for there is no born Turk so cruel to Christian folk as is the false Christian who falls from the faith-we shall stand in great peril. For if we persevere in the truth we will be more hardly handled and die a more cruel death by our own countrymen here at home than if we were carried off into Turkey. These fearful heaps of peril lie heavy upon our hearts. Since we know not which way our fortune will fall, our fear is all the worse. Many among us wish already, before the peril even comes close, that the mountains would overwhelm them or the valleys open and swallow them up.

The policy of Selim the Grim was to depopulate his conquered territories of Christians and move Muslims into the land. Islamic law would then be enacted. This enforced a special tax on non-Muslims and, apparently, confiscation of property was allowed as well. Women of conquered territories could be declared “possession of the right hand” and forced into concubinage or marriage, whether they were already married or not. The focus of More’s writing here is, however, upon the fallen away Christian who embraces the Muslim sect. That they are more cruel towards Christians than “the born Turk” or any other enemy of the faith is a statement not hard to justify. One only needs to think of the pseudo-Catholic politicians of today who, while making claims and pretensions to being faithful, push, support, and enact laws seeking to force Catholics and the institutions they belong to, to act against their conscience. This they do in the name of sexual deviancy, baby killing, suicide, and euthanasia; and they call it liberty, when in fact it is licentiousness; they call it democracy, when in fact it is tyranny; and they call it progress and modernity, but in fact it is merely a reversion back to the tired old whore called paganism. The dogs have returned to lap up their vomit: ” But these, as unreasoning creatures, born natural animals to be taken and destroyed, speaking evil in matters about which they are ignorant, will in their destroying surely be destroyed, cb(2,13);2:13 receiving the wages of unrighteousness; people who count it pleasure to revel in the daytime, spots and blemishes, reveling in their deceit while they feast with you; cb(2,14);2:14 having eyes full of adultery, and who can’t cease from sin; enticing unsettled souls; having a heart trained in greed; children of cursing; cb(2,15);2:15forsaking the right way, they went astray, having followed the way of Balaam the son of Beor, who loved the wages of wrongdoing; cb(2,16);2:16but he was rebuked for his own disobedience. A mute donkey spoke with a man’s voice and stopped the madness of the prophet. cb(2,17);2:17These are wells without water, clouds driven by a storm; for whom the blackness of darkness has been reserved forever. cb(2,18);2:18 For, uttering great swelling words of emptiness, they entice in the lusts of the flesh, by licentiousness, those who are indeed escaping from those who live in error; cb(2,19);2:19 promising them liberty, while they themselves are bondservants of corruption; for a man is brought into bondage by whoever overcomes him.cb(2,20);

2:20 For if, after they have escaped the defilement of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in it and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. cb(2,21); 2:21 For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. cb(2,22); 2:22 But it has happened to them according to the true proverb, “The dog turns to his own vomit again,”^* and “the sow that has washed to wallowing in the mire.”” (2 Peter 2:12-22)