109SermonsbyJCRyle (continued)
Caiaphas—with Pilate and Herod—with Festus and Agrippa—with Felix and Gallio—than with Paul and the Lord Jesus Christ.
II. I pass on now to the second thing I proposed to speak of. When is a man truly zealous in religion?
There never was a grace of which Satan has not made a counterfeit. There never was a good coin issued from the mint—but forgers at once have coined something very like it. It is one of Satan's devices to place distorted copies of the believer's graces before the eyes of men, and so to bring the true graces into contempt. No grace has suffered so much in this way as zeal. Of none perhaps are there so many shams and counterfeits abroad. We must therefore clear the ground of all rubbish on this question. We must find out when zeal in religion is really good, and true, and of God.
1. Reader, if zeal be true, it will be a zeal according to knowledge. It must not be a blind, ignorant zeal. It must be a calm, reasonable, intelligent principle, which can show the warrant of Scripture for every step it takes. The unconverted Jews had zeal. Paul says, "I bear them record that they have a zeal of God—but not according to knowledge." (Rom. 10:21.) Saul had zeal when he was a persecuting Pharisee. He says himself, in one of his addresses to the Jews, "I was zealous toward God, as you all are this day." (Acts 22:3.) Manasseh had zeal in the days when he was an idolater. The man who made his own children pass through the fire—who gave up the fruit of his body to Moloch, to atone for the sin of his soul—that man had zeal. James and John had zeal when they would have called down fire on a Samaritan village. But our Lord rebuked them. Peter had zeal when he drew his sword and cut off the ear of Malchus. But he was quite wrong. The Catholics Bonner and Gardiner had zeal when they burned Latimer and Cranmer. Were they not in earnest? Let us do them justice. They were zealous, though it was for an unscriptural religion. The members of the Catholic inquisition in Spain had zeal, when they tortured men, and put them to horrible deaths, because they would not forsake the Gospel. Yes—they