Just Why by Cuyler

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 20, 1902

Just Why

By Cuyler

JUST WHY the loving Master confines some of his choicest and best in rooms of suffering, and cripples others of them in body or in purse, we cannot always tell. One thing is very clear; that is, that he does not mean to cripple their usefulness. To speak for Christ or to work for Christ is often easy and pleasant; but to bear for Christ, either pain or poverty or confinement with courageous patience, is more eloquent than many a pulpit discourse. No portion of Paul’s wonderful career was productive of more solid results than the years of his imprisonment at Rome. He styled himself an “ambassador in chains,” and he preached the kingdom of God to those about him until there were many converts in “Cæsar’s household.” He wrote seven of his thirteen undisputed epistles while he was the prison chaplain under the eyes of Nero’s jailers. One of these was the letter to Philippi, which is the epistle of gratitude for divine mercies and of exultant joy under sharp affliction. If the cages of birds are sometimes covered up in order to make them sing, the old hero was caged to furnish to the world one of its melodious epics of sublime faith in Jesus. Satan afterwards clapped John Bunyan into prison; and lo! out of the windows of the Bedford jail floated the allegory of the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” —Cuyler.