This day, my dear Brethren, closes the solemn commemoration, which the Church has prolonged through eight days, of Our Lord’s glorious Ascension. It is right, therefore, that we should now attend to the lessons particularly connected with this event. None seems to me more suggested to our consideration, by the happy motive of our meeting here this day, than that which is contained in the words of my text.
They are the guarantee of the last commission which our Blessed Saviour gave to His Apostles, a guarantee of their success in preaching the Gospel to every creature, and teaching all nations to observe the whole of His doctrines.
The Apostles were a body corporate formed by Him, limited in number, and endowed with peculiar privileges. It is to them that these words were spoken. To them, and not to the bulk of His followers was committed the duty of converting the world, and establishing the Church: and consequently to them alone is given the assurance of success in its discharge. Nor could He have been more explicit in the expressions which He selects, to intimate the perpetuity of that assurance.
When a charter is given to a body, a corporation to a borough, a constitution to a kingdom, by an authority capable of bestowing them, when especially it is once for all stated to be granted in perpetuity, it is not necessary to repeat from age to age the original grant. It takes effect from the first moment; and no one doubts that the successors of the original recipients inherit the rights and privileges of those whose duties they are bound to continue. How much more must this be the case, when the granter is He whose word is creative of what it gives, and whose promises are faithful, under the guarantee of omnipotence and essential truth.
But further, the commission was one of impossible fulfilment by the Apostles in person. However much their lives might be prolonged, it was impossible for them to reach even the whole known world. We know, how they preached in Palestine, and Syria and Asia: how they carried the Gospel to the polished Greek, and to the haughty Roman; how they established the church in Egypt, and Mesopotamia. We flatter ourselves that the voice of the Apostles sounded on our shores. Spain too and other western countries have the same boast: while Scythia, Armenia and India were reached by these first preachers of God’s word. But surely much more than even all this was included in that promise of salvation to all the nations of the earth. Can we believe that the numerous tribes of Germany were not comprehended in this message? That the frozen regions of Scandinavia were not comprised in it? A second world was as yet undiscovered beyond the Western Ocean: and surely it formed a portion of the world to which the glad tidings of salvation were to be, one day, borne. And so, doubtless were the islands of the Pacific, and those new continents, rather than islands, which lie at the opposite extremity of earth; and so were China and Japan, and southern Africa, and many other regions unvisited by Apostolic feet.
The kingdom of Christ was to extend from sea to sea, to embrace all whom He had redeemed by His precious blood; and it is clear, from the very impossibility of compliance, by the Apostles, with the commission, given for carrying out this prophecy, that their successors, that is the Church, were to continue it till fulfilled, not only till the present time, but to the end of time. And as the assurance of Divine assistance, and so of perfect success, is an essential part of the heavenly commission, so is this also a prerogative of Christ’s Church.
Our Saviour therefore was careful to put this so beyond all doubt, that it seems wonderful that two opinions should have been ever entertained, as to the meaning of those simple but complete, and unmistakable words “all days”, “even to the Consummation of the world”.
“All days”, not by fits and starts, nor by centuries, nor periods; but each day, so that the divine assistance is a chain from which not a link can drop, but is woven on day by day till it reach the end of days. No interruption, no break, no weak point, in its well-knitted, smooth forging, unitedly and concurrently with the succession of day to day in the heavens; for both obey one ordinance. And as surely as the sun keeps his course by an unalterable and unceasing law of perpetuity, though apparently of successive appearances, so is Christ present with His Church uninterruptedly, whether day or night seem to have come upon her.