Commission

—challenge The word "challenge" (anfechten) completes the sentence from the previous page: "...who would, with doubt—challenge..." or hold them in lower esteem, because they are accepted by high and low, by kings and subjects, preached in temples and monasteries, and are known and honored everywhere.

But if our time were set as far back as his own, when the Word was still new and the Spirit a firstfruit firstfruitErstling; a biblical term (see Romans 8:23) referring to the first portion of a harvest, here signifying the initial outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the early Church.: then we would see a strange thing—how it was then received by the world, especially by those who taught God’s word and preached to the people; what a thanks and reward he reaped from it, as seen in 2 Corinthians 11, verse 23 etc. original: "&c." and elsewhere.

But it was nothing new for him, nor for all other apostles and messengers of God in their time; for all the prophets and men of God since the world began have experienced the same process processProcess; here used in the sense of a legal trial or a predetermined course of suffering and experience. before them, they who offered the pearl for sale A reference to the "Pearl of Great Price" from the parable in Matthew 13:45–46, representing divine truth.. Indeed, the Pearl himself, God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, was only to have it so; and for all the greatest deeds and miracles of His love and mercy, He had to be paid with persecution, disgrace, and bitter death.

The deep underlying causes of such insane—