Fruits of Captivity

Extract

Both under the Old Dispensation and under the New, God has often used the scourge of war, exile and captivity to summon his people to a renewal of faith, to call them to repentance and conversion. Christians have had to undergo this experience in our own times in Europe and Asia, and accounts of their witness to their faith are reaching us from many quarters. What grace and profit may accrue to the Church from their fidelity and their sufferings we cannot tell: that is in God's hands. But might it not be, also, that in his providential plan for us there is a place for the published records of such experiences, many of them by our separated brethren, which we have not yet learnt to appreciate sufficiently? Perhaps, in one sense, it is too easy to be impressed by the courageous stand of a Faulhaber or a Niemöller; perhaps we are too readily moved by the joy and serenity in the letters of a von Moltke, written from prison, awaiting execution, condemned for the sole reason that he had confessed to placing loyalty to God above that to his Führer.