The invasion of the Church by error is no accident or surprise.
"I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this," etc. It is not to be taken "as though some strange thing happened" (1 Peter 4:12). Faith is apt to be staggered or darkened by it. Yet it is to be anticipated. It has been the subject of prophecy. It is provided for in the Divine guidance of the Church, and it works to its own retribution. The history of God's ways, too, is the best corrective for faith's perplexities and fears in presence of the march of error. The history shows that what is, is only that which also has been. The dread things in its record bear witness to the fact that victory is not on the side of evil, but that there is a defeat predetermined for it—a penalty which follows it by a certain law. God's terrible deeds in righteousness attest the temporal punishment of sin. The Old Testament history, in which these are registered, is the nurse of a faith which should be humble, strong, courageous, hopeful. To neglect it is certain loss, It is gain to be "put in remembrance'' of it. "Them that believed not"—the explanation both of the sin, and of the destruction of the generation in the wilderness. So the evil heart of unbelief is the final secret of guilt and error, the hidden laboratory of all perversions of truth and all depravations of the moral life, the subtle inspiration of enmity to God and defiance to law.