EUTYCHUS
‘There sat in a window a certain young man named Eutychus, being fallen into a deep sleep.’
The point of the story for us is not that Eutychus slept, but that Eutychus was there. He had come to Christian worship early in the morning: he had done a hard day’s work: but he had come again at night to join in Christian worship. He had fallen asleep, because the room was too hot and crowded, because he was tired out, because, if you will, he did not care much for, or could not listen much to, sermons even from St. Paul. But he had come.
I. The sleepiness of Eutychus puts many a wakeful man and woman to shame.—In those days, for the majority of the Christian converts, who held subordinate positions and were not their own masters, the Lord’s Day must have been, not a day of rest, but a day of work, yet it was made also a day of worship. If the body had to be given to man, the soul was given to God. Now it is a day of rest—is it also a day of worship? Does Eutychus to-day, who has little to do, or his master, who has nothing, desire to worship God, his Father and his Saviour, as Eutychus of old did?
II. The comparison has only to be suggested and the contrast is plain.—It is obvious that what the necessities of work in the first century could not do—viz. override the greater necessities of worship—the exigencies of rest in the twentieth century are threatening to do. Nay more, rest, never more needful and salutary than it is now, is being driven out by what we call pleasure, but which is frequently not the recreation but the dissipation of our energies, physical, intellectual, and spiritual. The fact suggests the question of fundamental importance to us all; Do we mean our religion, as did those primitive Christians? Is it with us the one thing needful, or is it merely a side issue? Do we look at it as a necessity or a luxury which can be dispensed with in the face of lower but more urgent claims? Have the old heroisms become impossible? Are we the stuff of which the martyrs are made?
III. Primitive worship was as to externals poor, bare, uncomfortable; without any subsidiary aids to devotion; an ordinary, secular chamber for its church. Yet the gathering is alive with the magnetic vitality of the speaker; it is moved and cheered by the consciousness of the Divine presence, according to the Divine promise. It is a picture for admiration and imitation, not with servile literalness, but in spirit and in ideal truth. It is useless to reproduce the externals without the invisible presence and power which transfigured them. The power of the early Church did not lie in the fact that they worshipped in upper rooms, but in the fact that they worshipped in spirit and in truth.
—Rev. F. Ealand.
Illustration
‘The place was Troas, a city on the coast of Asia Minor. Romans had always cherished a warm feeling towards it because of their Trojan origin, a legend in which they had come to believe thoroughly. In fact, owing to the greatness of Troas and its legendary connection with the foundations of Rome, Julius Cæsar had actually entertained the idea of transferring thither the centre of government from Rome. Gibbon also tells us that some three hundred years later the Emperor Constantine, before he gave a just preference to Byzantium, had conceived the design of erecting the seat of empire on this celebrated spot from which the Romans derived their fabulous origin. It was of considerable commercial importance, as the port was the chief means of communication between Europe and Asia.’