In this period particularly, the teacher may demonstrate that the god of this world, the enemy of man's soul, allows slumbering saints to awaken only with a struggle. Although controversy is not to be sought, it must be accepted. Wherever truth exposes error, error will oppose truth, and truth will be drawn into conflict. The believer must both stand and advance against the enemy. He cannot ignore the strife, though it is not of his making.
Love is a noble virtue, but Christian love is love in the truth.
The age of revolutions followed the age of Reformation. Sixteenth-century England had embraced the Reformation, however imperfectly. When Spain tried to return England to the orbit of Roman Catholicism, her Armada was defeated by the English navy and by God's control of the heavens and the seas. Spain sank to the role of a third-rate power from which she has not yet recovered. To Spain's northeast, the nation of France for a time tolerated the Reformation.