In the 1600s, Jan Amos Comenius was a hero of the efforts to preserve the true Christian church, the ekklesia as Christ and the Apostles delivered it. Comenius was hounded from place to place by the soldiers of the Catholic and Reformation denominations. At one point he took refuge in the castle of Charles of Zerotin, where he became leader of the band of refugees that gathered there. While there, he wrote a book, “The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart,” in which, in allegorical form, he taught that peace is not to be found in the world but in the indwelling of Christ in the heart. The following is an excerpt from an article Comenius wrote in 1660, “The Voice of the Morning.”

The great number of teachers is the reason of the multitude of sects, for which we shall soon have no names left. Each church reckons itself as the true one, or at least the purest, truest part of it, while amongst themselves they persecute each other with the bitterest of hatred. No reconciliation is to be hoped for between them; they meet enmity with irreconcilable enmity. Out of the Bible they forge their different creeds; these are their fortresses and bulwarks behind which they entrench themselves and resist all attacks. I will not say that these confessions of faith-for that they are so we can admit in most cases-are not bad in themselves. They become so, however, in that they feed the fire of enmity; only by putting them away altogether would it be possible to set to work on healing the wounds of the Church. To this labyrinth of sects and various confessions another belongs, the love of disputation.

What is attained by it?  Has a single learned strife ever been settled? Never. Their number has only ever increased. Satan is the greatest sophist; he has never been overcome in a strife of words….In Divine service the words of men are usually heard more than the Word of God. Each one chatters as he pleases or kills time by learned disquisitions and disproving the case of the others. Of the new birth and how a man must be changed into the likeness of Christ to become a partaker of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) scarcely anything is said. Of the power of the keys of the Church it has almost lost the power of binding, only the power of loosing remains.

In short, Christendom has become a labyrinth. The faith has been split into a thousand little parts and you are made a heretic if there is one of them you do not accept.  What can help? Only the one thing needful; return to Christ, looking to Christ as the only Leader, and walking in His footsteps, setting aside all other ways until we reach that goal, and have come to the unity of the faith (Eph. 4:13). As the Heavenly Master built everything on the grounds of the Scriptures, so should we leave all particularities of our special confessions and be satisfied with the revealed Word of God which belongs to us all.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God; have mercy on us!