2 Timothy 4:3

Ver. 3. The earnestness and fidelity thus recommended, with all possible gentleness and patient industry in the application, is now enforced by a reference to the foreseen tendencies of the future: For there shall be a time when they will not endure the healthy instruction (or doctrine namely, of the gospel), but after their own lusts will heap up to themselves teachers, having itching ears ears, that is, which were always pricking with an uneasy desire for what would gratify the taste of a carnal, self-willed heart. The evil is drawn in very striking colours, especially considering that it is of persons still professedly within the pale of the Christian church that the apostle speaks. But the delineation is otherwise indefinite; he merely says there will be a time or season when such things shall happen, and urges the prosecution of ministerial work after the style and character he has described, as the only means of postponing its arrival. In the spirit of prophecy he knew it would come; it was but one of the phases of corruption and backsliding which were to characterize the last days. And we who now live in this advanced period of them, have no difficulty in pointing to facts which amply corroborate the apostle's forebodings; not only in these later times of discord and disunion in Protestant Christendom, but even greatly more in those ancient and so-called halcyon times, when the visible church was still in a manner one. For no one who has read with any degree of impartiality the history of those times, and with discernment to understand the lessons it teaches, can be ignorant that the falling away from sound apostolic doctrine, and sliding into the asceticism, the legalism, the endless mummeries and superstitions, which became consolidated into medieval and Romish Christianity, grew up precisely in the manner here indicated. Men came over into the church from the ranks of heathen superstition and Gentile philosophy, bringing along with them many false notions and degrading practices which should have been left behind; and the teachers of the church, unwisely accommodating themselves to these, preached so as to gratify the itching ears they should have reproved, and kept back the pure word which would have checked the influx of evil. Accordingly, the more the church grew as an outward institution, growing in that respect, indeed, far too rapidly, the fewer always became the number who would endure sound doctrine, till they were found only in holes and corners, or, when occasionally occupying more conspicuous places, it was at the hazard of their lives. There is enough of this itching after false doctrine in the scattered communities of Protestantism to humble and sadden any Christian heart; the signs of the times give no doubtful indication of even more vet to come; but it is in the bosom of the great apostasy that the most marked and mournful exemplification of the apostle's prediction is to be met with.