_THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN_
ii. 10-17
Passion and poetry, when they fire the imagination, do more than
personify individual material things. By fusing the separate objects
in the crucible of a common emotion which in some way appertains to
them all, they personify this grand unity, and so lift their theme
into the region of the sublime. Thus while in his second elegy the
author of the Lamentations first dwells on the desolation of inanimate
objects,--the temple, fortresses, country cottages,--these are all of
interest to him only because they belong to Jerusalem, the city of his
heart's devotion, and it is the city herself that moves his deepest
feelings; and when in the second part of the poem he proceeds to
describe the miserable condition of living persons--men, women, and
children--profoundly pathetic as the picture he now paints appears to
us in its piteous details, it is still regarded by its author as a
whole, and the people's sufferings are so very terrible in his eyes
because they are the woes of Jerusalem.
Some attempt to sympathise with the large and lofty view of the
elegist may be a wholesome corrective to the intense individualism of
modern habits of thought. The difficulty for us is to see that this
view is not merely ideal, that it represents a great, solid truth,
the truth that the perfect human unit is not an individual, but a more
or less extensive group of persons, mutually harmonised and organised
in a common life, a society of some sort--the family, the city, the
state, mankind. By bearing this in mind we shall be able to perceive
that sufferings which in themselves might seem sordid and degrading
can attain to something of epic dignity.
It is in this spirit that the poet deplores the exile of the king and
the princes. He is not now concerned with the private troubles of
these exalted persons. Judah was a limited monarchy, though not after
the pattern of government familiar to us, but rather in the style of
the Plantagenet rule, according to which the sovereign shared his
authority with a number of powerful barons, each of whom was lord over
his own territory. The men described as "the princes of Israel" were
not, for the most part, members of the royal family; they were the
heads of tribes and families. Therefore the banishment of these
persons, together with the king, meant for the Jews who were left
behind the loss of their ruling authorities. Then it seems most
reasonable to connect the clause which follows the reference to the
exile with the sufferings of Jerusalem rather than with the hardships
of the captives, because the whole context is concerned with the
former subject. This phrase read literally is, "The law is not."[143]
Our Revisers have followed the Authorised Version in connecting it
with the previous expression, "among the nations," which describes the
place of exile, so as to lead us to read it as a statement that the
king and the princes were enduring the hardship of residence in a land
where their sacred _Torah_ was not observed. If, however, we take the
words in harmony with the surrounding thoughts, we are reminded by
them that the removal of the national rulers involved to the Jews the
cessation of the administration of their law. The residents still left
in the land were reduced to a condition of anarchy; or, if the
conquerors had begun to administer some sort of martial law, this was
totally alien to the revered _Torah_ of Israel. Josiah had based his
reformation on the discovery of the sacred law-book. But the mere
possession of this was little consolation if it was not administered;
for the Jews had not fallen to the condition of the Samaritans of
later times who came to worship the roll of the Pentateuch as an idol.
They were not even like the scribes and Talmudists among their own
descendants, to whom the law itself was a religion, though only read
in the cloister of the student. The loss of good government was to
them a very solid evil. In a civilised country, in times of peace and
order, we breathe law as we breathe air, unconsciously, too familiar
with it to appreciate the immeasurable benefits it confers upon us.
[143] ii. 9.
With the banishment of the custodians of law the poet associates the
accompanying silence of the voice of prophecy. This, however, is so
important and significant a fact, that it must be reserved for
separate and fuller treatment.[144]
[144] See next chapter.
Next to the princes come the elders, to whom was intrusted the
administration of justice in the minor courts. These were not sent
into captivity; for at first only the aristocracy was considered
sufficiently important to be carried off to Babylon. But though the
elders were left in the land, the country was too disorganised for
them to be able to hold their local tribunals. Perhaps these were
forbidden by the invaders; perhaps the elders had no heart to decide
cases when they saw no means of getting their decisions executed.
Accordingly instead of appearing in dignity as the representatives of
law and order among their neighbours the most respected citizens sit
in silence on the ground, girded in sackcloth, and casting dust over
their heads, living pictures of national mourning.[145]
[145] ii. 10.
The virgins of Jerusalem are named immediately after the elders. Their
position in the city is very different from that of the "grave and
reverend signiors"; but we are to see that while the dignity of age
and rank affords no immunity from trouble, the gladsomeness of youth
and its comparative irresponsibility are equally ineffectual as
safeguards. The elders and the virgins have one characteristic in
common. They are both silent. These young girls are the choristers
whose clear, sweet voices used to ring out in strains of joy at every
festival. Now both the grave utterances of magistrates and the blithe
singing of maidens are hushed into one gloomy silence. Formerly the
girls would dance to the sound of song and cymbal. How changed must
things be that the once gay dancers sit with their heads bowed to the
ground, as still as the mourning elders!
But now, like Dante when introduced by his guide to some exceptionally
agonising spectacle in the infernal regions, the poet bursts into
tears, and seems to feel his very being melting away at the
contemplation of the most heart-rending scene in the many mournful
tableaux of the woes of Jerusalem. Breaking off from his recital of
the facts to express his personal distress in view of the next item,
he prepares us for some rare and dreadful exhibition of misery; and
the tale that he has to tell is quite enough to account for the start
of horror with which it is ushered in. The poet makes us listen to the
cry of the children. There are babies at the breast fainting from
hunger, and older children, able to speak, but not yet able to
comprehend the helpless circumstances in which their miserable parents
are placed, calling to their mothers for food and drink--a piercing
appeal, enough to drive to the madness of grief and despair. Crying in
vain for the first necessaries of life, these poor children, like the
younger infants, faint in the streets, and cast themselves on their
mothers' bosoms to die.[146] This, then, is the picture in
contemplation of which the poet completely breaks down--children
swooning in sight of all the people, and dying of hunger in their
mothers' arms! He must be recalling scenes of the late siege. Then the
fainting little ones, as they sank down pale and ill, resembled the
wounded men who crept back from the fight by the walls to fall and die
in the streets of the beleaguered city.
[146] ii. 11, 12.
This is just the sharpest sting in the sufferings of the children.
They share the fearful fate of their seniors, and yet they have had no
part in the causes that led to it. We are naturally perplexed as well
as distressed at this piteous spectacle of childhood. The beauty, the
simplicity, the weakness, the tenderness, the sensitiveness, the
helplessness of infancy appeal to our sympathies with peculiar force.
But over and above these touching considerations there is a mystery
attaching to the whole subject of the presence of pain and sorrow in
young lives that battles all reasoning. It is not only hard to
understand why the bud should be blighted before it has had time to
open to the sunshine: this haste in the march of misery to meet her
victims on the threshold of life is to our minds a very amazing sight.
And yet it is not the most perplexing part of the problem raised by
the mystery of the suffering of children.
When we turn to the moral elements of the case we encounter its most
serious difficulties. Children may not be accounted innocent in the
absolute sense of the word. Even unconscious infants come into the
world with hereditary tendencies to the evil habits of their
ancestors; but then every principle of justice resists the attachment
of guilt or responsibility to an unsought and undeserved inheritance.
And although children soon commit offences on their own account, it is
not the consequences of these youthful follies that here trouble us.
The cruel wrongs of childhood that overshadow the world's history with
its darkest mystery have travelled on to their victims from quite
other regions--regions of which the poor little sufferers are ignorant
with the ignorance of perfect innocence. Why do children thus share in
evils they had no hand in bringing upon the community?
It is perhaps well that we should acknowledge quite frankly that there
are mysteries in life which no ingenuity of thought can fathom. The
suffering of childhood is one of the greatest of these apparently
insoluble riddles of the universe. We have to learn that in view of
such a problem as is here raised we too are but infants crying in the
night.
Still there is no occasion for us to aggravate the riddle by adding
to it manufactured difficulties; we may even admit such mitigation of
its severity as the facts of the case suggest. When little children
suffer and die in their innocence they are free at least from those
agonies of remorse for the irrecoverable past, and of apprehension
concerning the doom of the future, that haunt the minds of guilty men,
and frequently far exceed the physical pains endured. Beneath their
hardest woes they have a peace of God that is the counterpart of the
martyr's serenity.
Nevertheless, when we have said all that can be said in this
direction, there remains the sickening fact that children do suffer
and pine and die. Still though this cannot be explained away, there
are two truths that we should set beside it before we attempt to form
any judgment on the whole subject. The first is that taught so
emphatically by our Lord when He declared that the victims of an
accident or the sufferers in an indiscriminate slaughter were not to
be accounted exceptional sinners.[147] But if suffering is by no means
a sign of sin in the victim we may go further, and deny that it is in
all respects an evil. It may be impossible for us to accept the Stoic
paradox in the case of little children whom even the greatest pedant
would scarcely attempt to console with philosophic maxims. In the
endurance of them, the pain and sorrow and death of the young cannot
but seem to us most real evils, and it is our plain duty to do all in
our power to check and stay everything of the kind. We must beware of
the indolence that lays upon Providence the burden of troubles that
are really due to our own inconsiderateness. In pursuing the policy
that led to the disastrous siege of their city the Jews should have
known how many innocent victims would be dragged into the vortex of
misery if the course they had chosen were to fail. The blind obstinacy
of the men who refused to listen to the warnings so emphatically
pronounced by the great prophets of Jehovah, the desperate self-will
of these men, pitted against the declared counsel of God, must bear
the blame. It is monstrous to charge the providence of God with the
consequences of actions that God has forbidden.
[147] Luke xiii 1-5.
A second truth must be added, for there still remains the difficulty
that children are placed, by no choice of their own, in circumstances
that render them thus liable to the effects of other people's sins and
follies. We can never understand human life if we persist in
considering each person by himself. That we are members one of
another, so that if one member suffers all the members suffer, is the
law of human experience as well as the principle of Christian
churchmanship. Therefore we must regard the wrongs of children that so
disturb us as part of the travail and woe of mankind. Bad as it is in
itself that these innocents should be thus involved in the
consequences of the misconduct of their elders, it would not be any
improvement for them to be cut off from all connection with their
predecessors in the great family of mankind. Taken on the whole, the
solidarity of man certainly makes more for the welfare of childhood
than for its disadvantage. And we must not think of childhood alone,
deeply as we are moved at the sight of its unmerited sufferings. If
children are part of the race, whatever children endure must be taken
as but one element in the vast experience that goes to make up the
life-history of mankind.
All this is very vague, and if we offer it as a consolation to a
mother whose heart is torn with anguish at the sight of her child's
pain, it is likely she will think our balm no better than the wormwood
of mockery. It would be vain for us to imagine that we have solved the
riddle, and vainer to suppose that any views of life could be set
against the unquestionable fact that innocent children suffer, as
though they in the slightest degree lessened the amount of this pain
or made it appreciably easier to endure. But then, on the other hand,
the mere existence of all this terrible agony does not justify us in
bursting out into tremendous denunciations of the universe. The
thoughts that rise from a consideration of the wider relations of the
facts should teach us lessons of humility in forming our judgment on
so vast a subject. We cannot deny the existence of evils that cry
aloud for notice; we cannot explain them away. But at least we can
follow the example of the elders and virgins of Israel, and be silent.
The portrait of misery that the poet has drawn in describing the
condition of Jerusalem during the siege is painful enough when viewed
by itself; and yet he proceeds further, and seeks to deepen the
impression he has already made by setting the picture in a suitable
frame. So he directs attention to the behaviour of surrounding
peoples. Jerusalem is not permitted to hide her grief and shame. She
is flung into an arena while a crowd of cruel spectators gloat over
her agonies. These are to be divided into two classes, the unconcerned
and the known enemies. There is not any great difference between them
in their treatment of the miserable city. The unconcerned "hiss and
wag their heads";[148] the enemies "hiss and gnash their teeth."[149]
That is to say, both add to the misery of the Jews--the one class in
mockery, the other in hatred. But what are these men at their worst?
Behind them is the real Power that is the source of all the misery. If
the enemy rejoices it is only because God has given him the occasion.
The Lord has been carrying out His own deliberate intentions; nay,
these events are but the execution of commands He issued in the days
of old.[150] This reads like an anticipation of the Calvinistic
decrees. But perhaps the poet is referring to the solemn threatening
of Divine Judgment pronounced by a succession of prophets. Their
message had been unheeded by their contemporaries. Now it has been
verified by history. Remembering what that message was--how it
predicted woes as the punishment of sins, how it pointed out a way of
escape, how it threw all the responsibility upon those people who were
so infatuated as to reject the warning--we cannot read into the poet's
lines any notion of absolute predestination.
[148] ii. 15.
[149] ii. 16.
[150] ii. 17.
In the midst of this description of the miseries of Jerusalem the
elegist confesses his own inability to comfort her. He searches for an
image large enough for a just comparison with such huge calamities as
he has in view. His language resembles that of our Lord when He
exclaims, "Whereunto shall I liken the kingdom of God?"[151] a
similarity which may remind us that if the troubles of man are great
beyond earthly analogy, so also are the mercies of God. Compare these
two, and there can be no question as to which way the scale will turn.
Where sin and misery abound grace much more abounds. But now the poet
is concerned with the woes of Jerusalem, and he can only find one
image with which these woes are at all comparable. Her breach, he
says, "is great like the sea,"[152] meaning that her calamities are
vast and terrible as the sea; or perhaps that the ruin of Jerusalem is
like that produced by the breaking in of the sea--a striking image in
its application to an inland mountain city; for no place was really
safer from any such cataclysm than Jerusalem. The analogy is
intentionally far-fetched. What might naturally happen to Tyre, but
could not possibly reach Jerusalem, is nevertheless the only
conceivable type of the events that have actually befallen this
ill-fated city. The Jews were not a maritime people. To them the sea
was no delight such as it is to us. They spoke of it with terror, and
shuddered to hear from afar of its ravages. Now the deluge of their
own troubles is compared to the great and terrible sea.
[151] Luke xiii. 20.
[152] ii. 13.
The poet can offer no comfort for such misery as this. His confession
of helplessness agrees with what we must have perceived already,
namely, that the Book of Lamentations is not a book of consolations.
It is not always easy to see that the sympathy which mourns with the
sufferer may be quite unable to relieve him. The too common mistake of
the friend who comes to show sympathy is Bildad's and his companions'
notion that he is called upon to offer advice. Why should one who is
not in the school of affliction assume the function of pedagogue to a
pupil of that school, who by reason of the mere fact of his presence
there should rather be deemed fit to instruct the outsider?
If he cannot comfort Jerusalem, however, the elegist will pray with
her. His latest reference to the Divine source of the troubles of the
Jews leads him on to a cry to God for mercy on the miserable people.
Though he may not yet see the gospel of grace which is the only thing
greater than the sin and misery of man, he can point towards the
direction in which that glorious gospel is to dawn on the eyes of
weary sufferers. Here, if anywhere, is the solution of the mystery of
misery.