_GRIEVING BEFORE GOD_
iii. 43-54
As might have been expected, the mourning patriot quickly forsakes the
patch of sunshine which lights up a few verses of this elegy. But the
vision of it has not come in vain; for it leaves gracious effects to
tone the gloomy ideas upon which the meditations of the poet now
return like birds of the night hastening back to their darksome
haunts. In the first place, his grief is no longer solitary. It is
enlarged in its sympathies so as to take in the sorrows of others.
Purely selfish trouble tends to become a mean and sordid thing. If we
are not yet freed from our own pain some element of a nobler nature
will be imported into it when we can find room for the larger thoughts
that the contemplation of the distresses of others arouses. But a
greater change than this has taken place. The "man who hath seen
affliction" now feels himself to be in the presence of God. Speaking
for others as well as for himself he pours out his lamentations before
God. In the first part of the elegy he had only mentioned the Divine
name as that of his great Antagonist; now it is the name of his close
Confidant.
Then the elegist is here giving voice to the people's penitent
confession and prayer. This is another feature of the changed
situation. An unqualified admission of the truth that the sufferings
of Israel are just the merited punishment of the people's sin has come
between the complaints with which the poem opens, and the renewed
expressions of grief.
Still, when all due allowance is made for these improvements, the
renewed outburst of grief is sufficiently dismal. The people are
supposed to represent themselves as being hunted down like helpless
fugitives, and slain without pity by God, who has wrapped Himself in a
mantle of anger, which is as a cloud impenetrable to the prayers of
His miserable victims.[213] This description of their helpless state
follows immediately after an outpouring of prayer. It would seem,
therefore, that the poet conceived that this particular utterance was
hindered from reaching the ear of God. Now in many cases it may be
that a feeling such as is here expressed is purely subjective and
imaginary. The soul's cry of agony passes out into the night, and dies
away into silence, without eliciting a whisper of response. Yet it is
not necessary to conclude that the cry is not heard. The closest
attention may be the most silent. But, it may be objected, this
possibility only aggravates the evil; for it is better not to hear at
all than to hear and not to heed. Will any one attribute such stony
indifference to God? God may attend, and yet He may not speak to
us--speech not being the usual form of Divine response. He may be
helping us most effectually in silence, unperceived by us, at the very
moment when we imagine that He has completely deserted us. If we were
more keenly alive to the signs of His coming we should be less hasty
to despair at the failure of our prayers. The priests of Baal may
scream, "O Baal, hear us!" from morning to night till their phrensy
sinks into despair; but that is no reason why men and women who
worship a spiritual God should come to the conclusion that their
inability to wrest a sign from Heaven is itself a sign of desertion by
Him to whom they call. The oracle may be dumb; but the God whom we
worship is not limited to the utterance of prophetic voices for the
expression of His will. He hears, even if in silence; and, in truth,
He also answers, though we are too deaf in our unbelief to discern the
still small voice of His Spirit.
[213] iii. 44.
But can we say that the idea of the Divine disregard of prayer is
always and only imaginary? Are the clouds that come between us and God
invariably earthborn? Does He never really wrap Himself in the garment
of wrath? Surely we dare not say so much. The anger of God is as real
as His love. No being can be perfectly holy and not feel a righteous
indignation in the presence of sin. But if God is angry, and while He
is so, He cannot at the same time be holding friendly intercourse with
the people who are provoking His wrath. Then the Divine anger must be
as a thick, impervious curtain between the prayers of the sinful and
the gracious hearing of God. The universal confession of the need of
an atonement is a witness to the perception of this condition by
mankind. Whether we are dealing with the crude notions of ancient
sacrifice, or with the high thoughts that circle about Calvary, the
same spiritual instinct presses for recognition. We may try to reason
it down, but it persistently reasserts itself. Most certainly it is
not the teaching of Scripture that the only condition of salvation is
prayer. The Gospel is not to the effect that we are to be saved by our
own petitions. The penitent is taught to feel that without Christ and
the cross his prayers are of no avail for his salvation. Even if they
knew no respite still they would never atone for sin. Is not this an
axiom of evangelical doctrine? Then the prayers that are offered in
the old unreconciled condition must fall back on the head of the vain
petitioner unable to penetrate the awful barrier that he has himself
caused to be raised between his cries and the heavens where God
dwells.
Turning from the contemplation of the hopeless failure of prayer the
lament naturally falls into an almost despairing wail of grief. The
state of the Jews is painted in the very darkest colours. God has made
them as no better than the refuse people cast out of their houses, or
the very sweepings of the streets--not fit even to be trampled under
foot of men.[214] This is their position among the nations. The poet
seems to be alluding to the exceptional severity with which the
obstinate defenders of Jerusalem had been treated by their exasperated
conquerors. The neighbouring tribes had been compelled to succumb
beneath the devastating wave of the Babylonian invasion; but since
none of them had offered so stubborn a resistance to the armies of
Nebuchadnezzar none of them had been punished by so severe a scourge
of vengeance. So it has been repeatedly with the unhappy people who
have encountered unparalled persecutions through the long weary ages
of their melancholy history. In the days of Antiochus Epiphanes the
Jews were the most insulted and cruelly outraged victims of Syrian
tyranny. When their long tragedy reached a climax at the final siege
of Jerusalem by Titus, the more liberal-minded Roman government laid
on them harsh punishments of exile, slavery, torture, and death, such
as it rarely inflicted on a fallen foe--for with statesmanlike wisdom
the Romans preferred, as a rule, conciliation to extermination; but in
the case of this one unhappy city of Jerusalem the almost unique fate
of the hated and dreaded city of Carthage was repeated. So it was in
the Middle Ages, as _Ivanhoe_ vividly shows; and so it is to-day in
the East of Europe, as the fierce _Juden-hetze_ is continually
proving. The irony of history is nowhere more apparent than in the
fact that the "favoured" people, the "chosen" people of Jehovah,
should have been treated so continuously as "the offscouring and
refuse in the midst of the peoples." As privilege and responsibility
always go hand in hand, so also do blessing and suffering--the Jew
hated, the Church persecuted, the Christ crucified. We cannot say that
this paradox is simply "a mysterious dispensation of Providence;"
because in the case of Israel, at all events in the early ages, the
unparalleled misery was traced to the abuse of unparalleled favour.
But this does not exhaust the mystery, for in the most striking
instances innocence suffers. We can have no satisfaction in our view
of these contradictions till we see the glory of the martyr's crown
and the even higher glory of the triumph of Christ and His people over
failure, agony, insult, and death; but just in proportion as we are
able to lift up the eyes of faith to the blessedness of the unseen
world, we shall be able also to discover that even here and now there
is a pain that is better than pleasure, and a shame that is truest
glory.
[214] iii. 45.
These truths, however, are not readily perceived at the time of
endurance, when the iron is entering into the soul. The elegist feels
the degradations of his people most keenly, and he represents them
complaining how their enemies rage at them as with open
mouths--belching forth gross insults, shouting curses, like wild
beasts ready to devour their hapless victims.[215] There seems to be
nothing in store for them but the terrors of death, the pit of
destruction.[216]
[215] iii. 46.
[216] iii. 47.
At the contemplation of this extremity of hopeless misery the poet
drops the plural number, in which he has been personating his people,
as abruptly as he assumed it a few verses earlier, and bewails the
dread calamities in his own person.[217] Then, in truly Jeremiah-like
fashion, he describes his incessant weeping for the woes of the
wretched citizens of Jerusalem and the surrounding villages. The
reference to "the daughters of my city"[218] seems to be best
explained as a figurative expression for the neighbouring places, all
of which it would seem had shared in the devastation produced by the
great wave of conquest which had overwhelmed the capital. But the
previous mention of "the daughter of my people,"[219] followed as it
is by this phrase about "the daughters of my city," strikes a deeper
note of compassion. These places contained many defenceless women, the
indescribable cruelty of whose fate when they fell into the hands of
the brutal heathen soldiery was one of the worst features of the whole
ghastly scene; and the wretchedness of the once proud city and its
dependencies when they were completely overthrown is finely
represented so as to appeal most effectually to our sympathy by a
metaphor that pictures them as hapless maidens, touching us like
Spenser's piteous picture of the forlorn Una, deserted in the forest
and left a prey to its savage denizens. Like Una, too, the daughters
in this metaphor claim the chivalry which our English poet has so
exquisitely portrayed as awakened even in the breast of a wild animal.
The woman of Europe is far removed from her sister in the East, who
still follows the ancient type in submitting to the imputation of
weakness as a claim for consideration. But this is because Europe has
learnt that strength of character--in which woman can be at least the
equal of man--is more potent in a community civilised in the Christian
way than strength of muscle. Where the more brutal forces are let
loose the duties of chivalry are always in requisition. Then it is
apparent that deference to the claims of women for protection produces
a civilising effect in softening the roughness of men. It is difficult
to say it to-day in the teeth of the just claims that women are
making, and still more difficult in face of what women are now
achieving, in spite of many relics of barbarism in the form of unfair
restrictions, but yet it must be asserted that the feebleness of
femininity--in the old-fashioned sense of the word--pervades these
poems, and is their most touching characteristic, so that much of the
pathos and beauty of poetry such as that of these elegies is to be
traced to representations of woman wronged and suffering and calling
for the sympathy of all beholders.
[217] iii. 48 ff.
[218] iii. 51.
[219] iii. 48.
The poet is moved to tears--quite unselfish tears, tears of patriotic
grief, tears of compassion for helpless suffering. Here again the
modern Anglo-Saxon habit makes it difficult for us to appreciate his
conduct as it deserves. We think it a dreadful thing for a man to be
seen weeping; and a feeling of shame accompanies such an outburst of
unrestrained distress. But surely there are holy tears, and tears
which it is an honour for any one to be capable of shedding. If mere
callousness is the explanation of dry eyes in view of sorrow, there
can be no credit for such a condition. This is not the restraint of
tears. Nothing is easier than for the unfeeling not to weep. Nor can
it be maintained that it is always necessary to restrain the outward
expression of sympathy in accordance with its most natural impulses.
Our Lord was strong; yet we could never wish that the evangelist had
not had occasion to write the ever memorable sentence, "Jesus wept."
Sufferers lose much, not only from lack of sympathy, but also from a
shy concealment of the fellow-feeling that is truly experienced. There
are seasons of keenest agony, when to weep with those who weep is me
only possible expression of brotherly kindness; and this may be a very
real act of love, appreciably alleviating suffering. A little courage
on the part of Englishmen in daring to weep would knit the ties of
brotherhood more closely. At present a chill reserve rather than any
actual coldness of heart separates people who might be much more
helpful to one another if they could but bring themselves to break
down this barrier.
But while the poet is thus expressing his large patriotic grief he
cannot forget his own private sorrows. They are all parts of one
common woe. So he returns to his personal experience, and adds some
graphic details that enable us to picture him in the midst of his
misery.[220] Though he had never provoked the enemy, he was chased
like a bird, flung into a dungeon, where a stone was hurled down upon
him, and where the water was lying so deep that he was completely
submerged. There is no reason to question that definite statements
such as these represent the exact experience of the writer. At the
first glance they call to our minds the persecutions inflicted on
Jeremiah by his own people. But the allusion would be peculiarly
inappropriate, and the cases do not quite fit together. The poet has
been bewailing the sufferings of the Jews at the hands of the
Chaldæans, and he seems to identify his own troubles in the closest
way with the general flood of calamities that swept over his nation.
It would be quite out of place for him to insert here a reminder of
earlier troubles which his own people had inflicted upon him. Besides,
the particulars do not exactly agree with what we learn of the
prophet's hardships from his own pen. The dungeon into which he was
flung was very foul, and he sank in the mire, but it is expressly
stated that there was no water in it, and there is no mention of
stoning.[221] There were many sufferers in that dark time of tumult
and outrage whose fate was as hard as that of Jeremiah.
[220] iii. 52 ff.
[221] Jer. xxxviii. 6.
A graphic picture like this helps us to imagine the fearful
accompaniments of the destruction of Jerusalem much better than any
general summary. As we gaze at this one scene among the many miseries
that followed the siege--the poet hunted out and run down, his capture
and conveyance to the dungeon, apparently without a shadow of a trial,
the danger of drowning and the misery of standing in the water that
had gathered in a place so utterly unfit for human habitation, the
needless additional cruelty of the stone-throwing--there rises before
us a picture which cannot but impress our minds with the unutterable
wretchedness of the sufferers from such a calamity as the siege of
Jerusalem. Of course there must have been some special reason for the
exceptionally severe treatment of the poet. What this was we cannot
tell. If the same patriotic spirit burned in his soul in the midst of
the war as we now find at the time of later reflection, it would be
most reasonable to conjecture that the ardent lover of his country had
done or said something to irritate the enemy, and possibly that as he
devoted his poetic gifts at a subsequent time to lamenting the
overthrow of his city, he may have employed them with a more practical
purpose among the battle scenes to write some inspiring martial ode in
which we may be sure he would not have spared the ruthless invader.
But then he says his persecution was without a cause. He may have been
undeservedly suspected of acting as a spy. It is only by chance that
now and again we get a glimpse of the backwaters of a great flood such
as that which was now devastating the land of Judah; most of the
dreary scene is shrouded in gloom.
Lastly, we must not fail to remember, in reading these expressions of
patriotic and personal grief, that they are the outpourings of the
heart of the poet before God. They are all addressed to God's ear;
they are all part of a prayer. Thus they illustrate the way in which
prayer takes the form of confiding in God. It is a great relief to be
able simply to tell Him everything. Perhaps, however, here we may
detect a note of complaint; but if so it is not a note of rebellion or
of unbelief. Although the evils from which the elegist and his people
are suffering so grievously are attributed to God in the most
uncompromising manner, the writer does not hesitate to look to God for
deliverance. Thus in the very midst of his lamentations he says that
his weeping is to continue "till the Lord look down, and behold from
heaven."[222] He will not cease weeping until this happens; but he
does not expect to have to spend all the remainder of his days in
tears. He is assured that God will hear, and answer, and deliver. The
time of the Divine response is quite unknown to him; it may be still
far off, and there may be much weary waiting to be endured first. But
it will come, and if no one can tell how long the interval of trial
may be, so also no one can say but that the deliverance may arrive
suddenly and with a surprise of mercy. Thus the poet weeps on, but in
undying hope.
[222] iii. 50.
This is the right attitude of the Christian mourner. We cannot
penetrate the mystery of God's times; but that they are in His own
hands is not to be denied. Therefore the test of faith is often given
in the necessity for indefinite waiting. To the man who trusts God
there is always a future. Whatever such a man may have to endure he
should find a place in his plaint for the word "until." He is not
plunged into everlasting night. He has but to endure until the day
dawn.