more of the Intelligence that contrived it, and keeps it continually
in working order, nay, lends it its very existence. More is known
about means and methods, but hardly more about aims and purposes. The
reflexion, how few are the master-conceptions which modern speculation
has added to the treasury of thought, should suggest humility to the
vainest and most self-confident of physical inquirers. In the very
dawn of philosophy the human mind appears to have anticipated as it
were by sudden flashes of insight some of the boldest hypotheses of
modern science, including that of Evolution itself.
The unchangeable or invariable laws of nature, that is to say, the
uniformity of sequence which we observe in physical phenomena, is not
to be regarded as a thing that explains itself. It is only intelligible
as the expression of the unchanging will of God. The prophet's word
is still true. It is God who "causes the vapours to rise from the end
of the earth," drawing them up into the air from oceans and lakes by
the simple yet beautiful and efficient action of the solar heat; it is
God who "makes lightnings for the rain," charging the clouds with the
electric fluid, to burst forth in blinding flashes when the opposing
currents meet. It is God who "brings the wind out of His treasuries."
In the prophet's time the winds were as great a mystery as the thunder
and lightning; it was not known whence they came nor whither they went.
But the knowledge that they are but currents of air due to variations of
temperature does not really deprive them of their wonder. Not only is it
impossible, in the last resort, to comprehend what heat is, what motion
is, what the thing moved is. A far greater marvel remains, which cries
aloud of God's wisdom and presence and sovereignty over all; and that
is the wonderful consilience of all the various powers and forces of
the natural world in making a home for man, and enabling so apparently
feeble a creature as he to live and thrive amidst the perpetual
interaction and collision of the manifold and mighty elements of the
universe.
The true author of all this magnificent system of objects and forces,
to the wonder and the glory of which only custom can blind us, is the
God of the prophet. This sublime, this just conception of God was
possible, for it was actually realized, altogether apart from the
influence of Hellenic philosophy and modern European science. But it
was by no means as common to the Semitic peoples. In Babylon, which
was at the time the focus of all earthly wisdom and power, in Babylon
the ancient mother of sciences and arts, a crude polytheism stultified
all the wisdom of the wise, and lent its sanction to a profound moral
corruption. Rapid and universal conquests, enormous wealth accruing
from the spoils and tributes of all nations, only subserved the luxury
and riotous living which issued in a general effeminacy and social
enervation; until the great fabric of empire, which Nabopalassar and
Nebuchadrezzar had reared by their military and political genius, sank
under the weight of its own vices.
Looking round upon this spectacle of superstitious folly, the prophet
declares that _all men are become too brute-like for knowledge_; too
degraded to appreciate the truth, the simplicity of a higher faith;
too besotted with the worship of a hundred vain idols, which were the
outward reflexion of their own diseased imaginations, to receive the
wisdom of the true religion, and to perceive especially the truth
just enunciated, that it is Iahvah who gives the rain and upon whom
all atmospheric changes depend (cf. xiv. 22): and thus, in the hour
of need, _every founder blushes for the image, because his molten
figure is a lie, and there is no breath in them_; because the lifeless
idol, the work of his hands, can lend no help. Perhaps both clauses
of the verse rather express a prophecy: _All men will be proven
brutish, destitute of knowledge; every founder will blush for the
graven image._ Wise and strong as the Babylonians supposed themselves
to be, the logic of events would undeceive them. They were doomed to
a rude awakening; to discover in the hour of defeat and surrender
that the molten idol was a delusion, that the work of their hands was
an embodied lie, void of life, powerless to save. _Vanity_--a mere
breath, nought--_are they, a work of knaveries_ (a term recurring
only in li. 18; the root seems to mean "to stammer," "to imitate");
_in the time of their visitation they will perish!_ or simply _they
perish!_--in the burning temples, in the crash of falling shrines.
It has happened so. At this day the temples of cedar and marble, with
their woodwork overlaid with bronze and silver and gold, of whose
glories the Babylonian sovereigns so proudly boast in their still
existing records, as "shining like the sun, and like the stars of
heaven," are shapeless heaps or rather mountains of rubbish, where
Arabs dig for building materials and treasure trove, and European
explorers for the relics of a civilisation and a superstition which
have passed away for ever. "Vana sunt, et opus risu dignum." In the
revolutions of time, which are the outward measures of the eternally
self-unfolding purposes of God, the word of the Judean prophets has
been amply fulfilled. Babylon and her idols are no more.
All other idols, too, must perish in like manner. _Thus shall ye say
of them: The gods who the_ heavens _and earth did not make, perish
from the earth and from under the heavens shall these!_ The assertion
that the idols of Babylon were doomed to destruction, was not the
whole of the prophetic message. It is connected with and founded upon
the antithetic assertion of the eternity of Iahvah. They will perish,
but He endures. The one eternal is El Elyon, the Most High God, the
Maker of heaven and earth. But heaven and earth and whatever partakes
only of their material nature are also doomed to pass away. And in
that day of the Lord, when the elements melt with fervent heat, and
the earth and the works that are therein shall be burnt up (2 Pet.
iii. 10), not only will the idols of the heathen world, and the tawdry
dolls which a degenerate church suffers to be adored as a kind of
magical embodiment of the Mother of God, but all other idols which
the sensebound heart of man makes to itself, vanish into nothingness
before that overwhelming revelation of the supremacy of God.
There is something amazing in the folly of worshipping man, whether
in the abstract form of the cultus of "Humanity," or in any of the
various forms of what is called "Hero-worship," or in the vulgar form
of self-worship, which is the religion of the selfish and the worldly.
To ascribe infallibility to any mortal, whether Pope or politician,
is to sin in the spirit of idolatry. The Maker of heaven and earth,
and He alone, is worthy of worship. "Where wast thou when I laid the
foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding" (Job
xxxviii. 4). No human wisdom nor power presided there; and to produce
the smallest of asteroids is still a task which lies infinitely beyond
the combined resources of modern science. Man and all that man has
created is nought in the scale of God's creation. He and all the
mighty works with which he amazes, overshadows, enslaves his little
world, will perish and pass away; only that will survive which he
builds of materials which are imperishable, fabrics of spiritual worth
and excellence and glory (1 Cor. iii. 13). A Nineveh, a Babylon, a
London, a Paris, may disappear; _but he that doeth the will of God
abideth for ever_ (1 John ii. 17). _Not like these_ (cf. verse 11 _ad
fin._) _is Jacob's Portion, but the Maker and Moulder of the All--He
is his heritage; Iahvah Sabaoth is His_ _name!_ (Both here and at li.
19 = xxviii. 19 the LXX. omits: _and Israel is the tribe_, which seems
to have been derived from Deut. xxxii. 9. Israel is elsewhere called
_Iahvah's heritage_, Ps. xxxiii. 12, and _portion_, Deut. xxxii. 9;
but that thought hardly suits the connexion here.)
_Not like these_: for He is the Divine Potter who moulded all things,
including the signs of heaven, and the idols of wood and metal, and
their foolish worshippers. And he is _Jacob's portion_; for the
knowledge and worship of Him was, in the Divine counsels, originally
assigned to Israel (cf. Deut. iv. 19; and xxxii. 8, according to the
true reading, preserved in the LXX.); and therefore Israel alone knows
Him and His glorious attributes. _Iahvah Sabaoth is His name_: the
Eternal, the Maker and Master of the hosts of heaven and earth, is the
aspect under which He has revealed Himself to the true representatives
of Israel, His servants the prophets.
The portion of Israel is his God--his abiding portion; of which
neither the changes of time nor the misconceptions of man can avail
to rob him. When all that is accidental and transitory is taken away,
this distinction remains: Israel's portion is his God. Iahvah was
indeed the national God of the Jews, argue some of our modern wise
ones; and therefore He cannot be identified with the universal Deity.
He has been developed, expanded, into this vast conception; but
originally He was but the private god of a petty tribe, the Lar of a
wandering household. Now herein is a marvellous thing. How was it that
this particular household god thus grew to infinite proportions, like
the genius emerging from the unsealed jar of Arab fable, until, from
His prime foothold on the tent-floor of a nomad family, He towered
above the stars and His form overshadowed the universe? How did it
come to pass that His prophet could ask in a tone of indisputable
truth, recognised alike by friend and foe, "Do not I fill heaven and
earth, saith Iahvah"? (Jer. xxiii. 24). How, that this immense, this
immeasurable expansion took place in this instance, and not in that of
any one of the thousand rival deities of surrounding and more powerful
tribes and nations? How comes it that we to-day are met to adore
Iahvah, and not rather one of the forgotten gods of Canaan or Egypt or
Babylon? Merodach and Nebo have vanished, but Iahvah is the Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ. It certainly looks very much as if the Hebrew
prophets were right; as if Iahvah were really the God of the creation
as well as the Portion of Jacob.
_The portion of Jacob._ Is His relation to that one people a
stumbling-block? Can we see no eternal truth in the statement of the
Psalmist that _the Lord's portion is His people_? Who can find fault
with the enthusiastic faith of holy men thus exulting in the knowledge
and love of God? It is a characteristic of all genuine religion,
this sweet, this elevating consciousness that God is _our_ God; this
profound sense that He has revealed Himself to us in a special and
peculiar and individual manner. But the actual historical results, as
well as the sacred books, prove that the sense of possessing God and
being possessed by Him was purer, stronger, deeper, more effectual,
more abiding, in Israel than in any other race of the ancient world.
One must tread warily upon slippery ground; but I cannot help
thinking that many of the arguments alleged against the probability
of God revealing Himself to man at all or to a single nation in
particular, are sufficiently met by the simple consideration that He
has actually done so. Any event whatever may be very improbable until
it has happened; and assuming that God has _not_ revealed Himself,
it may perhaps be shewn to be highly improbable that He would reveal
Himself. But, meanwhile, all religions and all faith and the phenomena
of conscience and the highest intuitions of reason presuppose this
improbable event as the fact apart from which they are insoluble
riddles. This is not to say that the precise manner of revelation--the
contact of the Infinite with the Finite Spirit--is definable. There
are many less lofty experiences of man which also are indefinable
and mysterious, but none the less actual and certain. Facts are
not explained by denial, which is about the most barren and feeble
attitude a man can take up in the presence of a baffling mystery. Nor
is it for man to prescribe conditions to God. He who made us and knows
us far better than we know ourselves, knows also how best to reveal
Himself to His creatures.
The special illumination of Israel, however, does not imply that no
light was vouchsafed elsewhere. The religious systems of other nations
furnish abundant evidence to the contrary. God "left not Himself
without witness," the silent witness of that beneficent order of the
natural world, which makes it possible for man to live, and to live
happily. St. Paul did not scruple to compliment even the degenerate
Athenians of his own day on the ground of their attention to religious
matters, and he could cite a Greek poet in support of his doctrine
that man is the offspring of the one God and Father of all.
We may see in the fact a sufficient indication of what St. Paul
would have said, had the nobler non-Christian systems fallen under
his cognisance; had heathenism become known to him not in the
heterogeneous polytheism of Hellas, which in his time had long since
lost what little moral influence it had ever possessed, nor in the
wild orgiastic nature worships of the Lesser Asia, which in their
thoroughly sensuous basis did dishonour alike to God and to man; but
in the sublime tenets of Zarathustra, with their noble morality and
deep reverence for the One God, the Spirit of all goodness and truth,
or in the reformed Brahmanism of Gautama the Buddha, with its grand
principle of self-renunciation and universal charity.
The peculiar glories of Bible religion are not dimmed in presence
of these other lights. Allowing for whatever is valuable in these
systems of belief, we may still allege that Bible religion comprises
all that is good in them, and has, besides, many precious features
peculiar to itself; we may still maintain that their excellences are
rather testimonies to the truth of the biblical teachings about God,
than difficulties in the way of a rational faith; that it would be
far more difficult to a thoughtful mind to accept the revelation of
God conveyed in the Bible, if it were the fact that no rays of Divine
light had cheered the darkness of the millions of struggling mortals
beyond the pale of Judaism, than it is under the actual circumstances
of the case: in short, that the truths implicated in imperfect
religions, isolated from all contact with Hebrew or Christian belief,
are a witness to and a foreshadowing of the truths of the gospel.
Our prophet declares that Jacob's portion--the God of Israel--is not
like the gods of contemporary peoples. How, then, does he conceive of
Him? Not as a metaphysical entity--a naked, perhaps empty abstraction
of the understanding. Not as the Absolute and Infinite Being, who is
out of all relation to space and time. His language--the language
of the Old Testament--possesses no adjectives like "Infinite,"
"Absolute," "Eternal," "Omniscient," "Omnipresent," nor even
"Almighty," although that word so often appears in our venerable
Authorized Version. It is difficult for us, who are the heirs of ages
of thought and intellectual toil, and whose thinking is almost wholly
carried on by means of abstract ideas, to realize a state of mind and
a habit of thought so largely different from our own as that of the
Hebrew people and even of the Hebrew prophets. Yet unless we make an
effort to realize it, however inadequately, unless we exert ourselves,
and strive manfully to enter through the gate of an instructed
imagination into that far-off stage of life and thought which presents
so many problems to the historical student, and hides in its obscurity
so many precious truths; we must inevitably fail to appreciate the
full significance, and consequently fail of appropriating the full
blessing of those wonderful prophecies of ancient Israel, which are
not for an age but for all time.
Let us, then, try to apprehend the actual point of view from which
the inspired Israelite regarded his God. In the first place, that
point of view was eminently practical. As a recent writer has forcibly
remarked, "The primitive mind does not occupy itself with things of no
practical importance, and it is only in the later stages of society
that we meet with traditional beliefs nominally accepted by every one
but practically regarded by none; or with theological speculations
which have an interest for the curious, but are not felt to have a
direct bearing on the concerns of life."
The pious Israelite could not indulge a morbidly acute and restlessly
speculative intellect with philosophical or scientific theories
about the Deity, His nature in Himself, His essential and accidental
attributes, His relation to the visible world. Neither did such theories
then exist ready made to his hand, nor did his inward impulses and the
natural course of thought urge him to pry into such abstruse matters,
and with cold irreverence to subject his idea of God to critical
analysis. Could he have been made to understand the attitude and the
demands of some modern disputants, he would have been apt to exclaim,
"Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out Shaddai
unto perfection? It is as high as heaven, what canst thou do? deeper
than hell, what canst thou know?" To find out and to know God as the
understanding finds out and knows, how can that ever become possible
to man? Such knowledge depends entirely upon processes of comparison;
upon the perception of similarity between the object investigated and
other known objects; upon accurate naming and classification. But who
can dream of successfully referring the Deity to a class? "To what
will ye liken God, or what likeness will ye compare unto Him?" In the
brief prophecy before us, as in the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, with
which it presents so many points of contact, we have a splendid protest
against all attempts at bringing the Most High within the limitations of
human cognition, and reducing God to the category of things known and
understood. Directed in the first instance against idolatry--against
vain efforts to find an adequate likeness of the Supreme in some one of
the numberless creations of His hand, and so to compare and gauge and
comprehend Himself,--that protest is still applicable, and with even
greater force, against the idolatrous tendencies of the present age:
when one school of devotees loudly declares,
"Thou, Nature, art our goddess; to thy law
Our services are bound: wherefore should we
Stand in the plague of custom?"
and another is equally loud in asserting that it has found the true
god in man himself; and another proclaims the divinity of brute
force, and feels no shame in advocating the sovereignty of those
gross instincts and passions which man shares with the beasts that
perish. It is an unworthy and an inadequate conception of God, which
identifies Him with Nature; it is a deplorably impoverished idea,
the mere outcome of philosophic despair, which identifies him with
Humanity; but what language can describe the grovelling baseness of
that habit of thought which knows of nothing higher than the sensual
appetite, and seeks nothing better than its continual indulgence;
which sees the native impress of sovereignty on the brow of passing
pleasure, and recognises the image and likeness of God in a temporary
association of depraved instincts?
It is to this last form of idolatry, this utter heathenism in the
moral life, that all other forms really converge, as St. Paul has
shewn in the introduction of his Epistle to the Romans, where, in
view of the unutterable iniquities which were familiar occurrences
in the world of his contemporaries, he affirms that moral decadence
of the most appalling character is ultimately traceable to a
voluntary indulgence of those idolatrous tendencies which ignore
God's revelation of Himself to the heart and reason, and prefer to
find their deity in something less awful in purity and holiness,
less averse to the defilements of sin, less conversant with the
secrets of the soul; and so, not liking to retain the true and only
God in knowledge, change His truth into a lie, and worship and
serve the creature more than the Creator: changing the glory of the
incorruptible God into an image made like unto corruptible man, or
even to birds and fourfooted beasts and creeping things.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] LXX. "for _they_ are afraid before them," לפניהם המה יחתו כי.
[40] This is the most natural interpretation of the passage according
to the Hebrew punctuation. Another is given below.
[41] It is against usage to divide the clause as Naegelsbach does,
"Vain instruction! It is wood!" or to render with Ewald "Simply vain
doctrine is the wood!" which would require the article (_ha'eç_).
VII.
_THE BROKEN COVENANT._
JEREMIAH xi., xii.
There is no visible break between these two chapters. They seem to
summarize the history of a particular episode in the prophet's career.
At the same time, the style is so peculiar, that it is not so easy,
as it might appear at a first glance, to determine exactly what it is
that the section has to tell us. When we come to take a closer look at
it, we find a thoroughly characteristic mixture of direct narrative
and soliloquy, of statement of facts and reflexion upon those facts,
of aspiration and prayer and prophecy, of self-communing and communing
with God. Careful analysis may perhaps furnish us with a clue to the
disentanglement of the general sense and drift of this characteristic
medley. We may thus hope to get a clearer insight into the bearing of
this old-world oracle upon our own needs and perplexities, our sins
and the fruit of our sins, what we have done and what we may expect
as the consequence of our doings. For the Word of God is "quick and
powerful." Its outward form and vesture may change with the passing
of time; but its substance never changes. The old interpreters die,
but the Word lives, and its life is a life of power. By that Word
men live in their successive generations; it is at once creative
and regulative; it is the seed of life in man, and it is the law of
that life. Apart from the Divine Word, man would be no more than a
brute gifted with understanding, but denied all answer to the higher
cravings of soul and spirit; a being whose conscious life was a mere
mockery; a self-tormentor, tantalized with vain surmises, tortured
with ever-recurring problems; longing for light, and beset with
never-lifting clouds of impenetrable darkness; the one sole instance,
among the myriads of sentient beings, of a creature whose wants Nature
refuses to satisfy, and whose lot it is to consume for ever in the
fires of hopeless desire.
The sovran Lord, who is the Eternal Wisdom, has not made such a mistake.
He provides satisfaction for all His creatures, according to the varying
degrees of their capacity, according to their rank in the scale of
being, so that all may rejoice in the fulness and the freedom of a happy
life for their allotted time. Man is no exception to the universal rule.
His whole constitution as God has fashioned it is such that he can find
his perfect satisfaction in the Word of the Lord. And the depth of his
dissatisfaction, the poignancy and the bitterness of his disappointment
and disgust at himself and at the world in which he finds himself, are
the strongest evidence that he has sought satisfaction in things that
cannot satisfy; that he has foolishly endeavoured to feed his soul upon
ashes, to still the cravings of his spirit with something other than
that Word of God which is the Bread of Life.