of the end for which individuality exists. The home has its development
of personality--for service. The peace and joy of religion nourish the
soul--for service. Life may be conquered in various regions, and a man
grow fit for ever greater victories, ever nobler service. But with the
end the means and spirit of each effort are so interwoven that alike in
home, and church, and society the human soul must move in uttermost
faithfulness and simplicity or fail from the Divine victory that wins
the prize.
III.
_AT BOCHIM; THE FIRST PROPHET VOICE._
JUDGES ii. 1-5.
From the time of Abraham on to the settlement in Canaan the Israelites
had kept the faith of the one God. They had their origin as a people in
a decisive revolt against polytheism. Of the great Semite forefather of
the Jewish people, it has been finely said, "He bore upon his forehead
the seal of the Absolute God, upon which was written, This race will rid
the earth of superstition." The character and structure of the Hebrew
tongue resisted idolatry. It was not an imaginative language; it had no
mythological colour. We who have inherited an ancient culture of quite
another kind do not think it strange to read or sing:
"Hail, smiling morn, that tip'st the hills with gold,
Whose rosy fingers ope the gates of day,
Who the gay face of nature dost unfold,
At whose bright presence darkness flies away."
These lines, however, are full of latent mythology. The "smiling morn"
is Aurora, the darkness that flies away before the dawn is the Erebus of
the Greeks. Nothing of this sort was possible in Hebrew literature. In
it all change, all life, every natural incident are ascribed to the will
and power of one Supreme Being. "Jehovah thundered in the heavens and
the Highest gave His voice, hailstones and coals of fire." "By the
breath of God ice is given, and the breadth of the waters is
straitened." "Behold, He spreadeth His light around Him; ... He covereth
His hands with the lightning." "Thou makest darkness and it is night."
Always in forms like these Hebrew poetry sets forth the control of
nature by its invisible King. The pious word of Fenelon, "What do I see
in nature? God; God everywhere; God alone," had its germ, its very
substance, in the faith and language of patriarchal times.
There are some who allege that this simple faith in one God, sole Origin
and Ruler of nature and life, impoverished the thought and speech of the
Hebrews. It was in reality the spring and safeguard of their spiritual
destiny. Their very language was a sacred inheritance and preparation.
From age to age it served a Divine purpose in maintaining the idea of
the unity of God; and the power of that idea never failed their prophets
nor passed from the soul of the race. The whole of Israel's literature
sets forth the universal sway and eternal righteousness of Him who
dwells in the high and lofty place, Whose name is Holy. In canto and
strophe of the great Divine Poem, the glory of the One Supreme burns
with increasing clearness, till in Christ its finest radiance flashes
upon the world.
While the Hebrews were in Egypt, the faith inherited from patriarchal
times must have been sorely tried, and, all circumstances considered, it
came forth wonderfully pure. "The Israelites saw Egypt as the Mussulman
Arab sees pagan countries, entirely from the outside, perceiving only
the surface and external things." They indeed carried with them into the
desert the recollection of the sacred bulls or calves of which they had
seen images at Hathor and Memphis. But the idol they made at Horeb was
intended to represent their Deliverer, the true God, and the swift and
stern repression by Moses of that symbolism and its pagan incidents
appears to have been effectual. The tribes reached Canaan substantially
free from idolatry, though teraphim or fetishes may have been used in
secret with magical ceremonies. The religion of the people generally was
far from spiritual, yet there was a real faith in Jehovah as the
protector of the national life, the guardian of justice and truth. From
this there was no falling away when the Reubenites and Gadites on the
east of Jordan erected an altar for themselves. "The Lord God of gods,"
they said, "He knoweth, and Israel he shall know if it be in rebellion,
or if in transgression against the Lord." The altar was called _Ed_, a
witness between east and west that the faith of the one Living God was
still to unite the tribes.
But the danger to Israel's fidelity came when there began to be
intercourse with the people of Canaan, now sunk from the purer thought
of early times. Everywhere in the land of the Hittites and Amorites,
Hivites and Jebusites, there were altars and sacred trees, pillars and
images used in idolatrous worship. The ark and the altar of Divine
religion, established first at Gilgal near Jericho, afterwards at Bethel
and then at Shiloh, could not be frequently visited, especially by those
who settled towards the southern desert and in the far north. Yet the
necessity for religious worship of some kind was constantly felt; and as
afterwards the synagogues gave opportunity for devotional gatherings
when the Temple could not be reached, so in the earlier time there came
to be sacred observances on elevated places, a windy threshing-floor,
or a hill-top already used for heathen sacrifice. Hence, on the one
hand, there was the danger that worship might be entirely neglected, on
the other hand the grave risk that the use of heathen occasions and
meeting-places should lead to heathen ritual, and those who came
together on the hill of Baal should forget Jehovah. It was the latter
evil that grew; and while as yet only a few Hebrews easily led astray
had approached with kid or lamb a pagan altar, the alarm was raised. At
Bochim a Divine warning was uttered which found echo in the hearts of
the people.
There appears to have been a great gathering of the tribes at some spot
near Bethel. We see the elders and heads of families holding council of
war and administration, the thoughts of all bent on conquest and family
settlement. Religion, the purity of Jehovah's worship, are forgotten in
the business of the hour. How shall the tribes best help each other in
the struggle that is already proving more arduous than they expected?
Dan is sorely pressed by the Amorites. The chiefs of the tribe are here
telling their story of hardship among the mountains. The Asherites have
failed in their attack upon the sea-board towns Accho and Achzib; in
vain have they pressed towards Zidon. They are dwelling among the
Canaanites and may soon be reduced to slavery. The reports from other
tribes are more hopeful; but everywhere the people of the land are hard
to overcome. Should Israel not remain content for a time, make the best
of circumstances, cultivate friendly intercourse with the population it
cannot dispossess? Such a policy often commends itself to those who
would be thought prudent; it is apt to prove a fatal policy.
Suddenly a spiritual voice is heard, clear and intense, and all others
are silent. From the sanctuary of God at Gilgal one comes whom the
people have not expected; he comes with a message they cannot choose but
hear. It is a prophet with the burden of reproof and warning. Jehovah's
goodness, Jehovah's claim are declared with Divine ardour; with Divine
severity the neglect of the covenant is condemned. Have the tribes of
God begun to consort with the people of the land? Are they already
dwelling content under the shadow of idolatrous groves, in sight of the
symbols of Ashtoreth? Are they learning to swear by Baal and Melcarth
and looking on while sacrifices are offered to these vile masters? Then
they can no longer hope that Jehovah will give them the country to
enjoy; the heathen shall remain as thorns in the side of Israel and
their gods shall be a snare. It is a message of startling power. From
the hopes of dominion and the plans of worldly gain the people pass to
spiritual concern. They have offended their Lord; His countenance is
turned from them. A feeling of guilt falls on the assembly. "It came to
pass that the people lifted up their voice and wept."
* * * * *
This lamentation at Bochim is the second note of religious feeling and
faith in the Book of Judges. The first is the consultation of the
priests and the oracle referred to in the opening sentence of the book.
Jehovah Who had led them through the wilderness was their King, and
unless He went forth as the unseen Captain of the host no success could
be looked for. "They asked of Jehovah, saying, Who shall go up for us
first against the Canaanites, to fight against them?" In this appeal
there was a measure of faith which is neither to be scorned nor
suspected. The question indeed was not whether they should fight at
all, but how they should fight so as to succeed, and their trust was in
a God thought of as pledged to them, solely concerned for them. So far
accordingly there is nothing exemplary in the circumstances. Yet we find
a lesson for Christian nations. There are many in our modern parliaments
who are quite ready to vote national prayer in war-time and thanksgiving
for victories, who yet would never think, before undertaking a war, of
consulting those best qualified to interpret the Divine will. The
relation between religion and the state has this fatal hitch, that
however Christian our governments profess to be, the Christian thinkers
of the country are not consulted on moral questions, not even on a
question so momentous as that of war. It is passion, pride, or
diplomacy, never the wisdom of Christ, that leads nations in the
critical moments of their history. Who then scorn, who suspect the early
Hebrew belief? Those only who have no right; those who as they laugh at
God and faith shut themselves from the knowledge by which alone his can
be understood; and, again, those who in their own ignorance and pride
unsheathe the sword without reference to Him in Whom they profess to
believe. We admit none of these to criticise Israel and its faith.
At Bochim, where the second note of religious feeling is struck, a
deeper and clearer note, we find the prophet listened to. He revives the
sense of duty, he kindles a Divine sorrow in the hearts of the people.
The national assembly is conscience-stricken. Let us allow this quick
contrition to be the result, in part, of superstitious fear. Very rarely
is spiritual concern quite pure. In general it is the consequences of
transgression rather than the evil of it that press on the minds of
men. Forebodings of trouble and calamity are more commonly causes of
sorrow than the loss of fellowship with God; and if we know this to be
the case with many who are convicted of sin under the preaching of the
gospel, we cannot wonder to find the penitence of old Hebrew times
mingled with superstition. Nevertheless, the people are aware of the
broken covenant, burdened with a sense that they have lost the favour of
their unseen Guide. There can be no doubt that the realization of sin
and of justice turned against them is one cause of their tears.
Here, again, if there is a difference between Israel and Christian
nations, it is not in favour of the latter. Are modern senates ever
overcome by conviction of sin? Those who are in power seem to have no
fear that they may do wrong. Glorifying their blunders and forgetting
their errors, they find no occasion for self-reproach, no need to sit in
sackcloth and ashes. Now and then, indeed, a day of fasting and
humiliation is ordered and observed in state; the sincere Christian for
his part feeling how miserably formal it is, how far from the
spontaneous expression of abasement and remorse. God is called upon to
help a people who have not considered their ways, who design no
amendment, who have not even suspected that the Divine blessing may come
in still further humbling. And turning to private life, is there not as
much of self-justification, as little of real humility and faith? The
shallow nature of popular Christianity is seen here, that so few can
read in disappointment and privation anything but disaster, or submit
without disgust and rebellion to take a lower place at the table of
Providence. Our weeping is so often for what we longed to gain or wished
to keep in the earthly and temporal region, so seldom for what we have
lost or should fear to lose in the spiritual. We grieve when we should
rather rejoice that God has made us feel our need of Him, and called us
again to our true blessedness.
* * * * *
The scene at Bochim connects itself very notably with one nine hundred
and fifty years later. The poor fragments of the exiled tribes have been
gathered again in the land of their fathers. They are rebuilding
Jerusalem and the Temple. Ezra has led back a company from Babylon and
has brought with him, by the favour of Artaxerxes, no small treasure of
silver and gold for the house of God. To his astonishment and grief he
hears the old tale of alliance with the inhabitants of the land,
intermarriage even of Levites, priests and princes of Israel with women
of the Canaanite races. In the new settlement of Palestine the error of
the first is repeated. Ezra calls a solemn assembly in the Temple
court--"every one that trembles at the words of the God of Israel." Till
the evening sacrifice he sits prostrate with grief, his garment rent,
his hair torn and dishevelled. Then on his knees before the Lord he
spreads forth his hands in prayer. The trespasses of a thousand years
afflict him, afflict the faithful. "After all that is come upon us for
our evil deeds, shall we again break Thy commandments, and join in
affinity with the peoples that do these abominations? wouldest not Thou
be angry with us till Thou hadst consumed us so that there should be no
remnant nor any to escape?... Behold we are before Thee in our
guiltiness; for none can stand before Thee because of this." The
impressive lament of Ezra and those who join in his confessions draws
together a great congregation, and the people weep very sore.
Nine centuries and a half appear a long time in the history of a nation.
What has been gained during the period? Is the weeping at Jerusalem in
Ezra's time, like the weeping at Bochim, a mark of no deeper feeling, no
keener penitence? Has there been religious advance commensurate with the
discipline of suffering, defeat, slaughter and exile, dishonoured kings,
a wasted land? Have the prophets not achieved anything? Has not the
Temple in its glory, in its desolation, spoken of a Heavenly power, a
Divine rule, the sense of which entering the souls of the people has
established piety, or at least a habit of separateness from heathen
manners and life? It may be hard to distinguish and set forth the gain
of those centuries. But it is certain that while the weeping at Bochim
was the sign of a fear that soon passed away, the weeping in the Temple
court marked a new beginning in Hebrew history. By the strong action of
Ezra and Nehemiah the mixed marriages were dissolved, and from that time
the Jewish people became, as they never were before, exclusive and
separate. Where nature would have led the nation ceased to go. More and
more strictly the law was enforced; the age of puritanism began. So, let
us say, the sore discipline had its fruit.
And yet it is with a reservation only we can enjoy the success of those
reformers who drew the sharp line between Israel and his heathen
neighbours, between Jew and Gentile. The vehemence of reaction urged the
nation towards another error--Pharisaism. Nothing could be purer,
nothing nobler than the desire to make Israel a holy people. But to
inspire men with religious zeal and yet preserve them from spiritual
pride is always difficult, and in truth those Hebrew reformers did not
see the danger. There came to be, in the new development of faith, zeal
enough, jealousy enough, for the purity of religion and life, but along
with these a contempt for the heathen, a fierce enmity towards the
uncircumcised, which made the interval till Christ appeared a time of
strife and bloodshed worse than any that had been before. From the
beginning the Hebrews were called with a holy calling, and their future
was bound up with their faithfulness to it. Their ideal was to be
earnest and pure, without bitterness or vainglory; and that is still the
ideal of faith. But the Jewish people like ourselves, weak through the
flesh, came short of the mark on one side or passed beyond it on the
other. During the long period from Joshua to Nehemiah there was too
little heat, and then a fire was kindled which burned a sharp narrow
path, along which the life of Israel has gone with ever-lessening
spiritual force. The unfulfilled ideal still waits, the unique destiny
of this people of God still bears them on.
Bochim is a symbol. There the people wept for a transgression but half
understood and a peril they could not rightly dread. There was genuine
sorrow, there was genuine alarm. But it was the prophetic word, not
personal experience, that moved the assembly. And as at Florence, when
Savonarola's word, shaking with alarm a people who had no vision of
holiness, left them morally weaker as it fell into silence, so the
weeping at Bochim passed like a tempest that has bowed and broken the
forest trees. The chiefs of Israel returned to their settlements with a
new sense of duty and peril; but Canaanite civilization had attractions,
Canaanite women a refinement which captivated the heart. And the
civilization, the refinement, were associated with idolatry. The myths
of Canaan, the poetry of Tammuz and Astarte, were fascinating and
seductive. We wonder not that the pure faith of God was corrupted, but
that it survived. In Egypt the heathen worship was in a foreign tongue,
but in Canaan the stories of the gods were whispered to Israelites in a
language they knew, by their own kith and kin. In many a home among the
mountains of Ephraim or the skirts of Lebanon the pagan wife, with her
superstitious fears, her dread of the anger of this god or that goddess,
wrought so on the mind of the Jewish husband that he began to feel her
dread and then to permit and share her sacrifices. Thus idolatry invaded
Israel, and the long and weary struggle between truth and falsehood
began.
We have spoken of Bochim as a symbol, and to us it may be the symbol of
this, that the very thing which men put from them in horror and with
tears, seeing the evil, the danger of it, does often insinuate itself
into their lives. The messenger is heard, and while he speaks how near
God is, how awful is the sense of His being! A thrill of keen feeling
passes from soul to soul. There are some in the gathering who have more
spiritual insight than the rest, and their presence raises the heat of
emotion. But the moment of revelation and of fervour passes, the company
breaks up, and very soon those who have won no vision of holiness, who
have only feared as they entered into the cloud, are in the common world
again. The finer strings of the soul were made to thrill, the conscience
was touched; but if the will has not been braced, if the man's reason
and resoluteness are not engaged by a new conception of life, the
earthly will resume control and God will be less known than before. So
there are many cast down to-day, crying to God in trouble of soul for
evil done or evil which they are tempted to do, who to-morrow among the
Canaanites will see things in another light. A man cannot be a recluse.
He must mingle in business and in society with those who deride the
thoughts that have moved him and laugh at his seriousness. The impulse
to something better soon exhausts itself in this cold atmosphere. He
turns upon his own emotion with contempt. The words that came with
Divine urgency, the man whose face was like that of an angel of God, are
already subjects of uneasy jesting, will soon be thrust from memory.
Over the interlude of superficial anxiety the mind goes back to its old
haunts, its old plans and cravings. The religious teacher, while he is
often in no way responsible for this sad recoil, should yet be ever on
his guard against the risk of weakening the moral fibre, of leaving men
as Christ never left them, flaccid and infirm.
Again, there are cases that belong not to the history of a day, but to
the history of a life. One may say, when he hears the strangely tempting
voices that whisper in the twilight streets, "Am I a dog that from the
holy traditions of my people and country I should fall away to these?"
At first he flies the distasteful entreaty of the new nature-cult, its
fleshly art and song, its nefarious science. But the voices are
persistent. It is the perfecting of man and woman to which they invite.
It is not vice but freedom, brightness, life and the courage to enjoy it
they cunningly propose. There is not much of sweetness; the voices rise,
they become stringent and overbearing. If the man would not be a fool,
would not lose the good of the age into which he is born, he will be
done with unnatural restraints, the bondage of purity. Thus entreaty
passes into mastery. Here is truth; there also seems to be fact. Little
by little the subtle argument is so advanced that the degradation once
feared is no longer to be seen. It is progress now; it is full
development, the assertion of power and privilege, that the soul
anticipates. How fatal is the lure, how treacherous the vision, the man
discovers when he has parted with that which even through deepest
penitence he may never regain. People are denying, and it has to be
reasserted that there is a covenant which the soul of man has to keep
with God. The thought is "archaic," and they would banish it. But it
stands the great reality for man; and to keep that covenant in the grace
of the Divine Spirit, in the love of the holiest, in the sacred
manliness learned of Christ, is the only way to the broad daylight and
the free summits of life. How can nature be a saviour? The suggestion is
childish. Nature, as we all know, allows the hypocrite, the swindler,
the traitor, as well as the brave, honest man, the pure, sweet woman. Is
it said that man has a covenant with nature? On the temporal and
prudential side of his activities that is true. He has relations with
nature which must be apprehended, must be wisely realised. But the
spiritual kingdom to which he belongs requires a wider outlook, loftier
aims and hopes. The efforts demanded by nature have to be brought into
harmony with those diviner aspirations. Man is bound to be prudent,
brave, wise for eternity. He is warned of his own sin and urged to fly
from it. This is the covenant with God which is wrought into the very
constitution of his moral being.
* * * * *
It would be a mistake to suppose that the scene at Bochim and the words
which moved the assembly to tears had no lasting effect whatever. The
history deals with outstanding facts of the national development. We
hear chiefly of heroes and their deeds, but we shall not doubt that
there were minds which kept the glow of truth and the consecration of
penitential tears. The best lives of the people moved quietly on, apart
from the commotions and strifes of the time. Rarely are the great
political names even of a religious community those of holy and devout
men, and, undoubtedly, this was true of Israel in the time of the
judges. If we were to reckon only by those who appear conspicuously in
these pages, we should have to wonder how the spiritual strain of
thought and feeling survived. But it did survive; it gained in clearness
and force. There were those in every tribe who kept alive the sacred
traditions of Sinai and the desert, and Levites throughout the land did
much to maintain among the people the worship of God. The great names of
Abraham and Moses, the story of their faith and deeds, were the text of
many an impressive lesson. So the light of piety did not go out; Jehovah
was ever the Friend of Israel, even in its darkest day, for in the heart
of the nation there never ceased to be a faithful remnant maintaining
the fear and obedience of the Holy Name.
IV.
_AMONG THE ROCKS OF PAGANISM._
JUDGES ii. 7-23.