trying others we use some catchword of our own Gilead by which to judge
their religion or their virtue. The danger of the earnest, alike in
religion, politics and philanthropy, is to make their own favourite
plans or doctrines the test of all worth and belief. Within our churches
and in the ranks of social reformers distinctions are made where there
should be none and old strifes are deepened. There are of course certain
great principles of judgment. Christianity is founded on historical fact
and revealed truth. "Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is
come in the flesh is of God." In such a saying lies a test which is no
tribal _Shibboleth_. And on the same level are others by which we are
constrained at all hazards to try ourselves and those who speak and
write. Certain points of morality are vital and must be pressed. When a
writer says, "In mediaeval times the recognition that every natural
impulse in a healthy and mature being has a claim to gratification was a
victory of unsophisticated nature over the asceticism of
Christianity"--we use no Shibboleth-test in condemning him. He is judged
and found wanting by principles on which the very existence of human
society depends. It is in no spirit of bigotry but in faithfulness to
the essentials of life and the hope of mankind that the sternest
denunciation is hurled at such a man. In plain terms he is an enemy of
the race.
Passing from cases like this, observe others in which a measure of
dogmatism must be allowed to the ardent. Where there are no strong
opinions strenuously held and expressed little impression will be made.
The prophets in every age have spoken dogmatically; and vehemence of
speech is not to be denied to the temperance reformer, the apostle of
purity, the enemy of luxurious self-indulgence and cant. Moral
indignation must express itself strongly; and in the dearth of moral
conviction we can bear with those who would even drag us to the ford and
make us utter their _Shibboleth_. They go too far, people say: perhaps
they do; but there are so many who will not move at all except in the
way of pleasure.
Now all this is clear. But we must return to the danger of making one
aspect of morality the sole test of morals, one religious idea the sole
test of religion and so framing a formula by which men separate
themselves from their friends and pass narrow bitter judgments on their
kinsfolk. Let sincere belief and strong feeling rise to the prophetic
strain; let there be ardour, let there be dogmatism and vehemence. But
beyond urgent words and strenuous example, beyond the effort to persuade
and convert there lie arrogance and the usurpation of a judgment which
belongs to God alone. In proportion as a Christian is living the life of
Christ he will repel the claim of any other man however devout to force
his opinion or his action. All attempts at terrorism betray a lack of
spirituality. The Inquisition was in reality the world oppressing
spiritual life. And so in less degree, with less truculence, the
unspiritual element may show itself even in company with a fervent
desire to serve the gospel. There need be no surprise that attempts to
dictate to Christendom or any part of Christendom are warmly resented by
those who know that religion and liberty cannot be separated. The true
church of Christ has a firm grasp of what it believes and is aiming at,
and by its resoluteness it bears on human society. It is also gracious
and persuasive, reasonable and open, and so gathers men into a free and
frank brotherhood, revealing to them the loftiest duty, leading them
towards it in the way of liberty. Let men who understand this try each
other and it will never be by limited and suspicious formulae.
Amidst pedants, critics, hot and bitter partisans, we see Christ moving
in divine freedom. Fine is the subtlety of His thought in which the
ideas of spiritual liberty and of duty blend to form one luminous
strain. Fine are the clearness and simplicity of that daily life in
which He becomes the way and the truth to men. It is the ideal life,
beyond all mere rules, disclosing the law of the kingdom of heaven; it
is free and powerful because upheld by the purpose that underlies all
activity and development. Are we endeavouring to realize it? Scarcely at
all: the bonds are multiplying not falling away; no man is bold to claim
his right, nor generous to give others their room. In this age of Christ
we seem neither to behold nor desire His manhood. Shall this always be?
Shall there not arise a race fit for liberty because obedient, ardent,
true? Shall we not come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge
of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature
of the fulness of Christ?
* * * * *
For a little we must return to Jephthah, who after his great victory and
his strange dark act of faith judged Israel but six years. He appears in
striking contrast to other chiefs of his time and even of far later
times in the purity of his home life, the more notable that his father
set no example of good. Perhaps the legacy of dispeace and exile
bequeathed to him with a tainted birth had taught the Gileadite, rude
mountaineer as he was, the value of that order which his people too
often despised. The silence of the history which is elsewhere careful to
speak of wives and children sets Jephthah before us as a kind of
puritan, with another and perhaps greater distinction than the desire to
avoid war. The yearly lament for his daughter kept alive the memory not
only of the heroine but of one judge in Israel who set a high example of
family life. A sad and lonely man he went those few years of his rule in
Gilead, but we may be sure that the character and will of the Holy One
became more clear to him after he had passed the dreadful hill of
sacrifice. The story is of the old world, terrible; yet we have found in
Jephthah a sublime sincerity, and we may believe that such a man though
he never repented of his vow would come to see that the God of Israel
demanded another and a nobler sacrifice, that of life devoted to His
righteousness and truth.
XIX.
_THE ANGEL IN THE FIELD._
JUDGES xiii. 1-18.
In our ignorance not in our knowledge, in our blindness not in our light
we call nature secular and think of the ordinary course of events as a
series of cold operations, governed by law and force, having nothing to
do with divine purpose and love. Oftentimes we think so, and suffer
because we do not understand. It is a pitiful error. The natural could
not exist, there could be neither substance nor order without the
over-nature which is at once law and grace. Vitality, movement are not
an efflorescence heralding decay--as to the atheist; they are not the
activity of an evil spirit--as sometimes to confused and falsely
instructed faith. They are the outward and visible action of God, the
hem of the vesture on which we lay hold and feel Him. In the seen and
temporal there is a constant presence maintaining order, giving purpose
and end. Were it otherwise man could not live an hour; even in
selfishness and vileness he is a creature of two worlds which yet are
one, so closely are they interwoven. At every point natural and
supernatural are blended, the higher shaping the development of the
lower, accomplishing in and through the lower a great spiritual plan.
This it is which gives depth and weight to our experience,
communicating the dignity of the greatest moral and spiritual issues to
the meanest, darkest human life. Everywhere, always, man touches God
though he know Him not.
No surprise, therefore, is excited by the modes of speech and thought we
come upon as we read Scripture. The surprise would be in not coming upon
them. If we found the inspired writers divorcing God from the world and
thinking of "nature" as a dark chamber of sin and torture echoing with
His curse, there would be no profit in studying this old volume. Then
indeed we might turn from it in discontent and scorn, even as some cast
it aside just because it is the revelation of God dwelling with men upon
the earth.
But what do the writers of faith mean when they tell of divine
messengers coming to peasants at labour in the fields, speaking to them
of events common to the race--the birth of some child, the defeat of a
rival tribe--as affairs of the spiritual even more than of the temporal
region? The narratives simple yet daring which affirm the mingling of
divine purpose and action with human life give us the deepest science,
the one real philosophy. Why do we have to care and suffer for each
other? What are our sin and sorrow? These are not material facts; they
are of quite another range. Always man is more than dust, better or
worse than clay. Human lives are linked together in a gracious and awful
order the course of which is now clearly marked, now obscurely
traceable; and if it were in our power to revive the history of past
ages, to mark the operation of faith and unbelief among men, issuing in
virtue and nobleness on the one hand, in vice and lethargy on the other,
we should see how near heaven is to earth, how rational a thing is
prophecy, not only as relating to masses of men but to particular
lives. It is our stupidity not our wisdom that starts back from
revelations of the over-world as if they confused what would otherwise
be clear.
In more than one story of the Bible the motherhood of a simple peasant
woman is a cause of divine communications and supernatural hopes. Is
this amazing, incredible? What then is motherhood itself? In the coming
and care of frail existences, the strange blending in one great
necessity of the glad and the severe, the honourable and the
humiliating, with so many possibilities of failure in duty, of error and
misunderstanding ere the needful task is finished, death ever waiting on
life, and agony on joy--in all this do we not find such a manifestation
of the higher purpose as might well be heralded by words and signs? Only
the order of God and His redemption can explain this "nature." Right in
the path of atheistic reasoners, and of others not atheists, lie facts
of human life which on their theory of naturalism are simply
confounding, too great at once for the causes they admit and the ends
they foresee. And if reason denies the possibility of prediction
relating to these facts we need not wonder. Without philosophy or faith
the range of denial is unlimited.
From the quaint and simple narrative before us the imaginative
rationalist turns away with the one word--"myth." His criticism is of a
sort which for all its ease and freedom gives the world nothing. We
desire to know why the human mind harbours thoughts of the kind, why it
has ideas of God and of a supernatural order, and how these work in
developing the race. Have they been of service? Have they given strength
and largeness to poor rude lives and so proved a great reality? If so,
the word myth is inadmissible. It sets falsehood at the source of
progress and of good.
Here are two Hebrew peasants, in a period of Philistine domination more
than a thousand years before the Christian era. Of their condition we
know only what a few brief sentences can tell in a history concerned
chiefly with the facts of a divine order in which men's lives have an
appointed place and use. It is certain that a thorough knowledge of this
Danite family, its own history and its part in the history of Israel,
would leave no difficulty for faith. Belief in the fore-ordination of
all human existence and the constant presence of God with men and women
in their endurance, their hope and yearning would be forced upon the
most sceptical mind. The insignificance of the occasion marked by a
prediction given in the name of God may astonish some. But what is
insignificant? Wherever divine predestination and authority extend, and
that is throughout the whole universe, nothing can properly be called
insignificant. The laws according to which material things and forces
are controlled by God touch the minutest particles of matter, determine
the shape of a dew-drop as certainly as the form of a world. At every
point in human life, the birth of a child in the poorest cottage as well
as of the heir to an empire, the same principles of heredity, the same
disposition of affairs to leave room for that life and to work out its
destiny underlie the economy of the world.
A life is to appear. It is not an interposition or interpolation. No
event, no life is ever thrust into an age without relation to the past;
no purpose is formed in the hour of a certain prophecy. For Samson as
for every actor distinguished or obscure upon the stage of the world
the stars and the seasons have co-operated and all that has been done
under the sun has gone to make a place for him. One who knows this can
speak strongly and clearly. One who knows what hinders and what is sure
to aid the fulfilment of a great destiny can counsel wisely. And so the
angel of Jehovah, a messenger of the spiritual covenant, is no mere
vehicle of a prediction he does not understand. Without hesitation he
speaks to the woman in the field of what her son shall do. By the story
of God's dealings with Israel, by the experiences of tribe and family
and individual soul since the primitive age, by the simple faith of
these parents that are to be and the honest energy of their humble lives
he is prepared to announce to them their honour and their duty. "Thou
shalt bear a son and he shall begin to deliver Israel." The messenger
has had his preparation of thought, inquiry deep devout and pondering,
ere he became fit to announce the word of God. No seer serves the age to
which he is sent with that which costs him nothing, and here as
elsewhere the law of all ministry to God and man must apply to the
preparation and work of the revealer.
The personality of the messenger was carefully concealed. "A man of God
whose countenance was like that of an angel of God very terrible"--so
runs the pathetic, suggestive description; but the hour was too intense
for mere curiosity. The honest mind does not ask the name and social
standing of a messenger but only--Does he speak God's truth? Does he
open life? There are few perhaps, to-day, who are simple and intelligent
enough for this; few, therefore, to whom divine messages come. It is the
credentials we are anxious about, and the prophet waits unheard while
people are demanding his family and tribe, his college and reputation.
Are these satisfactory? Then they will listen. But let no prophet come
to them unnamed. Yet of all importance to us as to Manoah and his wife
are the message, the revelation, the announcement of privilege and duty.
Where that divine order is disclosed which lies too deep for our own
discovery but once revealed stirs and kindles our nature, the prophet
needs no certification.
The child that was to be born, a gift of God, a divine charge, was
promised to these parents. And in the case of every child born into the
world there is a divine predestination which whether it has been
recognized by the parents or not gives dignity to his existence from the
first. There are natural laws and spiritual laws, the gathering together
of energies and needs and duties which make the life unique, the care of
it sacred. It is a new force in the world--a new vessel, frail as yet,
launched on the sea of time. In it some stores of the divine goodness,
some treasures of heavenly force are embarked. As it holds its way
across the ocean in sunshine or shadow, this life will be watched by the
divine eye, breathed gently upon by the summer airs or buffeted by the
storms of God. Does heaven mind the children? "In heaven their angels do
always behold the face of My Father."
In the marvellous ordering of divine providence nothing is more
calculated than fatherhood and motherhood to lift human life into the
high ranges of experience and feeling. Apart from any special message or
revelation, assuming only an ordinary measure of thoughtfulness and
interest in the unfolding of life, there is here a new dignity the sense
of which connects the task of those who have it with the creative energy
of God. Everywhere throughout the world we can trace a more or less
clear understanding of this. The tide of life is felt to rise as the new
office, the new responsibility are grasped. The mother is become--
"A link among the days to knit
The generations each to each."
The father has a sacred trust, a new and nobler duty to which his
manhood is entirely pledged in the sight of that great God who is the
Father of all spirits, doubly and trebly pledged to truth and purity and
courage. It is the coronation of life; and the child, drawing father and
mother to itself, is rightly the object of keenest interest and most
assiduous care.
The interest lies greatly in this, that to the father and mother first,
then to the world there may be untold possibilities of good in the
existence which has begun. Apart from any prophecy like that given
regarding Samson we have truly what may be called a special promise from
God in the dawning energy of every child-life. By the cradle surely, if
anywhere, hope sacred and heavenly may be indulged. With what earnest
glances will the young eyes look by-and-by from face to face. With what
new and keen love will the child-heart beat. Enlarging its grasp from
year to year the mind will lay hold on duty and the will address itself
to the tasks of existence. This child will be a heroine of home, a
helper of society, a soldier of the truth, a servant of God. Does the
mother dream long dreams as she bends over the cradle? Does the father,
one indeed amongst millions, yet with his special distinction and
calling, imagine for the child a future better than his own? It is well.
By the highest laws and instincts of our humanity it is right and good.
Here men and women, the rudest and least taught, live in the immaterial
world of love, faith, duty.
We observe the anxiety of Manoah and his wife to learn the special
method of training which should fit their child for his task. The
father's prayer so soon as he heard of the divine annunciation was, "O
Lord, let the man of God whom Thou didst send come again unto us and
teach us what we shall do unto the child that shall be born." Conscious
of ignorance and inexperience, feeling the weight of responsibility, the
parents desired to have authoritative direction in their duty, and their
anxiety was the deeper because their child was to be a deliverer in
Israel. In their home on the hillside, where the cottages of Zorah
clustered overlooking the Philistine plain, they were frequently
disturbed by the raiders who swept up the valley of Sorek from Ashdod
and Ekron. They had often wondered when God would raise up a deliverer
as of old, some Deborah or Gideon to end the galling oppression. Now the
answer to many a prayer and hope was coming, and in their own home the
hero was to be cradled. We cannot doubt that this made them feel the
pressure of duty and the need of wisdom. Yet the prayer of Manoah was
one which every father has need to present, though the circumstances of
a child's birth have nothing out of the most ordinary course.
To each human mind are given powers which require special fostering,
peculiarities of temperament and feeling which ought to be specially
considered. One way will not serve in the upbringing of two children.
Even the most approved method of the time, whether that of private
tutelage or public instruction, may thwart individuality; and if the way
be ignorant and rough the original faculty will at its very springing be
distorted. It is but the barest commonplace, yet with what frequency it
needs to be urged that of all tasks in the world that of the guide and
instructor of youth is hardest to do well, best worth doing, therefore
most difficult. There is no need to deny that for the earliest years of
a child's life the instincts of a loving faithful mother may be trusted
to guide her efforts. Yet even in those first years tendencies declare
themselves that require to be wisely checked or on the other hand wisely
encouraged; and the wisdom does not come by instinct. A spiritual view
of life, its limitations and possibilities, its high calling and
heavenly destiny is absolutely necessary--that vision of the highest
things which religion alone can give. The prophet comes and directs; yet
the parents must be prophets too. "The child is not to be educated for
the present--for this is done without our aid unceasingly and
powerfully--but for the remote future and often in opposition to the
immediate future.... The child must be armed against the close-pressing
present with a counter-balancing weight of three powers against the
three weaknesses of the will, of love and of religion.... The girl and
the boy must learn that there is something in the ocean higher than its
waves--namely, a Christ who calls upon them."[7] On the religious
teaching especially which is given to children much depends, and those
who guide them should often begin by searching and reconsidering their
own beliefs. Many a promising life is marred because youth in its wonder
and sincerity was taught no living faith in God, or was thrust into the
mould of some narrow creed which had more in it of human bigotry than of
divine reason and love.
[7] Richter, _Levana_.
"What shall be the ordering of the child?" is Manoah's prayer, and it is
well if simply expressed. The child's way needs ordering. Circumstances
must be understood that discipline may fit the young life for its part.
In our own time this represents a serious difficulty. What to do with
children, how to order their lives is the pressing question in thousands
of homes. The scheme of education in favour shows little insight, little
esteem for the individuality of children, which is of as much value in
the case of the backward as of those who are lured and goaded into
distinction. To broaden life, to give it many points of interest is
well. Yet on the other hand how much depends on discipline, on
limitation and concentration, the need of which we are apt to forget.
Narrow and limited was the life of Israel when Samson was born into it.
The boy had to be what the nation was, what Zorah was, what Manoah and
his wife were. The limitations of the time held him and the secluded
life of Dan knowing but one article of patriotic faith, hatred of the
Philistines. Was there so much of restriction here as to make greatness
impossible? Not so. To be an Israelite was to have a certain moral
advantage and superiority. It was not a barren solidarity, a dry ground
in which this new life was planted; the sprout grew out of a living
tree; traditions, laws full of spiritual power made an environment for
the Hebrew child. Through the limitations, fenced and guided by them, a
soul might break forth to the upper air. It was not the narrowness of
Israel nor of his own home and upbringing but the licence of Philistia
that weakened the strong arm and darkened the eager soul of the young
Danite. Are we now to be afraid of limitations, bent on giving to youth
multiform experience and the freest possible access to the world? Do we
dream that strength will come as the stream of life is allowed to wander
over a whole valley, turning hither and thither in a shallow and shifty
bed? The natural parallel here will instruct us, for it is an image of
the spiritual fact. Strength not breadth is the mark at which education
should be directed. The intellectually and morally strong will find
culture waiting them at every turn of the way and will know how to
select, what to appropriate. In truth there must be first the moral
power gained by concentration, otherwise all culture--art, science,
literature, travel--proves but a Barmecide feast at which the soul
starves.
The special method of training for the child Samson is described in the
words, "He shall be a Nazirite unto God." The mother was to drink no
strong drink nor eat any unclean thing. Her son was to be trained in the
same rigid abstinence; and always the sense of obligation to Jehovah was
to accompany the austerity. The hair neither cut nor shaven but allowed
to grow in natural luxuriance was to be the sign of the separated life.
For the hero that was to be, this ascetic purity, this sacrament of
unshorn hair were the only things prescribed. Perhaps there was in the
command a reference to the godless life of the Israelites, a protest
against their self-indulgence and half-heathen freedom. One in the tribe
of Dan would be clear of the sins of drunkenness and gluttony at least,
and so far ready for spiritual work.