_THE BREAD OF THE SOUL_
DEUT. viii.
In the chapters which follow, viz. viii., ix., and x. 1-11, we have
an appeal to history as a motive for fulfilling the fundamental duty
of loving God and keeping His commandments. In its main points it is
substantially the same appeal which is made in chapters i.-iii., is,
in fact, a continuation of it. Its main characteristics, therefore,
have already been dealt with; but there are details here which
deserve more minute study. Coming after Yahweh's great demand for
the love of His people, the references to the Divine action in the
past assume a deeper and more affectionate character than when they
were mere general exhortations to obedience and submission. They
become inducements to the highest efforts of love; and the first
appeal is naturally made to the gracious and fatherly dealing of
Yahweh with His people in their journey through the wilderness.
Of all the traditions or reminiscences of Israel, this of the
wilderness was the most constantly present to the popular mind, and
it is always referred to as the most certain, the most impressive,
and the most touching of all Israel's historic experiences. Yet
Stade and others push the whole episode aside, saying, if any
Israelites came out of Egypt, we do not know who they were. Such
a mode of dealing with clear, coherent, and in themselves not
improbable historical memories, is too arbitrary to have much
effect, and the wilderness journey remains, and is likely to
remain, one of the indubitable facts which modern critical research
has established rather than shaken.
To this, then, our author turns, and he deals with it in a somewhat
unusual way. As we have seen, the prevalent notion that piety and
righteousness are rewarded with material prosperity is firmly
rooted in his mind. But he did not feel himself limited to that as
the solitary right way of regarding the providence of God. Men's
minds are never quite so simple and direct in their action as many
students and critics are tempted to suppose. Every great conception
which holds the minds of men produces its effects, even from the
first moment it is grasped, by _all_ that is in it. Implications
and developments which are made explicit, or are called out into
visibility, only by the friction of new environments, have been
there from the beginning; and minds have been secretly moulded by
them though they were not conscious of them. Hard and fast lines,
then, are not to be drawn between the stages of a great development,
so that one should say that before such and such a moment, when a
new aspect of the old truth has emerged into consciousness, that
aspect was not effective in any wise. The outburst of waters from
a reservoir is indubitable evidence of steady persistent pressure
from within in that direction before the overflow. Similarly, in the
region of thought and feeling the emergence of a new aspect of truth
is of itself a proof that the holders of the root conception were
already swayed in that direction.
The history of Christianity affords proof of this. It is a
commonplace to-day that the world is only beginning to do justice
to some aspects of the teaching of our Lord. But the teaching,
always present, always exerted its influence, and was felt before
it could be explained. In the Old Testament development the same
thing was most emphatically true. Individual responsibility to God
was not, so far as we can now see, distinctly present in Israelite
religious thought till the time of Jeremiah, but it would be
absurd to say that any mind that accepted the religion of Yahweh
had ever been without that feeling. So with the doctrine of God's
providence over men: we are not to say that before the Book of Job
the explanation of suffering as testing discipline had been entirely
hid from Israel, by the view that material prosperity and adversity
were regulated in the main according to moral and religious life.
Consequently, notwithstanding previous strong assertions of the
latter view which we find in Deuteronomy, we need not be in the
least surprised to find that here the hardships of the wilderness
journey are regarded, not as a punishment for Israel's sins, but
simply as a trial or test to see what their heart was towards Him.
This is essentially the point of view of the Book of Job, the only
difference being that here it is applied to the nation, there to the
individual. But our chapter rises even above that, for the first
verses of it plainly teach that the experiences of the wilderness
were made to be what they were, in order that the people might
learn to know the spiritual forces of the world to be the essential
forces, and that they might be induced to throw themselves back upon
them as that which is alone enduring. In the words of ver. 3, they
were taught by this training that man does not live by bread alone,
but by everything that proceeds from the mouth of God.
These two then, that hardship was testing discipline for Israel,
and that it was also intended to be the means of revealing spirit
as the supreme force even in the material world, are the main
lessons of the eighth chapter. Of these the last is by far the
most important. Casting back his eye upon the past, the author of
Deuteronomy teaches that the trials and the victories, the wonders
and the terrors of their wilderness time were meant to humble
them, to empty them of their own conceits, and to make them know
beyond all doubting that God alone was their portion, and that apart
from Him they had no certainty of continuance in the future and no
sustainment in the present. "All the commandment which I command
thee this day shall ye observe to do, _that ye may live_," is the
fundamental note, and the physical needs and trials of the time are
cited as an object-lesson to that effect. "He humbled thee, and
suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna which thou knewest
not; that He might make thee to know that man doth not live by bread
alone, but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of Yahweh
doth man live." Of course the first reference of the "everything
that proceedeth" is to the creative word of Yahweh. The meaning is
that the sending of the manna was proof that the ordinary means of
living, _i.e._ bread, could be dispensed with when Yahweh chose to
make use of His creative power. Many commentators think that this
exhausts the meaning of the passage, and they regard our Lord's use
of these words in the Temptation as limited in the same fashion.
But both here and in the New Testament more must be intended. Here
we have the statement in the first verse that Israel is to keep the
commandments, which certainly are a part of "all that proceeds" from
the mouth of God, that they may _live_. This implies that the mere
possession of material sustenance is not enough for even earthly
life. Impalpable spiritual elements must be mingled with "bread" if
life is not to decay. This, our chapter goes on to say, would be
plain to them if they would carefully consider God's dealing with
them in the wilderness, for the sending of the manna was meant to
emphasise and bring home to them that very truth. It was meant, in
short, to convey a double lesson--the direct one above referred to,
and the more remote but deeper one which had been asserted in the
first verse.
In the Temptation narrative the same deeper meaning is surely
implied. The temptation suggested to Jesus was that He should use
the miraculous powers given to Him for special purposes to make
stones into bread for Himself. Now that would have been precisely
an instance of the literal primary meaning of our passage; it would
have been a case of supplying the absence of bread by the use of the
creative word of God. To meet that temptation and to put it aside
our Lord uses these words: "It is written, Man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of
God." Thereupon He was no more importuned to supply the place of
bread by a creative word. The implication is that the life of the
Son of God found sustenance in spiritual strength derived from His
Father. In other words, the passage is really parallel to John iv.
31 ff: "In the mean while the disciples prayed Him, saying, Rabbi,
eat. But He said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not. The
disciples therefore said one to another, Hath any man brought Him to
eat? Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of Him that
sent Me, and to accomplish His work." Understanding it thus, the
Temptation passage is entirely in accord with that from which it is
quoted, if the first and third verses be taken together. Both teach
that abundance of material resources, all that visibly sustains the
material life, is not sufficient for the life of such a creature
as man. Not only his inner life, but his outer life, is dependent
for its permanence upon the inflow of spiritual sustenance from the
spiritual God. For animals, bread might be enough; but man holds of
both the spiritual and the material as animals do not. It is not
mere mythical dreaming when man is said to be made in the image of
God; it expresses the essential fact of his being. Consequently,
without inbreathings from the spiritual, even his physical life
pines and dies. But how wonderful is this insight in a writer so
ancient, belonging to so obscure a people as the Jews! How can we
account for it? There was nothing in their character or destiny as
a people to explain it, apart from the supernatural link that binds
them and their thoughts at all times to the coming Christ, and draws
them, notwithstanding all aberrations, even when they know it not,
towards Him.
How great an attainment it is we may see, if we reflect for a moment
upon the state of Christian Europe at the present day. Nowhere
among the masses of the most cultured nations is this deeply simple
truth accepted by the vast majority of men. Nowhere do we find that
history has succeeded in bringing it home to the conscience as a
commonplace. The rich or well-to-do cling to riches, the means of
material enjoyment, as if their life did consist in the abundance
of things they possess. They strive and struggle for them with an
industry, a forethought, a perseverance, which would be justified
only if man could live by bread alone. That is largely the condition
of those who have bread in abundance or hope to gain it abundantly.
With those who do not have it the case is perhaps even worse. Worn
and fretted by the hopeless struggle against poverty, driven wild
by the exigencies of a daily life so near starvation point that a
strike, a fall in prices, a month's sickness, bring them face to
face with misery, the toiling masses in Europe have turned with a
kind of wolfish impatience upon those who talk of God to them, and
demand "bread." As a German Socialist mother said publicly some
years ago, "He has never given me a mouthful of bread, or means to
gain it: what have I to do with your God?" Their only hope for the
future is that they may eat and be full; and of this they have made
a political and religious ideal which is attracting the European
working classes with most portentous power.
In all countries men are passionately asserting that man _can_ live
by bread alone, and that he will. For this dreadful creed increasing
numbers are prepared to sacrifice all that humanity thought it had
gained, and shut their ears to any who warn them that, if they had
all they seek, earth might be still more of a Pandemonium than they
think it at present. But they have much excuse. They have never
had wealth so as to know how very little it can do for the deepest
needs of men; and their faith in it, their belief that if they were
assured of a comfortable maintenance all would be right with the
world, is pathetic in its simplicity. Yet the secret that is hid
to-day from the mass of men was known among the small Israelite
people two thousand five hundred years ago. Since then it has formed
the very keynote of the teaching of our Lord; but save by the
generations of Christians who have found in it the key to much of
the riddle of the world it has been learned by nobody.
Yet history has never wearied in proclaiming the same truth. Israel
as we have seen, had verified it in the history of the pre-Canaanite
races whose disappearance is recorded in the first section of our
book, and in the doom which was impending over the Canaanites. But
to our wider experience, enriched by the changes of more than two
thousand years, and by the still more striking vicissitudes of
ancient days revealed by archæology, the fact that intelligence of
the highest kind, practical skill, and the courage of conquerors
cannot secure "life," is only more impressively brought home.
If we go back to the pre-Semitic empire of Mesopotamia, to what
is called the Akkadian time, we find that, before the days of
Abraham, a great civilisation had arisen, flourished for more than
one thousand years, and then decayed so utterly that the very
language in which its records were written had to be dealt with
by the Semites, who inherited the former culture, as we deal with
Latin. Yet these early people had made a most astonishing advance
into the ocean of unknown truth. They had invented writing; they
had elaborate systems of law and social life; they had in other
directions made remarkable discoveries in science, especially in
mathematical and astronomical science, and had built great cities in
which the refinement and art of modern times was in many directions
anticipated. In all ways they stood far higher above neighbouring
peoples than any civilised nation of Europe stands now in comparison
with its neighbours. But if they were at all inclined to put their
trust in the immortality of science, if they ever valued themselves,
as we do, on the strength of the advances they had made, time
has had them in derision. Very much of what they knew had to be
rediscovered painfully in later times. Their very name perished out
of the earth; and it has been discovered now to make them an object
of abiding interest only to the few who make ethnology their study.
Neither material wealth and comfort nor assiduous culture of the
mind could save them. For their religion and morals were, amid all
this material success, of the lowest type. They heard little of
what issues from the mouth of God in the specially Divine sphere of
morality, and did not give heed to that little, and they perished.
For man does not live by bread alone, but by that also, and neglect
of it is fatal.
It may be said that they flourished for more than a thousand years,
and neglect of the Divine word, if it be a poison, must (as Fénélon
said of coffee) be a very slow one, so far as nations are concerned.
But it has always been a snare to men to mistake the Divine patience
for Divine indifference and inaction. The movement, though to us
creatures of a day it seems slow, is as continuous, as crushing,
and as relentless as the movement of a glacier. "The mills of God
grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small," and all along the
ages they have thrown out the crushed and scattered fragments of
the powers that were deaf to the Divine voice. So persistently has
this appeared that it would by this time have passed beyond the
region of faith into that of sight, were it not always possible to
ignore the moral cause and substitute for it something mechanical
and secondary. The great world-empires of Egypt and Assyria passed
away, primarily owing to neglect of the higher life. Secondarily,
no doubt, the ebbs and flows of their power, and their final
extinction, were influenced by the course of the Indian trade; and
many wise men think they do well to stop there. But in truth we
do not solve the difficulty by resting in this secondary cause;
we only shift it a step backwards. For the question immediately
arises, Why did the trade change its course from Assyria to Egypt,
and back again from Egypt to Assyria? Why did a rivulet of it flow
through the land of Israel in Solomon's day and afterwards cease?
The answer must be that it was when the character of these various
nations rose in vigour by foresight and moral self-restraint that
they drew to themselves this source of power. They "lived," in fact,
by giving heed to some word of God. Nor does the history of Greek
supremacy in Europe and Asia, or the rise and fall of the Roman
Empire, contradict that view. The modern historian, whatever his
faith or unfaith may be, is driven to find the motive power which
wrought in these stupendous movements in the moral and spiritual
sphere. This transforms history from being merely secular into a
Bible, as Mommsen finely says,[63] "And if she cannot any more than
the Bible hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from
quoting her, she too will be able to bear with and to requite them
both." She utters her voice in the streets, and in the end makes her
meaning clear. For she gives us ever new examples.
[63] _History of Rome_, vol. iv., Part II., p. 467.
Probably her grandest object-lesson at present is the wasting
and paralysis that is slowly withering up all Mohammedan states.
Where they have been left to themselves, as in Morocco and Persia,
depopulation and the break-up of society has come upon them, and
where Muslim populations are really prospering it is under the
influence of Christian Powers. And the reason is plain. Islam is
a revolt from, and a rejection of, the higher principles of life
contained in Christianity, and a return to Judaism. But the Judaism
to which it returned had already lost its finest bloom. All that was
left to it of tenderness or power of expansion Islam rejected, and
of the driest husks of Old Testament religion it made its sole food.
Naturally and necessarily, therefore, it has been found inadequate.
It cannot permanently live under present conditions, and it is
capable of no renewal. Here and there, especially in India, attempts
to break out of the prison house which this system builds around
its votaries are being made, but in the opinion of experts like
Mr. Sell[64] they cannot succeed. "Such a movement," he tells us,
"may elevate individuals and purify the family life of many, but it
will, like all reform movements of the past, have very little real
effect on Islam as a polity and as a religion." If he be right, we
learn from a Mohammedan whom he quotes, the Naual Mulisin-ul-Mulk,
what alone can be looked for. "To me it seems," he says, "that as a
nation and a religion we are dying out; our day is past, and we have
little hope of the future." More conspicuously and deliberately
perhaps than any one did Mohammed choose to go back from the best
light that shone in the world of his day. Some at least of his
contemporaries knew what a spiritual religion meant. He was guilty,
therefore, of the "great refusal"; and his work, great as it was,
seems to some even of his own disciples to be hastening to its end.
Material success, bread in all senses, the kingdoms founded by him
and his successors had in abundance, and still might have. But man
cannot live by that alone, and the absence of the higher element has
taken even that away.
[64] _Contemporary Review_, August 1893 p. 293.
In Christendom, too, the same lesson is being taught. Of all
European countries France perhaps is that where the corroding
power of materialistic thought has been most severely felt. Yet
few countries are so rich in material wealth, and if bread was
all that "life" demanded, no country should be so full of it. But
it is in no sense so. Even its intellectual life is drooping, and
its population, if not decreasing, is standing still. This, all
serious writers deplore; and the dawn of what may perhaps be a new
era is seen in the earnestness with which the sources of this evil
are sought out and discussed. Men like the Vicomte de Vogüé[65]
depict the new generation as weary of negations, sick of the
material positivism of their immediate predecessors, disgusted with
"realism," which, as another recent writer defines it, "in thought
is mere provincialism, in affection absolute egoism, in politics the
deification of brute force; in the higher grades of society tyranny;
in the lower, unbridled licence." And the only cure is faith and
moral idealism. "Society can apply to itself to-day," says De Vogüé,
"the beautiful image of Plotinus; it resembles those travellers
lost in the night, seated in silence on the shore of the sea,
waiting for the sun to rise above the billows." In Germany similar
conditions have produced similar though much mitigated results. Yet
even there, Lange, the historian of materialism, tells us that there
runs through all our modern culture a tendency to materialism, which
carries away every one who has not found somewhere a sure anchor.
"The ideal has no currency; all that cannot prove its claim on the
basis of natural science and history is condemned to destruction,
though a thousand joys and refreshments of the masses depend upon
it." He concludes by saying that "ideas and sacrifices may still
save our civilisation, and change the path of destructive revolution
into a path of beneficent reforms." Through all history, then, and
loudest in our own day, the cry of our passage goes up; and where
the path marked out by the faith of Israel, and carried to its goal
by Jesus Christ, has been forsaken, the peoples are resting in
hungry expectation. Words from the mouth of God can alone save them;
and if the Churches cannot make them hear, and no new voice brings
it home to them, there would seem to be nothing before them but a
slower or quicker descent into death.
[65] "_Heures d'Histoire._"
But it may be that the nations are deaf to the Churches' voice
because these have not learned thoroughly that life for them too
is conditioned in the same fashion. They can live truly, fully,
triumphantly only when they take up and absorb "everything that
issues from the mouth of God." All Christians must admit this;
but most proceed at once to annul what they have stated by the
limitations of meaning they impose upon it. An older generation
vehemently affirmed this faith, meaning by it every word and letter
which Scripture contained. We do not find fault with what they
assert, for the first necessity of spiritual life is the study and
love of the Holy Scriptures. No one who knows what the higher life
in Christ is, needs to be told that the very bread of life is in
the Bible. Neglect it, or, what is perhaps worse, study it only
from the scientific and intellectual point of view, and life will
slowly ebb away from you, and your religion will bring you none of
the joy of living. Bring your thoughts, your hopes, your fears,
and your aspirations into daily contact with it, and you will feel
a vigour in your spiritual nature which will make you "lords over
circumstance." Every part of it contributes to this effect when it
is properly understood, for experience proves the vanity of the
attempt to distinguish between the Bible and the word of God. As it
stands, wrought into one whole by labours the strenuousness, the
multiplicity, the skill, and the religious spirit of which we are
only now coming to understand, it is the word of God; it has issued
from His mouth, and from it, searched out and understood, the most
satisfying "bread" of the soul must come. Only by use of it can the
Christian soul live. But though the Bible is the word of God _par
excellence_, it is not the only word that issues from the mouth of
God to man. Because the Church has often too much refused to listen
to any other word of God, those who are without are "sitting looking
out over the sea towards the west for the rising of the sun which
is behind them." For if it is death to the spirit to turn away from
Scripture, it means sickness and disease to refuse to learn the
other lessons which are set for us by the God of truth. All true
science must contain a revelation of Him, for it is an exposition
of the manner of His working. History too is a Bible, which has
been confirming with trumpet tongue the truths of Scripture as we
have seen. Nay, it is a commentary upon the special revelation
given to us through Israel, set for our study by the Author of
that revelation. Further, we may say that the progress of our
Christian centuries has shown us heights and depths of wisdom in the
revelation mankind has received in Christ which, without its light,
we should not have known.
The spirit of Christ in regard to slavery, for instance, was made
manifest fully only in our day. The true relations of men to each
other, as conceived by our blessed Lord, are evidently about to be
forced home upon the world by the turmoils, the strikes, and the
outrages, by the wild demands, and the wilder hopes which are the
characteristic of our epoch. In the future, too, there must lie
experiences which will make manifest to men the brand which the
spirit of Christ puts upon war, with its savagery and its folly.
These are only noteworthy instances of the explanation of revelation
by the developments of the Divine purpose in the world. But in
countless ways the same process is going on, and the Church which
refuses to regard it is preparing a decay of its own life. For man
lives by _every_ word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, and
every such word missed means a loss of vitality. The Christian
Church, therefore, if it is to be true to its calling, should be
seriously watchful lest any Divinely sent experience should be lost
to it. It cannot be indifferent, much less hostile, to discoveries
in physical science; it cannot ignore any fact or lesson which
history reveals; it cannot sit apart from social experiments, as if
holding no form of creed in such things, without seriously impairing
its chances of life. For all these things are pregnant with most
precious indications of the mind of God, and to turn from them is
to sit in darkness and the shadow of death. In the most subtle
and multifarious way, the inner spiritual life of man is being
modified by the discoveries of scientists, historians, philologists,
archæologists, and critics, and by the new attention which is being
given to the foundations of society and social life. All the truth
that is in these discoveries issues from the mouth of God. They too
are a Bible, as Mommsen says, and if the Christian Church cannot
"hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting
them," it can itself listen with open ear to these teachings, and
work them into coherent unity with the great spiritual Revelation.
This is the perennial task which awaits the Church at every stage of
its career, for on no other terms can it live a healthy life.
Here we find the answer to timid Christians who address petulant
complaints to those who are called to attempt this work. If, say
they, these new thoughts are not essential to faith, if in the forms
to which we have been accustomed the essence of true religion has
been preserved, why do you disturb the minds of believers by outside
questions? The reply is that we dare not refuse the teaching which
God is sending us in these ways. To refuse light is to blaspheme
light. Though we might save our generation some trouble by turning
our back upon this light, though we might even save some from
manifest shipwreck of faith, we should pay for that by sacrificing
all the future, and by rendering faith impossible perhaps for
greater multitudes of our successors.
Yet this does not imply that the Church is to be driven about by
every wind of doctrine. Some men of science demand, apparently, that
every new discovery, in its first crude form, should be at once
adopted by the Church, and that all the inferences unfavourable
to received views of religion, which occur to men accustomed to
think only truths that can be demonstrated by experiment, should
be registered in its teachings. But such a demand is mere folly.
The Church has in its possession a body of truth which, if not
verifiable by experiment, has been verified by experience as no
other body of truth has been. Even its enemies being judges, no
other system of a moral or spiritual kind has risen above the
horizon which can for a moment be compared with Christianity as
the guide of men for life and death.[66] Through all changes of
secular thought, and amid all the lessons which the world has taught
the Church, the fundamental doctrines have remained in essence
the same, and by them the whole life of man, social, political,
and scientific, has ultimately been guided. Immense practical
interests have therefore been committed to the Church's keeping,
the interests primarily of the poor and the obscure. She ought
never to be tempted, consequently, to think that she is moving
and acting in a vacuum, or manage her affairs after the manner of
a debating society. It is no doubt a fault to move too slowly;
but in circumstances like that of the Church, it can never be so
destructive to the best interests of mankind as to move with wanton
instability. Her true attitude must be to prohibit no lines of
inquiry, to open her mind seriously to all the demonstrated truths
of science with gladness, to be tolerant of all loyal effort to
reform Christian thought in accordance with the new light, when
that has become at all possible. For her true food is everything
that issues from the mouth of God; and only when she receives with
gratitude her daily bread in this way also, can her life be as
vigorous and as elevated as it ought to be.
[66] Cf. Lange, _Geschichte des Materialismus_, vol. ii., pp. 510,
528.