Part 6 (1/2)
The depth and pa.s.sion of the struggle against sin is shown in the fifty-first Psalm. ”Have mercy upon me, O G.o.d, according to thy loving-kindness; according unto the mult.i.tude of thy tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.” ”Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.” ”Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” ”Make me to hear joy and gladness.” ”Create in me a clean heart, O G.o.d, and renew a right spirit within me.” ”Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it. The sacrifices of G.o.d are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O G.o.d, thou wilt not despise.”
This pa.s.sion against sin--this cry for inward purity--is the root of the religion of Jesus, the blessedness of the pure in heart; the warfare of Paul, the spirit against the flesh.
In other psalms, again, is a poignant cry for help and deliverance. It is the expostulation of the soul with Fate, the cry to a Power who should be a friend, but hides his face. There, is a pathetic sense of man's frailty and mortality. ”Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more.”
Praise for G.o.d's greatness and awe for his eternity are joined with the sad sense of man's mortality. ”Wilt thou show wonders to the dead?
Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?”
Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor.
Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to G.o.d, and can imagine no deliverance save by the ruin of his enemies. The cursing is tremendous. ”O daughter of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth them against the stones!” At this point is the widest ethical difference between ”them of old time” and our own religion. In them, abhorrence of sin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes of the Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of G.o.d.
To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend.
In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer: ”Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!” ”Love your enemies, and in loving you are saved.”
In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory of reward and punishment a later idea,--that goodness carries its own blessing with it,--that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds, health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of grat.i.tude, yes, even the pa.s.sionate contrition in which the soul revolts from its own sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a response to that effort like heaven's own smile. Not, goodness brings blessings, but goodness _is_ blessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickedness _is_ perdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms.
Among these hymns are some which are filled with a n.o.ble delight in the works of nature,--a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the hills, and the conies of the rock. There is frank satisfaction in the bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad.
And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality. It is everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and beneficent G.o.d.
What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most vivid and various play of human emotions,--sorrow, wrath, repentance, joy, dread, hope,--always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men. In this is their abiding power,--this close reflection of the fluctuations in every sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,--encompa.s.sed with an atmosphere of n.o.ble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.
In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself. It is not so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as a powerful and unanswered challenge to the current a.s.sertions of that faith. The characteristic idea of Judaism was that G.o.d rules the world in the interest of the good man. Not so, says Job, the facts are against it. Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought trouble and sorrow, without remedy and without hope! So stood first the bold arraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism. Job is skeptical, not from any want of goodness,--he has been strenuously good; even now in all his darkness, ”my righteousness I hold fast and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.” His goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has his hate gone out; he has not ”rejoiced at the destruction of them that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wis.h.i.+ng a curse to his soul.” Yet, after a life of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented.
Where is the righteousness of G.o.d? He turns to his friends for sympathy.
”Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of G.o.d hath touched me.” His friends for reply justify G.o.d by blaming Job.
Doubtless you deserve it all: you must have done all manner of wrong, and been a hypocrite to boot! That is all the comfort they give him. Dreary and desolate he stands, no good in the present, no hope in the future.
”I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou regardest me not. Thou art become cruel to me; with thy strong hand thou opposest thyself against me. I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living.”
Upon that gloom the curtain falls. ”The words of Job are ended.”
The later chapters of the book seem added by successive hands. They introduce a fresh speaker, to help out the argument for G.o.d. They make the Almighty speak in his own behalf. His answer is simply an appeal to the wonders of physical nature. Look, vain man, at my works; consider the war-horse, the behemoth, the leviathan; how can your petty mind judge the creator of these? This strikes a note which is still heard in the music of to-day, the awe and reverence before the grandeur of nature which can sometimes soothe the restlessness of man and hush his anxieties, as the harp of David brought peace to the moody Saul. Yet such thoughts do not suffice for the man whose personal suffering is keen. They silence rather than answer the question which presses upon Job.
The story must be otherwise helped out, so some kindly champion of orthodoxy put in a fairy-story climax,--Job got well of his boils, had more sheep and oxen than ever, had other children born to him. And so the difficulty is happily solved!
But the earlier and deeper words remain, with their unanswerable challenge to the comfortable creed that G.o.d will always make the good man happy. The book stands, the expression of a typical, a mournful but sublime att.i.tude of the human mind. It is a facing of truth when truth looks darkest, rather than to take refuge in comfortable make-believe.
And it shows man falling back on his innermost stronghold of all. If G.o.d himself fail me,--if the power of the universe be cruel or indifferent,--yet ”my righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go; my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live.”
The habitual weapon of the Prophets is denunciation. They pour out on their opponents a wrath which is the hotter because it involves a moral condemnation, and the heavier because it claims the sanction of Deity.
Among their exemplars are Samuel deposing Saul, and scaring him from the tomb, and Elijah slaying the priests of Baal. Of the written prophecies the characteristic word is ”Woe unto you!” They are the prototypes of Jesus a.s.sailing the Pharisees and driving out the money-changers; of the book of Revelation; of Tertullian proclaiming the torments of the d.a.m.ned; of the mediaeval ban on the heretic; of Puritan and Catholic hurling anathemas at each other; of Carlyle, of Garrison. But in the greatest of the prophets the threat is almost hidden by the promise, and instead of cursing there is benediction.
Whoever would get at the heart of the Old Testament, and understand the spell which the religion first of Judaism and then of Christianity has cast upon the world for thousands of years, should ponder the book of Isaiah. It blends the work of two authors, but their spirit is closely akin. In each case the prophet is full of a conviction so intense that he propounds it with perfect confidence as the word of G.o.d. By the boldest personification, he speaks continually in the name of G.o.d. This was the characteristic method of Hebrew prophecy. The prophetic books all stand as for the most part the direct word of G.o.d. This way of thought and speech was possible only to men in an early stage of intellectual development and under the highest pressure of conviction and emotion.
The traditional repute of these Jewish prophets and the record of their words were accepted by both Jews and Christians. Their writings were taken as the authoritative voice of G.o.d. The same credit came to be extended to all the ancient books of the Jewish religion,--psalms, histories, genealogies, ritual, and all. But it is mainly the prophecies to which this character originally belonged. The Psalms are, with few exceptions, purely human in their standpoint. In them, it is avowedly a _man_ who mourns, rejoices, repents, prays, curses, or gives thanks. But in the prophecies G.o.d himself is presented as the speaker.
In both the earlier and later Isaiah, G.o.d appears as speaking to men in extreme need, in words of incomparable comfort, inspiration, and hope.
To whatever special exigency of Israel they were first addressed, the language, stripped of all local references, comes home to the universal human heart in its deepest experiences. To the divine favor this teaching sets only one condition: ”Cease to do evil, learn to do well.”
”Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.” ”If ye be willing and obedient.” ”Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of his hands shall be given him.” On the one simple condition of turning from moral evil to good, the blessings of the inner life are promised in every tone of a.s.surance, consolation, promise. ”Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” ”Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your G.o.d. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.” ”He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.” ”Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth into singing, O mountains, for the Lord hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted.”