VIII. Thus Saith the Lord
Gerald Stanley Lee: Fifteen hundred years more beautiful than Moses, John [the Baptizer] of the Jordan wilderness comes to us, the last refinement and the highest development of the Mosaic tendency. Standing in the great assertive moment of history with the most specific and immediate Positive that ever fell from the lips of man, there seems to have gathered in him the residuum of that inspired negative which from the beginning had dominated the Hebrew life.
With all the dreaming and the living that had come between; with the mighty modulations that had been wrought in the voice of Sinai by the great Invitation Singers, and those full-hearted ones whom God had anointed to expect, it would be an exaggeration to say that John, the herald of Jesus, was a kind of contemporary Moses, facing God in Galilee as the leader of Sinai had faced him in the burning bush. But it would not be an idle exaggeration, and has within its doubtful boundaries a certain capacity to work out a thought for us.
Perhaps it is more the picturesqueness of John's position in history than John himself, but whether he is really more illustrative or not, he certainly is more availably illustrative of the Old-Testament "Thus saith the Lord" than the Old Testament itself. Standing in high relief against the divine life, he dramatizes the commanding ethical conception of fifteen centuries. It is placed in him once and forever, bold and strong beside the conception of eternity. With all that exuberant atmosphere of promise that a herald must always have, John surely had about him a haunting spirit from far back in the years, a glorified "THOU SHALT NOT," which made him as negative as a herald could be, and be a herald.
As a method either in ethics or religion, the lineal descendant of No is MUST. The spirit which in the rudimentary stages of prophecy had caused the law to be stated in negations is the same spirit which in the rudimentary stages of the Christian truth causes the gospel to be stated in obligations. Obligation was John's way of stating it.
The contrasts that have been contrived between the law on the one side and the gospel on the other have long since receded from our thought, and except as conveniences for the stronger statement of lower and developing phases of the great paradox, they stand as added symbols of that trait of finiteness, that whimsical dogmatism, that must ever be detected, as the years go on, in the deciduous theology of men.
That God is Love, and that Law is the way he loves us, and that God is Law, and that Love is the way he rules us, must be an assured principle in any Messianic presentation of the truth. Until we can separate God from God or make him superior to himself, there is but one God and he is the God of the Law, and Jesus is its mighty Adjective. The question before all the following saviors of the world is not one of law or one of gospel, but a question as to the most inspired statement of the gospel law. This is the question that John asked Jesus - "Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?" (Luke 7:19)
It was before he had heard of Christ's evangelistic methods that John had called him "One the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose" (Luke 3:16). Looking almost out of his grave to watch himself being forgotten, the John in the prisoner's cell was too essentially a preacher not to question the Son of God because he was different from himself.
When his disciples returned to him with "Do you not remember, John, those old sermons of yours, the city trooping out to meet you - strong men crying out with a sense of their disobedience - the long lines of weeping penitents that you baptized in the river?" - when, as the shadows grew long in the cell, they told him the words of Christ, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest," (Matt. 11:28) there came into the broken old prophet's heart the thought of that greatest sermon of his life and the mighty climax of it, "Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? His fan is in his hand. He will gather his wheat into his garner, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." (Matt. 3:12)
And the more he heard about Jesus, his inscrutable "Abide in me," (John 15:4) his eating with publicans, his divine, disreputable love for every one, - the more he wondered how this disastrous tenderness could belong to one in whose face he had seen, one wonderful day, the shining of God.
If Jesus had approached the woman at the well (John 4:7) with the air of being better than she was, she would either have doubted it or hated him for it. It was because he offered her the most perfect fellowship at first, and afterward told her all that she ever did, that he was the Son of God.
It is because John would have commenced with the seven husbands and would have conditioned his fellowship, that on hearing the rumors of Jesus he sent word to him "Art thou he that should come, or look we for another?" (Luke 7:19) It was the residuum of the negative. It was the law trying to state the gospel and the obligation stating the invitation - a way of reaching men which Christ himself was never eloquent enough to attempt - to whom it has ever belonged to reveal, from the very first, a fellowship divinely unconditioned except by blindness in men themselves - the distinctive prerogative of whose mighty heart has ever been the beautiful recklessness with which he opened it and kept it forever open.
The law with an open heart is the gospel. The law with the heart open first.
God may be as frank as he will. It is the littleness of love that has taught us conditions and economies. The conditions of fellowship make themselves. The irreverent seeing of too much love, like the seeing of too many stars, is guarded forever by blindness. A great heart keeps its secrets like the sky, by being open.
Though a merely apparent refusal and but Moses' way of stating his fear to look, the Lord's refusal to let Moses see his face is one of the root-principles of the Decalogue. John was the spiritual descendant of a prophet who would have been ruined at Sinai if he had let the children of Israel become too familiar with him. It was appropriate that he should go out into the wilderness of Jordan to keep his influence. His doctrine depended upon the wilderness, and John was too thorough a theologian to be an immediate convert to one who both by temperament and destiny kept out of it, and mingled with men.
The most characteristic sentence that Jesus ever uttered was "Follow me," (Matt. 4:19) and it is because the spirit of the Old Testament says "Go," (e.g., Gen. 8:16) and the spirit of the New says "Come," (e.g., Matt. 11:28) that we know that God has been upon the earth.
The emphasis of the Old Testament is in the second person. Its whole attitude is "Thou," and the New Testament which came with Christ is a revealed WE from beginning to end - the mutual book in which the Law lived with the disciples, the terrible "Thus saith the Lord" (Exod. 4:22, etc. 415 times!) kneeling down before a few unknowing fishermen to wash their feet. The real distinction between Jesus and his disciples was his incredible approachableness - that he could get nearer to men than men could.
The Son of God because he would almost rather have been called the son of man, he abolished forever the Divinity of Distance and made fellowship the supreme attribute of God. With heroic simplicity he risked his mission on the earth, and founded his title to be the ruler of men upon letting them be familiar with him. This is the most sublime and daring adventure in the history of truth. The gospel consisted in knowing him. Redemption consisted in living with him. Salvation, impossible as an act, became inevitable as an acquaintance, and the whole New Testament wins our hearts because our hearts are woven into it. Peter's epistles being published with his denials and Paul's sermons with Christ's - it is a shared book, in which God and men tell how they have loved and judged each other.
Entering into the You and I, beginning to see duty from above, instead of seeing it from below - surrounding it with God - this is knowing what duty is. The opportunity that He and we have together.
The difference between the "Thus saith the Lord" and the "Abide in me" no man has ever told. At once the sublimest and tenderest truth in all the wandering of the human heart - the answer of the wistfulness of thousands of sad dead years - there is nothing beautiful enough to say about it - except silence and living - and living - and living.
IX. Milk And Honey
ON some accounts the best time to have been a preacher was just before Christ. Zechariah and Malachi had a great advantage in preaching Jehovah to their congregations. No one could ask for better material for powerful sermons than the minor prophets had - which explains their being minor prophets. Their sermons were all worked out for them. Preaching was sheer history. The bare facts of the Hebrew national life were brutally on the side of the preacher. A Hebrew audience could almost have been converted with a map; and spiritual insight, dramatic genius, or subtlety of philosophy, or ingenuity of statement would hardly seem to have been necessary to make a profound impression upon the Jew. His doctrines had dates and places; his belief was what had happened to him; his convictions were events, and the events said just what the prophets wanted them to.
Wickedness was never remunerative in the Old Testament. The catastrophes that came upon the wicked were all accurately timed and overwhelmingly convincing. It was a book to delight a preacher's heart - the Arabian Nights of goodness. It had the appeal of appeals to the mass of men. Zechariah and Malachi were fortunate in being preachers just at the end of an Ancient Book, in which everything came out right, and just before the beginning of a New one, in which everything came out divinely and sublimely wrong.
Jehovah began with what his children could understand - with stories - with telling them what he would give them if they would obey him - a new playground called Canaan - milk and honey (Exod. 3:8).
A Bible not full of inventories of property written with a naive relish that soothes the guilty human heart, would not be human enough to have come from God, or divine enough to have understood humanity; the only difference between the Jews and the Gentiles in the love of gold being that the former gained more to love.
David sings, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want," (Psa. 23) and the fear of God is the fear of poverty, and faith is the spiritual interpretation of gold.
The Book of Job, sublime in being an exception, is founded on the wonder of a righteous man that the Lord could take away his riches when he had not sinned. Entering the presence of the Lord with his teasing, infidel swagger, Satan strikes the keynote of the Old Testament, "Doth Job serve God for nought?" (Job 1:9) - the first anticipation of Christ's criticism on the origin of the Jew being curiously made by Satan himself, some fifteen hundred years before.
The Book of Job begins with an imposing processional of camels, and the woe of it begins with the fact that the camels are carried away. It rises by sheer force of personality into the New-Testament song of suffering, of freedom, of noble defiance of reward and supreme consciousness of God; but all this glowing vision of the soul moves on to the climax, at last, of 14000 sheep and 6000 camels and 1000 yoke of oxen and 1000 she-asses, - the necessary moral to the Jewish mind. Sheep, religion, and camels. Righteousness, milk, and honey. And what the Jews would have done with the Book of Job if it had had a New-Testament ending they told the world with a cross.
Solomon will be wise, but wise enough to be rich. The story of the Queen of Sheba gazing on his glories until "she had no more spirit in her" (1 Kings 10:5) is handed down from generation to generation of mothers, to teach children morality and the pomp of righteousness; and John [in the Book of Revelation] himself, writing after Christ and trying to find a figure that would appeal to his people, brings a gold-loving Bible to a close with a shining Hebrew picture of a sapphire heaven, with pavements of the root of evil and pearl gates and jasper walls.
"Blessed are ye when men shall persecute you" (Matt. 5:11) was not the text that led the children of Israel out of Egypt. In the childhood of religion, their Bible is the child bible of the human heart. "He that is greatest among you let him be your servant" (Matt. 23:11) would not have been the watchword with which Abraham acquired his fortune; and when Joshua led the people over Jordan, if they could have seen the crosses with which the King of the Jews rewarded his disciples, they would have turned back to Egypt.
Christ's stories to his children ended in crosses; Moses' in flocks. That a Bible, that had failed to get men to perform their duties by placing riches at the end of them, should go bravely and divinely on to try to get them to perform their duties with crosses at the end of them, might seem strange; but crosses were more practical, - and Jesus was the Son of God because he knew it.
Abraham is converted by an offer of sheep and a nation of grandchildren, and his Peradventure prayer (Gen. 18:24) is one of the great bargaining classics of the world.
When Jacob wrestles with the Angel of the Lord, and, getting what he wants, makes it the turning-point of his life and falls forthwith on Esau's neck, and is a good and prosperous saint ever afterwards, it would seem to make the best possible material for teaching ethics.
When Joseph, who is the religious lad of the family, is put into a well, only to make the bad brothers bow the knee to him in Egypt; when he resists temptation in Potiphar's house and is forthwith offered the Prime Ministry - nothing could be better, one would think, for impressing the generations with a proper conception of duty than this.
Pharaoh tries to be boldly wicked, and the twelve plagues announce to all men that it does not pay; and when he breaks his word and pursues Israel, his army dwindles down to a few bubbles rising from the bottom of the sea.
Amos and Haggai had all these facts on their side, but they accomplished nothing with them. The Savior of Success failed.
The delicious boyish thrill of Haman's leading the beggar Mordecai in the king's clothes around the city, the exultant justice of Haman's hanging on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai, would make a climax in a sermon to men; but it failed. In the New Testament Mordecai would have been hung, and Jesus, committing the very important mistake of bearing his own cross, conquers the nations of the earth.
Esther weeping for joy because God rewards her with saving her people, in the New Testament is Mary weeping in the darkness under the cry of her child, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46)
Daniel, made Lord High Chancellor for saying his prayers under Darius, under Christ is Peter: "Lord, I am ready to go with thee both into prison and to death." (Luke 22:33)
The fire comes down from heaven to the lonely righteousness of Elijah, and he kills four hundred of Baal's prophets; but we see Stephen with the dying glory in his face under the flying stones. No hand stops them. There was another way. It was to let Paul catch the cross-vision in Stephen's look and bear away the inspiration that was to save the world.
The mouths of Daniel's lions are opened in the Coliseum. The flames that would not burn Shadrach break out at the stakes of Christ's disciples, and Nero's torches of Christians flame the light of our sweet and suffering gospel upon the stately walls of Rome.
The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,
But the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. (Matt. 8:20)
The "Thou shalt not" failed. The "Thou shalt" failed. The gospel of bribery failed. They were but the gropings of the human spirit; the wavering intimation of One who said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." (John 12:32)
X. I Am That I Am
NAAMAN was a foreigner. He did not see any connection between dipping in a particular river seven times and being cured of leprosy. He wondered why five times would not do as well. [M. Porcius] Cato [Latin poet, ca. 190 B.C.] would have thought the command trivial and unphilosophic. Victor Hugo would have said that Elijah was lacking in a sense of humor, and Benjamin Franklin would have gone down to the river and taken an analysis of the water.
But it was different with a Hebrew. He preferred not to know why a thing happened. He could not see the connection between the blowing of trumpets and the falling of the walls of Jericho. So it impressed him. He would have patronized a God he could understand.
Gideon was not troubled because he could not see the logical relation between lapping water with the hands and bravery. Napoleon would have chosen his three hundred men by studying them closely, and Xenophon [soldier and student of Socrates, 444-357 B.C.] would have philosophized that the men who lapped with their hands showed more self-control than those who greedily knelt down to drink, and would therefore make the better soldiers. Gideon did as he was told. He probably would not have done it at all if he had been told why.
It was when the sun stood still that the sons of Abraham and Isaac were breathless in their piety and overwhelmed with a sense of the righteousness of Jehovah. Amiel (?) stands under the sky and worships the Creator because the sun moves on, and if the sun were to stand still at ten tomorrow half the Christian world would begin to wonder if God existed, and the other half would for the first time be thoroughly convinced he did, and pray as they never had prayed before. These are two influences toward deity.
The first Hebrew to be impressed with the orderliness of God was Job; but the more thoughtful the Jew became in his religion, the less hold the religion had upon the masses. And except with the progressive minority the proverb never had the force of the command. If the reasons for the Decalogue had been published as an appendix, or scattered suggestively through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, it would have honeycombed the Mosaic law with a pathetic and fatal logicalness. A god giving a reason would have been plaintive to a Hebrew. Even men did not have to give reasons - except to their superiors.
They could argue with the Voice, but they did not expect the Voice to argue with them. Aristotle (Greek philosopher, 384-322 B.C.) would have died unknown in Canaan. A command was the only syllogism that a Hebrew understood. It was because Moses never argued, perhaps, that the Lord selected him. Aaron's argumentative gift furnished the reasons for a Golden Calf (Exod. 32:24).
The reasoning people are largely on the wrong side in the earlier revelation. Pharaoh made out an excellent case against Moses. Moses had nothing to say except the ten plagues.
Elijah was not a philosopher. He called down the fire from heaven; and there is no finer scene in Elijah's life than when he silently throws his mantle upon Elisha's shoulders without trying to convince him of anything. No one but Elijah could have done it, and he could not have done it except with an Elisha, who was entitled to be a prophet because with one glance into the splendid, silent face he knew a man.
Balaam was full of reasons.
Jonah had it all thought out why he should not go to Nineveh; but when the Lord's spirit returned to him, and he was preaching in the streets of the city, he told them the facts. It was later, when at a safe and righteous distance he was serenely waiting for the city to be destroyed, that he commenced to argue again, and Jehovah left him. "Why did not the fire come down from heaven?" And Jonah soon found himself in a naive, prophetic distress that the Lord would not sweep away forty thousand families in earthquake and lightning, to finish his argument and prove that he was right.
It was an essentially matter-of-fact inspiration that held the balance of power in Hebrew history - one which (outside of the great prophets) explains every great popular faith and every great popular movement from the demand for a literal king to the cross of the figurative One. The national inspiration came from the blending of two facts. One was a command, and the other a miracle.
Right was right because God commanded it. He did not command it because it was right, and the Hebrew felt bound to a thousand duties because of the orthodox miracle he always required to help him do them. The obedience, that came in the gospel because the reasons of heaven are shared with us, was demanded in Leviticus because the reasons were not shared; and the miracle, which is a glorified lack of reason, was the far-off deprecating secret symbol with which the hiding human heart approached its open God. The great sharing ideal had not been reached. It was a slave's religion. The moral philosophy of the Hebrew was the Lord's convenience, and the lash of the Egyptian followed his worship for a thousand years.
In its first conception being a god is being subject to oneself, and, with all his theocratic traditions, the king was guiltily nearer to the Hebrew heart than the prophet, because a prophet was subject to a God and a king was a god - having at least the divinity of doing as he pleased, except when an unseen power interfered. Ahab was the logical outcome of the Decalogue. With the idea that righteousness consisted in not having one's will, the stronger a man was the more right he had to do wrong and the more inevitable it was that the king should be the most wicked man in Israel. Disobedience was but dealing with the Commandments in the same spirit with which they had been written - a fulfillment of a choice - an ethical conception on which one does right for the same reason that he does wrong - because there is something stronger than he is - the very brutality of morals, the religious form of cowardice.
In all the most simple concerns of faith and conduct, unquestioning obedience is but a higher form of unquestioning disobedience, still maintaining the rudimentary and barbaric emphasis of force.
Elijah's argument was not with the nature of his hearers nor with the nature of God, and the four hundred dead prophets with which he brought his mighty service to a close were but the inevitable outcome of the doctrine he had been preaching. The children of Israel went to and fro on the scene of slaughter, looking logically down into dead faces for the proofs of the righteousness of God.
The bears that devoured the mockers of Elisha but put into bear language the essential elements of Elisha's ethics. The leprosy of Gehazi was the argument for the tenth commandment. The sinfulness of adultery was proved by the throwing of stones, and the unrighteousness of murder was established beyond all dispute by another murder.
A law which found its first appeal in not giving any reasons could only be reasonably enforced by not giving any more reasons. The theory of ethics that was based on a will could only be carried out by force. It was the time of the unsharing One - the One who was God on Mount Sinai because he would not give an account of Himself, and God on the Cross because He would.
The life of the Messiah was not a denial of reason, but a definition of it, being from the first an exaltation both of its sincerities and possibilities, and always of its dignity. Intuitive rather than dialectic in his methods, it was the very nature of his commands that they were insights and demanded insights - the seeing of reasons - to keep them. "I am the light of the world." (John 8:12) The unquestioning obedience that Moses demanded became in the Christ the great sharing ideal of men - the obedience which questions, and then commands itself.
The word Why is one of the keynote words running through His influence on the earth - a word around which he gathered all the tragedy and love and sorrow and faith and hope that made him the Great Experience of the world. In all his exasperating interviews with ignorant men, used as it was from the beginning to the end for cunning and cruelty and scoffs and crosses, one of the great fundamental forms of growth, which He informed forever with the inspiration of His life, was the question mark.
The divinest word in the human heart except Yes, and the only way to Yes, - this Why that followed Jesus - a word the limitations of which can only be known by using it, and the inspiration of which is living in the Mind of God. Perfect obedience can only be the sharing of a command, and through the freedom of many a brave and struggling question entering at last into that divine life which belongs to us and to which we belong - the divinity of which is that it commands its own obedience and obeys its own commands.
"They shall say unto me, `What is His name?' And God said unto Moses, `I AM THAT I AM.'" (Exod. 3:13-14) A non-committal divinity allowed but a non-committal Decalogue. It was but the time of intimation. Jesus was the frankness of God.
XI. Thy Gentleness has Made Me Great
A PROPHET is one who infers. He abides in the divine symbols that concentrate life. He is spiritual, because instead of needing a thousand facts for one faith, he gathers from every fact faiths that are thousandfold. The unknown wraps its spirit about every knowledge, and every experience is the symbol of what he knows without experience. The souls of events commune with him before they are born upon the earth. In the passion of his thought, walk the centuries which hour by hour and day by day his brothers shall live bitterly through to know. His spirit comes, a figure of speech. To understand him is to be a nation in one's heart. He is the metaphor of a thousand years.
The world's dullness is its literalness. We know the earth by surveys and the sky we have learned with figures, but the prophecies that God would sing to us - one by one we grimly pace them off. They are trodden in sorrow into the creeds of men. Our religion has been seeing afterward. The only prophet we fear is History - the Brute of Truth - too actual to argue with, too safe in the past to crucify.
Moses was solitary because he looked forward, and David a minstrel of the people because he sang five hundred years of facts. In the naked might of personality, out of oblivion itself a prophecy can come forth, but hundreds of years must visit the heart for a psalm. It took a great many graves for David to sing, and the wine of countless lives, crushed in sorrow and sparkling with gladness, drop by drop, to make songs like these.
The people had lived. So they could sing. Decalogues may be drawn down from a cloud and delivered on stones in a day, but songs are not made while a bush is burning, or conceived of smoke and thunder while the people wait. With great slow chords they come - tremulous out of the past - with shadow choruses they come, with dead hands to touch the strings and old souls for melodies.
To prophesy is to anticipate a new experience; to sing is to bring back the soul of old ones. God has two prophets for every truth: Moses gives the law; David sings its life.
The inspirations that have been founded in the beginning upon a solitary soul obeying a mountain must be founded now upon the experience of a nation with itself. It was a literal nation. It could not take its songs in advance. Its overtures are all solos. Note by note, life by life, Song is taught them. David's is an after-song. So it is a chorus. He sings facts.
But the experience of the nation is the accompaniment, the innumerable undertone, to which David sings, rather than the song itself. It affords him the choral effects, those mighty antiphonals between the soul of a poet and the voices of his age and people, which alone can make the song of his life an immortal necessity with men - a multitudinous truth. But as with all great singers, the greatest fact, the greatest experience to David, is himself.
To be a great man is to be greater than a people, and to be a great singer is more than to sum up a nation in a rhapsody or write down its heart in a hymnal. It is to sing more than the nation sings.
Truth calls to every poet:
"Thou shalt come with me. Through shadow and sun I will lead thee; with dreams I write upon thy face, and into thy heart I pour forever the Melody that dwells with me. It shall be thou."
With the tyranny of truth the poet goes forth, and Life, Life, like the hand of God, sweeps across the spirit that he calls his own, and strokes from out the strings the strange, unwilling songs that sleep within. Melody will not let him go.
"Yea, though thou art broken, O poet, and in the silence and the dark thou wouldst lie, thou shalt sing! The day shall smite thy chords. In the night shall beautiful truth break in upon thy rest."
Leading by being led, ordained from the beginning of the world to be greater than himself, with irrevocable beauty each new-born song locks the poet's old self away. If he be a singer, song shall sing him into a great poet. If he be a great poet, song shall sing him into a prophet - or silence shall be his - or the muffled way where great songs cease, and the great but broken voices are led to the forgetting-place of men.
It came to David to be greater than himself. And to him who is greater than himself is God. God. Not on Mount Sinai, nor in the biography of Moses, nor in a book, nor in a temple, but in himself, David worshiped. So he was a singer. So he was a prophet; and the greatest event that had taken place in Hebrew history was the heart of a shepherd lad - a heart which was a continual discovery to itself, from the psalms the sheep knew in the night dews to those the people chanted when the king was dead, and the singer was borne to silence.
Through a supreme achievement with himself - a penitent, beautiful self-respect - a self-assertion as sweet as the trust of a child, there came to pass in David the first great revolution in the Old Testament. The God who is a Speaker in the Pentateuch is the Listener in the Psalms. The law of the gospel "The Lord said unto Moses" (Exod. 4:4). The gospel of the law - the first of the Bethlehem shepherds singing on the hills a thousand years away with the daring of love. "Bow down Thine ear, O Lord, and hear me, for I am poor and needy, yet the Lord thinketh upon me. Make no tarrying, O my God." (Psa. 86:1)
It would seem as if being a Moses were one of the helpless instincts of life - the "Thus saith the Lord." But David's asking the Creator to listen to his thoughts is the mightiest acquirement of the Hebrew spirit, and forever marks with the soul of the psalmist the most difficult crisis in the approach to God.
The prophecy of Isaiah was supremely logical, and had that inspiration of inevitableness which the Great Spirit is wont to give to utterance.
The coming of Jesus was the unfolding of the only possible plan. His dying on the cross was the very axiom of his being among men at all. His resurrection was as unavoidable as his life, and for a Church not to have followed His message is as unthinkable as the discouragement of God.
But all these have been the unfoldings, the refinements, the inevitable beliefs that came from this first victorious belief of David's, when, thousands of years ago, with no great ages to tell him the way, with the God of Sinai he walked the hills at night and dared to tell Him all his heart.
With an artlessness that makes him man's immortal child, with the Awful One of the clouded mountain - the Thunder One of Moses - wandering with his hand in His hand, prattling of his tiny life to the Creator of the ends of the earth - to David, little one of God, great among men, was the mightiest, loneliest dead-lift of faith, in the conquering of the heavens for the earth.
Belonging to a people who had assumed that what made authority "authority" at all was its being outside of themselves; taught to look out, David dared to look in, and He who had appealed to men because He was a Pillar of Fire, appealed to David because he was in himself.
The crisis which comes to every religion and to all art came in Hebrew history with this first great poet. The eternal issue faced the shepherd boy - the one that has faced every singer and every prophet since. It came to him either to found his faith upon his experience or upon his inexperience. Either to base his inspiration upon not being inspired himself, and fight for the experience of Moses with an inspiration of not believing in his own, or to trust himself as a man's only reverent way of trusting God, and to serve Moses by being a prophet too.
David looked in. He lived within. He sang his life. Not a minor poet or a sub-Mosaic prophet, but, like Isaiah and Job and Jesus, giving to the world, he gave himself.
One of the great self-assertions of history, the first radiant, humble GOD AND I - the egoism of a shepherd boy becomes the ritual of the human heart and the dignity of a listening God is conferred upon the children of men.
by Gerald Stanley Lee (1862-1944), New York: The Century Co., 1896
Contents
Part 1
INTRODUCTION
I. THE PAGAN EMPHASIS
II. THE EMPHASIS OF LIFE
III. THE EMPHASIS OF THE IDEAL
IV. THE HAGAR NATION
Part 2
V. THOU SHALT NOT
VI. THOU SHALT NOT
VII. THOU SHALT NOT
Part 3
VIII. THUS SAITH THE LORD
IX. MILK AND HONEY
X. I AM THAT I AM
XI. THY GENTLENESS HAS MADE ME GREAT
Part 4
XII. DEEP CALLETH UNTO DEEP
XIII. WHO GIVETH SONGS IN THE NIGHT
XIV. WHEN THE PEOPLE SAW THE MOUNTAIN SMOKING THEY STOOD AFAR OFF
Part 5
XV. "WHERE WAST THOU WHEN I LAID THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EARTH?"
XVI. CURSE GOD AND DIE
XVII. DOTH NOT WISDOM CRY AND UNDERSTANDING PUT FORTH HER VOICE?
XVIII. VANITY! VANITY! ALL IS VANITY
Part 6
XIX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XX. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXI. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
XXIII. THE SHADOW CHRIST
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