02 The First of the Prophets

LECTURE II THE FIRST OF THE PROPHETS THE Prophet stood in the old world as a mysterious and romantic figure, played upon by strange and sublime lights, his speech charged with subtle meanings, his life commissioned out of the supernatural for surprising and perilous errands. His is by far the most arresting figure in the Old Testament. When he takes the stage all other actors are dwarfed. If he is not there, time itself seems to wait for his appearance. Prince and priest alike are insignificant in his majestic presence. In his highest exemplars both his words and his deeds are memorable. His interventions, his appearances mark the crises of history. His words set the standard of thought for generations. With the people he is by no means always popular. He has no genius for smooth speech. He flatters neither monarch nor mob; and nations have seldom loved the uncompromising truth. He appears on the canvas of Holy Writ as the clear-sighted enemy of powerful, selfish, vested interests; and the passages are yet to be discovered in which he pronounces blessing on the rich. The language he holds is scathing and passionate; and in many cases the denunciations are more frequent than the consolations. Mr. Matthew Arnold would perhaps have called the prophet a Philistine; but imagination fails to conceive what the prophet would have called Mr. Matthew Arnold. But whatever be the type of mission and of personality, the prophet dominates the life of his time. Wherever and whenever he appears men’s souls are stirred, and there is a shaking of the dry bones. We realize that he awes even the worldly-minded. He fixes men’s thoughts on serious issues. He rebukes their triviality and flippancy. He brings a breath of reality into ordinary conversation. He confronts the careless and frivolous with the claims of the Eternal. We realize, too, that the great prophets had a genius for the unexpected and the unconventional. They ignored tradition. They were fiery iconoclasts, intolerant of illusions however fashionable. They had no excessive respect for the orthodoxy so-called of the rigid schools of the Rabbis. Of ceremonies and ordinances as you know they were apt to speak with very slight respect. The tendency of religion in all ages to stereotype its forms and formulas was viewed by the prophets as an insidious evil. Thus it was never long before they had arrayed against them all those who were keenly interested in the preservation of the old order of things. For the prophet was always and everywhere a reformer, zealous to reconstruct life as it is so that it might more perfectly express the will of God.

You will bear this in mind also, that even when the people believed but little in their prophet, the true prophet never faltered in his belief in the people. He knew their souls were soil adapted to the seed. He knew that they were capable of all the aspirations and all the heroism’s which they habitually professed to despise. He knew that their agnosticism was superficial, and their contempt of idealism a pose. Let any genuine voice reach them and thrill them, or let some great crisis shatter their slumbers, and their affectations, and all the inferior creeds would go down before the resistless tide of spiritual feeling. Unless there is in men and women this capacity of re-birth the preacher’s work everywhere is vain; we may as well dismantle our pulpits, and recognize that human progress is a delusive hope. So Thomas Carlyle exclaims concerning the European Reformation: "Nations are benefited, I believe, for ages by being thrown into divine white heat in this manner, and no nation that has not had such divine paroxysms at any time is apt to come to much." The preacher, it is true, may feel himself to be, in the beginning, only! a voice crying in the wilderness, but he also believes that the desert can rejoice and blossom as the rose. That is to say, he believes that actual desert is potential Eden; and that all that is needed to effect the miracle is the cooperant forces of what we describe as the Sun of Righteousness and the Water of Life. This inspired visionary, with his radiant belief in transfigured deserts,--in sandy and barren wastes gay with lilies and roses--is surely the very insuppressible hero of Romance. He walks the mean streets and dreary paths of modern industrial districts, with the same high confidence that lighted the face of Isaiah amid the desert of commercialized Judaism, in the unspiritual environment of ancient Babylon. For he believes in his people; he is sure of his audience. It is nothing to him that they do not believe in themselves. It is nothing to him that the soil to be cultivated is so heavy and obstinate a clay, or so barren a waste. The more unpromising the material, the more smiling is his prevision of success. This, surely, is the element of futurity about the prophet’s message has often been fiercely debated. He is more than a forth-teller. He is a fore-teller. He does "dip into the future." It is given to him to see the end from the beginning. More certainly than the scientist with boasted precision can dogmatize on the ultimate product in the total process of cause and effect, the prophet fore sees and foretells the inevitable transformations that will be produced upon the desert of unbelief and unrighteousness, by the operation of the Divine Spirit. But let us leave these generalizations and make a more close and detailed study of the first great master of the art of the prophet as he is portrayed for us in the Book of Exodus. To those who frankly disbelieve that the message of God to man is even more than the call to personal regeneration, and who are aghast at the idea of the preacher being made the instrument of popular liberty and social reconstruction, the mission and message of Moses must be the source of endless difficulty. On what theory they rely for explaining away this man and his work I have no notion. But to the candid student who holds no brief for, or against, any particular theory, the story of Moses is surely one of the most luminous and thrilling in human history.

I need not dwell here on the romantic circumstances of his preservation from death, and his transfer from the hovel of the slave to the palace of the Pharaoh. His education is more to the point. Do not fail to note that the Scripture assumes that it belonged to the will and purpose of Providence that this first great Hebrew prophet should be instructed in all the lore of the Egyptians. There was no prejudice against what is sometimes derided as pagan or classical culture. Familiarity with the thoughts and imaginations of great men is taken as an invaluable preparation for the preacher’s work, even when these thinkers belong to a very different school of religious philosophy. Like the apostle Paul, his mental powers are trained and disciplined in the wisdom of the ancients, but his personality and his experience are his own; and so far as we can see, he is never in any danger of surrendering his personality or depreciating his experience. His nearest successor in modern times was John Wesley whose whole preaching was colored by his classical learning, who abounded in illustrations drawn from the ancients, and yet the originality of whose spiritual experience was the secret of his unique influence over his generation. It can never be necessary in this atmosphere to protest against any and every theory that makes light of an educated ministry, and that assumes that Providence prefers to let loose upon an unsophisticated generation the man of undisciplined mind. I shall have more to say on this subject when I come to deal with the Romance of Evangelism. But for the present let me lay it down that there is nothing in Holy Writ to warrant the assumption that a man is likely to be more spiritual if he is an ignoramus; or that prophetic power in the pulpit especially attaches to the preacher whose heart is full and whose head is empty. Knowledge is really not a disqualification for the ministry; neither is there any incompatibility between the seer and the scholar. Because Festus chose to assume that much learning had made Paul mad, we need not be seriously afraid that a similar cause will be likely to produce that effect in us. That Moses brought to his great democratic task a finely trained, balanced and disciplined intellect was of immeasurable value to him, and gave him at once a portion of personal ascendency when he came to deal with those whose misfortune it was, that they had been deprived of his advantages. But on the most vital point of all, the Scripture narrative is emphatic. No weight of learning, no insight into alien creeds, and no increase of social prestige injured his humanity. In the court atmosphere that he breathed, and under the tuition of the Egyptian scholars, he did not lose his capacity for indignation, his passionate hatred of oppression and love of liberty. Neither did his own prosperity make him forgetful of those who were the victims of cruelty, and apparently in the grip of an inexorable fate. His eulogists were wont to celebrate the meekness and patience of his later days. But I do not think I am wrong in saying that in every true prophet there is something volcanic. Well is it for all of us when our primal instincts remain intact, however thoroughly we may master the lessons of self-control. Moses in his young manhood betrays the depths of his humanity--his elemental hatred of oppression; but I ask you to observe that when he fled from the consequences of his own rough blow struck for justice and freedom, he is guided to a solitude where he might think out his problem. For the problem was not only to avenge one wrong but to destroy the system that authorized the wrong. After all it was a poor thing merely to strike down the agent of Pharaoh’s tyranny. The war Moses had to wage was against the throned iniquity, the entrenched and panoplied injustice that had behind it all the force of organized authority, and all the glamour of a throne. In other words, the problem for this Man of destiny was how to end an iron despotism and substitute an order of justice, freedom and humanity. No preacher into whose soul God’s light has penetrated will ever content himself with seeking the deliverance of the individual, so long as systems of wrong are allowed to stand which have issue, generation after generation, in the demoralization of human nature, and the consequent perpetuation of injustice. The next stage in the ordeal of Moses may be described as his fight against his destiny. For it has always been true that God’s best ministers take up their commission under a sense of compulsion. They cannot easily believe that this awful and sublime call is to them. They are conscious of no capacity in their nature equal to so tremendous a vocation. They are driven out on to these great waters, where the Divine business is to be done, under stress of storm. It needs the utter maximum of revelation to convince us that we are actually the elect of God for tasks so mighty. Like Moses, we plead nature’s bar, and cry "Impossible!" "0 Lord, I am not eloquent. And the Lord said, Who hath made man’s mouth, is it not I the Lord?" Science has labored in our time to make a Gospel out of natural selection. But this Gospel of supernatural election is a greater one. God’s miracles are wrought by those who, in spite of themselves, do the humanly impossible.

You remember a passage in one of Mr. Augustine Birrell’s essays in which he reminds us that the poet Gray longed to be a soldier; he wrote the immortal elegy but he took no Quebec; General Wolfe took Quebec, and with his latest breath declared he would rather have written Gray’s elegy. Not natural selection, but divine election! Frederick William Robertson broke his heart because he might not be a soldier; and was constrained into the office of prophet by influences he could not comprehend. Yet, so coerced in spirit, he preached; and did more than any other of his time to create a new birth of faith. Not natural selection but supernatural election. Strange as it seems, and paradoxical, God’s noblest warriors have felt like pressed men. Said a young fellow once before a college committee when asked why he wanted to enter the ministry, "Because all other ambitions went down before the revelation of life in Christ." The other ambitions have to go down. The one and only ambition that is big enough to overwhelm all others has to master and possess the preacher. I know nothing in history more impressive than the resistless way in which God urges His claims; how He seems to shut in the man to the task, and sweep away his objections and hesitations like chaff before the wind.

"So nigh is grandeur to the dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, ’ Thou must,’ The soul replies, ’ I can.’"

It is that determinative "thou must" that lies behind the consecrated audacity of the prophet, and lends strange fire to his words.

Surely there is no prayer more appropriate to any one who feels the inner urging of the spirit towards the office of the preacher than the famous one of Augustine--" O God, give what Thou commandest and then command what Thou wilt." When we are ready to cry out with Moses, "I cannot go, I have not the gift, I should only bring dishonor upon the cause," the answer is, "The gift is in the good pleasure of the Giver." Certain it is He will send no man on any errand of His, without the ability to discharge it.

Yet this diffidence on the threshold is surely a sign of grace. We notice it not only in Moses but in Jeremiah, in Zechariah and in Paul. They require to be convinced that they are not being tempted to build the most responsible and difficult of all lives on mere raw impulse. They are resolved to hold no illusions as to their own character and capacity. They weigh, and measure up, their powers and talents with scrupulous exactitude. They disguise none of their deficiencies. They do full justice to the magnitude of the work required of them. Then with genuine humility they object their insufficiency for the task. Only men who have approached the ministry in this spirit have had their souls and wills purged from the alloy of false and base ambitions. But at the last, Moses is made to see that his mistrust of self and his fear of failure, alike spring from an imperfect knowledge of God and partial surrender to His will. The one thing lacking in the special education of Moses for the crisis in history which he has to handle is Revelation. The solution of Israel’s social problem lies precisely where the solutions of all social troubles lie,--in the knowledge of God and of His will.

It is this experience to which the next chapter in his education is sacred. The special gift that is to fit him for his ambassadorship is God’s revealed secret to him--a new knowledge of God which former generations had not known, nor needed to know, but which was revealed to him, Moses, because without it he could not accomplish his task. It is well to take note of the actual words as they are given us in the Book of the Exodus. The passages are gathered from two chapters. To the petition of Moses for new light on the nature of God the answer is, "I AM hath sent thee"; and it dawns on this young Liberator that this mystic message contains a new truth of pregnant meaning--" I am the Lord; I appeared unto Abraham, Isaac and Jacob by the name of God Almighty but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them." This spiritual crisis in the personal preparation o! the prophet for his work is worthy of your attention. By some flash of inner light he is conscious of out distancing the greatest of his predecessors. Some new conviction is burned into his brain. He is literally on fire with a new ideal.

"O glory of the lighted mind," exclaims Mr. Masefield’s converted hero in "The Everlasting Mercy." There is no glory equal to it. In that hour Moses became a seer, and stands illuminated with the glory of the lighted mind. In the first place it is a great thing to know by actual verification that Revelation is progressive.

"Each generation learned Some new word of that great Credo which in prophet hearts has burned Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to Heaven upturned."

It is one thing to believe that as a theological proposition; it is quite another thing to know its truth in some hour of exalted vision. This is the very soul of religion. It thrills us in those majestic words which form the stately exordium of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "God who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets hath in these latter days spoken unto us by His Son." "God hath spoken." This is the life of truth. God hath spoken to us. The Divine word has become cogent and pertinent to our life and our need. Something of the infinite reserve of truth has been specially disclosed for our enlightenment. We are not the disciples of a closed canon. Do not the astronomers tell us that we live in so splendid and spacious a physical universe that not a year passes but the light from some new star, some effluence out of the Infinite, reaches our world and adds to our perception of the wealth of the Eternal? And are we to suppose that the spiritual universe is less august? And that those rays that speak of realities old as the worlds yet new to our ken, may not reach our souls today, and continue to illumine with fresh radiance the spirits of the generations yet unborn? We are the heirs of progressive revelation. We are admitted to know secrets withheld from the knowledge of our sainted sires. We are always knowing God. To know Him is the life which is life indeed. The special revelation that lighted the mind of Moses and made him a prophet lay in the name of God—the I AM, the Eternal Presence; or as Dr. Fairbairn more truly phrases it, "He who causes to be." This is the Vision of the Immanent Deity without whom there is no existence and no progress; and who has not made either the world or humanity but is ever making them. This is the Vision of the Will that rolls through all things, molding and making all that is. The soul that is one with that Will is lifted above fear and failure. For him the Present is alive with God; and the Future is forever with Him. That is the faith with which to conquer the hell of slavery; that is the vision to give hope and patience to the Reformer whose business it is not only to deliver the people’s bodies from bondage but their souls from the curse of captivity. "I Am hath sent thee." It is not very far from that revelation to the central Christian faith--Emmanuel, God with us.

Here then is our man, the first in the august line of the prophetical succession, one who of his own choice espouses the cause of a suffering people, who for the sake of the enslaved and oppressed eats the bread of exile and servitude, who by Divine constraint takes up the sacred but thankless task of liberator, and becomes the mouthpiece of the will of God alike to tyrant monarch and depraved multitude. He is the servant and spokesman of "Him who causes to be." On that revelation of the Divine purpose and cooperation he relies, and under the inspiration of it he rises to a sublime height. He sees that the social revolution without which national emancipation cannot be achieved lies within the will and power of Him who causes to be. Henceforth Moses is a "God-intoxicated" man. But so far from being a visionary, his spiritual illumination confers practical insight and the wisdom of statesmanship. He has not only to persuade a dark, degraded and discouraged people that their social misery is not irremediable nor their spiritual despair indestructible if only faith in God revives in their breasts; but he has somehow to lead them up from the depths of servitude and fashion for them a religious and social system which shall incorporate and express the new revelation of God and His will.

I need not tell you that our inspired prophet was no infallible pope. As we have seen he was the disciple of progressive revelation, and just as he saw truths about God that had been concealed from his fathers, so the generations to come would outgrow the Mosaic system in the light of a still purer and humane revelation. Something of the harshness and inhumanity of the heathenism from which his race had emerged betrays itself in many of his statutes. But it is not the man’s limitations that astonish us, but his almost incredible height of wisdom and humanity, standing where he did. And one supreme conviction masters him. God must rule the whole life of man. Nothing that is human must ever lie outside the divine governance. That is why he brings the will of God to bear on the minutest details not only of worship, but of conduct. The wonder of the Mosaic legislation is not in the provision of the tabernacle and the elaborate system of symbol by means of which he designed to teach a people of very rudimentary religious education the spiritual and moral truths he himself had grasped; the wonder of the Mosaic legislation is in the new social and economic order that it created, and the moral code that was to hold therein. First, in the Decalogue, he not only sweeps away by solemn enactment all polytheism and idolatry, but all external temptations thereto. Then he provides by law for one day’s rest in seven for everybody. Then he lends the sanction of religion to that respect due to parents which is the key to a wholesome family life. Then he legislates against murder, adultery, theft and scandal, and even ventures to lay the divine law upon the thoughts and imaginations of the heart by a statute against those envious desires which are the source of so many deeds of unjust aggrandizement. So much for the Decalogue. But there follows, as you know, the most elaborate and interesting series of statutes, dealing with various classes of labor, menservants and maidservants, for whom a whole charter of rights, exemptions and privileges is devised. He faces problems as to the responsibility of those who are the unwitting cause of injury to others. He is rigorous against usury. He safeguards the position of the "foreigner," and enjoins hospitality. He deals with the appointment of judges and decrees the punishment for perjury. He sketches the system of land tenure and asserts the original and inalienable proprietorship of God. He has a good deal to say as to the conduct of war, and while his words are in places dark and fearful, we have nevertheless in his statute the first attempt ever made to humanize war and moderate some of its consequences. His agrarian legislation includes details as to the cultivation of vineyards, and methods of ploughing. He even condescends to the character and quality of clothing that is appropriate to the life of the people; and again and again he throws the shelter of Divine authority about the life and fortune of the poor, the infirm and the "stranger"; as well as around the dumb beasts that are the servants of mankind.

Perhaps I may be allowed to interpolate here that my argument is scarcely, if at all, affected by the most advanced criticism, assigning much that has been included in the code of Moses to a later date. It is really a question of the foundation tradition of a great people. The prophet comes upon the scene as the herald of a theocracy. His soul is alive with faith in the kingdom of God. He sees that government by God’s will means not only the acceptance of certain beliefs, and the performance of certain acts of worship, but the observance of certain ethical obligations, and the organization of a certain social order. The tradition of the Hebrew nation was, from henceforth, that its state was founded by its first prophet; that its first statesman and legislator was one who received his ideals in communion with God upon the Mount of Vision. No one can wonder that the successors of Moses in the great prophetical line were similarly endowed by the spirit for momentous political errands. Hence Samuel crowns and discrowns kings. Elijah, flying from life and duty to Horeb, hears commanding words bidding him return to the thick of the human fray "and anoint Hazael to be king over Syria and Jehu the son of Nimshi to be king over Israel." So he, too, becomes the instrument of political revolution, and the mouthpiece of the creed that the Lord God cares how the people are governed, and that His sovereignty remains unaffected by the particular mode of government that may obtain at any time and in any land. This then is the conception alike of the work of the preacher, and of the ideal constitution of a people that we derive from the Old Testament; and as I hope to be able to show you in later lectures, it is not modified by any teaching or practice that we owe to the New Testament. The whole problem of good government is how to give effect to the ideal of the kingdom of God. The problem of bad government lies in the men who have lost sight of that ideal.

I think we may spare a few more thoughts for the problem of how God made His first great prophet--the leader of that hero race whose deeds and words belong to the unperishable glories of the world. You and I come to our consideration of this man with questions in our minds which we shall have to answer, and in regard to which people will look to us for guidance. Yet these questions only differ in degree from those that tortured the soul of Moses and inspired his sacrifice and devotion. He became the man he was because he saw the two extremes of life, its luxury and its misery, its cruel indefensible inequalities. I sometimes think no man is qualified to be a preacher at all into whose soul that iron has not entered. We may state our economic beliefs today in more scientific terms than Moses could. But do we feel as much as he did what the actual facts mean? Do we realize the poignancy of the contrast? It was the great advantage of this embryo prophet that he lived in both worlds; he knew the want at one end of the social scale and the waste at the other. He saw that the pomp and splendor of the court of the Pharaohs was all sweated out of the unpaid labor of the toilers. He saw the inside organization of a vast tyranny which kept multitudes in poverty that a few might revel in luxury and idleness. He saw the scorn and contempt of the exploiters of industrialism for those on whose labor they lived. He saw all these things; and according to a modern pietistic school, he would have done his duty if he had simply preached the existence of God, and had taken no step to break up this iniquitous order and give freedom and justice to the people. Fortunately for the Israelites he did not read his destiny and duty so.

It is no business of mine to suggest what subjects should be included in the curriculum of a college where men are in training to be preachers. The day will come, I suspect, when a course of instruction on social conditions will be a part of the normal education of every minister of religion. But desirable and important as that is, you cannot nourish the spirit and passion of a Moses simply on a diet of political economy and social statistics. What counts is actual experience of the cruelties and miseries of an organized society where unbridled prodigality at the top, is balanced by indescribable poverty at the bottom. The course of study I would fain include in the curriculum of every modern school of the prophets would be conducted in a tenement district, or some area where men and women live--or exist--doing unending tasks for starvation wages. If to that could be added a brief course of study of the actual lives of the wealthy dilettantists and neurotics who make up so large a portion of what is called Society, we should breed a race of prophets who would be our leaders in a new exodus towards a new land of promise. When the great masses of our peoples are made to understand that our preachers are those who know the inwardness of their life and lot, and have entered into close brotherhood with them to champion their right to fullness of life and opportunity, then faith will revive in our lands even as we read in the time of Moses, "And the people believed, for when they saw that the Lord had visited His children, and had seen their afflictions, then they bowed their heads’ and worshipped."

Somewhere in your literature I have read the story of a scene after one of the battles of your Civil War. The rude hospital was crowded and the surgeons were busy with their instruments of pain. And in the midst of all the anguish and agony there stood a fair young girl who had devoted herself to the task of nursing. The turn of one of the wounded men had come, and his operation had to be faced. He said he thought he could bear it if the lady would come and hold his hand. And she went where he lay, and held his hand; watched the cold beads stand out on his brow; and gathered up into her heart all his suffering and pain. If the world bears its sorrow and miseries today with some measure of faith and fortitude it is because the Lord Christ has stood, during these centuries, by the bedside of a suffering Humanity and held its hand, and gathered into His Divine heart its pain, its grief, and its sin.

Remember, there is no cheaper way than this to bring about a revival of faith. Faith is often crushed out of the hearts of people by harsh and unjust social conditions. It is not unnatural that the victims of these conditions should argue from man’s inhumanity to man either that the God who permits it is indifferent, or that there is no God since He does not intervene. It is little use to go to such as these and preach the theory of religion. Theology is a fascinating subject, but the formula has yet to be invented that will satisfy the souls of those who are suffering under the cruel lash of injustice, and who are the prisoners of circumstance. Some one must go to them who by his own life of brotherhood and practical sympathy will interpret to them God’s redeeming purposes. Some one must do what Moses did for the Israelites--consecrate his sympathy, his sagacity, and his energy to the task of deliverance, and the substitution of the right for the wrong, which is the eternal world-task at which all must labor. The Old Testament introduces us broadly to two orders of preachers. Of the one Elijah is the type the uncompromising individualist, remote, inaccessible, ascetic. Ever and anon he descends from his solitude’s to thunder his denunciations against an apostate age. But he knows little of the people, or of the time. He is apt to exaggerate his loneliness in righteousness. He thinks the whole land has gone after Baal while all the time there are seven thousand non-conformists. But his courage, and his austerity make him a power. The people gaze with awe upon his face, even though they look with relief upon his back. This is a great type of preacher; but I question whether it is the type that is most welcome, or most potent. Elijah was succeeded by Elisha; and the young disciple who received for endowment a double portion of the old preacher’s spirit dedicated himself to a totally different type of ministry. He was a homely, friendly man, whose place was in the hearts and homes of the people.

Think of the facts about him as we know them. The Shunammite woman knew him as the one man in the land who would understand what the loss of her lad meant to her. The young prophets, eager to erect their new house, put their arms around him, and said, "Be content, and go with us." If they had acted like that to Elijah, I do not know which would have been the more uncomfortable party, the old prophet or the young probationers. When the widow of a young preacher comes to Elisha, he reads her tragedy in shrewd human fashion. "What hast thou in the house?" he asks, and she answers pathetically, "Thine handmaid hath not anything in the house, save a pot of oil." When the Shunammite woman returned after the famine to find her lands alienated, he made himself at once her champion, and faced the king with the demand, "Restore to her lands, and the fruits since the day she left." This is the new order of ministry. It is human, social, sympathetic. Elisha knows how people live, enters into their joys, shares their ambitions, instinctively discerns their privations, and will not see them defrauded of their rights. Both orders of ministry may have their place; but I believe that the future will largely be the inheritance of the latter. We are returning in thought and feeling in these latter days to the ideal which lies behind the Book of the Exodus, and which is reflected in the renunciation, the practical sympathy, the strenuous and sagacious leadership, and the code of moral and social legislation, of the first of the Prophets.