The paradox of the world; sermons by John Oman, D. D.

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I THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES . . i

II A DYING CIVILISATION ... 15

II I Kings xix. 12. 'And after the fire a still small voice.'

Xhe sublimity of this scene should impress us with its tremendous significance, but, as we watch the haggard solitary figure at the mouth of the cave, the shattered head of Horeb towering above him, and the desert stretching out dim and boundless and desolate before, and hear the rocks crash in tornado, and feel the earth quake in pent-up agony, and see the lightning wrap the world in flame, and shudder with awe as the tumult of nature changes to the sudden silence of the great waste places of the earth, our imagination is so filled with the spectacle that we may forget to ask what it meant for that lone watcher.

Positive misunderstanding, moreover, is introduced by the translation of our text as 'a still small voice,* and especially by the accepted exposition of it both in preaching and poetry. The tumult in which God was not is taken to be the vehement methods of judgment, and in particular Elijah's violence with idolatry and the priests of Baal. The * still small voice,' in which God was, is then a declaration of the gentle ways of God and a prophecy of Him who was full of grace and truth.

But even Christ's denunciation of an adulterous generation, who corrupted religion by hypocrisy, could be heart-shaking as earthquake and scathing as lightning; and no one ever announced more terrible judgments. Besides, if this voice rebuked violence and promised gentleness, why should it be followed by the announcement of just such a terrible upheaval in human society as had passed over nature ? Why was Elijah to anoint Hazael to be king over Syria, and Jehu to be king over Israel, and Elisha to be prophet in his own room, that him who escaped from the sword of Hazael, Jehu should slay, and him who escaped from the sword of Jehu, Elisha should slay ? Instead of gentleness and rebuke of the spirit of judgment, the doom is so appalling that Elijah himself, for all his sternness, sought delay when he took the first step of calling Elisha, and Elisha wept in the streets of Damascus when he took the second by appointing the kingdom to Hazael.

The seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal are the one hope in the distress. They become the holy remnant from which is to spring a new nation, and then the servant of the Lord who is to be a light to lighten the Gentiles as well as the glory of Israel. But even their presence, though it assures hope at the end of the day, cannot avert judgment or do more than delay the blotting-out of civilisation. And it is this blotting-out which is predicted in the solemn stillness which follows the agony of nature.

The only doubtful word is that translated 'small/ Literally it means something beaten fine like dust, but it was also in common use for something thin like a veil. The rest is in no way doubtful. It is not a still voice, but a voice of silence. The silence itself speaks as when the heavens, which have no speech or language, declare the glory of God. The best commentary is the passage in Job, where Eliphaz says that, in visions of the night, a mysterious presence passed before his face, and a voice of silence — not a voice following silence, but the voice of the silence itself — said, Can man be pure before God who charges even His angels with folly? Our text, therefore, means a voice of a silence which either wrapped the world like a veil or fell upon it like dust on one vast desolation. In either case it means the arresting, solemn, dread stillness of the great waste-places. It speaks in the same language of nature as the tornado, the earthquake and the lightning. As they meant invasion, revolution and moral disaster, this typifies the ruined world which shall remain when the work, of which Hazael, Jehu and Elisha are but the beginnings, has reached its calamitous close.

That the Lord was not in tempest, earthquake or fire, does not mean that they were contrary to His mind or apart from His purpose, or even that he did not command them into action, but only that the prophet could not yet hear in them the deliverance he expected, the satisfaction of His longing for a purified religion and a regenerated society. That first spoke in the voice of the arresting silence which fell upon the lightning-riven masses of Horeb and the storm-driven sands of the farstretching desert. This desolate stillness first uttered to his heart the hope that, as once the religion of Israel had been cleansed of idolatries and its society ordered on simple human relations in the wilderness, so it might be again.

By invasion, insurrection and moral corruption the present civilisation would fall to ruin. Its worldly and selfish prosperity, which drowned every voice of the human heart except ambition and pride of place and love of pleasure and greed of gain and alldevouring lust, would cease; its worship, which debased religion to ceremonial and faith to superstition, would sink into silence. Then, in that dread stillness of desolation, man would once again hear the deep divine voices in his own heart, love his neighbour in justice and kindness, and worship God in simplicity and humility. Then, too, above all, the seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal would come to their own, and in God's name rebuild a new and better world.

This was the prophet's hope: and, without hope, he was not asked to do his work. But, so far is his resistance to evil from being rebuked, that he is ordered to begin an upheaval which would shake all false securities, burst all unreal bonds, and manifest the disaster of all corruptions. In spite of the hope shining at the end, this way of the wilderness remained dark and terrible, a way before which even Elijah's high courage quailed and his stern heart melted. The silence of desolation, which followed tempest and earthquake and fire, meant the blotting out of civilisation by brutal wars of conquest, by national anarchies and by moral corruptions ; and no vision behind it of religious or social regeneration could change the awful doom of misery, captivity, slaughter, which overshadowed men and women and even little children. Beyond lay the vision of God's Holy Mountain where the ransomed of the Lord should walk and none hurt or destroy, but even that hope could not still the present agony which rent the heart of every prophet, till he cried 'O Lord, how long?' nor did it alter the terrible answer, 'Until cities be waste without inhabitants and houses without men, and the land become utterly waste.'

In that voice of the silence of desolation can be heard the whole burden of Hebrew prophecy. Even Isaiah and Jeremiah, for all their far greater gifts of genius, are but followers and disciples of Elijah, and only the scope and splendour of their application obscures the extent to which they merely reecho this message of the voices of the desert.

Elijah, listening in trembling awe to this pause of the utter, lone silence of the waste, learned the measure of value which gave birth to all the prophets' thoughts of God as ruling in righteousness the armies of Heaven as well as the inhabitants of Earth.

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2o A DYING CIVILISATION

From it they learned that no interests compare with the interests of the soul, that every loss is gain upon which the soul can feed, and that earthly kingdoms are less than nothing and vanity when God's Kingdom is at stake. Their sublime monotheism, with all its confidence in the wise omnipotent righteous sovereignty of the One God, is just the application of this discovery. God has ceased to be an idol to secure individual prosperity or a national deity to guarantee His people's security, and has become the director of all destinies and the measure of all good, for whose ends man might with profit suffer and die and the world with advantage be reduced to ruin and desolation. Though this message never ceases to be tremendous and appalling, all true thoughts, not only of God's righteous sovereignty, but of His patient wise love, spring from it. And, if it grow only on soil ploughed deep with the agony of men and nations, it bears, as no other plant, the fruit of eternal hope.

This we see in all the prophets from Amos to Jeremiah.

The work of Amos is so amazingly original, that it has been described as the most remarkable phenomenon in the history of the human spirit, yet the heart of his message is just what Elijah saw at Horeb : and his continual reference to fire seems to show that he was not ignorant of his dependence. God will send His fire upon Syria, which is still to him the house of Hazael, and upon Israel and Judah and all the nations round about. And fire means with Amos also the consuming power of the moral nature of things when ignored and defied. The present civilisation is doomed, and nothing in it more certainly than its religion of much ritual and little righteousness. God despises its feasts, has no delight in its solemn assemblies, and pays no regard to its sacrifices, which were never offered in the wilderness.

This is his only reference to the wilderness, yet it is of deep significance, as it plainly hints that there alone lies the hope of a purified, sincere and neighbourly piety. But of the coming desolation which was to reduce religion to this simplicity, nowhere are there more terrible descriptions. There may even be a definite reference to the experience of Elijah in the demand for silence after the songs of the Temple have become howlings and the dead are too many and the living too few for the rites of burial. Even of the remnant he can only say that their wisdom is in silence, and that, if they hate the evil and love the good and establish judgment in the gate, it may be that God will be gracious unto them. The hymn of restoration at the close, when cities should be rebuilt and inhabited, and fields sown and the bread eaten, and vineyards and gardens planted and the wine drunk and the fruit enjoyed, is thought to be later, but, as it is a hope still limited to Israel, it may not; and, in any case, we cannot suppose that Amos, any more than Elijah, was asked to prophesy mere desolation without some assurance that God's voice spoke in its silence, promising a purer religion and a regenerated society.

Invasion and insurrection are for Amos, as for Elijah, the means of destruction. Yet they remain vague hints of slaughter and wasting and captivity and risings against the house of Jeroboam, the descendant of Jehu. Only when we come to the supreme destructive force, the nature of moral reality, have we a concreteness, an intensity, an inevitableness, without parallel. A nation in which lies are cherished and prophets silenced, the needy robbed and the meek oppressed, adultery flagrant and drunkenness rampant, luxury rapacious, recreation frivolous and amusement the only serious pursuit, till nothing is left sacred, God calls to contend with fire not to be escaped in heaven or hell or the depths of the sea, till the land shall melt and its inhabitants mourn.

In Hosea there is a still clearer conception that the goal is the wilderness. 'Behold, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the Valley of Troubling for a door of hope.' Anarchy is already doing its destructive work within and the invader is thundering at the gate. But the inevitable still lies in the moral and spiritual forces. A nation sunk in idolatry, licentiousness, intemperance, greed, pride and injustice, cannot abide.

A great agony of sympathy possesses the heart of the prophet. But comfort springs from the very depth of his woe, for the very agony in his own heart interprets the heart of God. 'In Him the fatherless findeth mercy/ 'His heart is turned within Him/ 'His compassions are kindled together/ He cannot finally give up His people.

The message of Isaiah is not essentially different. Though the destruction of Judah is deferred, the present civilisation is doomed in every nation, And the powers before which it is to fall are still the same. First there is conquest. Assyria is at hand, a razor Judah herself has hired, which will shave her bare. Next there is anarchy. 'Children are their princes, and babes rule over them,' and the distress is so great that anyone with clothing is urged to be a ruler and take in hand to bring some order into the ruin.

But the final, the unescapable cause of disaster is still that, however it be ignored or denied, the supreme reality is moral and spiritual. A nation cannot abide when religion degenerates into complicated ceremonial, trampling of God's courts, presenting vain oblations and calling solemn assemblies, when the heart's best reverence is so material that it cannot rise above superstition and idolatry, when pride flaunts its luxury in the face of poverty, and wealth won by oppression is spent in strong drink and frivolous and licentious festivities. This is the all-consuming fire in which men shall be ' devoured like stubble and their blossom go up like dust/

At the end lies still the discipline of the wilderness. The land is to be a place of briars and thorns where the sparse inhabitants hunt and dig and pasture their few cattle for the simplest livelihood.

Yet in this stock of a felled tree, the holy remnant, as Isaiah names the seven thousand who have not bowed the knee to Baal, are the life out of which there will be a growth more spacious and glorious, an Israel of a faith and a righteousness which will show that great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of her.

Later there was a change to a larger, more gracious, more spiritual conception of the work of the holy remnant. From a mere seed from which might grow a renovated Israel, it came to be a redeeming leaven in the whole world, through whom the knowledge of the Lord should cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, from whose pure and sincere worship would proceed the law which would establish perfect peace in perfect righteousness, not by any form of outward compulsion, but by the covenant of a new spirit within of truth and love.

Even more pointedly and exclusively this message of the wilderness was the prophetic burden of Jeremiah; while, through him, the method of the remnant was still clearly conceived as service and sacrifice.

Finally, under his influence, the remnant came to be later the Suffering Servant, whose work crowned the prophetic hope of the Old Testament and was the supreme preparation for Him who came from the bosom of the Father to declare Him and establish among men the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Old Testament has become in these days a real, an appallingly real book, and no part of it more concerns us than this central message of the silence of desolation.

When there is no principle of righteousness to oppose to the brutal strength of invasion, no rule of duty and devotion to maintain civil order, no worship but of place and gain and pleasure to give regard for man made in God's image and reverence for the soul which is His breath in our mortal clay, the spirit is dead and only the pampered body remains and there is no need to ask,

Shall worms inheritors of this excess Eat up thy charge?

Then the only hope remaining is that 'the soul may live upon its servant's loss.'

When the great gift of civilisation, so rich in its possibilities for higher thought and purer worship, for gracious sympathies and helpful, brotherly human relations, is misused for obscuring the vital demands of religion, for enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor, for competition in which strength serves only selfish desire, and for a measure of values by wealth and not by worth and wisdom and goodness, there is no hope but in its destruction and a return to the solemn stillness of the wilderness where men may hear, in the deeper voices of their own hearts, the call of the Divine Will of righteousness and love above them and of the sacred humanities around them.

We have often said there are worse things than war; and, in spite of all these recent years have taught us of its horrors, it is still true that there are subjections and disloyalties worse than war. Yet war, not to bring nations to their senses that we may once again trust the securities of reason and righteousness, but to put each other in strait-waistcoats of annexations and armed suppressions and control of material resources, is only what the ancient peoples like Assyria attempted to do by humiliating subjection and crushing tribute and the removing of peoples. The result could only be once again to turn the world into a permanent Bedlam in which civilisation would end in mutual destruction.

Nor could we save anything out of the ruin except by having in us a principle of reasonableness and righteousness and unselfish regard for human good which, by right of its own nature, could appeal against mad ambition and brutal aggression.

With even more confidence we can say there are worse things than insurrection. Our own civil wars have won for us more permanent good than our many foreign wars : and even the chaos and weakness of Russia might be a cheap price for an enlightened and just and ordered freedom. Something of revolution, if not by arms, yet by other ways of anarchy, every country in Europe may soon have to face. But again how much of our civilisation we can bring out of it will depend on the measure of responsibility and devotion to liberty, for the growth of man's spirit and not for unbridled ambition and material good, we can oppose to the excesses of license and personal ambition.

But the heart-shaking part of this ancient message of the silence of the wilderness is that there are worse things even than the blotting out of our whole civilisation in war and anarchy. Terrible as that would be, it is better than to pamper the body and starve the spirit, to make machines of men and blot out human kindness, to find our heaven in the world and shut out God. Civilisation is a great good, and no prophet despises even its material blessings or ceases to hope for their return when men shall have discovered that prosperity is not a god to be worshipped, but only a means of worshipping God through using it to serve the noblest welfare of His children. Yet civilisation is no end in itself, but, on the contrary, a civilisation, without justice and mercy, without purity and self-control, without reverence for truth and beauty and goodness, without a sense for things unseen and eternal, without a religion that passes by observances and activities and offerings to do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with our God, is the supreme obstacle to God's purpose with the spirit of man, and the supreme denial of His eternal Rule of Truth and Love.

However appalling the agony, God will not hesitate to destroy it, nay, He has so made the world and the moral nature of things, that it is necessarily self-destructive, as, for the final good, every corrupt thing always is. Our present calamity may be great, yet to leave us in a state in which the world was our god and we had our selfish desires, but had leanness in our souls, would have been a still greater disaster, for it would have meant that God had renounced His high task with the world and the spirit of man.

As of old salvation can only come through the holy remnant. To it we belong as we do not bow the knee to the Baal of worldly success and lust of pleasure and power, but worship the Father in spirit and in truth by reverencing only what is spiritual and true.

Our first task is to save what we can of our present world by the call to sincere penitence and simple faith. But it may be that we shall not be heard till the striving and crying of a complex, worldly, prosperous age have fallen silent. Then our value for rebuilding our waste civilisation to the true glory of God and the real good of man will depend on the measure we have been, like Isaiah and the children that God had given him, for signs and for wonders, in our unfaltering faith that God does not fail and is not discouraged, and in our possession of the prophetic vision which sees through all the night of darkness and distress 'the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness/ Then so high will the destiny of man appear and so glorious God's final kingdom of peace established in truth and righteousness, that we shall know, how, throughout all the terrible journey towards it, 'in all our affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved us: in His love and in His pity He redeemed us: and He bare us and carried us all the days of old/

Ill

GOD'S INSTRUMENT AND GOD'S AGENT

2 Kings viii. II. 'And he settled his countenance stedfastly upon him, until he was ashamed: and the man of God wept.'

All of us alike are God's instruments. By no setting of our hearts on wickedness or doing evil with both our hands can we prevent God from using us. Our folly will serve Him, when our wisdom fails; our wrath praise Him, though our wills rebel. Yet, as God's instruments without intention and in our own despite, we generally serve God's ends only as we defeat our own. To be God's agent is quite another matter. This we are only as we learn God's will, respond to His call, work faithfully together with Him, and find our own highest ends in fulfilling His.

But while the mere instrument is constantly broken and cast aside that God's work may proceed, the true good of His agent is itself of the essence of God's purpose.

In Hazael and Elisha, as they stand looking into each other's eyes in that narrow ancient street, this contrast between God's blind, unwilling tool and His conscious, consecrated fellow-worker is incarnate. We should consider them well, for both the use we shall make of life, and the use life will make of us, depend entirely on whether we are of Hazael's kin or of Elisha's.

1. Let us look at God's instrument

You see the first minister of state, arrayed in oriental magnificence of office, with many gorgeous attendants in his train avouching his dignity, a channel of gifts beyond the dreams of avarice, the wielder of every power short of the sceptre, and of that also by the trust and favour of the king, with a renown which busy rumour has carried even to the prophet in hostile Israel.

Hazael's abilities, moreover, are equal to his position and reputation. Especially he has imagination, the pre-eminent gift for greatness, without which no man has royalty of nature for true distinction in any sphere, but carries even riches and position and renown as a mere ass's burden. Imagination gives Hazael soaring ambition, and, what is more, munificence in things material and penetration into human qualities as wings to sustain its flight. The order to take a present in his hand expands into forty camels' load of all the good things of Damascus: and, the moment he sees Elisha, he is aware that this lavishness is not a whit overdone. He does not judge, like the children in Israel, by the cut of the hair or the fashion of the clothes, but discerns in that plain travel-stained civilian the biggest man he had ever met, a man to be addressed as, ' My Lord,' a man to whom nothing less than a lordly present could be offered, and one well worth winning at the price.

Nor is that all. The imagination of this Macbeth of Damascus is more stirred by the unseen than by the seen. A supernatural suggestion of his destiny means more to him than the possession of an army. It plays the part with him of the witches' prophecy with Macbeth, assuring to him:

The golden round Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem To have thee crown'd withal.

Only the small and shallow man thinks he drives the chariot of the universe. What Goethe has called the demonic element in every really great man is, on the contrary, the sense of being a child of destiny. Though from men neither reverent nor scrupulous, Caesar's assurance in the storm, "You carry Caesar and his fortunes," and Napoleon's cry, "The world still turns for us," when the armies of Europe were hemming him in after the Russian disaster, have something akin to the religious assurance of a devout Calvinist like Cromwell. Nor can a man move the world with ideas any more than with deeds, without some sense, like the Apostle, of being consecrated to it from his mother's womb.

Thus the world saw Hazael : and was it not right in thinking him a man to command the uses of the present and control the issues of the future?

But Elisha showed himself truly a man of God both by looking deeper into Hazael's heart and surprising there a guilty secret, which made himself weep and even this man of blood and iron look down ashamed before his steadfast gaze, and by looking farther into his fortunes and seeing the vanity of its gains when all should be weighed.

Three marks of God's mere instrument Elisha discerned.

Firsts there was unbridled ambition^ not less evident for a submissive bearing and a lowly speech. When Elisha tells of coming greatness, he knows he is only giving utterance to Hazael's own mind; and when Hazael replies, 'What is thy servant?,' the obeisance does not hide the thought that even the royal position and the most extended sway are no more than his desert.

No driving force more ensures success than such vast ambition, even though it be the supreme denial of God's requirement of a humble mind in His children. And — what may seem still stranger in God's world — its success God often puts to great uses. Alexander's ambition of conquest spread the Greek language and Greek ideas for the progress of the world and the preparation for Christianity; Caesar's ambition imposed a peace upon the world, under which knowledge spread, and peaceful commerce united the peoples, and a higher religion secured a footing in the earth; Napoleon's ambition ended many grave oppressions, emancipating a large part of Europe from serfdom, and ultimately for-

GOB'S INSTRUMENT warded both freedom and equal law. And that remains true, though the misery for others and the fleeting profit for themselves justify Pascal's sarcastic estimate of the folly of swaggering about conquering the world, as excusable for a crude youth like Alexander, but unpardonable frivolity in a sensible middle-aged man like Caesar. The gain of the present ambition which is now blotting-out humanity is still beyond our vision, and the loss and suffering visible to the blindest, but we can still trust that God does not faint and is not discouraged, and that out of it He will bring something worthy of our distress, even while the ambitions themselves prove, as of old, self-destructive.

In humbler spheres also, though, so far as its own true place and abiding possession is concerned,

Vaulting ambition o'erleaps its selle And falls on th' other — ,

it is constantly an instrument of God for enriching life by discoveries and achievements which for no love of good its possessor ever had in his heart would he have pursued. While only by right motive does God estimate any man's good, the worst motive does not prevent God from using men for His own higher ends. .

Second, you see atrocious cruelty. Hazael's ambition is not qualified by any illusion about the beneficence of his reign. Though the picture Elisha drew of the misery he was to work might have touched the hardest heart, when Hazael understood that he occupied the centre of the scene as a great conqueror, he cried, 'But what is thy servant, who is but a dog, that he should do this great thing!' Cruelty for him was the equivalent of glory, and blood and tears the measure of renown.

The story of human cruelty is an appalling record. How often has the conqueror repeated the work of Hazael, consuming towns with fire, slaying young men, dashing little ones in pieces, ripping up women with child. We dreamt that the heart of man had grown incapable of such iniquity: and now even that is beyond our dreaming. We may wonder if it be not capable still of inventing instruments of torture, and, like the Inquisition, attempting again to extend empire, by cruelty, from the body to the mind.

Yet even cruelty God may turn to His own ends. Though still harder to accept than His use of ambition, without a trust that God has a purpose He can make it serve, human cruelty dethrones for us either God's goodness or His omnipotence; and one is a mockery without the other.