The pilgrim; essays on religion

Preface

A volume of collected papers must have some central idea, and perhaps that central idea is given clearly enough in the title and in the article that stands first. All the sections of the book turn upon the spiritual life, and on that interpretation of it which we find in the New Testament, in its precursors and in those who in art and life have developed and elucidated it.

The study of Jeremiah appeared in the Expositor.; "The Meaning of Christmas Day" was written at the request of the Y.M.C.A. for distribution in the British Army, and it was reprinted, I understand, by the wish of the American Y.M.C.A. for the American Expeditionary Force. Two other papers in a somewhat different form were in a small booklet, once published by the Student Christian Movement under the title of Vocation, and now out of print. Others rest on contributions to the Nation and other journals, but have been completely rewritten. Four at any rate have not been in my writing before.

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Pilgrim ........ 13

II The Making of a Prophet .... 2.2

II

One of the most profitable studies is to know the man to whom a call to some high task has come, and to find out, if he lets us so far into his heart, how it came to him. Where the call of God is heard by a man with any measure of obedience, there can seldom be for long any great doubt as to the history of it. Sometimes he will tell it us himself, vividly and directly, as Isaiah tells how he "saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple" (Isaiah vi.). But that is not the whole story, for if we ask who was this man to whom this vision came, and why should he have had it rather than anyone else, we are involved in a good many questions. If we can find the answers to them, we shall be in a position better to understand how God deals with men — how, historically, He has dealt with men; and when we understand that, we may find that He has had dealings with us ourselves, the significance of which we did not see.

It is perhaps rather a risky thing to enter on such

a I have to thank Dr Theodore H. Robinson, Lecturer in 'Hebrew at University College, Cardiff, for reading this paper, and for his criticism.

inquiries when one is dependent on translations and is not at home in the vernacular spoken by the man we study. But I begin to think that a foreign speech is never fully mastered, however long one reads it ; — do we know our own ? And again, when a thought reaches a certain elevation, it may lose something in translation — a great deal perhaps — and yet reveal a great soul in awful simplicity. "And His will is our peace" — that is, even in a foreign prose, a thought of power and wonder, and it speaks, for those who will hear, of a spiritual experience of no common kind. Without Italian, we shall not know Dante to the full; but we can know something worth while of the greater sort of man from even a very little of him. One of Shakespeare's most famous women speaks thirty lines only in the course of the play. So, if we recognize that we are to lose something, we may also fairly claim that we do not lose all; when we read so living a man as Jeremiah in translation.

He tells us a little about himself and his antecedents. He was "the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin' ' (i. i), a member by birth of a priestly caste, which does not always imply much religion but which sometimes explains reaction against a priestly view of religion and of God. The episode of his purchase of land (ch. xxxii.) seems to suggest that he was a man of some means. He further tells us (xvi. 2)

that he did not marry. The rest of his story must be gathered from the things of which he speaks and the way in which he speaks of them.

It has been remarked of our Lord and St. Paul, that it is plain from their speech that the one was country-bred and the other a man of municipalities — "a citizen of no mean city/' he says himself. The same contrast would appear to hold between Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Similes from nature are frequent in all literature, but there are differences in the way in which men use them. Our Lord always confined himself to the real and the actual, and so does Jeremiah; and there is a certain likeness in their use of country things and country ways, though Jeremiah does not employ the parable-form with anything approaching the supremacy we find in the Gospels. But contrast him with Ezekiel. The eagle, with great wings and long pinions, full of feathers, which comes to Lebanon and carries off the topmost of the young twigs of a cedar and sets it in a city of merchants in a land of traffic (Ezek. xvii. 2-8), — the other cedar, under whose shadow "dwelt all nations" (Ezek. xxxi. 6), — and the lioness with the wonderful whelps (Ezek. xix. 1-9), leave nature a long way behind ; and we are perhaps right in thinking that men who have lived close to nature take fewer liberties with her. Ezekiel draws his imagery less from nature than from Babylonian art. Jeremiah's references to country life, to the farm, the animals wild and tame, the daily round of labours and anxieties, and the wonder and beauty of nature, surely have something to tell us of a sentient spirit, for whom all these things were familiar and were dear. The examples of Virgil, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson, of Jesus himself, prompt the thought that Jeremiah's instinctive recurrence to country scenes and doings whenever he wishes an illustration that will reach the heart and make the matter clear and living, points to boyhood and its impressions.

It is wonderful how many sides of country life he touches — perhaps he would have been surprised to be told it himself. There is the vineyard, with the "noble vine, wholly a right seed," and "the degenerate plant of a strange vine" (ii. 21), and the grapegatherer (vi. 9). 1 There is the olive; and here we may pause to note a certain deliberate use of the adjective, not idle at all, which suggests feeling and gives a hint of the man's style — "a green olive tree, fair with goodly fruit" (xi. 16) — and we may compare the question "where is the flock, that was given thee, thy beautiful flock?" (xiii. 20). There is the cornfield of course. "What is the straw to the wheat? saith the Lord" (xxiii. 28). That is not quite the Lord's dialect when He speaks with the city-bred. One of his most haunting phrases turns

1 1 omit other references in chapters xlix. to li., as the ascription of the chapters to Jeremiah is questioned, but they too contain interesting pictures — the vineyard (xlix. 9) ; the lion (xlix. 19, 20, li. 38) ; the scattered sheep (1. 17) ; the eagle (xlix. 16).

on harvest — "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved" (viii. 20). He thinks of a harvest much earlier than ours in a more genial latitude. After harvest the preparations begin for next year and new cattle are broken in — Ephraim, he says, is "chastised, as a calf unaccustomed to the yoke" (xxxi. 18).

As the boy grows, he ranges further afield — with the fowler after the birds — "they watch," he says of the wicked, "as fowlers lie in wait; they set a trap, they catch men" (v. 26). He studies the birds — "the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times ; and the turtle and the swallow and the crane observe the time of their coming" (viii. 7) ; as to the partridge (xvii. 11) it is suggested that he depends here on a legend of the countryside, as White of Selborne followed the popular tale of the swallows lying congealed together under ponds in winter. Or perhaps he wandered with the shepherds — stretched the tent with them and set up the curtains (x. 20; vi. 3) ; and later on he looked back to the desert life and wished he could have it again (ix. 2). He told the flocks with them (xxxiii. 13), and grew into acquaintance with the wild beasts, notably the lion. The jackal, perhaps referred to in iv. 17 as the watcher of the fields, the leopard (xiii. 23) and the wild ass * (ii. 24) we can believe, had all

1 The text appears doubtful. The Greek of the LXX. shows considerable variation.

their interest, and the wildest and most dangerous of all the desert-dwellers no less — "by the ways hast thou sat for them, as an Arab in the wilderness" (iii. 2).

But apart from the living creatures,

The earth And common face of Nature spoke to him Rememberable things. 1

There is the great drought — "because of the ground which is chapt, for that no rain hath been in the land, the plowmen are ashamed, they cover their heads. Yea, the hind also in the field calveth and forsaketh her young, because there is no grass. And the wild asses stand on the bare heights, they pant for air like jackals ; their eyes fail, because there is no herbage" (xiv. 4-6). That passage shows the man — the keen observation, the memory, the short, quick, telling phrase, and the picture, alive with truth and imagination. There is the "[hot] wind from the bare heights in the wilderness" (iv. 11), and in telling contrast we read: "Shall the snow of Lebanon fail from the rock of the field? or shall the cold waters that flow down from afar be dried up?" (xviii. 14). "Are there any among the vanities of the heathen that can cause rain? or can the heavens give showers? art not thou He, O Lord our God?" (xiv. 22). There is the constant and familiar mys- 1 "Prelude," i. 586.

tery of day and night — "the shadows of the evening are stretched out" (vi. 4) and "the host of heaven that cannot be numbered" (xxxiii. 22) rise over the boy in the shepherds' camp, and the sense for God grows. Then back into the village to watch the potter busy at his wheel (xviii. 1-4), and the metalworker (x. 4, 9) and the bellows blowing fiercely (vi. 29), the mud field-oven, familiar still in the East and elsewhere (i. 13). It is, in short, a boyhood like Wordsworth's in close touch with objects that endure.

From what has been said, it will take little insight to infer a meditative temperament. There is a reflective cast about him from the start, tinged with melancholy. He is given to introspection, and life with many moods lacks ease. Popular talk has 'exaggerated — grossly — his weeping and his tears, and the impression has been strengthened by the ascription to him of Lamentations. His contemporaries saw another Jeremiah — "a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole land" (xv. 10). He turns things over and over — "Thy words were found and I did eat them ; and thy words were unto me a joy and the rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O Lord God of hosts. I sat not in the assembly of them that make merry, nor rejoiced. I sat alone because of thy hand; for thou hast filled me with indignation" (xv. 16, 17). He looks into his own heart — "pained at my very heart;

my heart is disquieted within me" (iv. 19), — and, like other men who look within, he is shocked and troubled at what he finds, for "the heart is deceitful above all things, and it is desperately sick ; who can know it?" and he answers, only God (xvii. 9). "O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. O Lord, correct me" (x. 23, 24). As he grew to know better the life of his people — the hopelessness of effort to help or guide them — the inevitable doom descending on them, which he was to share — it is easy to understand how melancholy grew upon him (viii. 18; ix. 1), and how he wished he had never been born (xx. 14) ; but even before all this, the seeds of disquiet were with him.

A striking trait in his character is the extraordinary frankness with which, deeply pious as he is, he challenges God to explain Himself — "Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet I would reason the cause with thee; wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they at ease that deal very treacherously?" (xii. 2). A similar question is asked by Theognis and other Greeks, but with them it is not a matter of religion. The Zeus to whom they address their inquiry is not the personal Jehovah of Jeremiah. The sensitive nature, coming gradually into the knowledge of the badness and rottenness of human character and human life, suffers acutely; the times are out of joint — there is so much to explain, and to endure; and the prophet (not yet at all conscious of any prophetic gifts or call) cannot explain and cannot bear, for he has not in himself the power to do either. Such a man, as he sees later on, is not the type needed for a prophet, yet God calls him, and we after the event see why. It is the sensitive nature, for which things are unendurable and unintelligible, that sees and reads the problem true. He, of all men, has the best chance to know, for he feels the irreconcilable elements that other men miss, and cannot rest with them in a peace that is no peace. Finally it has to be remembered that the clue which later Judaism found to unravel the mystery of pain and failure upon earth was not in Jeremiah's hand; he has no doctrine of personal immortality — a strange fact, when we realize the grasp he had of God and man as personalities.

This then is our man, but now we reach a place where there is a gap in our story. With this type it is never easy to know where and when they become conscious of God — even when they tell us. For God is with them, and as they go they have, in George Fox's phrase, "great openings." Things stand out in a new way — they see — and all before seems dim by comparison. This happens again and again. When further, as in the case of Jeremiah, we depend on a book notoriously confused and uncertain in text and order, as the Septuagint translation sufficiently shows, a book about the writing of which we can never pronounce definitely how much the prophet wrote or Baruch or others, we cannot get very far with a narative. But we find sooner or later a man with an unspeakable consciousness of God. "Am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off. Can any hide in the secret places that I shall not see him? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord" (xxiii. 2$, 24). God, near and far, and filling all things — it is the knowledge of all the mystics. How can there be other gods? And yet the prophet's people neither see nor feel. "Hath a nation changed their gods, which yet are no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit. Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the Lord" (ii. 11, 12), for over these very heavens God's people have set another. "Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem? The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven" (vii. 17, 18). Thus from childhood the minds of his people were being steeped in falsity, and years after in Egypt the women said that so long as they had burnt incense to the queen of heaven they had "plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil," and things had gone wrong since they left off (xliv. 18). There were other renunciations of God, too — "for according to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah; and according to the number of the streets of Jerusalem have ye set up altars to the shameful thing, even altars to burn incense unto Baal" (xi. 13). Here we have the beginning of the call — in the dreadful contrast between God and No-gods, between the prophet's sense of God's nearness and wonder, and the people who turned their back to God, and not their face (ii. 27).

The prophet looked out on the world around ; the vision of God does not dull the eyes of understanding. No, with keener gaze he looked and he saw other nations — armies and kings and great powers — danger ever nearer. But no one else saw it. Poor and great alike are under delusion; false to God, false to one another, delusion has come upon them. Their very confidence in God is false. Isaiah had foretold the safety of Jerusalem from Sennacherib; plenty of new Isaiahs foretold in the same strain her safety from Nebuchadnezzar. It was in vain; God's thoughts were other. "Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place (or, I will dwell with you). Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord are these" (vii. 3, 4). The temple had been saved before, this time it would not be. God asked righteousness, but they were satisfied without it. But the place is full of prophets of peace — saying, "I have dreamed, I have dreamed" (xxiii. 25); and "they have healed also the hurt of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace" (vi. 14; viii. 11). The "hurt" here is a breakage not to be healed by words. "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so; and what will ye do in the end thereof?" (v. 31). And God has heard what the prophets have said that prophesy lies in His name (xxiii, 25).

The call comes to a point. The situation grows intolerable — false peace, real danger, rejection of God, rejection by God, captivity — "and my people love to have it so!" Then Jeremiah hears God speaking, and speaking to him personally. It does not matter whether the conversation took a moment or six months — it came. "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before thou earnest out of the womb I sanctified thee; I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations" (i. 5). This is indeed a dreadful outcome of the realization of God — this awful charge — to be a prophet — to quit field and quiet, to speak of God and His judgments to men who will not listen, when one is a man, sensitive, shrinking, and uneasy. God must have chosen the wrong man. "Then said I, Ah, Lord God ! behold,

I cannot speak, for I am a child. 1 But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child : for to whomsoever I shall send thee thou shalt go, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces : for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth His hand, and touched my mouth, and the Lord said unto me, Behold I have put my words in thy mouth. . . . Gird up thy loins, and arise and speak unto them all that I command thee : be not dismayed at their faces, lest I dismay thee in their sight. For, behold, I have made thee this day a de fenced city, and an iron pillar, and brazen walls, against the kings of Judah, against the princes thereof, against the priests thereof, and against the people of the land. And they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee ; for I am with thee, saith the Lord, to deliver thee."

"Peace, peace," when there was no peace, was the message of the false prophet. Jeremiah's message was to be judgment, the destruction of temple and tower, captivity in a strange land and no speedy return. And when the false prophet promised a short exile, Jeremiah had to write and give his countrymen a strange message from God — to settle down, to marry and multiply, "and seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried

*By "child" he means that he has never had responsibility; he is not a person whose words will naturally carry weight.

away captive, and pray unto the Lord for it ; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace" (xxix. 6, 7) ; for they were to be there seventy years. So far every word of God that He puts in Jeremiah's mouth is a word of terror and pain. No man would wish to speak them — least of all such a man. And yet he could not help it. That we learn from the burning utterance that follows the conflict with Pashhur (ch. xx.). Here we have to remember the contemporary belief that God would receive a man to his damnation. The very word used by Jeremiah is employed by Ezekiel (xiv. 9), "if the prophet be deceived and speaketh a word, I the Lord have deceived that prophet and I will stretch out my hand upon him and will destroy him/' and in the story told to Ahab by Micaiah (2 Kings xxii. 19-23)., Jeremiah has become charged with words from God, and finds, or thinks he finds, that God does not fulfil them. It is the most terrible mood that a sensitive nature can experience. "O Lord," cries the prophet (xx. 7) after his public exhibition in the stocks, "thou hast deceived me and I was deceived ; thou are stronger than I, and hast prevailed ; I am become a laughing-stock all the day, every one mocketh me. For as often as I speak, I cry out; I cry, Violence and spoil : because the word of the Lord is made a reproach unto me, and a derision, all the day. And if I say, I will not make mention of him, or speak any more in his name, then there is in mine heart as it were a burning fire, shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing and I cannot contain." Such words need no comment — they are true of every prophet, every poet, every man to whom God speaks; there is nothing for it but to speak what is given, and at last the given word comes out almost of itself.

Even yet we have hardly got the whole of the call, but we have seen certain elements of it — the consciousness of God and the sense of the all-importance of the God-directed life — the contrast offered by the nation's indifference to God, their need of God and their danger — the summons to speak, coupled with reluctance and a deep feeling of unfitness, — the growing, burning inevitableness of obedience — and somehow the conviction that God, Who fills earth and heaven, Who picks His man before he is born, must go with His messenger. Pain there will be — endless conflict with the men of his nation, prophet and priest and king — contumely, stocks and dungeon — and, at last deportation — a long record of failure. The brazen wall and iron pillar, the man of strife and contention (as they called him), stout, dauntless and impenetrable — they little knew how he quivered and tingled and suffered. The promise was fulfilled to the letter that he should be like a "brazen wall" ; whatever his inward moods, revealed to us in his writings, his countrymen saw in him a man of brass, neither to be intimidated nor cajoled.

At last he has to tell Israel that not only is God entirely independent of them and their worship, but that God is utterly done with them : "I have sworn by my great name, saith the Lord, that my name shall no more be in the mouth of any man of Judah in all the land of Egypt, saying, As the Lord God liveth (i.e. God will no longer be the God they swear by; he will no longer be their God at all). Behold, I watch over them for evil and not for good. . . . They shall know whose word shall stand, mine or theirs" (xliv. 26, 27, 28). The message was a hard one — doubly hard when it had to be given against his own people, when it bore the look of disloyalty and bad patriotism — and he gave it at all costs.

But then because he is obedient and risks everything on God, he is given a still deeper insight into God's nature and God's ways. They have turned the back to God and not the face, though He has sent prophet after prophet, "rising up early and sending them" (vii. 13), — so God is to be frustrate of His purpose? Is He? "Then came the word of the Lord unto Jeremiah, saying, Behold I am the Lord, the God of all flesh; is there anything too hard for me ?" (xxxii. 26, 27) . God's message given through Jeremiah has failed, — not altogether, for there were some who listened and remembered and wrote down his words — but in the main it had failed, and God is beaten? It is early to say that. No, God is not likely to be beaten — hardly that. Then?

By and by the prophet, despised and rejected along with his God, penetrates farther into the secrets of God. God's love of Israel and God's rejection by Israel meet, as it were (in Bunyan's phrase), in his soul; and which will prove stronger? "The Lord appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (xxxi. 3). If God's love is on the same scale as His other attributes, it will be as eternal as God Himself; it will in the long run prevail over Israel, and will achieve its purpose. A new Israel, ransomed and redeemed from the hand of him that is stronger than he, shall come back from captivity, "and they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together unto the goodness of the Lord . . . and my people shall be satisfied with my goodness, saith the Lord" (xxxi. 11-14). But it will be a changed Israel, and the change will be an inward one. "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah. ... I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people ; and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord [the sorry task of the prophet himself] : for they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord ; for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more" (xxxi. 31-34). The insight here is amazing — hundreds of years later the infant Christian church saw the meaning of the passage and took it, and gave the name of "New Covenant' ' to the book that told the story of God in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. The instinct that seized the quotation was sound; but how came the thought to Jeremiah? Surely by obedience to God's call.

God has many ways of calling men ; but when side by side a man grows conscious of the love of God in Christ, with all it means of freedom and peace, and of the darkness of the heathen world, given over to gods that are no gods, and all they involve of falsity, cruelty, and lust — or when, in short, he realizes the distance between the actual and the ideal in any sphere — is it not legitimate to suggest that in such a contrast there lies a call for him also, and that, if he obeys, he too will enter into new knowledge of the love of God and of God's purposes?

Ill

Sometimes one opens an old book and a leaf of writing will flutter out — a letter written perhaps a hundred years ago or more, a letter that tells of passionate feeling, and gives one a glimpse of some great moment in the life of a man or woman forgotten, whose very name may have perished. There is something moving in thus stepping into the experience of another, seeing the eye flash, the lip quiver for a moment, and then realizing that this intensity of suffering or joy was long ago — long ago, and yet living still — and the rest silence.