No parent, teacher, or friend can possibly reproduce himself in another. It is God's law that, however alike plants may seem in reproduction, no child shall see life exactly as his parents, nor shall a pupil see it exactly as a teacher. This law is most wise. The same work is never given to any two people to do. It may be work of the same general nature, but never work the same in all particulars. Different types of men, actuated by the same motives, are required for different types of work. Any man who endeavors to be a pure copyist of another gone before him, always fails of individual development and fails of usefulness. Elijah could not foresee the changed circumstances in which Elisha would live, when many of the vexatious questions of Elijah's day would be settled and new questions of morality and public welfare would arise. All that he could do, all that any man can do, is to give the best he has to another, andsend him forth to use that best as well as the other can in the new place. The beauty of human history is that the work the best man of one age could not accomplish, another coming after him does accomplish, and he accomplishes it, not because he is any better than his predecessor, but because he is the man for this hour as his predecessor was for the hour before this. There is always work to be done. There are always tasks left over from a previous generation. There are always ideas hitherto unemphasized that to-day must be emphasized, else society will not know its duty. For this work and task and emphasis new men are needed, men who do not see exactly as their fathers saw, nor pronounce nor act exactly as their fathers did. To provide such men, to inspire them with a great sense of duty, and send them out into life with open minds toward God and open hearts toward their fellows, and then withdraw our hand and let them do their own work, in their own way, this is our blessed privilege.
We may endeavor to put the best into othersdirectly. A parent is a parent largely for this particular purpose. The father and mother have this end as their greatest and highestresponsibility. They cannot shirk it without hurt to themselves and to their child. No one can and no one should influence a child as directly as does a parent. The parent may temporarily place the child beneath the influence of a nurse, a pastor, or a teacher, but the abiding influence should be and is the parent's. Little by little, line upon line, precept upon precept, conduct upon conduct, the parent should endeavor to set before the child the highest ideas of life. Skill is requisite in stating these ideas, in illustrating them, in making them attractive, in persuading to their acceptance. The evil or the inferior lodged in the child's heart needs to be forced out, that the best may enter. Happy the parent whose forcing process is like the incoming of light into a darkened room, a process that is gentle and conciliatory, a process that never boasts of victory and never leaves a pain.
This is the parent's greatest hope and greatest reward, to have a child who shall in the child's own time and place be an advancer of the world's good. A thousand spheres of opportunity open before each new generation. Into any one of them the child may carrythe best his father or mother ever thought or said. Many parents wish their children to do in life work of the very same type that they once did. It was therefore a gratification to their ministerial fathers when they saw their own sons enter the ministry, Henry Ward Beecher, Jonathan Edwards, Frederick W. Farrar, Charles H. Spurgeon, John Wesley, and Reginald Heber. But other ministerial fathers likewise might be gratified when they saw their sons helpfully laboring in noble spheres not specifically "the ministry," as in poetry, Joseph Addison, Samuel T. Coleridge, William Cowper, Ben Jonson, Oliver Goldsmith, Alfred Tennyson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver W. Holmes, John Keble, and James Montgomery; as in literature, Matthew Arnold, Bancroft, Froude, Hallam, and Parkman; as in art, Joshua Reynolds and Christopher Wren; as in law, Lord Ellenborough, Stephen J. Field, David J. Brewer, David Dudley Field; as in statesmanship, Henry Clay, Edward Everett, Sir William Harcourt, John B. Balfour, and William Forster; and as in invention, Samuel F. B. Morse.
But while the great opportunity of putting thebest into others is the parent's (and men out in earnest usefulness thank God most of all for their mothers and fathers, especially as they grow older and realize how early in youth it was that their characters received determining impressions), still others, besides parents, may use direct means toward this same end. Here is the teacher's opportunity. A plastic, receptive mind is before him. It says to him: "I am here to be taught. Teach me the best—the best way to see, to reason, to act, the best way to do my part in society and the world." Many a teacher has looked on that opportunity as sacred; has valued it as much as Elijah valued his opportunity to cast his mantle on Elisha. Such teachers have wrought out most valuable results. They have put ideas, methods, principles, and a spirit into pupils that have made those pupils a blessing to the world. The pupils may not recall much of what the teacher said—perhaps they cannot recall one particular truth that the teacher enforced—but they recall a purpose that dominated the teacher, and the pupils now are endeavoring to fulfil what they feel would be the wishes of that teacher if the teacher to-day could stand beside them.
Andwhy should we stop with parents and teachers in speaking of this direct effort to put the best into other lives. Nurses in homes have endeavored to give little children the truest knowledge of God and of beauty, and have succeeded. The world owes them much for its best men and women. Had they not seconded parents, had they attempted to uproot the good implanted by parents, all would have been ruined. So, too, have friends, masters, employers, writers in the press, writers of books, lecturers, and preachers aimed at this same end. They have felt a great desire to give their fellows beautiful thoughts, strong principles, supporting comforts, and heavenly ideals. They have felt that their heart's supreme wish would be met if they could only cause a double portion of their own spirit—aye, a four-fold, a hundred-fold of their good purposes to rest upon others—and to this end they have prayed, given money and counsel, spoken to employees and friends and comrades, written, sung, preached, labored, and died. The company of those who have wished to put the best into others is a glorious company, the company of prophets, apostles, saints, martyrs, workmen in every sphere, in everyclime, in every age. Surely this host is the host of the elect, the choicest ones of all God's people on earth and in heaven.
Apart from and beyond our direct effort to put the best into other lives is ourindirect, our unconscious influence to this good end. Personality is more potent than words. Men and women impart ozone to the atmosphere without knowing what good they have done. They become standards of righteousness and are all unaware that any one looks at them to gauge his own opinion or shape his own conduct. They are like regulator clocks, by which the watches of the world seen to be wrong are set aright and are kept aright. To try to live the best in the hope that somehow one can put the best into the very air, and get it into the life of the school and community, and have it become a part of public sentiment, that surely is noble. That is the way to live. No one ever lives in vain who so lives. Some one is helped by him. Some one tells of him. Cecil's saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, "I know he can toil terribly," is an electric touch.
In one of my pastorates there was a farmer's son, living two miles from the church. Almostall the young men of his age in the village and congregation were careless, selfish, and a little fast. His father was out of sympathy with religious earnestness. But the son resolved that he would put his best into others' lives. He thought, prayed, worshiped, to that end. Through snow and rain and mud he came where earnestness and high ideals were in the air. He did a manly, helpful part in his home, in his village, and in his church. Then, thinking that he knew farming and could teach it, he volunteered to go to an Indian school in Indian Territory, and as a farm manager, teach farming. He went, on almost no salary, and lived and labored, that through his words, conduct, and spirit he might put the best into others' lives. Thus he lived and labored till he died, two thousand miles from home, and was buried there, the only one of his family not placed in the village graveyard. But his work has not died. It lives in all who know of it. They think of it again and again, and it always makes them wish to fulfil to the best all their opportunity for the good of others.
There are many, many hearts so conscious of the help they have received from others thatthey read with appreciation the commemorative tablet placed by the distinguished Pasteur on the house of his birth: "O my father and mother, who lived so simply in that tiny house, it is to you that I owe everything! Your eager enthusiasm, my mother, you passed on into my life. And you, my father, whose life and trade were so toilsome, you taught me what patience can accomplish with prolonged effort. It is to you that I owe tenacity in daily labor."
"Others shall sing the song;Others shall right the wrong,Finish what I begin,And all I fail of, win.What matter, I or they,Mine or another's day,So the right word be said,And life the sweeter made."
Developing Our Best Under Difficulties.
CHAPTER V.
Developing Our Best Under Difficulties.
There is nothing in this world that more appeals to my admiration than a man who makes the best of himselfunder difficulties. Robert Louis Stevenson deservedly has many admirers by reason of his writings, but what in him most appeals to my admiration was the struggle he waged with difficulties. "For fourteen years," he wrote the year before his death, "I have not had a day's real health. I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary. I have written in bed, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written worn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness. I am better now, and still few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on—ill or well is a trifle, so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battle-field should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle. I would have preferred a place of trumpetings and the open air overmy head. Still I have done my work unflinchingly."
The story of many a strong and useful life is very similar to this story of Stevenson's.
Parkman wrote his histories in the brief intervals between racking headaches. Prescott struggled with blindness as he prepared his volumes. Kitto was deaf from boyhood, but he wrote works that caught the hearing of the English-speaking world.
It sometimes seems as though God never intended to bring the best out of us excepting through pain and pressure. The most costly perfume that is known is the pure attar of roses, and one drop of it represents millions of damascene roses that were bruised before the sweet scent they contained was secured.
"The best of menThat e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer."
The sphere of difficulty is usually the sphere of opportunity. "I was made for contest," Stevenson said. We all are made for it. As we let the contest overpower us, we fail; as we overpower the contest, we succeed.
One particular personage of the Old Testament is in mind as illustrative of these thoughts, Jeremiah. He always reminds me ofa violet I once saw growing on Mount St. Bernard in Switzerland. The snow was deep on every side, excepting on one little slope a few feet in width, exposed to the eastern sun. There, so close to the snow as almost to be chilled to death by the cold atmosphere about it, was a violet sweetly lifting its head and blooming as serenely as though it knew nothing of the struggle for life.
Jeremiah was a mere youth when the conviction came into his heart, "God wishes me to be his mouthpiece in teaching the people to do right." He lived at Anathoth, three miles from Jerusalem, the distance of an hour's easy walk. His father was a priest who probably in his turn served in the duties of the temple at Jerusalem. But though he came of religious ancestry, and though he heard much of the religious exercises of the temple, this call from God to be his mouthpiece in teaching the people to do right, broke in upon his life as a disturbing force. The times were worldly, and even wrong. Nobles and princes, merchants, scholars, and priests had put the fear of God away from their eyes, and were acting according to the selfish impulses of the hour. The general outward life ofthe nation was pure, but it was the pureness of mere formality. Beneath the surface ambitions and purposes were cherished that uncorrected would surely lead the people into selfishness, idolatry, and transgression.
It was no easy thing for Jeremiah to answer "yes" to this call of God. The call involved a lifetime of brave service. Matters in the nation were sure to go from bad to worse. Difficulties after difficulties therefore, as they developed, must be faced. He stood at what we name "the parting of the ways"; if he did as God wished, his whole life must be given to the work indicated; if he said "no" to God's call, he would drift along with the rest of the people, leaving them to their fate, he no better and perhaps no worse than they.
In some respects there is nothing better than to beforcedto a decision on some important matter, particularly if that decision is a decision involving character. It was a choice with Jeremiah whether he would live unselfishly for God or selfishly for himself. That choice ordinarily is the supreme choice in every one's life. It is the supreme choice that the Christian pulpit is constantly presenting.Present character and eternal destiny are shaped according to that choice.
In Jeremiah's case there was a native reluctance to do the deeds which he saw were involved in obedience to God's call. He was by temperament modest and retiring. He shrank from publicity. He did not like to reprove any one. Severe words were the last words he wished to speak. It would have been a relief to him if God had simply let him alone and imposed on others this duty of trying to make the people better. Some men seem to be adapted for a fray, as Elijah was, and as John the Baptist was. But Jeremiah was more like John the beloved. He would have been glad to live and die, simply saying, "Little children, love one another."
It is God's way, however, again and again, to take lives that to themselves seem utterly unfitted for special duties and assign them to those duties. Almost all the best workers in God's cause came into it reluctantly, and against the feeling that they were fitted for it. We are bidden ask the Lord of the harvest tothrustmen into the fields of need. Jeremiah felt in his heart this "thrusting." He did not kick against it. He yielded to it.
Butwith what results? The first result wasestrangement. His goodly life and conversation soon made the people of his village and even the brothers and sisters of his home feel that he was different from themselves. They chafed under the contrast of their carelessness and his earnestness. He found himself left out of their pleasures and chilled by their indifference. The estrangement developed until his fellow-townsmen were eager to rid themselves of his presence, and his own family were ready to deal treacherously with him.
It is just at this point that so often a good purpose breaks down. When a man's foes are they of his own household or comradeship, he is very apt to give up his good purpose. It is more difficult for a beginner in the religious life to resist the insinuating and depreciating remarks of near acquaintances than to face a mob. It must have cut Christ to the heart's core when his brethren said of him, "He hath a devil!" "I would rather go into battle," said a soldier newly enlisted as a Christian, "than go back to the mess-room and hear what the men will say when they know of my decision."
Jeremiahstarted his obedience to God amid estrangement. It was not long before estrangement had given place tothreatening. His duties as he grew older called him to Jerusalem. The youth become a man must leave the village, go to the city, and in the larger sphere of need, speak the messages of God. In Jerusalem he assured the people that if they did injustice, oppressed the poor, built themselves rich houses out of wages withheld from servants, made sacrifices to base idols, and strengthened the hands of evil-doers, God would bring a terrible overthrow upon them. His task was made the more difficult because in his words and attitude he stood alone. He had no following among priests or prophets to back him. With one consent they affirmed that he was wrong and that a lie was on his lips when he predicted desolation if present practices were continued.
It is a great hour in any man's life when he is obliged to stand up alone and state his case or defend his cause. What an hour that was in Paul's history when before the Roman officials "no man stood with him," but, dependent as he was on sympathy and fellowship,he stood alone! It is when a man is absolutely left alone, in danger or disgrace, that the deepest test of his character is reached. That is the reason why the night-time, which seems to say to us "You are alone with God," has its impressiveness, and why the death hour has a similar impressiveness.
Jeremiah felt his loneliness. There was nothing of the stoic in him. He could not school himself to be brazen-hearted. He was so human, so like the great majority of people, that every now and then some cry of weariness would escape his lips. "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me, a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth. I have neither lent on usury, nor men have lent me on usury; yet every one of them doth curse me." Sometimes his outbursts of mental agony make us feel that the man has almost lost his bravery. "Cursed be the day wherein I was born! Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labor and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?" But glad as he would have been to escape the responsibility of rebuking people, and glad as he would have been to hold the affection and regard of his companions, he neverfor a moment kept back the truth, nor for a moment did he distrust God's blessing on his life. "All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him." "But the Lord is with me," he declared, and so declaring he was immovable before his adversaries.
There came a third experience into his life, which carried his difficulties one degree higher. It was the experience ofdisdain. He knew full well that the wicked course of the nation was inevitably leading to destruction. Unless the evil of the people should cease the powers of Babylon would come and would destroy Judah. He was debarred an interview with the king. He therefore wrote his message on a roll, put it in the hands of a messenger, Baruch, and in due time that roll was carried into the king's presence by Baruch and read to the king. The king was sitting in his winter house. The weather was cold. A fire was burning before him in a brazier. As the king heard the words of Jeremiah that called him and the people to penitence, his anger was aroused. He seized the roll ere threeor four of the columns had been read, cut it up with his penknife, and cast the whole roll into the fire to be utterly consumed therein. He did this in the presence of his court. He did it with a disdain and contempt that made every man present feel that Jeremiah and Jeremiah's words were to be despised.
It never is a pleasure to be despised. Contempt usually embitters a man or suppresses him. The derisive laugh against a man is more powerful in breaking him than the compactest argument. Many men can remain steadfast to convictions in estrangement or in opposition who give way when they hear that their words and actions are the subject of twitting and ridicule. "Who is this Jeremiah, and what are his words, that we should think of them a second time? I will cut these words into fragments even with my pocket-knife, and then I will burn them in this little brazier, and that shall be the last of them!" So said and did King Jehoiakim. And his princes heard and saw.
But whatever the effect produced on others, the effect produced on Jeremiah must have been to the king a great disappointment. Jeremiahheard God's voice saying in his heart, "You must write those same words of truth again." And again he wrote them on a roll. And just here comes out one of the sweetest and most characteristic features of Jeremiah's character. The ordinary man, if he has made up his mind to retort or to ridicule, says to himself, "Now I will pour out my wrath on my adversary." But such was Jeremiah's self-control and peacefulness of temper that perhaps he would have erred on the side of leniency unless God had charged him, not to soften or to suppress one part of the message, but to writeallthe words that were in the former roll and add thereto other special predictions. To this charge, whatever his obedience might lead to, Jeremiah immediately and completely responded.
Then came Jeremiah's fourth experience. His persistence in duty now cost himimprisonment. Not an ordinary imprisonment, but such an imprisonment as Oriental monarchs employ when they wish to place those whom they dislike in a living death. The king first put Jeremiah in a dungeon-house where there were cells. This was not very bad. Then, when Jeremiah still was true tohis testimony, the king put him in the court of the guard, giving him a daily allowance of one little eastern bread-loaf. This also was not very bad. But later the king, when the princes claimed Jeremiah for their victim, as afterward the rabble claimed Christ from Pilate for their victim, gave Jeremiah into the hands of the princes to do with him as they pleased. Then it was that they with cords dropped him down into a deep subterranean pit, whose bottom was mire, so that Jeremiah sank in the mire.
How many people in the time of the Inquisition, when they were racked to pieces, when thumb-screws agonized them, when water drop by drop fell ceaselessly on their foreheads, and when pincers tore their flesh little by little continuously, renounced their faith and so saved themselves from slow torture! It was not an easy thing to die from starvation in a dark, damp pit, with mire creeping up all about him. It never has been easy to die slowly and alone for the faith; to die for a testimony; to die for a message that involved others much more than one's self. All that was needed to protect him from pain and to preserve his life was silence. If Jeremiahwould keep quiet all would be well. But for Jeremiah to keep quiet would be to prove disobedient to a sense of duty implanted by God in his heart. So this gentle nature, that shrank from the horrors of the miry pit, horrors more to be dreaded than the lions' den or the fiery furnace or the executioner's sword, went down into the pit unbroken—precursor of those sweet natures in woman and child that all the beasts of the Colosseum could not dismay, and that all the fires of martyrdom could not weaken.
One more experience awaited Jeremiah—deportation. So far as we know, it was the closing experience of his life. The dauntless soul had not been suffered to die in the pit. Patriotic men who realized the folly of letting an unselfish, high-minded citizen perish so terribly, and who realized, too, the desirability of preserving alive so wise a counselor, secured permission from the vacillating king to take rags and worn-out garments, and let them down by cords into the pit. "Put now these rags and worn-out garments under thine arm-holes under the cords," they said, "and Jeremiah did so. So they drew up Jeremiah with the cords." Once again he was in his positionof responsibility as God's messenger. In that position he held fast to his faithfulness.
Then came his final experience. Judah had passed through trial upon trial. Jeremiah had shared in her trials, never running away from them, but always bearing his full brunt of burden and loss. Then he was forced to go away from the land of his love and his tears to Egypt! He did not wish to go. He assured those who headed the movement that it was folly to go. But they took him with them, and carried him, like a captive, off to a foreign land.
All this would have meant little to some men, but to Jeremiah it meant everything. Jerusalem and the land of Judah were dear to his heart. He had lived for them, spoken for them, suffered for them, and well-nigh died for them. In older years the land of one's birth and of one's sacrifices becomes very dear. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning; if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" Into that deportation we cannot follow him. We only know that up to the very last minute in which we see him and hear his words, he was unceasinglytrue to his God, and true to the people around him, loving his Master and loving his brethren, with an unfailing devotion.
But this we do know, ignorant as we are whether he died naturally or was stoned to death, that in after years this Jeremiah became among the Jews almost an ideal character. They saw that all his words predicting the destruction of the holy city and the captivity were fulfilled. They learned to revere his fidelity. They even called him "the greatest" of all their prophets. They well-nigh glorified him. In times of war and difficulty they used his name wherewith to rouse halting hearts to bravery and to lead the fearful into the thick of perilous battles.
Here, then, is a life that came to its best and developed its best under difficulties. "Best men are molded out of faults." So was this man molded to his best out of faults of hesitation and unwillingness and impatience. No one knows the best use we can make of ourselves but the One who created us and understands our possibilities.
In the struggle against difficulties we have Christ's constant sympathy. Were notestrangement,threatening,disdain,imprisonment,anddeportationHis own experiences? And did not they come in this same order? And does not He realize all the stress through which a soul must pass that would fight its contest and advance to its best? Certainly He does. And when He lays a cross upon us, it is that through our right spirit in carrying that cross we may become sweeter in our hearts and braver in our lives, and thus change our cross into a very crown of manliness and of usefulness.
To many a man there is no object in this earth that so appeals to his admiration as a person who makes the best of himself under difficulties. We may well believe that to Christ likewise there is no human being so prized and admired as he who advances to his best through the conquest of difficulties.
The Need of Retaining the Best Wisdom.
CHAPTER VI.
The Need of Retaining the Best Wisdom.
No one can read the story of Solomon's life, as given in the Bible and as given in eastern writings, without wonder. That story in the Bible is amazing; that story in the historic legends of Persia, Abyssinia, Arabia, and Ethiopia is still more amazing. It is said of Solomon that "those who never heard of Cyrus, or Alexander, or the Cæsars have heard of him," and that "his name belongs to more tongues, and his shadow has fallen farther and over a larger surface of the earth than any other man's. Equally among Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan nations his name furnishes a nucleus around which have gathered the strangest and most fantastic tales."
Almost at the beginning of his public activities he made a prayer to God that may well be the prayer of every one. In a dream God appears to him, asking what he most wishes God to confer upon him. Humbly andearnestly he asks for a discerning mind—a mind capable of distinguishing between good and evil. He passes by long life, passes by wealth, passes by victory over enemies, and he asks only for such understanding as shall enable him to know the right from the wrong.
We cannot call this prayer a surprise to God, but we can call it a delight to Him. There are very many kinds of wisdom, but in God's judgment, the best wisdom is that which always discriminating between the good and the bad, the true and the false, the permanent and the fleeting, prefers the good, the true, and the permanent. It surprises us that Solomon was wise enough to make the desire for discrimination the one petition of his heart. He was comparatively young, he was inexperienced in life's responsibilities, he was at the threshhold of what promised to be a great, almost a spectacular career. Most men, under such circumstances, given the opportunity of asking for anything and everything they pleased, would have said, "Give me many, many years of mental growth; give me much, very much material wealth; give me great and constant triumphs over all who in anyway oppose me." But Solomon asked only for a discerning mind that could see the difference between right and wrong, and in asking that, he asked for the best wisdom any human life can ever have.
Solomon had other kinds of wisdom. How they came to him we do not know. Perhaps he was born with a large degree of mother wit and with a very strong mental grasp. Perhaps his father, himself a thoughtful man and a brilliant writer, provided the best teachers that wealth could procure for his son. Perhaps his mother, who had eager ambition for her son, constantly urged him on to large intellectual development.
Explain his case as we may, the facts are that he hadscientificwisdom. He knew nature so well that careful writers have even called him "the father of natural science." He knew trees, from the lordly cedar-tree that graced Lebanon to the little hyssop that springs out from between the stones of a wall, as I once saw it in an old well near Jerusalem. He knew beasts of the field, fowls of the air, animals that creep on the ground, and fishes that swim in the water. Such is the brief résumé by the Scriptures of his acquaintance withnature. The legends of the East add that he could interpret the speech of beasts and birds, that he understood the hidden virtues of herbs, and that he was familiar with the secret forces of nature.
He had alsoliterarywisdom. He was a beautiful, trained, and forceful writer. The seventy-second Psalm, beginning "Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king's son," is ascribed to him. So is the one hundred and twenty-seventh Psalm, opening with the words, "Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it." Much of the book of Proverbs is written by him or compiled by him—a book whose concise, striking, intelligent, helpful utterances are a monument of literary skill. Ecclesiastes, with its philosophical dissertations on the fleeting and disappointing elements of human life, is also assigned to him. So is the Song of Solomon, which breathes a wealth of poetical fervor, that understood and applied spiritually, is as sweet as the voice of the meadow lark soaring skyward in the light and beauty of a summer day. Yet these writings are only a part of what he produced. His songs were athousand and five, his proverbs not less than three thousand. What we have in the Bible simply suggests the variety and power of his literary style, the force and sagacity of his sound sense, the brilliancy and fitness of his practical wisdom. Solomon's words are such that to this day, in this land, and in every land of the earth, they are competent to teach prudence, economy, reverence for parents, self-protection, purity, honesty, and faithfulness to duty. The boy that learns them and carries them with him as a vital principle of being and of conduct will move unsoiled and unhurt wherever he may go. The home that places them at its center and reveres them will be cheerful and brave. The grown man that carries them with him into every detail of business and care will be upright and beautiful.
The wisdom of Solomon wascommercialas well as scientific and literary. He recognized the advantages of trade. He extended it. He sent ships so far away to the east that passing through the Red Sea out into the Indian Ocean they brought back the treasures of Arabia and India and Ceylon—gold and silver and precious stones; nard, aloes, sandalwood, and ivory; apes and peacocks. He sentother ships along the Mediterranean coasts to the north, where Hiram, king of Tyre, lived, and then to the west, out between the gates of Hercules, past the present Gibraltar, up the Atlantic Ocean to the north until they touched at southern England, at Cornwall, where they found the tin which, combined with copper, formed the bronze for armor and for all so-called "brazen" furniture. Not alone through ships of the sea did he seek out the best treasures of all the accessible earth and beautify Jerusalem with them, but also through ships of the desert—camels—did he do the same. He caused the great caravan routes of the day to pass through Jerusalem, and he levied duties on the objects transported from Damascus on the north to Memphis on the south, and from Tadmor in the east to Asia Minor in the west. He put himself into contact with all the thought and purposes of other nations than his own, he learned what their kings and queens, their merchants, their sailors, their writers, were saying and doing, and thus he brought home to his mind the leading ideas of his time. His knowledge of men, of methods, and of enterprise became vast.
Nordid his wisdom stop with commerce; it included government also, and waspolitical. He took the throne at a time when government was weak, or almost disorganized. David's last years were years of physical disability, wherein he could not curb the rebellious spirits that were gaining influence in many quarters. Solomon, upon his assumption of rule, judiciously subdued all rebellion of every kind, united the entire kingdom, and started that kingdom upon the period of its greatest glory. He made treaties that bound adjacent principalities to him and caused them to pay tribute. He held such power that nations did not care to fight with him, and so he became a king of peace. He laid taxes on his own people that brought in large revenue. It was indeed the golden period of Israel.
The effect of Solomon's wisdom was great and extensive. Hisreputationwent far and wide. People made long journeys to see him, ask him questions, and honor him. Even one like the Queen of Sheba came with a great retinue, up through the desert, past village and town, to bring him costly gifts and talk with the man who knew so much. Hisinfluencebecame pervasive. It entered into the legendsof people who never saw him, and became so fixed a part of those legends, that those legends, repeated until to-day, still sound his praise. He was known in tent and in palace as the wisest man that had ever lived, and the most exaggerated statements were made and received of his insight into the mysteries of the spirit world and his power to control the supposed spirit forces of the air. Hiswealthbecame almost incredible. Nothing like it has ever been known—not in the time of the Roman emperors, nor in the time of to-day. The fabulous magnificence of Mexican and Peruvian kings helps us to realize Solomon's glory. "The walls, the doors, the very floor of the temple, were plated with gold, furnishing gorgeous imagery for John's description of heaven." Two hundred targets and three hundred shields of beaten gold were held by the guard through whose lines Solomon passed to the temple or to his house of the forest. His throne of ivory, as were its steps, was overlaid with plates of gold. All his drinking-vessels were of gold, and all the vessels of the house of the forest were of pure gold, none were of silver. He was able to make the temple the costliest structure for itssize the world has ever seen. Hundreds of millions of dollars went into its erection and decoration. When to-day the traveler visits Baalbec and sees stones over seventy feet in length and fourteen in width and in depth—stones quarried, conveyed, raised up into high walls and securely masoned there; when to-day the traveler sees the golden jewelry gathered from ancient Grecian graves and placed on exhibition in Athens; and when to-day the traveler examines the massive work done in Egypt, whose ruins are overpowering in their grandeur, and seeing these stones, jewelry, and structures remembers that Solomon knew all the skill, wealth, and buildings of the whole Mediterranean world, then he can understand how Solomon, with his resources, built a city like Palmyra, and a house of worship like the temple, and made silver to be as stones in Jerusalem.
Ah, if this Solomon, so brilliant and so powerful, so "glorious," as Christ called him, could only have preserved the best wisdom all through his years, whose name—except Christ's—would be comparable to his!
He asked God for the wisdom that discerns between the good and the evil. God answeredthat prayer and gave him such wisdom. How clearly he saw at the first! If two women came to him, each claiming to be the mother of a little child, and asking for the child's possession, how skilful he was in ordering that the child be cut in twain in their presence, thus causing the true mother to cry out in love for her child and then giving her the child unhurt. The traditions of the east—some of them perhaps once a part of those lost books mentioned in the Bible, The Book of the Acts of Solomon, The Book of Nathan the Prophet, The Prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, The Visions of Iddo the Seer, tell again and again how quiet and accurate Solomon's perception was in distinguishing real flowers from artificial, in distinguishing girls from boys though dressed alike, and in deciding case after case of legal perplexity. He did have a discerning heart when, in his early days, he knew who his enemies were and he crushed them, who his true counselors were and he listened to them, what his supreme duty was and he built God's house, what his sinful heart needed and he shed the blood of atonement for it. It was discernment when, though he made his own houserich, he made God's house richer; when he counted his gift of millions of dollars to God's honor a delight; and when he would let neither knowledge nor pleasure nor pomp nor glory withdraw his supreme affection from God.
Would that he had always continued as he was! Would that he had remembered that the prayer offered to-day for a blessing in character must be offered again to-morrow if that blessing in character is to be retained! Prayer is not so much a momentary wish as a continuous spirit. His momentary wish and the resolve that sprang from it were at the time all that God or man could desire. A mind distrustful of its own omniscience, humbly waiting on God for discernment, is the wisest of all minds. That mind was once in Solomon, but not always. When grown to maturity he talked philosophy, still he was wise. But when he came to act upon his philosophy, he was unwise. He failed to discern between the value and the curse of wealth. He became a lover of money for money's sake. He laid taxes on the people that they could not endure. He treated them no longer as a father, but as a master. He ceased to distinguish between the beauty and the disease of luxury.He built gardens and palaces, and made displays, not with the thought of any praise they would be to Jehovah, or to the establishment of God's people on a sound financial and political basis, but for the honor and recognition that would come to him. He became a captive to the love of magnificence and to the desire for display. He made marriages that were matters of state expediency and were not matters of heart conviction, and thus put himself under the influence of those whose religious purposes were wholly opposed to his own. He filled his palaces with women whose presence indeed was a great indication of Oriental affluence, but whose presence was a menace to clear vision of integrity, and was a woeful example to the nation. He grew blinder and blinder to fine perceptions, not alone of what was good in taste, but of what was right in principle. He became so broad in his religious sympathies that he seemed to forget that there can be but one living and true God. He even went after "Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milcar, the abomination of the Amonites." And as a last blind act of folly, he even raised within sight of God's holy temple"an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, and for Moloch, the abomination of the children of Ammon, in the hill that is before Jerusalem." What men like Daniel would not do, what men like Shadrach would not do, what martyrs in after days, asked to say the simple word "Cæsar" and throw a grain of corn on an heathen altar, would not do, though death awaited them, Solomon did. He gave up the fine distinction between the true and the untrue, between God and idolatry, between divine principle and human expediency. And with this loss of the best wisdom came loss of manliness, loss of peace, and loss of the favor of God. Wealth, power, luxury, praise, glory, were still about him, but he had made the most serious of all serious mistakes. Later he recognized his mistake. We hope that he repented, genuinely repented, of his mistake, and before his death turned back to God and the best wisdom. But whether he died repentant or unrepentant Solomon is the man who is forever the example of unparalleled wisdom and of ruinous folly—of ruinous folly because his wisdom failed to retain the element of the discerning mind.
Here,then, is a lesson: "With all thy getting, get understanding." Life is not a best success, whatever else it may have in it, unless it draws fine lines of separation between good and evil. The wealth and learning and glory of the wide world cannot make up for a lack of sensitive conscientiousness. The study and ambition of life must be applied to the securing and retaining of fine powers of moral discrimination if we are to be truly wise. Every one can have this discerning mind, at least to such a degree as shall enable him to avoid the fearful mistake of palliating evil and of becoming enslaved to evil. A little child may in this respect be wiser than the oldest man; the simple peasant may be safer than the most cultured scholar. Not even libraries of knowledge can save the character of the man whose vision of good and evil is blunted.
Youth is the time to make this prayer for true wisdom—when life's decisions are first opening before us. Youth is the time when God can best answer and when God cares most to answer prayer for the discerning mind. We need to start upon our careers withhearts exceedingly sensitive to the least variation from right. As the gunner cultivates his aim and notes his least deviation from the true line to the target, so should we cultivate clearness of moral perception. We need the "practiced" eye and the "practiced" heart, for safe judgment.
"The grand endowment of Washington," wrote Frederic Harrison, "was character, not imagination, not subtlety, not brilliancy, but wisdom. The wisdom of Washington was the genius of common sense, glorified intounerring truth of view."
Almost the same tribute can be paid to Victoria. When, six months after her accession, Victoria drove to the House of Parliament, there was not a hat raised nor a voice heard. But when sixty years later her jubilee was held, such pæans of admiration and love swelled in London's streets as never before had greeted any sovereign's ears—and all because the people saluted in Victoria's person thediscriminationthat had shunned vice, corrected abuses, exalted integrity, and glorified religion.
What every one needs, Washington, Victoria,and all—and what every one should crave—is such wisdom, as all through life shall keep him from confusing moral principles and shall make him see, choose, love, and follow the best.
The Best Possession.
CHAPTER VII.
The Best Possession.
What is the best possession a human life can have? Judging from the efforts made to secure wealth, fame, and power, the answer would seem to be that they—wealth, fame, and power—are the best possessions any one can have. Observant and thoughtful people know, however, that such possessions do not necessarily nor ordinarily make their owners happy. They therefore argue that there must be better possessions than these. So they say, eloquence is perhaps the best possession, or knowledge is, or ability to do great deeds or express great thoughts is. But the wisest book that has ever been written says that something not yet mentioned is the best possession, and says that that something makes life the happiest, and even makes it the holiest. That something, in the language of the Bible, islove. The man that in his heart has love, true, pure, lasting love, has the best possession that can be secured.
It is for this reason that Jonathan is such aninspiring character. The story of his life, hastily viewed, seems almost incidental, but scholarly examination of it shows that its light and gladness are in marked contrast to the darkness and sorrow in the careers of Saul and David. The story of Jonathan's life has probably done more to suggest and arouse the unselfish devotion of man to man, than any story, apart from that of the Christ, that has ever been told. If we wish to find one who really had the best possible possession, Jonathan is that one, a man whose heart was bright, whose deeds were noble, and whose death was glorious.
Jonathan was a physical hero. He had both muscular strength and muscular skill. The way he could throw a spear and shoot an arrow made him famous. He had rare courage. Assisted only by his armor-bearer he once made an attack upon a whole garrison at Michmash, slaying twenty men within a few rods and putting an entire army to flight. He had great self-control. Found fault with by his father because in an hour of weariness he had tasted honey—in ignorance of his father's wish to the contrary—he opened his breast to receive the death penalty vowed by the father, andstood unmoved until the soldiers cried to Saul that the deed of blood must not be done. He was no weakling. Rather he was a mighty man, able to command military forces and call out their enthusiasm. Men rallied about him for hazardous undertakings, saying, "Do all that is in thy heart; behold, I am with thee according to thy heart." In the field or in the court he was equally acceptable. His father, the king, had implicit confidence in him, and took him into all his counsels. In the language of poetry, he was "swifter than an eagle, he was stronger than a lion." Israel might well look forward to the day when this stalwart, inspiring, wise son should succeed his father and be their king. His name, in time of battle, would be a terror to their foes.
But better than Jonathan's strong arm and clear intellect and winsome personality was his loving heart. He never had read Paul's description of love as given in the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, nor had he read Henry Drummond's exposition of love as "The Greatest Thing in the World," nor had he ever seen the devoted character of Christ, nor known any of the beautiful examples of lovecreated by the Gospel. He was living in a selfish age—an age of strife and tumult and blood—and still his whole being seemed pervaded by that love which is "unselfish devotion to the highest interests of others." Such love was his joyous and abiding possession.
The first time we have an opportunity of reading his inmost heart is when David, having slain Goliath, stands before Saul, holding Goliath's head in his hand. Here we see thegenerosityof love. It was an hour when every eye was turned from Jonathan and centered upon an unknown stripling who had carried off the honors of the day by a startling and brilliant deed. Hitherto Jonathan had been the national hero; now he was to be set aside, and David was everywhere to come into the foreground. How should all this transfer of honor affect Jonathan? Should it sour him, making him look askance on this new competitor for the public recognition, and influencing him to send back David to his father's flocks, away from further opportunity for martial deeds? Any such method would be what is called "natural." Men usually try to get rid of competitors. They do this inbusiness and in games. Opera singers often keep back, if they can, the voice that once heard will supersede their own voice in popular favor. We do not like to have another outshine us. Praise is sweet. People hate to lose it. Plaudits transferred to another leave a painful vacancy in the ordinary soul. We crave favor, and when that favor passes from us to rest upon another we are severely tried. Many a man has thought himself kindly dispositioned until he found that some one else was obtaining the recognition previously so secure to him, and then to his own surprise he has found himself grudging the other that recognition. How much of the unhappiness of human life comes from the fact that persons do not speak to us or of us as they do of others! How apprehensively many people protect their place—social, political, or commercial—lest another shall in any wise encroach upon it! Jonathan might easily have recognized that, so far as his interests were concerned, it was far better that David should be dismissed to the sheep pastures than allowed to stay near the court.
But in spite of what Jonathan recognized, Jonathan's heart warmed to David. By the timehe had heard the story of David's home and family, the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. The interests of David became his interests. He wished David to succeed. Praises of David sounded sweet in his hearing. He showed such wish to have David stay right there, at the heart of the nation's capital, where people could see him and honor him, and where David could have new opportunity for public service, that Saul would not let David go back to the distant and quiet pastures. Jonathan even made a covenant with David, promising to be his friend and helper. To show the sincerity of that covenant, or rather in the expression of that covenant, Jonathan took off his robe and his garments, even to his sword and to his bow and to his girdle—stripped himself of them—and gave them to David. Jonathan wished David to be ready for possible opportunities of military success, and therefore he armed him with his own chosen and well-tried weapons.
So their friendship began. It was a friendship that was all "give" on one side and all "take" on the other. There never was a clearerillustration of what love is than the relation between Jonathan and David. It is always said that "Jonathan loved David," but no emphasis is placed on David's love for Jonathan. David appreciated Jonathan, but Jonathan loved David, and loving him, unceasingly aided him. "I call that man my friend," a noble poet declared, "for whom I can do some favor." Love exists only where costly kindnesses are conferred upon another.
Turner, England's honored painter, exemplified love when he was on a committee on hanging pictures for exhibition in London and a picture came from an unknown artist after the walls were full. "This picture is worthy; it must be hung," he said. "Impossible; the walls are full now," others asserted. Quietly saying "I will arrange it," Turner took down one of his own pictures and hung the new picture in its place.
The second scene of Jonathan's devotion to David reveals theprotectionof love. David's life was in danger. Saul, jealous of David's popularity, desired to be rid of David. He even wished to kill him. He let his servants know his wish. David was encompassed by peril. What would Jonathan do now? Whenothers were turning against him, would he also turn against him? The current was all setting one way. Any kindness to David would now be in direct opposition to a ruler's will and to the sentiment of the court. Interest in another often becomes luke-warm under such circumstances. "There is no use of resisting the tide of events," people say. They therefore leave the man that is down to himself and to his fate. How lovers fall away in the hour of disgrace and danger! How difficult it becomes to speak favorably of a man when every other is condemning him! In periods of excitement when the motives of men are called into question and innuendo is in the air, how reluctant we are to avow our confidence and try to still the cries of opposition.
But what was the effect of this situation on Jonathan? His heart warmed all the more to the imperiled man whose one crime was that he was a deliverer to Israel. Jonathan delighted much in David. Jonathan revealed to David Saul's purpose to kill him. Jonathan provided for David's immediate safety and took means to anticipate his future safety. Then he went to the king andpleadfor David. Thatwas a splendid piece of work. It was much as John Knox plead with Mary, Queen of Scots, for Scotland. She did not wish to hear Knox's words. She was bitter against Scotland and Scotland's religion. He risked much in venturing into her presence and interceding. But he loved Scotland and Scotland's religion. He would rather die than have Scotland suffer, and so he braved Mary's tears and entreaties and commands, and he spoke for Scotland. Love is a very expensive thing; it often summons us to surrender our personal ease, and surrender, too, our closest comradeships. It may cost us obloquy, it may cost us loss of standing with king and court, it may cost us the disdain of the world, but cost what it might, Jonathan plead for David's safety, and temporarily secured his wish.
Later the love of Jonathan was to be subjected to a more subtle and more difficult test. It was to be called upon forself-effacement. Saul's misdemeanors and incompetences had so weighed on Saul's mind that Saul actually hated the David whose conduct was always irreproachable; Saul's mind, too, at times had lost its balance, and he had done the insaneacts of a madman toward David. Saul, now half-sane and half-insane, was irrevocably determined to kill David. He learned that Samuel had quietly anointed David as king, and that David in due time would succeed to the throne! Saul's heart was aflame with bitterness—the bitterness that is born of chagrin and envy. David knew of that bitterness, and knew that Saul's persistent enmity left but a "step between him and death." Then it was that Jonathan ventured to interview his father and see whether his father's hatred could not in some way be appeased and David's safety be secured.
But with the first revelation of Jonathan's interest in David came an outburst from Saul that showed the utter implacability of Saul's rage. Saul even tried to inflame Jonathan's temper, charging him with perversity and rebellion, and with acting undutifully; and then, when he hoped that Jonathan was excited, he introduced the thought, "This David, if you let him live, will seize the throne which is yours as my son and heir! Will you suffer David to live and take your throne?" It was an appeal to Jonathan's envy, and that appeal touched on the most delicate ambition of Jonathan'sheart. What a fearful thing envy is! History is full of its unfortunate work. It hurts him who cherishes it as well as him against whom it rages. Cambyses killed his brother Smerdis because he could draw a stronger bow than himself or his party. Dionysius the tyrant, out of envy, punished Philoxenius the musician because he could sing, and Plato the philosopher because he could dispute, better than himself. "Envy is the very reverse of charity; it is the supreme source of pain, as charity is the supreme source of pleasure. The poets imagined that envy dwelt in a dark cave; being pale and lean, looking asquint, abounding with gall, her teeth black, never rejoicing but in the misfortune of others, ever unquiet and anxious, and continually tormenting herself."
When such an appeal to envy as that subtly made by Saul to Jonathan comes to most human hearts they are conquered by it. Few, very few, men hail the rise of the sun that pales their own star. But Jonathan could not be overpowered by this appeal, however wilily the king drove it home. He stood true to David, though by so doing he imperiled his own life. For with his quick perceptionof Jonathan's fixed adherence to David, Saul hurled his javelin at his own son's breast and would have slain him on the spot.
In the days that followed this stormy interview, when the king's wrath against David was still at white heat, and when one turn of Jonathan's hand could have ended all possible rivalry between himself and David for the throne, Jonathan sought David, said gladly to him, "Thou shalt be king in Israel, and I shall be next unto thee," and saying this, made a new covenant of love that should bind themselves and their descendants to all generations!
I know not what others may think, but as for me, nothing in this world is sweeter, stronger, nobler, than an unselfish friendship. We have used and misused the word "love" so often that we have dragged it down from its high meaning. We have flippantly passed it over our lips when by "love" we meant mere interest, or sympathy, or fondness, or even a mental or a physical passion. We have belittled it and even smirched it in the mire. But next to the word "God" it is the greatest word of human life, and is associated withGod as no other word is. The man that can and will prove a generous, unselfish, devoted friend is the highest type of man. The man that can cherish a sweet, uplifting love that is beyond the reach of envy, and that will lay down every treasure but itself for another, is the noblest specimen of manhood that can be produced. More and more it becomes clear that genuine devotion to the highest interests of others is the solution of the world's social problems. Love makes its owner happy. It is a giver and a sustainer of joy. There is no bitterness in its root and no acid in its fruit. By nature it is the sweet, the healthy, the sane. The absence of love always means the presence of the selfish, or of the vain, or of the proud, or of the self-seeking, or of the cruel. Envy is a thorn in the soul. Love is content and cheer, a radiant flower whose perfume is refreshingly fragrant.
"For life, with all it yields of joy or woe,And hope or fear,Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love—How love might be, hath been, indeed, and is."
To the very end of his days Jonathan stood true to David. He accomplished what might seem to many an impossible task, but whatby his accomplishment of it is shown to be possible. He was true to two persons whose interests were opposite, proving a friend to each. He loved his father. He knew his father's weaknesses. They tried him seriously. When his father threw the spear at his head, and maligned his mother, and charged him with ingratitude, his whole being was stirred; he went out from his father's presence "angry." But that anger was merely a temporary emotion. He soon realized his duty to his father. He returned, placed himself at his father's hand, continued to be his adherent, counselor, and helper, went with him as one of his lieutenants to the battle on Gilboa, and fought beside him until he fell dead at Saul's side!
There is nothing weak in this character of Jonathan. Let him who can reproduce it. Christ said of John the Baptist, "There hath not been born of women a greater than he," because John, free from envy, was so full of love that he rejoiced to see Christ come into a recognition that absolutely displaced John. By these words of Christ John is made to loom up as no other character of his day. Jonathan was John's prototype—a massive man, aman of momentum, a man of absolute fearlessness, whose virtues were crowned by his generous, protecting, self-effacing love. No wonder that when word reached David that Jonathan had been slain in fierce battle his heart poured out the greatest elegy of history—an elegy that has been sung and resung for thousands of years—"How are the mighty fallen! I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant hast thou been unto me. Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of war perished!" Noticeable it is that the supreme elegy of the Old Testament is on the man who had a heart of unselfish devotion, Jonathan; and that the one elegy of the New Testament pronounced by Christ, is likewise on the man who had a heart of unselfish devotion, John the Baptist. The greatest possession any one can have is a loving heart—a heart that generously recognizes worth in another and tries to make place for that worth; a heart that guards another's interests, even though such guarding costs intercession; a heart that gladly surrenders its own advantage that another may advance to the place which might be its own.
Noone can tell another how and when the heart of love should show itself. All that can be told is this: "Let any one be pervaded by love as Jonathan was, and in that one's home, in that one's business, and in that one's pleasures God will provide him occasion upon occasion for living that love." The love that a man gives away is the only love his heart can retain. The man that has such a heart of love has the sweetest, happiest, gladdest possession that can be obtained on earth or in heaven. All the money in the world leaves a man poor if his heart is bitter. All the poverty that can come to a man finds him rich if his heart is glad and strong. Love is the only possession that a man can carry with him to heaven and always keep with him in heaven. He lives for eternity who lives for love.
"The one great purpose of creation—love,The sole necessity of earth and heaven."
Using Aright Our Best Hours.
CHAPTER VIII.
Using Aright Our Best Hours.
Every writer who has described what we call opportunity has insisted upon the necessity of seizing opportunity as it flies. We are told that there is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its proper moment leads us on to fortune. It is also asserted that once at least there comes into every one's life a special hour which used aright has much to do with assuring his permanent welfare.
Universal experience bears witness to the truthfulness and force of these sayings. Every human being who has studied the history of the race is aware that now and then decisive hours come to his fellows, and according as those hours are used to advantage or to disadvantage, is the success or failure of his fellows. We know this fact applies also to ourselves. All our hours are not the same hours, either in their nature or in their possibility. Some hours are special hours when, for one reason or another, crises are present; if we meet these hours aright weadvance, if we fail to meet them aright we fall back.
Such hours are the supreme opportunities of our entire existence: the hours when duty appears more clear than is its wont, or hours when the heart is strangely moved toward the good, or hours when a new and very uplifting sense of God's presence is felt. It is not asserted that such hours are equally bright and glorious to every one. They may not be bright at all. They may be dull and heavy. But they bring us a conviction of what is right, a sense of obligation to do the right, and an assurance that God's way is the way our feet should tread. Given any such hour, whether it be on the mountain or in the valley, and a man has his best hour. All other hours, as we plod or play, may be good, but the hour when a soul is brought face to face with duty and with God is the best hour in that particular period of our life.
It was simply and only because Jacob used aright his best hours that he rescued his name from disgrace and crowned it with glory. If ever a man started in life handicapped by unfortunate characteristics and unfortunate environments Jacob was such a man.One of the modern sculptors, George Grey Barnard, has a life-sized marble, showing what he names "Our Two Natures," two men, one the good and one the evil, coming out of the same block of stone, and struggling, each to see which shall gain the ascendancy over the other. Such two natures are in every one; but they appear with special prominence in Jacob. The question of his life was, Which is to conquer, the good or the evil? The struggle of the good for ascendancy was prolonged and severe. It was a struggle in which there were disgraceful defeats, but in which there was also a persistency of purpose and a reassertion of effort whereby the good finally triumphed. And this triumph, it may safely be asserted, was secured through the use Jacob made of a few supreme hours in his life.
When we first begin to notice Jacob, we see him participating in the deception of his aged and almost blinded father, Isaac. We do well, in studying that deception, to bear in mind that the mother, before Jacob's birth, had been told that Jacob should inherit his father's blessing. So she had probably taught Jacob that this blessing belonged to him,and that she and he were justified in securing it in any way they could. And we do well also to bear in mind that the mother recognized a certain undeveloped but capable fitness in Jacob for this blessing, a fitness that Esau lacked. Esau was a lusty, out-of-doors, happy-going man who would not control his appetites, and who, however pleasant he might be to have around when merry-making and sport were in the air, was not prudent enough and judicious enough to be the head of a great people. Rebekah, and Jacob, too, may have felt that it would be the height of family folly to leave the family blessing with Esau, who probably in a short time would squander it; it ought, therefore, to be diverted from him. Besides, the age was one in which fine distinctions between right and wrong, as we to-day see these distinctions, were not clear. We thus can understand some of the reasoning which lay back of the fraud practiced on Isaac when Jacob made believe that he was Esau bringing the desired venison, and so secured the blessing.
But we do not mean to justify the deception. It carried—as every sin carries—fearful consequences, and those consequences affectedall of Jacob's future life. As he had deceived his father, again and again his children deceived their father. Even immediately upon its perpetration Jacob's life became endangered. He was obliged to flee from enraged and threatening Esau. Then it was that Jacob, at nightfall, coming alone to rocky Bethel, and lying down to sleep—a wrong-doer, a fugitive, homeless, friendless, and in peril—had his dream. He saw heaven opened over him, with angels ascending as it were by a ladder to God and then descending by that ladder from God to his resting-place. The dream bore in upon his mind certain thoughts. One was, that God had not forsaken him, but was with him. Another was, that God was ready to forgive him for his sin and bless him. And still a third was, that God would take even his life and so use it, if he should be consecrated to Him, that he, Jacob, should some day come back to Bethel as its owner and be the head of that people through whom the whole world should be blessed. And a fourth thought was, that however long the delay in fulfilling the promises, God certainly would fulfil them, and He would watch over Jacob until they were fulfilled.