Part 23

However, without wishing to modernize the details of this incident, which, owing to our civilization, would be impossible, it is enough to remember that, in the early days of collegiate and school life, the scholars were prepared to do something toward helping themselves. They did not send for builders from Jerusalem, or even from the city of Jericho; they undertook the work at their own impulse and at their own charges.

There is a line of beauty even in the proposition of the young men. They desired Elisha’s permission. They said, in effect: “Father, may we go?” They were enthusiastic, but they were under discipline; they had fire enough, but they responded to the touch of the master. And one said to Elisha: “Be content, I pray thee, and go with thy servants.” They were stronger when the elder man was with them.

Sometimes the eye is the best master. It often happens that the man who is standing in the harvest field, resting upon his rake, a picture of dignity and ease, is doing more than if he were sweltering himself by cutting down corn with his own sickle. His eye is doing the work, and his presence is exerting an immeasurable and happy influence upon the whole field.

Elisha was not asked to go and fell the timber, but to be with the young men while they did the hard work; and, becoming young again himself, as old men do become young when associated with young life, he replied:

“I will go. The work is a common work. It belongs to me as well as to you; it belongs to all Israel, in so far as all Israel is true to the living God. Come, let us go in one band; union is strength.”

Now, they went--the old and the young together. Why would they not go alone? Perhaps they were all reminded of what happened when once they did go alone. Elisha ordered that food should be prepared, and when the seething pot was on, one of the young men went out and gathered something and threw it into the pot, and nearly poisoned the whole college. Small wonder if one of them, remembering this, said:

“No more going out alone, if you please. We once took the case into our own hands, and I remember how many of us fell sick, and how we cried to Elisha: ‘Master, there is death in the pot!’ And he kindly took up a handful of meal, sprinkled it into the vessel and restored its healthfulness. The pot was relieved of all the disease which it had contained, and the meal most happily proceeded.”

We should remember our blunders, and learn from them. We are always safer in the company of the old and wise than when we are in our own society. Happy is the man who takes counsel with his elder neighbors, and who can sometimes renounce himself and say unto wise men: “Such and such are my circumstances; now, what would you advise me to do?”

Elisha and the young men have now gone down to the Jordan. Elisha felled no tree but he did his own particular kind of work.

The Syrian king could not rest. In his heart he hated or feared the king and the hosts of Israel. There was chronic war between Israel and Syria. The king of Syria said: “I will fix my camp in such and such a place.” Of this the sacred record says: “And the man of God sent unto the king of Israel, saying: ‘Beware that thou pass not such a place, for thither the Syrians are come down.’”

There is a ministry of warning. Men may not go themselves to battle, and yet they may be controlling the fortunes of war. We need statesmen, spiritual interpreters, religious teachers, men of thought and men of prayer; and they may be doing more practical work than is being done by those who are engaged in the physical work of leading armies and commanding military hosts.

This is what Elisha did.

He felled no tree; he wielded no sword. Yet, alike in the building of the college and in the direction of the war, his was the supreme mind. The prophet saved the king. This must always be the case.

The great man of the nation is the man who can think most profoundly and most comprehensively. The architect is a greater man than the builder. The prophet is a greater man than the king. He reads more; he sees farther; he grasps a larger field. He is master of metaphysical principles, which alone endure. They wear the clothes of the present time; they adopt the form of the passing generation, but they go on from age to age--themselves always the same, their adaptations being addressed to the immediate and pressing necessities of the people.

We have been told that “Justice is not an intermittent apparition.” That is perfectly true in one sense; but justice is often a deferred creditor, and sometimes that may be done tomorrow which can not be justly done today. The prophet sees all this. He looks ahead; he has a larger horizon than is accessible to the vision of other men.

So let it stand, an eternal lesson, that the greatest men in any nation are the men who can think most, pray best, feel most deeply and penetrate the metaphysics and the inmost reality of politics and of civilization.

Spiritual power is not only useful in one direction; it is alarming in another. When the king of Syria felt himself baffled, all his plans thrown into uncontrollable bewilderment, his heart was sorely troubled. It is the Immeasurable that frightens men. It is the Unknown Quantity that troubles all their calculations and causes them to feel that after they have completed their arithmetic their conclusion is a lie.

What was in the air? Whose was this ghostly presence that was upsetting Ben-hadad’s well laid schemes? What was it, or who, that always went before him, and that made his proposals abortive and turned all his policies into mocking nothings?

Had there been any man who was visible and measurable, that man could have been dealt with. There is always a quantity equal to any quantity that is known. What is wanting in one way can be made up in another--as, for example, what is wanting in number may be made up in quality. As one great leader said in ancient history, when his soldiers were saying they were too few for the battle: “How many do you count me for?” That touched the fire of the army, and inspired the soldiers with confidence.

Now, the matter was revealed to the king, and he took means to remove the spectral influence. He made this arrangement: “Go and spy where he is, that I may send and fetch him.” When he knew that Elisha was in Dothan the king sent “thither horses and chariots and a great host.”

What unconscious tributes bad men pay to good influences! Men do not know wholly what they are doing. Why, this was but a poor prophet, wearing a hairy robe that had descended to him; he was no king; he had no sword or horse; he was but a man of prayer. How did Ben-hadad propose to capture him?

The king sent “horses and chariots and a great host” to take a man whose sword was the word of God, whose helmet was the defense of the Most High, whose breastplate was Righteousness!

Here are three arms of the Syrian service--footmen, horsemen and chariots; and remember that these were all employed to bring one poor man to the king’s presence. Well might Elisha have said, before Antigonus uttered it: “How many do you count _me_ for?” Elisha might have taunted the king of Syria, saying: “Why all this ado? Would not one soldier have been enough to take one prophet? He might have come on foot; a horse was not necessary, and certainly not a sword. One soldier might surely have arrested me.”

But bad men unconsciously pay tribute to good men. They say, in effect: “Elisha is only one, but a stubborn one; only one tree, but his roots seem to have spread themselves through the Earth, and to have taken hold of the entire scheme of things; he is only one, yet, what is strange, he is many in one.”

And this, indeed, was the interpretation given by Elisha, for he said: “They that be with us are more than they that be with them.”

Who can tell how many angels are round about the praying man? How is it that when the arresting hand is laid upon some men it becomes softened, the muscles relax and have no more pith in them, and the men come back to say: “Never man spake like this man; arrest him we can not”? This is a tribute paid to the Christian religion. Men have passed parliamentary statutes against it, but the religion of the cross has outlived the statutes--has seen them grow into yellow letters, has observed them being canceled or otherwise passing into obsoleteness.

We are now brought to a very striking point in the incident. The servant of Elisha came back, saying: “Alas, my master, how shall we do? I have been up early, and behold, a host compasses the city--both with horses and chariots.”

Then Elisha said: “Lord, open his eyes; let this young man see. At present he can only look upon appearances, which are not realities. The universe is within the universe. The Bible is within the Bible. The man is within the man. This servant of mine sees only the outer circle--the rim or rind of things. Lord, show him the reality; let him see, and then he will be at peace.”

There is a view of sight; there is a view of faith. The worldly man goes by what his bodily eyes notice or discern; the spiritually minded man walks by faith, not by sight.

The telescope does not create the stars; the telescope only reveals them, or enables the eye to see them. If, then, a telescope can do this, shall we deny to that spiritual power within us called Faith the power which we ascribe to a mechanical instrument which our own hands have fashioned?

Look upon a given object--say, you take a piece of glass two inches square; look upon it and ask: “Is there any thing on that glass?” Looking with the naked eye, the sharpest man would say: “That glass is perfectly free from blot, stain, flaw or inscription of any kind whatsoever.”

Now, put that same two-inch square of glass under a microscope, and look through the microscope. What is upon it? The Lord’s Prayer, upon a speck not discernible by the naked eye.

If, then, we ascribe such wonderful powers to a glass which we ourselves have determined as to its size and its relation to other glasses, shall we deny to a certain spiritual faculty the power of seeing that which can not be discriminated by unaided reason?

By all the pressure of analogy, by all the reasoning of inference, we insist that, if such wonderful things can be done mechanically, things at least equally wonderful can be done by forces that are spiritual.

The Sun does not make the landscape; the Sun only shows it. A man may stand upon a high hill on a dull-gray day and say: “I can imagine what this would be when the Sun was shining.” But no man can imagine light. It stands as a sacred mystery in our life that the Sun never comes within the lines of imagination. The Sun light is a continual surprise, even to the eyes that have most reverently and lovingly studied it.

When the Sun looks upon the landscape there are new colors, new distances, new forms; a whole work is wrought upon the landscape which can only be described by the word “wizardry.”

So it is with the Bible, the great work of the living God. Look at it with the natural vision, and you may discover in it particular beauties. You may say: “The poetry is noble; the English is pure; and the moral sentiment of the book is not without a certain elevation.”

But the Bible wants no such reluctant or impoverished compliments. Let the soul be touched by the Spirit that wrote the book; let the eyes be anointed by the living God; and then the Bible is like a landscape shone upon by the noonday’s cloudless Sun.

Elisha took his own way with the Syrian army, and here occurs a point worthy of special note. When the Lord smote the people with blindness, according to the word of Elisha, the latter said unto them: “This is not the way, neither is this the city; follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek.” But he led them to Samaria.

What! Then did the man of God resort to a false strategy? This is a very serious case, indeed, and has occasioned much difficulty. Nor need we wonder, for in “The Speaker’s Commentary” we find such words as these:

“Untruth has been held by all moralists to be justifiable toward a public enemy. Where we have a right to kill, much more have we a right to deceive by stratagem.”

When words like these occur in a Christian commentary, no wonder that infidelity should seize upon the annotation as a prize, or use it as a weapon. No such comment can we adopt in perusing this portion of sacred Scripture. It can not be justifiable to treat a public enemy by untruth or deception. We have no right to kill, and therefore we have no right to deceive by stratagem. This is not the way to recommend the word of the living God.

The incident must be taken in its totality. The reader must not arrest the progress of the narrative by stopping here or there to ask a question. He must see the incident in its completeness, and, seeing it, he will have reason further to glorify God for the pure morality of the book and the noble spirit of the record.

Elisha might well so far follow his illustrious predecessor as to use the weapon of irony or taunting in dealing with the Lord’s enemies.

Elijah said to the prophets of Baal: “Cry aloud; for he is a god.” As well might we stop there, and say: “By Elijah’s own testimony deity was ascribed to Baal.” We forget the irony of the tone; we forget that Elijah was mocking the debased prophets.

So Elisha might say: “This is not the way, neither is this the city; follow me, and I will bring you to the man whom ye seek.”

There was a taunt in the tone; there was sarcasm in the emphasis. Nor is the verse to be read in its unity. It is to be read as part and parcel of a whole narrative.

Now, what became of all this so-called deception and stratagem?

When the people were come into Samaria, Elisha said: “Lord, open the eyes of these men, that they may see.”

He prayed, first, that their sight might be taken away. That seemed to be cruel. Now he prays that their sight may be given to them again.

“And, behold, they were in the midst of Samaria. And the king of Israel said unto Elisha, when he saw them: ‘My father!’” As if he had become a convert. The son of Ahab and Jezebel said to Elisha: “My father!” A reluctant and hypocritical compliment, for Jehoram could be neither reverent or true.

But, said he, observing the prize that was before him: “Shall I smite them? Shall I smite them?” This was a Hebraism equal to: “Smiting, shall I smite?” So Jehoram said: “Shall I, smiting, smite them?”

Elisha answered: “No.”

Now, let us hear what this man can say who has been judged guilty of untruth and of stratagem.

Elisha said to Jehoram: “Thou shalt not smite them. Wouldst thou smite those whom thou hast taken captive without thy sword and without thy bow?” This is the same as saying: “If you yourself have won the victory, then you can smite; but you did not take these men, and therefore you shall not smite them. What you have taken by your own sword and spear may be your lawful prize in war; but here is a capture with which you have had nothing to do.”

What, then, is to be done? Hear Elisha: “Set bread and water before them, that they may eat and drink and go to their master.”

And so great provision was prepared, “and when they had eaten and drunk, he sent them away, and they went to their master.”

We might even excuse a strategic act in order to secure such a conclusion.

Elisha was supposed to be about a hundred years of age when he died. We have seen that he was a domestic rather than a public prophet. He was unlike his great predecessor and father. The awful Elijah dwelt alone. He came upon society now and then--came down like a flood from the threatening clouds; shot out like a fire, and burned the men whom he approached.

Elisha was exactly the contrary. He worked his miracles in the house. He often called upon people; he was quiet, serene, most sympathetic and tender-hearted. Now and then he could stand bolt upright and send away proud men from his door with a disdain that they could never forget; but in the usual process of his life he was a mother-man in Israel. He went into people’s houses and asked how they were. He consented to increase their oil and their flour, and to bless their family life with prophetic benedictions.

GEHAZI.

The name Gehazi means “valley of vision,” and is appropriate enough if we think of what Gehazi saw as to the nature of wickedness when the prophet opened his eyes.

Let us note what points there are in this case which illustrate human life as we now know it. In this way we shall test the moral accuracy of the story--and that is all we are now principally concerned about.

Gehazi was “the servant of Elisha, the man of God.” Surely, then, he would be a good man? Can a good man have a bad servant? Can the man of prayer, whose life is a continual breathing unto God of supreme desires after holiness, have a man in his company, looking on and watching him, and studying his character, who denies his very altar and blasphemes against his God? Is it possible to live in a Christian house and yet not be a Christian? Can we come so near as that, and yet be at an infinite distance from all that is pure and beautiful and true?

If so, then we must look at appearances more carefully than we have been wont to do, for they may have been deceiving us all the time.

Surely, every good man’s children must be good, for they have had great spiritual advantages. They have, indeed, had some hereditary benefits denied to many others. Their house has been a home, their home has been a church, and surely they must show by their whole spirit and tone of life that they are as their father as to all spiritual aspiration and positive excellence.

Is it not so?

If facts contradict that theory, then we must look at the theory again more carefully, or we must examine the facts more closely, because the whole science of Cause and Effect would seem to be upset by such contradictions. There is a metaphysical question here, as well as a question of fact. A good tree must bring forth good fruit; good men must have good children; good masters must have good servants. Association in life must go for something.

So we would say--emphatically, because we think reasonably.

But facts are against such a fancy.

What is possible in this human life? It is possible that a man may spend his days in building a church, and yet denying God. Does not the very touch of the stones help him to pray? No. He touches them roughly; he lays them mechanically, and he desecrates each of them with an oath.

Is it possible that a man can be a builder of churches and yet be a destroyer of Christian doctrine and teaching generally? Yes.

Let us come closer still, for the question is intensely interesting and may touch many.

It is possible for a man to print the Bible and yet not believe a word of it. On first hearing this shocking statement we revolt from it. We say it is possible for a man to handle type that is meant to represent the greatest revelation ever made to the human mind without feeling that the very handling of the type is itself a kind of religious exercise. Yet men can debauch themselves in the act of printing the Bible; can use profane language while putting the Lord’s Prayer in type; can set up the whole Gospel of John without knowing that they are putting into visible representation the highest metaphysics, the finest spiritual thinking, the most tender religious instruction.

Let us come even closer. A man can preach the Gospel and be a servant of the devil. Who, then, can be saved? It is well to ask the question. It is a burning inquiry; it is a spear-like interrogation. We would put it away from us if we dare.

Now, let this stand as our first lesson in the study of this remarkable incident, that Gehazi was the servant of Elisha, the man of God, and was at the same time the servant of the devil. He was receiving wages from both masters. He was a living contradiction; and in being such he was most broadly human. He was not a monster; he was not a natural curiosity; he is not to be accounted for by quietly saying that he was an eccentric person. He represents the human heart, and by so much he brings against ourselves an infinite impeachment.

It is in vain that we shake our skirts as if throwing off this man and all association with him and responsibility for him; this can not be done. He anticipated ourselves; we repeat his wickedness. The iniquity is not in the accident, in the mere circumstances, or in the particular form; the iniquity is in the heart--yea, in the very heart itself. Marvel not that Christ said: “Ye must be born again.”

Gehazi did not understand the spirit of his master. He did not know what his master was doing. How is it that men can be so far separated from one another? How is it that a man can not be understood in his own house, but be thought fanciful, fanatical, eccentric and phenomenally peculiar? How is it that a man may be living among men, and yet not be of them; may be in the world and yet above the world; may be speaking the very language of the time, and yet charging it with the meaning of eternity? See here the differences that still exist, and must ever exist, as between one man and another:

Elisha--living the great spiritual life, the grand prayer-life and faith-life.

Gehazi--grubbing in the Earth and seeking his contentment in the dust.

These contrasts exist through all time, and are full of instruction. Blessed is he who observes the wise man, and copies him; who looks upon the fool, and turns away from him, if not with hatred yet with a desire not to know his spirit.

Gehazi had a method in his reasoning. Said he, in effect:

“To spare a stranger, a man who may never be seen again; to spare a beneficiary, a man who has taken away benefits in the right hand and in the left; to spare a wealthy visitor, a man who could have given much without feeling he had given any thing; to spare a willing giver, a man who actually offered to give something and who was surprised, if not offended, because his gift was declined! There is no reason in my master’s policy.”

It never occurred to Gehazi that a man could have bread to eat that the world knew not of. It never occurs to some men that others can live by faith, and can work miracles of faith by the grace of God.

Are there not minds that never had a noble thought? It is almost impossible to conceive of the existence of such minds, but there they are. They never went beyond their own limited location; they never knew what suffering was on the other side of the wall of their own dwelling place. They were never eyes to the blind, or ears to the deaf, or feet to the lame; they never surprised themselves by some noble thought of generosity. How, then, can they understand the prophets of the times?

Yet how noble a thing it is to have among us men who love the upper life, and who look upon the whole world from the very sanctuary of God, and who say:

“A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth, but a man’s life consists of his faith, love and charity.”

We can not tell how much the prophets are doing to refine their age, to give a new view to all human duty, to inspire those who otherwise would fail for the lack of courage.

We can not tell where the answers to prayer fall, or how those answers are given, but we feel that there is at work in society a mystic influence, a strange, ghostly, spectral action, which keeps things together, and now and again puts Sabbath day right in the midst of the vulgar time.