Part 1

SECULAR ANNOTATIONS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS.

Scripture Texts Illustrated BY GENERAL LITERATURE.

BY THE REV. FRANCIS JACOX, B.A.

NEW YORK: THOMAS NELSON & SONS, 42, BLEECKER STREET. 1871.

_Issued in this country by special arrangement with Messrs. HODDER & STOUGHTON, of London, England._

CONTENTS.

PAGE

FELLOWSHIP IN ACHAN’S FALL 1 JOSHUA xxii. 20.

SILENT SYMPATHY 6 JOB ii. 13.

THE TEMPTER’S “IT IS WRITTEN” 10 ST. MATTHEW iv. 6, sq.

ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR 15 DANIEL iv. 27.

WIND, EARTHQUAKE, FIRE, AND STILL SMALL VOICE 32 1 KINGS xix. 11, 12.

HAMAN HANGED ON HIS OWN GALLOWS 41 ESTHER vii. 10.

TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE 47 ST. MATTHEW vi. 34.

MEDICAMENTAL MUSIC 55 1 SAMUEL xvi. 23.

FREE FROM RIGHTEOUSNESS 60 ROMANS vi. 20.

THE SERVICE OF FREEDOM 66 ST. MATTHEW xi. 29, 30.

THE DISCREET SILENCE OF FOLLY 70 PROVERBS xvii. 28.

PENAL PREVISION 76 1 SAMUEL xxvii. 19, 20.

BEATIFIC VISION AND OVERSHADOWING CLOUD 86 ST. LUKE ix. 34.

THE SPREADING GOURD AND THE SPEEDING WORM 91 JONAH iv. 6-8.

SELF-PRAISE 96 PROVERBS xxvii. 2.

PAINTED FACE, TIRED HEAD, AND EXPOSED SKULL 101 2 KINGS ix. 30, 35.

THE CARCASE OF JEZEBEL ON THE FACE OF THE FIELD 104 2 KINGS ix. 37.

“CONSIDER THE LILIES” 109 ST. MATTHEW vi. 28.

A HISTRIONIC ASPECT OF LIFE 114 1 CORINTHIANS vii. 31.

PHARAOH’S ALTERNATIONS OF AMENDMENT AND RELAPSE 125 EXODUS vii.-x. _passim_.

SLEEP AND DEATH 134 ST. JOHN xi. 11-14.

ELIAB AND DAVID IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH 139 1 SAMUEL xvii. 28.

THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY 143 ST. LUKE iv. 24.

DESIRED BOON: REALIZED BANE 147 PSALM cvi. 15; lxxviii. 22, sq.

“AND HE DIED” 156 GENESIS v. _passim_.

AN ULTRA-PROTESTER 165 ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 33-35; 69-75.

FLEETING SHADOWS 170 JOB xiv. 2.

HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT 182 GENESIS xi. 28.

THE MOTE AND THE BEAM 187 ST. MATTHEW vii. 5.

STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS 192 1 PETER ii. 11.

THE FALSITY OF THE FAMILIAR FRIEND 200 PSALM xli. 9.

“JUDGE NOT” 208 ST. MATTHEW vii. 1.

PART-KNOWLEDGE 224 1 CORINTHIANS xiii. 9.

RULING THE WAVES 231 PSALM cxiv. 1-5; ST. MARK iv. 39.

IN DEADLY PERIL UNAWARES 237 1 SAMUEL xxvi. 8-25.

NO LEISURE 242 ST. MARK vi. 31.

A PROPHYLACTIC KNIFE TO THE THROAT 249 PROVERBS xxiii. 2.

HAZAEL’S ABHORRENT REPUDIATION OF HIS FUTURE SELF 255 2 KINGS viii. 13.

THE OPEN RIGHT HAND’S SECRET FROM THE LEFT 259 ST. MATTHEW vi. 3.

TO-MORROW 263 ST. JAMES iv. 13, 14.

THE DIVINE AUTHORSHIP OF ORDER 273 1 CORINTHIANS xiv. 33, 40.

SWEET SLEEP AND ITS FORFEITURE 282 PROVERBS iii. 24.

ONCE DENIED, THRICE DENIED 286 ST. MATTHEW xxvi. 69, sq.

LINKED LIES 290 GENESIS xxvii. 19-24.

A TIME TO WEEP, AND A TIME TO LAUGH 296 ECCLESIASTES iii. 4.

DISALLOWED DESIGNS 301 PROVERBS xix. 21

MAN DEVISING: GOD DIRECTING 305 PROVERBS xvi. 9.

A PURSEBEARER’S PROTEST AGAINST PURPOSELESS WASTE 309 ST. JOHN xii. 5.

LIGHT AT EVENING-TIME 313 ZECHARIAH xiv. 7.

WISHED-FOR DAY 323 ACTS xxvii. 29.

THE MORE THAN BROTHERHOOD OF A BOSOM FRIEND 328 PROVERBS xviii. 24.

MANY YEARS TO ENJOY LIFE: THIS NIGHT TO DIE 333 ST. LUKE xii. 19, 20.

GREAT BABYLON BUILT: A BUILDER’S BOAST 337 DANIEL iv. 29-33.

INVOCATION AND INACTION 342 EXODUS xiv. 15.

CO-OPERANT UNITS 348 EPHESIANS iv. 16.

SUBORDINATE, NOT SUPERFLUOUS; OR, DEPRECIATED MEMBERSHIP 353 1 CORINTHIANS xii. 22.

THE WRATH-DISPELLING POWER OF A SOFT ANSWER 357 PROVERBS xv. 1.

A TWICE-TOLD TALE OF YEARS 361 ECCLESIASTES vi. 6.

DAYBREAK NO SOLACE: NIGHTFALL NO RELIEF 365 DEUTERONOMY xxviii. 36, 37.

BUYER’S BARGAIN AND BOAST 367 PROVERBS xx. 14.

GRAY-HAIRED UNAWARES 372 HOSEA vii. 9.

RESTRAINED ANGER 376 PROVERBS xvi. 32.

EVANESCENCE OF THE EARLY DEW 381 HOSEA vi. 3.

EARS TO HEAR 386 ST. LUKE viii. 8.

NOT ALONE IN THE VALLEY OF SHADOWS 389 PSALM xxiii. 4.

SECULAR ANNOTATIONS ON SCRIPTURE TEXTS.

_FELLOWSHIP IN ACHAN’S FALL._

JOSHUA xxii. 20.

When Achan the son of Zerah committed a trespass in the accursed thing, wrath fell not alone upon Achan, but upon all the congregation of Israel; “and that man perished not alone in his iniquity.” The text is one to arrest the thoughtless, and to suggest even to the most thoughtful matter for very serious consideration.

“Should one man sin, and would God be wroth with all the congregation?” That deprecatory question had been put twenty years before Achan’s trespass, by the congregation of Israel, in the matter of Korah, when they fell upon their faces and pleaded with God, the God of the spirits of all flesh. And some centuries later the confession of King David in time of pestilence took this form: that he had sinned and done wickedly; but those sheep—those subjects of his, involved in the penalty of his transgression, and dying off like sheep in a flock to the right and left of him, seventy thousand of them from morning to evening, from Dan even to Beersheba,—what had they done?

If, indeed, says Dr. South, a man could be wicked and a villain to himself alone, the mischief would be so much the more tolerable. But the case, as he goes on to show, is much otherwise: the guilt of the crime lights upon one, but the example of it sways a multitude; especially if the criminal be of any note or eminence in the world. “For the fall of such a one by any temptation (be it never so plausible) is like that of a principal stone or stately pillar, tumbling from a lofty edifice into the deep mire of the street; it does not only plunge and sink into the black dirt itself, but also dashes or bespatters all that are about it or near it when it falls.” It is by no very subtle and far-fetched reasoning that a living divine essays to show that we may sin in the persons of other men, and so may sin in other countries which we never saw, and in years after we are in our graves. For may we not, he asks, be partakers in other men’s sins of which at their commission we knew not, indeed at whose commission we would shudder? May we not in the moral world sometimes set the great stone rolling down the hill, with little thought of the ruin it may deal below? “Ah, you may live after you are dead, to do mischief; live in the evil thoughts you instilled, the false doctrines you taught, the perverted character you helped to form.” And just as a righteous exemplar, “being dead, yet speaketh,” and is a living means of good ages after he has been in his grave, “so may you, insignificant though you be, have left some impress of yourself upon minds more powerful than your own, and so be exercising a power to do harm to people you have never heard of, years after you are dead.” Thus it is that far down into unknown time, and far away into the unknown distance, the moral contagion of our sin may be proved to spread; so that we may still be incurring guilt after the green turf is over us, and in lands which we have never seen and shall never see. “The evil principle we instilled, the evil example we set, may ripen into bitter fruit in the murderous blow which shall be dealt a century hence upon Australian plains!” Well may the note of exclamation follow: how strange, yet how inevitable, the tie which may link our uneventful life with the stormy passions of numbers far away! More wonderful than even the Atlantic cable is declared to be that unknown fibre, along which, from other men’s sins, responsibility may thrill even to our departed souls: “a chain whose links are formed perhaps of idle words, of forgotten looks, of phrases of double meaning, of bad advice, of cynical sentiment hardly seriously meant; yet carried on through life after life, through soul after soul, till the little seed of evil sown by you has developed into some deed of guilt at which you shudder, but from participation in responsibility for which you cannot clear yourself.” Every sin, we are in fine reminded, may waken its echo; every sin is reduplicated and reiterated in other souls and lives.

A distinguished French preacher, of the Reformed faith, has a striking discourse on what he entitles the _solidarity_ of evil; and he too dilates upon the mysterious links which connect together persons and acts that appear to have nothing in common,—suggesting melancholy examples of the contagion of guilt and its consequences, of the expansive power of corruption and its almost boundless results.

Our most powerful female writer of fiction has emphatically taught, if a striking story can teach, that there is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease. “I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of Arthur’s has caused to others,”—so the good rector tells one who cherishes vengeance on the wrong-doer; “but so does every sin cause suffering to others besides those who commit it.” The problem how far a man is to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own deed this speaker pronounces to be one that might well make us tremble to look into it; the evil consequences that may lie folded in a single act of selfish indulgence being a thought so awful that it ought surely to awaken some feeling less presumptuous than a rash and vindictive desire to punish.

In another of her books the same authoress takes pains to prove how deeply inherent it is in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins; so inevitably diffusive is human suffering that we can conceive no retribution which does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

There is a passage in one of Madame de Charrière’s letters in which, avowing her full recognition of the fact that she must pay in person for the costly experience of life, she expresses the futile wish that others might not have to share in the costs, but owns with a sigh that the wish _is_ futile, for one does nothing absolutely alone she says, and nothing so happens to us as to entirely exclude the participation of others: “_On ne fait rien tout seul, et il ne nous arrive rien à nous seuls._” We are taught by modern science that the slightest movement, of the smallest body, in the remotest region, produces results which are perpetual, which diffuse themselves through all space, and which, though they may be metamorphosed, cannot be destroyed.[1] Or again, as Mrs. Browning reminds us,—

“Each creature holds an insular point in space: Yet what man stirs a finger, breathes a sound, But all the multitudinous beings round, In all the countless worlds, with time and place For their conditions, down to the central base, Thrill, haply, in vibration and rebound, Life answering life across the vast profound, In full antiphony....”

If no good work that a man does is lost—the smallest useful work, as an octogenarian essayist assures us, continuing to be useful long after the man is dead and forgotten, so neither do bad actions die with the doer. “Future generations suffer for the sin of their ancestors, and one great crime or act of folly causes the misery of unborn millions.” So all things, it is added, hang together in one unbroken chain, of which we see a few links, but the beginning and the end we see not and never shall see.

Seneca was writing for all time when he said that no man’s error is confined to himself, but affects all around him, whether by example, or consequences, or both: “_nemo errat uni sibi_.” A latter-day philosopher assigns to a place among the most insoluble riddles propounded to mortal comprehension what he calls the fatal decree by which every crime is made to be the agony of many innocent persons as well as of the single guilty one. “Ah!” exclaims Hilda to guilty Miriam, in the story of “Transformation,”—“now I understand how the sins of generations past have created an atmosphere of sin for those that follow. While there is a single guilty person in the universe, each innocent one must feel his innocence tortured by that guilt. Your deed, Miriam, has darkened the whole sky!” To apply the lines of a reflective poet,—

“’Tis not their own crimes only, men commit; They harrow them into another’s breast, And they shall reap the growth with bitter pain.”

Very forcibly Mr. Isaac Taylor warns us that in almost every event of life the remote consequences vastly outweigh the proximate in actual amount of importance; and he undertakes to show, on principles even of mathematical calculation, that each individual of the human family holds in his hand the centre lines of an interminable web-work, on which are sustained the fortunes of multitudes of his successors; the implicated consequences, if summed together, making up therefore a weight of human weal or woe that is reflected back with an incalculable momentum upon the lot of each. The practical conclusion is that every one is bound to remember that the personal sufferings or peculiar vicissitudes or toils through which he is called to pass are to be estimated and explained only in an immeasurably small proportion if his single welfare is regarded, while their “full price and value are not to be computed unless the drops of the morning dew could be numbered.” So the most popular of domestic story-tellers expatiates in an early work on the impossibility of wiping off from us, as with a wet cloth, the stains left by the fault of those who are near to us. Another of the tribe, but more “sensational” in subject and style, is keen to show how the influence of a man’s evil deed slowly percolates through insidious channels of which he never dreams; how the deed of folly or of guilt is still active for evil when the sinner who committed it has forgotten his wickedness. “Who shall say where or when the results of one man’s evil-doing shall cease? The seed of sin engenders no common root, shooting straight upwards through the earth, and bearing a given crop. It is the germ of a foul running weed, whose straggling suckers travel underground beyond the ken of mortal eye, beyond the power of mortal calculation.” And so again the caustic showman of “Vanity Fair,” in his last completed work, paused to explain how a culprit’s evil behaviour of five and twenty years back, brought present grief and loss of rest to three unoffending persons; and he characteristically utters the wistful wish that we “could all take the punishment for our individual crimes on our individual shoulders,” but laments the futility of any such wish, recognising as he does so plainly that when the culprit is condemned to hang, it is those connected with him who have to weep and suffer, and wear piteous mourning in their hearts long after he has jumped off the Tyburn ladder.

We conclude with a suggestive stanza of Mr. Robert Browning’s, worth learning by heart in more senses than one: he is speaking of the soul declaring itself by its fruit—the thing it does:—

“Be Hate that fruit, or Love that fruit, It forwards the general deed of Man; And each of the many helps to recruit The life of the race by a general plan, Each living his own, to boot.”

_SILENT SYMPATHY._

JOB ii. 13.

Job’s friends have long since been a sort of bye-word. But be it not forgotten that the friendship of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, to the ruined and desolate man of Uz, evidences itself as very genuine in one or two salient points, before it came to be, what it is apt to be now exclusively considered, all talk. Before the talk there was prolonged silence; and before the silence there was lamentation of undoubted earnest. Coming from afar to mourn with him, and to comfort him, from afar off they caught sight of him, but so altered—_heu, quantum mutatus!_—that they lifted up their voice and wept; and they rent each one his mantle, and sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven. And then they “sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, _and none spake a word unto him_; for they saw that his grief was very great.”

The sonnet of a Quaker poet has thus far vindicated the sincerity of their friendship, and on the ground of their silent sympathy:

“However ye might err in after-speech, The mute expression of that voiceless woe Whereby ye sought your sympathy to show With him of Uz, doth eloquently preach,— Teaching a lesson it were well to teach Some comforters, of utterance less slow, Prone to believe that they more promptly know Grief’s mighty depths, and by their words can reach. _Seven days and nights_, in stillness as profound As that of chaos, patiently ye sate By the heart-stricken and the desolate. And though your sympathy might fail to sound The fathomless depth of his dark spirit’s wound, Not less your silence was sublimely great.”

In his vivid picture of the desolation of a bereaved husband, Sir Richard Steele goes on to say, “I knew consolation would now be impertinent; and therefore contented myself to sit by him, and condole with him in silence.” “_Les consolations indiscrètes_,” says Rousseau, “_ne font qu’aigrir les violentes afflictions. L’indifférence et la froideur trouvent aisément des paroles, mais la tristesse et LE SILENCE sont alors le vrai langage de l’amitié_.” Gray writes to Mason, while yet uncertain whether the latter is already a widower or not,—“If the last struggle be over ... allow me (at least in idea, for what could I do were I present more than this,) to sit by you in silence, and pity from my heart, not her who is at rest, but you who lose her.” So it happened that Mason received this little billet at almost the precise moment when it would be most affecting.

Horace Walpole, again, writes to an afflicted correspondent,—“I say no more, for time only, not words, can soften such afflictions, nor can any consolations be suggested, that do not more immediately occur to the persons afflicted. To moralize can comfort those only who do not want to be comforted.” So Marcia replies to Lucia, in Addison’s tragedy:

“_Lucia._ What can I think or say to give thee comfort?

_Marcia._ Talk not of comfort, ’tis for lighter ills.”

Words are words, says Shakspeare’s Brabantio, and never yet heard he that the bruised heart was relieved through the ear. When, towards the close of Campbell’s metrical tale of fair Wyoming, on Susquehanna’s side, “prone to the dust, afflicted Waldegrave hid his face on earth, him watched, in gloomy ruth, his woodland guide; but words had none to soothe the grief that knows not consolation’s name.” But the Oneyda chief was not on that account Waldegrave’s least efficient comforter. What though others around him, less reticent, and more demonstrative, found utterance easy, and shaped their kind common-place meaning into kind common-place words? “Of them that stood encircling his despair, he heard some friendly words, but knew not what they were.” Wise-hearted, too, was Southey’s young Arabian, in watching silently the frantic grief of the newly childless old diviner: in pitying silence Thalaba stood by, and gazed, and listened: “not with the officious hand of consolation, fretting the sore wound he could not hope to heal.” It has been called the last triumph of affection and magnanimity, when a loving heart can respect the suffering silence of its beloved, and allow that lonely liberty in which alone some natures can find comfort. A late author portrayed in one of his tales a dull, common-place fellow enough, of limited intellect and attainments, whose, however, was one of those kind and honest natures fortunately endowed with subtle powers of perception that lie deeper than the head. Accordingly he is described, in the capacity of an unofficious condoler, as appreciating perfectly the grief of his friend; at his side throughout the day, but never obtruding himself, never attempting jarring platitudes of condolence: “in a word he fully understood the deep and beautiful sympathy of silence.” So with Adela and Caroline in _The Bertrams_,—interchanging those pressures of the hand, those mute marks of fellow-feeling, “which we all know so well how to give when we long to lighten the sorrows which are too deep to be probed by words.” But though we all may know so well how to give these mute marks, we do not all and always practice what we know. ’Tis true, ’tis pity; pity ’tis ’tis true.

Adam Bede’s outburst of maddened feelings, uttered in tones of appealing anguish, when the loss of Hetty is first made clear to him, is noted in silence by the discreet rector, who is too wise to utter soothing words at present, as he watches in Adam that look of sudden age which sometimes comes over a young face in moments of terrible emotion. As Bartle Massey elsewhere describes this silent sympathizer, “Ay, he’s good metal; ... says no more than’s needful. He’s not one of those that think they can comfort you with chattering, as if folks who stand by and look on knew a deal better what the trouble was than those who have to bear it.”

Madame de Sévigné frankly deposes of her capacity as regards wordy consolation: “_Pour moi, je ne sais point de paroles dans une telle occasion._” Mr. Tennyson submits what is applicable to any _telle occasion_,

“That only silence suiteth best. Words weaker than your grief would make Grief more. ’Twere better I should cease.”