Chapter I: 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.”

Miss Procter sings the praises of a true comforter in little Effie,—“just I think that she does not try,—only looks with a wistful wonder why grown people should ever cry.” It is such a comfort to be able to cry in peace, adds that sweet singer (with _larmes dans la voix_):

“And my comforter knows a lesson
Wiser, truer than all the rest:—
That to help and to heal a sorrow,
Love and silence are always best.”

_THE TEMPTER’S “IT IS WRITTEN.”_

MATTHEW iv. 6.

“It is written,” said the Tempter, quoting Scripture for his purpose, when it was his hour and the power of darkness, in the day of temptation in the wilderness. The quotation was refuted on the spot, and the Tempter was foiled. But his failure has not deterred mankind, at sundry times and in divers manners, from venturing on the same appeal, with no very unlike design. The wise as serpents (there was a serpent in Eden) who are not also harmless as doves, have now and then essayed to round a sophistic period, or clench an immoral argument, with an _It is written_.

Among the crowd of pilgrims who throng the pages of his allegory, Bunyan depicts one Mr. Selfwill, who holds that a man may follow the vices as well as the virtues of pilgrims; and that if he does both, he shall certainly be saved. But what ground has he for so saying? is Mr. Greatheart’s query. And old Mr. Honesty replies, “Why, he said he had Scripture for his warrant.” He could cite David’s practice in one bad direction, and Sarah’s lying in another, and Jacob’s dissimulation in a third. And what they did, he might do too. “I have heard him plead for it, bring Scripture for it, bring arguments for it,” etc., quoth old Honesty with a degree of indignation that does credit to his name.

“The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose.
An evil soul, producing holy witness,
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the core.”

Such is Antonio’s stricture on Shylock’s appeal to Jacob’s practice, “When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban’s sheep”; and there is a parallel passage in the next act, where Bassanio is the speaker:—

“In religion,
What damnèd error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?”

Against divines, indeed, of every school and age, the reproach of citing a text in support of doctrine or practice the reverse of divine, has been freely cast, with more or less of reason. Orthodox and heterodox, each has flung against the other his retort uncourteous.

“Have not all heretics the same pretence
To plead the Scriptures in their own defence?
How did the Nicene Council then decide
That strong debate? Was it by Scripture tried?
No, sure; to that the rebel would not yield:
Squadrons of texts _he_ marshall’d in the field.
...
With texts point-blank and plain he faced the foe;
And did not Satan tempt our Saviour so?”

A Dublin synod of the Irish Roman Catholic bishops, a few years since, which distinguished itself by its enthusiasm for Pope Pius IX., against the King of Italy, and by its arrogation of a divine right of practical monopoly in overseeing the schools and colleges of Ireland, was made the theme of comment by unsympathetic British critics; who remarked that when the question of education is stirred in such quarters, the dullest heretic can divine that the national system is to be denounced; and that it is easy to guess at the text of Scripture to be quoted in support of the pretensions of the Church. “The command to ‘go and teach all nations’ vested in the successors of the Apostles a rightful monopoly of instruction in Greek, mathematics, and civil engineering.” According to the same elastic authority, the “Puritans,” we are reminded, were justified in shooting and hanging their enemies, because Samuel hewed Agag in pieces, or because Phineas arose and executed judgment. “There never was a proposition which could not be proved by a text; and perhaps the effect is more complete when the citation is taken from the Vulgate.” Gray’s malicious lines against Lord Sandwich, a notorious evil-liver, as candidate for the High Stewardship in the University of Cambridge, include this stanza, supposed to be uttered by a representative D.D., of the old port-wine school, and a staunch supporter of his profligate lordship:

“Did not Israel filch from th’ Egyptians of old
Their jewels of silver and jewels of gold?
The prophet of Bethel, we read, told a lie;
He[2] drinks—so did Noah:—he swears—so do I.”

Gray’s _jeu d’esprit_ was, throughout, not in the best of taste; but it was vastly relished at the time, as an election squib. The reference to spoiling the Egyptians is a well worked one in the history of quotations. Coleridge has a story of a Mameluke Bey, whose “precious logic” extorted a large contribution from the Egyptian Jews. “These books, the Pentateuch, are authentic?” “Yes.” “Well, the debt then is acknowledged: and now the receipt, or the money, or your heads! The Jews borrowed a large treasure from the Egyptians; but you are the Jews, and on you, therefore, I call for the repayment.” Such conclusions, from such premises, and backed by such vouchers, are open to logicians of every order, sacred and profane.

“Hence comment after comment, spun as fine
As bloated spiders draw the flimsy line;
Hence the same word that bids our lusts obey,
Is misapplied to sanctify their sway.
If stubborn Greek refuse to be his friend,
Hebrew or Syriac shall be forced to bend:
If languages and copies all cry, No!
Somebody proved it centuries ago.”

Burns was never any too backward in having his fling at a “minister”; and there is exceptional (and perhaps exceptionable) gusto in his averment that,

“E’en ministers, they have been kenn’d,
In holy rapture,
A rousing _whid_, at times, to vend,
And nail’t wi’ Scripture.”

There was a time in the life of Diderot when that freest of free-thinkers made a living, such as it was, by writing sermons to order—half a dozen of them, for instance, a missionary bespoke for the Portuguese colonies, and is said to have paid for them very handsomely at fifty crowns each. Mr. Carlyle is caustic in his commemoration of this incident in Denis Diderot’s career. “Further, he made sermons, to order; as the Devil is said to quote Scripture.” In Mr. Carlyle’s latest and longest history, we find once and again the like allusion. Frederick William, and his advisers, bent on a certain match for the Princess Wilhelmina, which the queen, her mother, as steadfastly opposed, took to quoting Scripture by way of subduing her majesty’s resistance. “There was much discourse, suasive, argumentative. Grumkow quoting Scripture on her majesty, as the devil can on occasion,” says Wilhelmina. “Express scriptures, ‘Wives, be obedient to your husbands,’ and the like texts; but her majesty, on the Scripture side, too, gave him as much as he brought.” And at a later stage of the negotiation, the same Grumkow appears again, citing the Vulgate to a confidential correspondent, in reference to their political schemings. “But ‘_Si Deus est nobiscum_’—‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ For the Grumkow can quote Scripture; nay, solaces himself with it, which is a feat beyond what the devil is competent to.” Shakespeare embodies in Richard of Gloster a type of the political intriguer of this complexion; as where that usurper thus answers the gulled associates who urge him to be avenged on the opposite faction:

“But then I sigh, and with a piece of Scripture,
Tell them, that God bids us do good for evil.
And thus I clothe my naked villany
With old odd ends, stolen forth of holy writ;
And seem a saint when most I play the devil.”

An unmitigated scoundrel in one of Mr. Dickens’s books is represented as overtly grudging his old father the scant remnant of his days, and citing holy writ for sanction of his complaint. “Why, a man of any feeling ought to be ashamed of being eighty—let alone any more. Where’s his religion, I should like to know, when he goes flying in the face of the Bible like that? Threescore and ten’s the mark; and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what’s expected of him, has any business to live longer.” Whereupon the author interposes this parenthetical comment, and highly characteristic it is: “Is any one surprised at Mr. Jonas making such a reference to such a book for such a purpose? Does any one doubt the old saw that the devil ... quotes Scripture for his own ends? If he will take the trouble to look about him, he may find a greater number of confirmations of the fact in the occurrences of a single day than the steam-gun can discharge balls in a minute.” Fiction would supply us with abundant illustrations—fiction in general, and Sir Walter Scott in particular. As where Simon of Hackburn, the martial borderer, backs his hot appeal to arms, for the avenging a deed of wrong, by an equivocal reference to holy writ. “Let women sit and greet at hame, men must do as they have been done by; it is the Scripture says it.” “Haud your tongue, sir,” exclaims one of the seniors, sternly; “dinna abuse the Word that gate; ye dinna ken what ye speak about.” Or as where the Templar essays to corrupt the Jewess by citing the examples of David and Solomon: “If thou readest the Scriptures,” retorts Rebecca, “and the lives of the saints, only to justify thine own licence and profligacy, thy crime is like that of him who extracteth poison from the most healthful and necessary herbs.” One other example. Undy Scott, that plausible scamp of Mr. Trollope’s making, propounds an immoral paradox, to the scope of which one of his dupes is bold enough to object. But how is the objector disposed of? “‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged,’ said Undy, quoting Scripture, as the devil did before him.” Dupes can quote Scripture, too, and perhaps that is more demoralizing still. For Cowper did not rhyme without reason when he declared, that

“Of all the arts sagacious dupes invent,
To cheat themselves, and gain the world’s assent,
The worst is—Scripture warped from its intent.”

_ROYALTY REMINDED OF THE POOR._

DANIEL iv. 27.

Great was Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, even as the tree that he saw in his dream; for, by the avowal of the Hebrew prophet who interpreted that dream, the king was indeed become strong, and his greatness was grown, and reached unto the heaven, and his dominion unto the ends of the earth. But sentence had gone forth, as against the tree, so against the king. Nebuchadnezzar was to be degraded; despoiled of his kingdom, cast down from his throne, and driven from men, to eat grass as oxen. This counsel, however, the prophet urged upon the sovran, that he should break off his sins by righteousness, and his “iniquities by showing mercy to the poor”; if it might be a lengthening of his tranquillity, or a healing of his error.

What error? That of which ex-king Lear accused himself, when he owned, amid words of frenzy, all however with more or less of tragic significance in them, that he had taken too little care of _this_,—of sympathy with desolate indigence, and of readiness to relieve the sufferings of the destitute and forlorn.

The storm is raging on the heath, and faithful Kent implores his aged master to take shelter, such as it is, within a hovel hard by; some friendship will it lend him against the tempest; the tyranny of the open night’s too rough for nature to endure. But Lear would be let alone. “Wilt break my heart?” he exclaims, in answer to Kent’s fresh entreaty: Kent had rather break his own. Again the drenched, discrowned old man is urged to enter the hovel on the heath. But he stays outside, to reason on his past and present, till reason gives way. Kent may think it a matter of moment that this contentious storm invades them to the skin; and so it is to him. But Lear has deeper griefs to shatter him; and “where the greater malady is fixed, the lesser is scarce felt.” Let Kent go in, by all means: the king enjoins it—at least the ex-king desires it: let Kent seek his own ease—and perhaps Lear will follow him in. Meanwhile, in draggling robes, drenched to the skin, chilled to the heart, Lear’s thoughts perforce are turned to “houseless poverty,” to the indigent and vagrant creatures once, and so lately, his subjects, equally exposed to the downpour of the wrathful skies, of whom he had seldom, if ever, thought till now. Poor naked wretches, he apostrophises them, wheresoever they are, that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,—how shall their houseless heads, and unfed sides, their looped and windowed raggedness, defend them from seasons such as these? And then, in an outburst of repentant self-reproach, he that had been King of Britain breaks forth into the avowal,

“O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel;
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.”

Between the history of Lear and that of Gloster, in the same play, there is a curious and significant parallel maintained throughout. And it is observable that when Gloster too, another duped and outcast father, is wandering in his turn on the same heath, and is accosted by “poor mad Tom,”—the sightless, miserable father thus addresses the “naked fellow” whose identity he so little suspects:

“Here, take this purse, thou whom the heaven’s plagues
Have humbled to all strokes: that I am wretched,
Makes thee the happier:—Heavens, deal so still!
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man,
That slaves your ordinance, that will not see
Because he doth not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo the excess,
And each man have enough.”

Strictly a parallel passage to the one just cited from the lips of Lear, even as the disastrous personal experiences of King of Britain and Duke of Gloster were along parallel lines, as we have said.

The words of Amos, the herdman of Tekoa, include a denunciation of woe to them that lie upon beds of ivory, and eat the lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall, and drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with costly ointments, and chant to the sound of the viol,—but are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. As the minor prophet with his woe to them that are thus at ease in Zion, so a major prophet declares this to have been the iniquity of a doomed race—pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness, with disregard of all means to strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. Lazarus the beggar was, as some scholars interpret the passage, “content to be fed” on the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table; in which case he would not appear to have been refused the crumbs: indeed, had this been the case, it would scarcely, they contend, have been omitted in the rebuke of Abraham. “The rich man’s sins were ravenousness and negligence rather than inhumanity.”[3] He took too little care of this—that beggary lay in helpless prostration before his doorway, the while he clothed himself in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day.

La Bruyère observes that “la santé et les richesses ôtent aux hommes l’expérience du mal, leur inspirent la dureté pour leurs semblables;” and adds, that “les gens déjà chargés de leur propre misère sont ceux qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d’autrui.” If these by comparison become wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that makes them so. _Haud ignari mali, miseris succurrere discunt._ In another chapter of his “Characters,” La Bruyère sketches the portrait of one he styles Champagne, who “au sortir d’un long dîner qui lui enfle l’estomac, et dans les douces fumées d’un vin d’Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un ordre qu’on lui présente, qui ôterait le pain à toute une province, si l’on n’y remédiait: il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans la première heure de la digestion, qu’on puisse quelque part mourir de faim?” _Il est excusable_, on the principle of Horace Walpole’s similar plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to Miss Hannah More that he used to hate that king and t’other prince—but that on reflection he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. “They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation? Poor creatures! think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered! To be educated properly, they should be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath—somewhat late in life], and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately afterwards _sugar-plum’d_) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. No part of a royal brat’s memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of human suffering.” “_Il y a une espèce de honte d’être heureux à la vue de certaines misères_,” writes La Bruyère again. Adam Smith, however, made a dead set against what he calls those “whining and melancholy moralists,” who he complains, are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc. “Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men.” Adam Smith opposes this “extreme sympathy” as altogether absurd and unreasonable; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it; and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose than to render miserable the person who possessed it. This, of course, is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser’s relief. Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson’s celebrated passage:

“Ah! little think the gay licentious proud,
Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;
They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste;
Ah! little think they, while they dance along,
How many feel this very moment death
And all the sad variety of pain.”

Many variations on that theme of sad variety the poet sings: moving accidents by flood and fire,—pining want, and dungeon glooms,—the many who drink the cup of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread of misery—sore pierced by wintry winds, how many shrink into the sordid hut of cheerless poverty (the hovel on the heath again), etc., etc., etc.

“Thought fond man
Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills
That one incessant struggle render life
One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,
Vice in his high career would stand appalled,
And heedless rambling impulse learn to think;
The conscious heart of charity would warm,
And her wide wish benevolence dilate;
The social tear would rise, the social sigh,
And into clear perfection, gradual bliss,
Refining still, the social passions work.”

This may, perhaps, said Baron Alderson, in winding up a charge to a grand jury, whom he exhorted at that winter season to show sympathy and kindness to the distressed,—this, perhaps, may be one of the objects for which God sends suffering, that it may tend to re-unite those whom prosperity has severed. So Burns—

“O ye who, sunk in beds of down,
Feel not a want but what yourselves create,
Think for a moment on his wretched fate
Whom friends and fortune quite disown.
Ill-satisfied keen nature’s clam’rous call,
Stretch’d on his straw he lays himself to sleep,
While through the ragged roof and chinky wall,
Chill, o’er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap.
...
Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress:
A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!”

Again and again the question recurs, to quote from an able casuist on casual charity, why one man should be literally dying of want, whilst another is able to send him a cheque for £100 without thinking about it, or knowing that the money is gone? If Dives, it is asked, feels bound to give Lazarus so much, where does he draw the line? If the demand upon the superfluities of the rich is to be measured by the wants of the poor, why stop at £100 rather than £1000 or £10,000 or £100,000? “This is the question which lies at the root of half the melancholy sarcasms and still more melancholy wit of the present day. The writings of such men as Hood are little more than embodiments of it in a variety of forms, ludicrous or pathetic. It forms the burden of a whole class of literature, not the less influential because it is somewhat vague in its doctrines, and rests rather on sentiments than on dogmas.” Now this writer believes it to be always the best to look such questions in the face, and to attempt at least to give the true answer to them. And the answer, at least in part, in this instance, he takes to be that the antithesis is only sentimental, and not logical. The poverty of the very poor is not, he contends, either a cause or an effect of the riches of the very rich, nor would it be relieved by their permanent impoverishment. “That it is not a cause of their riches, is obvious from the fact that if by any change pauperism and misery were suddenly abolished, the rich would be all the richer.” But not to follow out a line of argument that would take us too far afield, we may advert to a corresponding essay, in the same _Review_, if not by the same contributor,—in which a picture is drawn of a rich man at church, who hears some stray verses in the second lesson, or some eloquent menace from the pulpit, which makes him very uncomfortable about the contrast between his own easy life and the massive wretchedness of Spitalfields or Poplar. The uneasiness is supposed to rankle in him for some time, spoiling his digestion, and making him very cross to his wife and daughters. Not that he “for a moment dreams of literally obeying the texts in the New Testament that have hit him hard; for he has a shrewd notion that they imply a very different state of society from the busy nineteenth century. He feels that he has no time for visiting the sick, and that if he had, the sick would think him a great nuisance; and he knows that when he got to the bedside, he would probably be at his wits’ ends for anything to say, and would end by twisting his watch-chain, and remarking that it was a cold day.” The practical inference is, that if he is to do any of the corporal works of mercy, he must do them by commission;—and so, at last, the irritation in his conscience throws itself out in the form of a liberal cheque upon his bankers. _He_, at least, will vindicate himself, so far as that vicarious beneficence may avail, from any possible charge of branded fellowship with such as the poet of the Seasons depicts, in

“The cruel wretch
Who, all day long in sordid pleasure rolled,
Himself a useless load, has squandered vile
Upon his scoundrel train, what might have cheered
A drooping family of modest worth.”

Horace Walpole, on being complimented by letter on the patience with which he bore an acute attack of his chronic malady, replies: “If people of easy fortunes cannot bear illness with temper, what are the poor to do, who have none of our comforts and alleviations? The affluent, I fear, do not consider what a benefit-ticket has fallen to their lot out of millions not so fortunate; yet less do they reflect that chance, not merit, drew the prize out of the wheel.” Crabbe portrays this non-reflecting complacency in one of his metrical tales:

“Month after month was passed, and all were spent
In quiet comfort and in rich content:
Miseries there were, and woes, the world around,
But these had not her pleasant dwelling found;
She knew that mothers grieved, and widows wept,
And she was sorry, said her prayers, and slept.
Thus passed the seasons, and to Dinah’s board
Gave what the seasons to the rich afford;
For she indulged,” etc.

Not so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated paragraph beginning, “But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying,” etc. And, by the way, there is another of Crabbe’s Tales, in which, too late, a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered:

“To have this money in my purse—to know
What grief was his, and what to grief we owe;
To see him often, always to conceive
How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve;[4]
And every day in ease and peace to dine,
And rest in comfort!—what a heart is mine!”

Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy prosperity, much as (_mutatis mutandis_) Lear apostrophises pomp. “Turn out, fat man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the banks of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you—when the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged for breaking into your dwelling-house. ‘The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold,’ sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart is not warmer than it was wont to be—whether thou dost not pray prayers of long omission—whether thou wilt not, in the morning, bethink thee of the poor, and relieve them out of thy abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!” As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent,

“Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield
When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows;
You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood,
And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind.”

Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found nothing wherewith to dine that day—which he spent in wandering about Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters, went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine. “That day,” he often told a friend, in after life, “I swore that, if ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful.” As the sailor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe’s tragedies: “We may be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care; but being aboard themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a fellow-feeling.” And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.

Mr. Ruskin demands whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. “Luxury is indeed possible in the future—innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold.”

Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiff’s temporal government of Rome, that he—Gregory the Great—relieved by the bounty of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and needy—his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his name, the requirements of indigence and merit. “Nor would the pontiff indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion.” A _non possumus_ this, in its beneficent _nisi prius_ scope, more appreciable by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A sovran’s interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of exceptional interest in the eyes of fellow-subjects. Leigh Hunt knew this, when he pictured, in her early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the Queen of these realms,

“Too generous-happy to endure
The thought of all the woful poor
Who that same night lay down their heads
In mockeries of starving beds,
In cold, in wet, disease, despair,
In madness that will say no prayer;
With wailing infants some; and some
By whom the little clay lies dumb;
And some, whom feeble love’s excess,
Through terror, tempts to murderousness.
And at that thought the big drops rose
In pity for her people’s woes;
And this glad mother and great queen
Weeping for the poor was seen,
And vowing in her princely will
That they should thrive and bless her still.”

Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and _at_, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the “vulgar herd,” that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance—by courtesy historical; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of Falstaff’s bread bill to his running account for sack—one of Anne of Austria’s sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of suffering _in propriâ personâ_,—the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortress—but his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger: “that he should have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the enjoyment of every happiness, without having bestowed a moment’s thought

[O, I have ta’en too little thought of this!]