And dare we be indifferent? Hence, and be mute,
Light scoffer, vain trifler! Through all thou discernest
A Greater than thou is at work, and in earnest;
And he who dares trifle with man, trifles too
With man’s awful Maker.”...
HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT.
Genesis xi. 28.
There is a pathetic significance in what to the unobserving reader might seem a dry record of decease, commonplace among other commonplaces, in the fact mentioned concerning the house of Terah, the father of Abraham,—that “Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.”
It is, as Canon Melvill says, like an inversion of the natural order, when we see parents performing the last office to their children: we feel it natural that children should close the eyes, and shroud the limbs of fathers and mothers, but unnatural that fathers and mothers should perform these sad duties for children. “Haran should have followed Terah, and not Terah Haran.”