The climax is reached, however, neither when Jonah feels his common humanity with the heathen nor when he discovers their awe of his God, but when in order to secure for them God’s sparing mercies he offers his own life instead. Take me up and cast me into the sea; so shall the sea cease from raging against you. After their pity for him has wrestled for a time with his honest entreaties, he becomes their sacrifice.
In all this story perhaps the most instructive passages are those which lay bare to us the method of God’s revelation. When we were children this was shown to us in pictures of angels bending from heaven to guide Isaiah’s pen, or to cry Jonah’s commission to him through a trumpet. And when we grew older, although we learned to dispense with that machinery, yet its infection remained, and our conception of the whole process was mechanical still. We thought of the prophets as of another order of things; we released them from our own laws of life and thought, and we paid the penalty by losing all interest in them. But the prophets were human, and their inspiration came through experience. The source of it, as this story shows, was God. Partly from His guidance of their nation, partly through close communion with Himself, they received new convictions of His character. Yet they did not receive these mechanically. They spake neither at the bidding of angels, nor like heathen prophets in trance or ecstasy, but as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And the Spirit worked upon them first as the influence of God’s character,[1523] and second through the experience of life. God and life—these are all the postulates for revelation.
At first Jonah fled from the truth, at last he laid down his life for it. So God still forces us to the acceptance of new light and the performance of strange duties. Men turn from these, because of sloth or prejudice, but in the end they have to face them, and then at what a cost! In youth they shirk a self-denial to which in some storm of later life they have to bend with heavier, and often hopeless, hearts. For their narrow prejudices and refusals, God punishes them by bringing them into pain that stings, or into responsibility for others that shames, these out of them. The drama of life is thus intensified in interest and beauty; characters emerge heroic and sublime.
“But, oh the labour,
O prince, the pain!”
Sometimes the neglected duty is at last achieved only at the cost of a man’s breath; and the truth, which might have been the bride of his youth and his comrade through a long life, is recognised by him only in the features of Death.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE GREAT FISH AND WHAT IT MEANS—THE PSALM
JONAH ii