The moral sentiment takes another step in advance with the unknown but artistic writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Moses had described God as a ‘consuming fire;’ and ‘the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel’ (Exod. xxiv. 17). When next we meet this phrase it is with this writer, who seeks to supersede what Moses (traditionally) built up. ‘Whose voice,’ he says, ‘then shook the earth; but now he hath promised, saying, Yet once more I shake not the earth only, but also heaven. And this word, ‘yet once more,’ signifieth the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those which cannot be shaken may remain.... For our God is a consuming fire.’
‘Our God also!’ cries each great revolution that advances. His consuming wrath is not now directed against man, but the errors which are man’s only enemies: the lightnings of the new Sinai, while they enlighten the earth, smite the old heaven of human faith and imagination, shrivelling it like a burnt scroll!
In this nineteenth century, when the old heaven, amid which this fiery pillar glowed, is again shaken, the ancient phrase has still its meaning. The Russian Tourgenieff represents two friends who had studied together in early life, then parted, accidentally meeting once more for a single night. They compare notes as to what the long intervening years have taught them; and one sums his experience in the words—‘I have burned what I used to worship, and worship what I used to burn.’ The novelist artfully reproduces for this age a sentence associated with a crisis in the religious history of Europe. Clovis, King of the Franks, invoked the God of his wife Clotilda to aid him against the Germans, vowing to become a Christian if successful; and when, after his victory, he was baptized at Rheims, St. Remy said to him—‘Bow thy head meekly, Sicambrian; burn what thou hast worshipped, and worship what thou hast burned!’ Clovis followed the Bishop’s advice in literal fashion, carrying fire and sword amid his old friends the ‘Pagans’ right zealously. But the era has come in which that which Clovis’ sword and St. Remy’s theology set up for worship is being consumed in its turn. Tourgenieff’s youths are consuming the altar on which their forerunners were consumed. And in this rekindled flame the world now sees shrivelling the heavens once fresh, but now reflecting the aggregate selfishness of mankind, the hells representing their aggregate cowardice, and feeds its nobler faith with this vision of the eternal fire which evermore consumes the false and refines the world.
[1] It is not certain, indeed, whether this Brightness may not have been separately personified in the ‘Eduth’ (translated ‘testimony’ in the English version, Exod. xvi. 34), before which the pot of manna was laid. The word means ‘brightness,’ and Dr. Willis supposes it may be connected with Adod, the Phœnician Sun-god (Pentateuch, p. 186).
[2] It is important not to confuse Satan with the Devil, so far as the Bible is concerned. Satan, as will be seen when we come to the special treatment of him required, is by no means invariably diabolical. In the Book of Job, for example, he appears in a character far removed from hostility to Jehovah or goodness.
Name ist Schall und Rauch,
Umnebelnd Himmelsgluth.—Goethe.
[4] ‘Targum to the Prophets,’ Jonathan Ben Uzziel. See Deutsch’s ‘Literary Remains,’ p. 379.