JEREMIAH’S lot was cast in the darkest period of his country’s history. He was called on to declare the Divine will to the exiles in Babylon and the remnant in Palestine. In the context he is warning his countrymen against false prophets and false priests who were deceiving the people by proclaiming peace when there was no peace. He urges them to inquire after the ancient faith revealed to the patriarchs and prophets of old. Thus, and thus only, would they find “rest for their souls.”
The metaphor is a striking one; it is that of a traveller who comes to a place where several roads meet. He hesitates till he discerns the most beaten track, or till he hails another traveller from whom he can ask his way. Those were days of doubt and difficulty, when the royal counsellors were urging conformity to the idolatrous rites of the powerful nations around them as a policy of wisdom and conciliation. But Jeremiah regarded it as nothing less than apostasy. Those idolatries were abomination in the sight of Jehovah. Hence the people must return to the worship of the one true God—the God “who made heaven and earth,” to be true to the covenant which “He made with Abraham, the oath which He swore unto Isaac, and confirmed the same to Jacob for a law, and to Israel for an everlasting covenant.”
But the text applies to ourselves. The days in which our lot is cast are days of doubt and difficulty—days when ancient landmarks are being removed, and the beaten tracks so effaced as almost to be indiscernible. So that we may well stand, like the traveller in the metaphor, to see and ask for the old paths, for the good way, amid the clouds of scepticism and unbelief which gather athwart our pathways; amid the Babel of voices saying “Who will show us the good?” we may say, with the Psalmist, “Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.”
For what are those ways, those old paths, that good way, but the original revelation of God as our Father in heaven—subsequently manifested in the Person of His Incarnate Son as the Revealer of the Divine will, in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, acting through the Church as His agent for making His “ways known to the sons of men.”
“The history of the race of Adam before the Advent,” says a great statesman,[69] “is the history of a long and varied, but incessant preparation for the Advent;” and the history of the human race since the Advent, it may be added, is but a record of the gradual but sure progress of that kingdom which Christ came to establish upon earth, an earnest of the time when the kingdoms of this world shall have become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever as King of kings and Lord of lords.
And to this, as it seems to me, all historical research as well as scientific discovery points. There are those who to exalt Christianity would represent the world as in total darkness before the Advent. The truer estimate of the Gospels shows us that Christ was in fact the “true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The investigation of the records of the past assures us of this fact, confirms us in this belief, proves to us that God never “left Himself without witness,” teaches us that Christ drew as it were into a focus all the truths that men had previously held, only freeing them from error and bringing them into clearer light. “The words,” says a great scholar,[70] “by which God was known in the far-off ages are but mere words; but they bring before us with all the vividness of an event which we witnessed ourselves but yesterday, the ancestors of the whole Aryan race, thousands of years, it may be, before Homer and the Vedas, worshipping an unseen Being under the self-same name, the best, the most exalted name they could find in their vocabulary.” Plutarch wrote ages ago: “If you travel through the whole world, well, you may find cities without walls, without literature, without kings, moneyless, and such as desire no coin; which know not what theatres or public halls or bodily exercise mean; but never was there, nor ever shall be, any one city seen without temple, church, or chapel, without some God or other, which useth no prayers, nor oaths, no prophecies and divinations, no sacrifices either to obtain good blessings, or to avert heavy curses and calamities. Nay, methinks a man should sooner find a city built in the air without any plot of ground whereon it is seated than any commonwealth altogether void of religion.... This is that containeth and holdeth together all human society, this is the foundation prop and stay of all.”[71]
Brethren of the Archæological Association, I venture to think that you will not fail to see the application of these remarks to your own researches, and to the consequences which are happily arising from these researches. Of course I speak of archæology in its widest sense. Your investigations of the records of antiquity, your examination of ancient remains, your discovery of the sites and foundations of temples, tombs, altars, and cromlechs, confirm the testimony of philologists, historians, and philosophers, nay the witness of the human heart; they all speak with more or less clearness of a belief in the Supreme Being, of a longing for a clearer revelation of His will, of a hope of immortality, of a sense of sin and desire for reconciliation with Him, obscured it may be, often perverted, debased by superstitious, cruel, and unholy rites, sometimes feebly held, but never totally lost.
And the same observations apply to the attestation by archæology to the scriptural records. Nothing is more remarkable than the recovery of ancient monuments, unless it be the deductions of science which are marking the intellectual activity of the age. What a revelation was that finding of the famous Rosetta stone[72] which by its triple inscription in the Sacred, the popular Egyptian, and the Greek languages, gave the key to unlock the mysteries of figure writing, so that thanks to Egyptologists, who are but archæologists under a local name, we may picture to ourselves the Egypt of the Pyramids, of Abraham, of Joseph, and the Exodus, and see the Pharaohs in their colossal palaces, and learn something of that wisdom of the Egyptians in which we are told “Moses was learned.” Think, too, how the unshapely mounds on the banks of the Euphrates have given up their treasures, so that we may now know the history of those mighty empires which each in its day exercised its influence on the chosen people, and through that chosen people on the destinies of the Church. Think of the excavations of a Layard, the researches of a Rawlinson in Babylon and Assyria, and of the Palestine explorers, which bring before us not only the land of the Judges and the Kings, but the scenes of the earthly ministry of the Son of God Himself.
And what is it but archæology that led to the exhuming of those long-lost cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii which have thrown such a lurid glare on the morals of the Græco-Roman world, confirming as it does the keen satires not only of a Juvenal or a Persius, but the mournful testimony of a Paul, showing as nothing else could show the world’s need of a divine Saviour, and a newer and fuller revelation of the Divine will.
Or think of the identification of the sites of classic Troy and Mycenæ by Dr. Schliemann, and of the discoveries of Mr. Wood at Ephesus, and of Mr. Ramsay in Phrygia. These investigations might seem to have only an indirect reference to Christianity, but they may help to attest the accuracy of the Scripture record and of the history of the isapostolic Church. Asia Minor, be it remembered, was, next to Palestine, the theatre of the earliest apostolic labours; Ephesus was the city wherein St. Paul encountered the worshippers of the Temple of the world-renowned Artemis. To the Ephesians he addressed one of his most remarkable epistles, to Ephesus he sent his son in the faith, Timothy; over the Ephesian Church St. John presided as the survivor of the Twelve; in Ephesus was held the third of the Œcumenical Councils. Who knows, then, what the archæology of the future may not discover in these interesting regions? What treasures may not yet be buried under those shapeless masses, the accumulations of ages of neglect? Who knows what light they may not shed on the annals of a hoary antiquity in which we of this busy nineteenth century may be vitally interested?—interested as we “ask for the old paths.”