Finally, recollect the gulf between a reform in words and its translation into fact. With all our political machinery designed to yield better legislation, how difficult it is to give effect to the will of the wiser and nobler members of the community. Ancient society found it incalculably harder to redress its wrongs. Grievances were not always stifled; they might be aired in moderation and provided the charge was vague. But, short of revolution, how was it possible to bring adequate pressure to bear on the guilty, strongly entrenched in their high offices by birth and wealth and autocratic might? These and similar considerations will suggest the external difficulties of the life in which the Wise were placed.
To the “fightings without,” however, must next be added a tale of “fears within.” The Old Testament writers were not unconscious of the intellectual problems of religion. It is true that they do not debate, or often doubt, the existence of God. But the question of the Being of God is, in a sense, academic; the question of His character and relation to men is vital; and this problem the Jews felt as acutely and faced as honestly as any modern men can do. Many of them had encountered realities of experience sterner than most modernists have known—at least until 1914. Some of the Sages, no doubt, were unspeculative persons, content with traditional beliefs. But others there were not blind to any of the poignant elements of life. All may have assumed God as a fact, but some realised that only if God be just and holy and merciful, was the ground of morality solid beneath their feet. Men who maintained that in the fear of the Lord and honourable conduct is found the key to a successful career, could not ignore the fact that in reality the wicked were frequently prosperous and the good subject to misfortune, injustice, pain, and bitter hardships. How could such things be in the world of a righteous God? Not until the post-exilic period was it vividly realised by a number of Jewish thinkers how obdurate these facts are to an optimistic interpretation of life, and how they menace not only belief in a gracious God, but also the whole structure of morality. In many of the later Psalms, and in portions of the Wisdom literature, to which the Book of Proverbs belongs, the stringency of the problem is clearly recognised, and the struggle for faith grows correspondingly severe. Men cried to God to sustain their trust despite the awful enigmas of suffering and wrong. They wrestled agonisingly with the facts, turning now to one, now to another, explanation, if in any wise hope in God might be preserved.
Our consideration of the great subject must here be confined to considering the proverbs of the period. From these it appears that the rank and file of the Wise-men either did not feel the problem in its acutest form or failed to reach those heights of spiritual insight that some of the Jews attained. In the proverbs a variety of sensible but unsatisfactory arguments are put forward. One method of defence was to challenge or deny the reality of the facts alleged: There shall no mischief happen to the righteous, but the wicked shall be filled with evil (Pr. 1221)—Say not thou, “I will recompense evil.” Wait on the Lord, and he shall save thee (Pr. 2022)—The Lord is far from the wicked but he heareth the prayer of the righteous (Pr. 1529)—The Lord will not suffer the soul of the righteous to famish, and he thrusteth away the desire of the wicked (Pr. 103). No one capable of sympathy with human perplexity will dismiss such assertions as merely stupid. Pathetically insufficient they may be, but these are the words of men convinced that somehow their instinct for God and the moral life is sound; and there is grandeur in the unyielding defiance. Another favourite reply was to insist on the solid rewards of virtue or to maintain that in the end it is honesty that pays best: The wicked earneth deceitful wages, but he that soweth righteousness hath a sure reward (Pr. 1118)—He that soweth iniquity shall reap calamity (Pr. 228). The Wise liked also to dwell on the fear of retribution which is likely to haunt the evil-doer: His own iniquities shall take the wicked, and he shall be holden in the cords of his sin (Pr. 522), a retort to the power of which many a villain, dogged by the thought of exposure, could bear witness. After all, there generally is human justice to be considered, although the divine seem far away. Sometimes The Wise had recourse to the suggestion that the fear of the Lord prolongeth life, but the years of the wicked shall be shortened (Pr. 1027). Some, more daringly, declared that the agony of a single day or hour might redress the balance; thus Ben Sirach: It is an easy thing in the sight of the Lord to reward a man in the day of his death according to his ways. The affliction of an hour causeth forgetfulness of delight, and in the last end of a man is the revelation of his deeds. Call no man blessed before his death[84]; and (yet another suggestion) a man shall be known in his children (E. 1126-28). This further possibility that Justice, if nowhere manifest in a man’s own life, will certainly appear in the fortunes of his descendants, is emphasised also in several Psalms and in passages of the Book of Job (e.g., Job 54), and apparently was more satisfying to the Jews than it would be to ourselves. A new argument, too vague to be consoling, is hinted in Pr. 164, where it is declared that God hath made everything for its own end, even the wicked for the day of trouble.
These answers, of course, do not cut deep enough, and their inadequacy reflects adversely on the value of the Wise-men’s judgments of life. But three important points must be noted in extenuation. First, the best that Israel’s Wisdom had to say on the sore problem was not said in the proverbs to which we are here limiting attention. If anyone desires to know how unflinchingly certain Wise-men and other Jews could face the facts and uphold their faith, he must turn to the Book of Job, to the Psalms, to Daniel and the daring aspirations of Apocalyptic writers. Secondly, there was as yet among the Jews no active belief in the continuance of personal consciousness after physical death, and thus the moral problem raised by the suffering of good men was immensely harder for them than it is for ourselves. The Hebrews from earliest times had believed vaguely that a phantom-like continuation of individuality awaited good and bad alike in the underworld of Sheol; but that existence was not reckoned to be “life” in any real sense; certainly it was not thought that a man could receive the reward of his merits in Sheol, the land of shades. Sheol offered no solution, or even alleviation, of the moral enigma confronting the Wise. If there was to be a Divine vindication of morality, in their opinion it must needs be shown on earth, either in the life-time of the sufferer himself or in that of his children. In the period we are considering, reason and intuition were already pointing the Jewish thinkers to a higher doctrine of human immortality; but no traces of the great liberating conception have made their appearance in the proverbs.[85] The attitude of the Wise towards death may be grasped from Ben Sirach’s words: When a man is dead he shall inherit creeping things and beasts and worms (E. 1011)—Thanksgiving perisheth from the dead, as from one that is not; he that is in life shall praise the Lord (E. 1728). Death to Ben Sirach is a great silencing fact, not a mystery provoking thought. Sometimes he speaks of it very quietly: All things that are of the earth turn to the earth again, and all things that are of the waters return to the sea (E. 4011), and he bids men fear it not, seeing that death comes to us all: Fear not the sentence of death. Remember them that have been before thee and that come after. This is the sentence from the Lord over all flesh, and why doest thou refuse when it is the good pleasure of the Most High? Whether thou livest ten or a hundred or a thousand years, there is no inquisition of life in the grave (E. 413, 4). The same unquestioning acquiescence appears in the helpless commonplace of the following: O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that is at peace in his possessions, unto the man that is at ease and hath prosperity in all things, and that still hath strength to enjoy luxury. O death, acceptable is thy sentence to a man that is needy and that faileth in strength, that is in extreme old age and is distracted about all things, and is perverse and hath lost patience (E. 411, 2); and still more grimly in his unconsciously brutal counsel to beware of long sorrow for the dead: My son, let thy tears fall over the dead, and as one that suffereth grievously begin lamentation, and wind up his body according to his due, and neglect not his burial. Make bitter weeping and passionate wailing, and let thy mourning be according to his desert, for one day or two, lest thou be evil spoken of; and so be comforted for thy sorrow. For of sorrow cometh death, and sorrow of heart will bow down the strength. Set not thy heart upon him, forget him, remembering thine own last end. Remember him not, for there is no returning again: him thou shalt not profit, and thou wilt hurt thyself (E. 3816ff).
This great difference of outlook would of itself incline one to a lenient judgment on the imperfections of the proverbs. But thirdly, and chiefly, remember that the Wise-men lived in a world that knew not Jesus, a world in which the supreme moral fact had not yet appeared. Therefore they lacked what we possess—the assurance that nothing, tribulation or anguish or persecution, or famine, nakedness, peril or sword, can sunder the spirit of Man from the love of Him whom to know is life eternal. To them it was not possible, as it is for us, to confront the reality of evil with the greater reality of good, to answer the mystery of present suffering with the deeper mystery of the peace of Christ.
Lastly, the noblest of the proverbs has been kept in reserve till now. Said one of the Sages, perceiving that suffering (be it justly or unjustly incurred) is at least an efficient teacher: My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord, neither be weary at his reproof. For whom the Lord loveth he reproveth, and paineth the son in whom he delighteth (Pr. 311, 12). The author of Hebrews 12, writing to men enduring great distress but with the fact of Christ before them, thought fit to quote those words; and we also will do well to ponder them. It is reasonable to believe that hardships (which judged from certain aspects often are unjust), even such terrible hardships as men sometimes endure, are inevitable in a world where moral personality is in the making: not otherwise could God Himself make man “in His own image”; not otherwise could even He create beings who should learn to seek the Truth, and to will the Good, in freedom. It is easy to see that courage, to take one instance, cannot be disciplined in sham fight, but only in the hazard of real risks. So also, it may be, all other fruits of the Spirit will grow for men nowhere save on the rugged slopes of the hill called “Difficulty.” The Wise, therefore, despite their perplexities, were not pessimistic. But, though they resolutely drove out despair, they knew depression: Even in laughter the heart may be sorrowful, and the end of mirth be heaviness (Pr. 1413), and A faithful man who can find? (Pr. 206)? To at least one of the Sages God seemed far distant, silent and inscrutable. Thus Pr. 301-4—The Words of Agur, ... I have wearied myself, O God, I have wearied myself, and am consumed, I surely am more foolish than other men, and no wisdom have I acquired to give me knowledge of the Holy One. Who hath ascended up into heaven and descended?... What is his name and his son’s name, if thou knowest? The sturdy rebuke that immediately follows, (Pr. 305-6)—Every word of God is tried. He is a shield to them that trust in Him. Add not thou unto His words, lest He reprove thee, and thou be found a liar, is the sentiment of another and a happier man than Agur.
Such was the world in which the Wise had to labour and to think. How like our own! How sobering in the discipline it imposes on the idealist! To one who reads without consideration of the back-ground the sententiousness of these Jewish proverbs may soon prove irksome. But the fault becomes bearable, and the Wise grow very human, when we recognise that for all their bold words, they were not always confident of their creed, and that to many an earnest man among them the preaching of morality must at times have seemed a weary and a fruitless task.
CHAPTER XI
Harvest
We have seen the Wise at work, breaking up the hard ground, ploughing the field and scattering the seed. Came ever their toil to harvest? And since the world is the field, to what place in the wide world, what point of time in the world’s long story, ought our search to be directed? “They that sow in tears,” said a brave man long ago, “shall reap in joy; though he goeth on his way weeping bearing forth the seed, he shall come again rejoicing bringing his sheaves with him,”—and his words encourage us to search for effects of the Wise-men’s teaching in the immediate history of their times. No matter how often the Psalmist’s expectation has gone unfulfilled, something in us cries assent to his daring, and we shall therefore follow his guidance; nor shall we look in vain. But one knows that the proverb Jesus quoted to His disciples, One soweth and another reapeth, is more often true to the facts of life; and therefore, following its warning, we must be prepared also to seek traces of the Wise-men’s influence in times and places unforeseen by them.
So wide a range of human history thus opens for consideration that the task we are attempting in this chapter is necessarily difficult. It is still further complicated by the problem of analysis. For example, to say bluntly that in the modern determination to remedy existing evils in our social organisation the Christian Church may see the harvest of its labours is ultimately true, but it is not the whole truth, and because there is so much more to be said on the matter the statement might be challenged as actually untrue by those whose thoughts leap at once to the chequered official record of the Church in the last few centuries. But the opposition with which such cut-and-dry assertions are received often requires only a more careful analysis for its removal. Quite certainly, despite the antagonism of certain professed Christians, the penetrative influence of the regular preaching and teaching of Christianity, especially during the last generation or so, has done more towards rousing and enlightening the national conscience regarding social conditions than can easily be measured; but the social movement of to-day also owes much to the rise of ambitions that naturally accompany the increase of wealth, to scientific invention, to popular education, and to other factors that might be mentioned. The progress of mankind is the product of many influences that have worked together for good, and the ethical and intellectual condition of a people at any given period is like a garment woven from many threads but without seam. Analysis of history is desirable; but to attempt an analysis so subtle that we can say, “Just so much is due to this influence from the past, so much to that,” is always difficult, if not impossible. In part of what follows we must be content to describe certain events and circumstances concerning which we make no greater (but also no less) a claim than that the Wise were a contributory cause, their words and their example having co-operated with the work of others in producing the result described.