It was natural that the Jews should have been encouraged to give expression to the Divine joy at a great festival. The final harvest-home of the year, the merry celebration of the vintage, was then due. No Jewish feast was more cheerful than this, which expressed gratitude for "wine that maketh glad the heart of man." The superiority of Judaism over heathenism is seen in the tremendous contrast between the simple gaiety of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles and the gross debauchery of the Bacchanalian orgies which disgraced a similar occasion in the pagan world. It is to our shame in modern Christendom that we dare not imitate the Jews here, knowing too well that if we tried to do so we should only sink to the heathen level. Our Feast of Tabernacles would certainly become a Feast of Bacchus, bestial and wicked. Happily the Jews did not feel the Teutonic danger of intemperance. Their festival recognised the Divine bounty in nature, in its richest, ripest autumn fruitfulness, which was like the smile of God breaking out through His works to cheer His children. Bivouacking in greenwood bowers, the Jews did their best to return to the life of nature and share its autumn gladness. The chronicler informs us that since the days of Joshua the Jews had never observed the feast as they did now—never with such great gladness and never so truly after the directions of their law. Although the actual words he gives as from The Law[231] are not to be found in the Pentateuch, they sum up the regulations of that work. This then is the first application of The Law which the people have received with so much distress. It ordains a glad festival. So much brighter is religion when it is understood and practised than when it is only contemplated from afar! Now the reading of The Law can go on day by day, and be received with joy.
Finally, like the Christians who collected food and money at the Agapé for their poorer brethren and for the martyrs in prison, the Jews were to "send portions" to the needy.[232] The rejoicing was not to be selfish; it was to stimulate practical kindness. Here was its safeguard. We shrink from accepting joy too freely lest it should be followed by some terrible Nemesis; but if, instead of gloating over it in secret, selfishly and greedily, we use it as a talent, and endeavour to lessen the sorrows of others by inviting them to share it, the heathenish dread is groundless. He who is doing his utmost to help his brother may dare to be very happy.
CHAPTER XXVI.
THE RELIGION OF HISTORY.
Nehemiah ix.
After the carnival—Lent. This Catholic procedure was anticipated by the Jews in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah. The merry feast of Tabernacles was scarcely over, when, permitting an interval of but a single day, the citizens of Jerusalem plunged into a demonstration of mourning—fasting, sitting in sackcloth, casting dust on their heads, abjuring foreign connections, confessing their own and their fathers' sins. Although the singular revulsion of feeling may have been quite spontaneous on the part of the people, the violent reaction to which it gave rise was sanctioned by the authorities. In an open-air meeting which lasted for six hours—three of Bible-reading and three of confession and worship—the Levites took the lead, as they had done at the publication of The Law a few weeks earlier. But these very men had rebuked the former outburst of lamentation. Must we suppose that their only objection on that occasion was that the mourning was then untimely, because it was indulged in at a festival, whereas it ought to have been postponed to a fast day? If that were all, we should have to contemplate a miserably artificial condition of affairs. Real emotions refuse to come and go at the bidding of officials pedantically set on regulating their alternate recurrence in accordance with a calendar of the church year. A theatrical representation of feeling may be drilled into some such orderly procession. But true feeling itself is of all things in the universe the most restive under direct orders.
We must look a little deeper. The Levites had given a great spiritual reason for the restraint of grief in their wonderful utterance, "The joy of the Lord is your strength." This noble thought is not an elixir to be administered or withheld according to the recurrence of ecclesiastical dates. If it is true at all, it is eternally true. Although the application of it is not always a fact of experience, the reason for the fluctuations in our personal relations to it is not to be looked for in the almanack; it will be found in those dark passages of human life which, of their own accord, shut out the sunlight of Divine gladness. There is then no absolute inconsistency in the action of the Levites. And yet perhaps they may have perceived that they had been hasty in their repression of the first outburst of grief; or at all events that they did not then see the whole truth of the matter. There was some ground for lamentation after all, and though the expression of sorrow at a festival seemed to them untimely, they were bound to admit its fitness a little later. It is to be observed that another subject was now brought under the notice of the people. The contemplation of the revelation of God's will should not produce grief. But the consideration of man's conduct cannot but lead to that result. At the reading of Divine law the Jews' lamentation was rebuked; at the recital of their own history it was encouraged. Yet even here it was not to be abject and hopeless. The Levites exhorted the people to shake off the lethargy of sorrow, to stand up and bless the Lord their God. Even in the very act of confessing sin we have a special reason for praising God, because the consciousness of our guilt in His sight must heighten our appreciation of His marvellous forbearance.
The Jews' confession of sin led up to a prayer which the Septuagint ascribes to Ezra. It does so, however, in a phrase that manifestly breaks the context, and thus betrays its origin in an interpolation.[233] Nevertheless the tone of the prayer, and even its very language, remind us forcibly of the Great Scribe's outpouring of soul over the mixed marriages of his people recorded in Ezra ix. No one was more fitted to lead the Jews in the later act of devotion, and it is only reasonable to conclude that the work was undertaken by the one man to whose lot it would naturally fall.