The Hermit Nation

“For from the top of the rocks I see Mm, and from the hills I behold him: lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” — Numb, xxiii, 9.

As long as its channel is rock there is no fear for the river. There is no risk that its volume will lessen, or that it will fail to reach its terminus, although the ocean should be a thousand miles distant. But if in its progress it is met by a sandy desert, what is it to do? This Sahara will engulf it, and although it were another Nile, this sultry monster is able to devour it every drop, and cheat the thirsty regions beyond.

The first ages of the world had no lack of revelation. For a thousand years they retained Adam, rich in the recollections of Paradise, and from time to time men rose up like Enoch the prophet and Noah the preacher of righteousness — men who revived forgotten truth or faded piety, and who added new elements to the pre-existing knowledge; and from all the probabilities of the case, we do not doubt that not only was there communion with God and with one another among the members of the little church which survived in the ark, but there is every evidence that it was a pure and ample creed which emerged from that floating tabernacle — a creed which recognised the unity, the spirituality, the truth and holiness of God; which kept sacred one day in seven; which looked for a seed of the woman who should be deliverer and restorer of humanity; and which retained the practice and the doctrine of sacrifice.

In all likelihood Noah’s creed was much more minute and comprehensive than this, but it is a great matter to know that all this was included. It is a great matter to know that four thousand years ago there was a church catholic — a church within which there were no schismatics, as there were no separatists without — a church unanimous in worshipping, without any idolatrous intermedium, the King eternal, immortal, and invisible — a church which lived in the hope of redemption — a church which kept holy the Sabbath, and which solemnized its signal deliverance and sanctified its new abode by that great holocaust of Ararat.

But it is sad to see how soon this primeval and catholic creed got corrupted. Men did not lose it entirely, but they so depraved and distorted it that its features could scarcely be identified. Instead of worshipping the unseen all-seeing Creator, they chose His brightest creature, and, like the ancient Persians, became worshippers of the fire or the sun; or they put together rude emblems of wisdom, swiftness, and strength, — the head of a man, the wings of an eagle, the legs of an ox or a lion, and, like the old Assyrians, at last bowed down and worshipped their carved or molten symbol. The Sabbath faintly survived in the traditions of all lands, and the coming Redeemer was travestied in the incarnations of Bramah and Vishnu, whilst a device of His advent may be perceived, more or less faintly, in the musings of Plato, in the sighs of Socrates, and in Virgil’s beautiful vision. But the true doctrine of sacrifice soon got divorced from the practice, and, losing sight of the Lamb of God who should take away the sin of the world, the descendants of Noah found poor consolation in that blood of bulls and goats which can never cancel transgression. With most of them the offering became a mere bribe to the Deity, the price of some favour which they wished to procure; and those who retained the idea of a vicarious atonement, like the earlier Greeks, and like the Phoenicians, the predecessors of the Jews in Palestine, by way of adding value to the victim, and rendering it actually life for life, they outraged Heaven’s Majesty by the slaughter of a human sacrifice, and by giving the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul.

Dark and dreadful as some of these systems were, it must not be forgotten that they were perversions of an original truth. When that coin came from the mint its milled edges were sharp, its image and inscription stood out, and its lustre was spotless. But now that it has passed through ten thousand hands, wantonly defaced by some and inevitably worn by others, it has thinned down into a mere glittering scale, a blank unmeaning counter; or you drop it into the sea, and years afterwards, at the same spot, you dredge up a curious conglomerate, a mass of pebbles, shells, and sand, all aggregated round a black and rusty nucleus; and it is only by dint of assiduous polishing, or by the use of some chemical re-agent, that you recognise your lost piece of silver. As the world’s second father received the truth from God, it was all in Heaven’s own currency, full weight and without a flaw, and what would have been accepted in the Great King’s assay. But as soon as it began to circulate it began to deteriorate. Some truths simply wore out. The Sabbath, for example, soon ceasing to be a day of rest and religion, thinned off into a mere nonentity; and although most nations deemed seven a sacred number, and counted time by weeks of seven days, they could give no right reason for the usage. But most truths get tarnished and corroded. Consigned to no written record, when intrusted to the memory of man, with all his prejudices and bad propensities, they were like shillings dropt into the tide. When next you see them you can hardly recognise them, crusted over with such uncouth or monstrous additions, and changed into a substance so remote from the bright original. This black mass, slippery with weeds and crawling with sea- worms, who could conceive that it was hiding in its heart a shekel of the sanctuary? And even when you get at the nucleus, it is so damaged and decomposed that you feel it is now good for nothing; it must be cast into the furnace and melted anew before it will be accepted as precious metal again. And just so, when we dredge into the sea of ancient history, or when we dive into the dark places of the present day, and bring up some ugly superstition, it is hard to believe, and yet it is often true, that its core is one of these old Noachian coins; and although man’s tradition has so corrupted God’s saying as to give it the aspect and effect of an impious falsehood, even under that falsehood may be detected a trace of the primitive truth.” When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and, making corruptible images of the incorruptible

God, they changed his truth into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator. And as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind.” When, as in the days of the post-diluvian patriarchs, they possessed the knowledge, they lacked the piety, and for want of the piety they soon lost the knowledge. “Their foolish heart was darkened.” But still, for all their first germs of knowledge they were indebted to God’s own teaching. Their most horrible superstition was a truth of God, which they had “changed into a lie;” and as the beginning of idolatry we recognise the abuse of symbols and the depravation of a theology originally true; and at the basis of every sacrifice, however mercenary in its spirit, and however offensive in its mode, we recognise a reminiscence, distant and distorted no doubt, but still a reminiscence, of what was in the beginning a Divine institution. In other words, the fragments of truth which have come down in the heathen religions are relics of the primeval and universal religion which issued from the ark with Noah, and with that Church of which Noah was the pastor and the priest; and just as we call Popery a corruption of Christianity, so may we call Paganism a corruption of Patriarchism — a perversion of the primitive and catholic religion.

Or, to revert to the comparison which we made at the beginning: from Ararat there flowed a stream of revelation fresh and pure, and had the channel been retentive, had men’s hearts been honest, and had they liked to retain God’s truth in their knowledge, that stream might have come down to the era of the Advent pellucid and ample, and making wise unto salvation the successive ages as it passed. But as its course extended it was soon perceived that its volume was lessening and its contents were corrupting. It was not merely as if it had come to a sultry desert where it was likely to disappear in the burning sand; but it had reached a swampy wilderness, where it was sure to merge in the brack - ishness and noisomeness of the festering ooze, and retain no token of that gladsome river which took its rise at Noah’s altar and beneath the rainbow of God’s covenant. It pleased the Most High to obviate this disaster. By narrowing the channel He saved the stream. He no longer left the conservation of His truth to the world at large; but He selected a people and set up a system which should place the great saving doctrines beyond the casualties of time and the caprice of changing generations. He segregated from all the families of the earth the line of faithful Abraham, and He set up that peculiar institution which is known as the Levitical Economy, or Mosaic Dispensation.

Precisely as before the flood, all flesh were again corrupting their way, and there was every danger that true religion would utterly expire. If left any longer to the memory of mankind at large, it was plain that the promise of a Saviour and the true doctrine of sacrifice, and Sabbath-keeping, and the knowledge of God’s perfections, would soon be extinct. And whilst there was still a godly remnant, the Most High chose out a specific’ depository for the all-important revelation. So to speak. He formed a canal or aqueduct along which the stream might be conducted safe from the irruption of the bitter and offensive fen on either side. And although, with its straight and monotonous banks and unvarying width, the canal is not so picturesque as the free meandering river, in such a case it is the only security. He not only took the new method of confiding His precepts and promises to a written record — the tables of stone and the book of the covenant, but He had recourse to an additional precaution, and these lively oracles thus written down He intrusted to a 2^eculiar people. The very existence of that people as a nation he bound up with the preservation of these records, and thus secured in His wisdom a twofold guarantee for their unimpaired transmission. It was as if the engineer of our artificial river had intrusted its embankments to some special clan whom he appointed its guardians, so contriving it that if through their fault any breach were committed their own supply should be cut off or their own fields should be flooded. Or perhaps it would be niore correct to say, that for His revelation God provided a twofold receptacle: writing it in letters of ink on the Hebrew Bible, and in indelible usages and unaltering ideas inscribing it on the Hebrew people. It was a concentric channel: within, the tables of stone compactly joined together; without, the concrete, almost as impervious, of a nationality the most tenacious and cohesive which our world has ever witnessed, — the living network of willows by the water- courses, whose fond branches skim the glassy current, whilst their wattled rootlets guard and cradle the bed in which that current flows.

With their precious deposit of a revelation at once written and ritual, it was the purpose of God that the people should “dwell alone,” and not be mingled with the nations; and with this design He made it difficult for them to go far from home, and at the same time inconvenient and distasteful to associate with strangers. It was not only by depriving them of horses and giving them no instinct for the ocean, that the Divine Lawgiver confined them to their own country; but, by appointing festivals which required their attendance in the capital three times a year. He rendered long journeys all but impossible. On the other hand, by prescribing rules as to their daily life, — rules of singular minuteness as to things which they must not taste, nor touch, nor handle, — He made it a problem full of anxiety and peril to travel among their heathen neighbours or to have their heathen neighbours sojourning with them. And altogether, betwixt that short cable which kept them moored to the Temple, and that regimen which made them and the rest of the world so ungainly if not odious to one another. He secured for this singular people a seclusion almost as absolute as if they had been transported to some island in a distant sea.

Thus isolated, shut up in the calm enclosure of their Holy Land, the Most High commenced that series of lessons by which He educated the pupil nation up to the proper point for appreciating Messiah when He came, and on the strength of which her more proficient scholars were destined to become the recipients of the final revelation and the first heralds of God’s mercies to mankind. But without stretching away into a theme so vast as is that anomalous Hebrew history, our present object is to see the precise relation which that Hebrew system bears to its patriarchal predecessor. And if we do not greatly err, it may, as already hinted, be described as a reservoir or artificial channel, in which the remains of patriarchal theology were conserved, and in which provision was made for the reception and transmission of all the intermediate revelation which Jehovah might vouchsafe till the Word should be made flesh, and grace and truth should come in Jesus Christ.

What all remained of the patriarchal or primeval theology, it is vain to conjecture: but all that remained, we may safely assert, was absorbed into the new dispensation. For if we found a Sabbath in Paradise, and signs of a Sabbath in the Ark, and if we find in the readiness with which it was recognised in the wilderness that it had not been absolutely forgotten in the brick-kilns of Egypt, this patriarchal Sabbath was adopted and sanctioned as one of the most prominent features in the Hebrew economy. If we found graciously given to the exiles of Eden the promise of a Saviour, under the name of Shiloh, and the prophet like unto Moses, and the root and offspring of David, we find the promise repeated and restricted till the Desire of the World became the hope and the proud prospect of Israel. If our first father knew the Father of Spirits in the awe of His justice as well as the endearment of His mercy, and if the world’s second father saw the Divine perfections diffracted, as in yonder symbolic bow, in the various tints of vengeance, patience, pity, the founder of that new dispensation saw the scattered rays again united in the white focus of the burning bush, and in the name, “The Lord God, merciful and gracious, forgiving iniquity, yet by no

Y means clearing the guilty,” received a presentiment of the great gospel announcement, “God is love.” And if substitution and expiation by sacrifice are as ancient as the world before the flood, we find the principle assumed and the practice systematized, codified, reduced to a rubric, in the statute-book of Israel, and the precedents of Abel, Noah, and Melchisedec, carried out in the priesthood of Levi, and in those altars which did not cease to smoke for fifteen centuries.

And yet, although so much of the old patriarchal revelation was restored or preserved in the Hebrew economy, the knowledge of God, access to Him through mediation, the hope of a Redeemer, sacrifice, and Sabbath-keeping, — in other words, although Judaism was in one respect a reform from Paganism and a return to the pure and primitive Patriarchism (as Protestantism is a reform from Popery, and a return to pure and primitive apostolism), it must not be forgotten that in all its outward form and figure it was a very different system; and could an Abel or an Enoch have made the direct transition from the palmy days of the patriarchal piety to the era of the Aaronic priesthood, he might have felt it a change from liberty to bondage, and from sunshine to clouds and shadows. And even although the actual transition was from an old dispensation’s twilight to a new one’s dawn, and from the vagueness and uncertainty of decaying tradition to the precision and permanence of a written revelation, so narrow was the range, so strict the rubric, and so stern the threatenings of the new economy, that, looking back to that incident in the childhood of the Church of God, we feel as if it then had quitted the lap of a nursing mother to be under the bondage of a schoolmaster. Its first salutation, — one which the wild and wayward scholar greatly needed, but still a salutation harsh and startling, — was in the hoarse thunder of Sinai, and its first lesson a severer ordeal than Pythagoras imposed on his pupils, a novitiate of forty years’ silence, a probation not of forty days but of forty years, in which one murmuring word would be fatal. And the task which was prescribed, and which it took a thousand years to learn, was enforced by so many pains and penalties, and truant moments were visited by corrections so severe, that after ages of so strict a monitor we do not wonder that it was felt a joyful emancipation when Jesus stretched out His hands and said, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest;” we do not wonder that in exchanging Moses for Messiah those who made the trial declared His yoke to be easy and His burden light.