The Father of History

The Book of Gknesis — Chap, i. — l.

One of the most delightful books which ancient Greece has handed down to us is the History of Herodotus. With its old stories of Persia, Egypt, and Babylon — with its romantic episodes and amusing anecdotes — with its clever sketches of character and its interesting details regarding countries which the writer actually visited, all given off with matchless simplicity and freshness, in a style free, open, and flowing, it forms a repertory of entertainment and instruction of which the reader never wearies, and to which, all its credulity and superstition notwithstanding, we return from time to time with affectionate gratitude. Its nine books, dedicated to the nine Muses, are said to have been publicly read over to the Athenians, who rewarded the recital with a vote of ten talents (£2400); and. Homer excepted, no Greek author has taken such hold of succeeding generations as he whom, with fond consent, they have agreed to call “The Father of History.”

There is no risk that we shall pluck a leaf from these ancient laurels if we remark that there is another more strictly entitled to the epithet. For the true Father of History we must go back a thousand years before the days of Herodotus; and the fact that it forms a portion of the sacred canon is no reason why we should close our eyes on the historic value of the first book of the Bible and its many incidental charms.

We have already so far traced the history of Moses. Born in the midst of mournful circiunstances, but miraculously preserved, we have seen him brought up amidst wealth and luxury and brilliant expectations; we have seen him initiated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and have no doubt that geometry and the movements of the heavenly bodies, with the jurisprudence and chronology of that wise and ancient people, became familiar to his mind. But although adorned with these “Egyptian jewels,” we have seen how his heart continued leal to his own people, and how, disdaining the bribes of ambition, he quitted the tyrant’s palace a Hebrew and a patriot. We have seen how the active and athletic frame into which his goodly childhood had grown, prophetic of a green and energetic old age, was animated by the soul of a hero; and in our last lecture

E we saw that patriot and hero come out the noblest style of manhood, — a saint renouncing the pleasures of sin, — a believer casting himself on the protection and promises of God. We saw him an exile and an outlaw, escaping to a sublime but lonely region, and finding an asylum in a good man’s tent, where, amidst simple pursuits, domestic affections, and the society of those by whom the true God was known and worshipped, Egypt and its enjoyments, if not Egypt and its captives, could easily be foTgotten.

Here it was, we have little doubt, that he wrote the Book of Genesis. How much of its information lingered in the memory of the Israelites, how many of its narratives and incidents had, with other patriarchal traditions, come down in the family of Jethro, it is idle to inquire, because impossible to ascertain. Enough for us to know that it is a portion of that canon to which the Saviour pointed when He said, “Search the Scriptures, for they are they which testify of me;” and of which St. Paul declares, “They are all given by inspiration of God.” And we may just add, that with what has recently come to light of Egyptian theology and cosmogony, it is the last book which an Egyj)tian, or one learned in no other “wisdom” than theirs, could have written.

There are two ways in which the Book of Genesis throws light on its author. It helps to show us what manner of man he was, and it shows how far lie was furnished for the work God had given him to do.

True, the book is inspired, but it is all the more expressive of its author on this account. Believing as we do the plenary inspiration of Scripture, we deprecate the theory which confounds a true inspiration with a mere mechanical instrumentation. An organ is an instrument. To the hand of a mighty master it yields effects which it might never otherwise have entered into the heart of man to conceive, but when that hand is withdrawn it falls mute and dead. Before Milton or Handel touched it, it was not thinking of Bethlehem or Messiah, and now that the strain is ended there is no longer any actual sympathy between the engine and the theme which it discoursed so grandly. But a mind, if it be an instrument, is also a great deal more. With its intelligence and will, with its affections and feelings, when God uses as His instrument the mind of man, He does homage to the laws with which He has Himself impressed it, and brings it into unison with His own; and setting aside the exceptional cases of Balaam and Annas, we may safely affirm that when God condescends to give forth His mind through the minds of our fellow-men, the prophecy and the character of the prophet are in keeping. Glorious gospels are not proclaimed by fierce and fiery Hildebrands, and great tribulations are not predicted by smart and dapper seers, who buy consols with the proceeds; but just as holy men speak as they are moved by the Holy Spirit, we expect a congruity throughout. We expect that the light-giver will be himself enlightened; that the utterer of great thoughts will be himself a thinker; that the evangelist’s own feet will be beautiful on the mountains; that the life of a Jeremiah will be itself a lamentation. In other words, instead of setting aside the penman, or using him as a mere mouthpiece or machine, we expect to find the prophet full of his own oracle; the sacred scribe his own volume impersonate and alive. The men of God we expect to find the truest types at once of manhood and of godliness; God’s men, but still men, our fellow-men, men of like passions with ourselves; and none the less because it constitutes a portion of God’s own book, do we regard the first volume of the Pentateuch as one of the books of Moses: a book indicative of his belief and his feelings, of his intelligence, of his taste, of his habits of thought and tone of mind.

Try to isolate this book. Imagine that it is once again what Genesis was once before, all the Bible in the world, then try to form from it a little summary of religion, a little system of theology, and you will be surprised to see how clear and ample is the light which, let forth from God, it sheds on man. Of God it teaches at once the spirituality and unity, revealing Him as the Supreme Creator, the ever-present, ever-watchful Governor. In the instantaneous expulsion from Eden it exhibits the strictness of His threatenings, in His dealings with Abraham and his descendants, the steadfastness of His promises. In Enoch, with his early assumption to congenial climes, it shows God’s affection for His children, and the fond delight with which He takes all goodness to its proper home, even as we have the opposite abhorrence of iniquity in that Nemesis which, at the moment of his crime, clutched the first murderer, and, with fiery brain and branded brow, hurried him away from all but his own horrible companionship. That same revulsion from evil we perceive in the deluge which washed over a polluted world, and in the midst of their orgies swept down into the abyss the revellers obscene; and the same lesson we read again in the flames which, like a blot from the landscape, burned out Sodom. Yet God’s mercy and patience and long-suffering, how soft and full they shine in the 120 years’ reprieve granted to the guilty antediluvians, in those constant concessions to the cities of the plain, which only ceased when Abraham was ashamed to ask. And, so to put it, which of us could desire a God more gracious, more kind and condescending, than He who talked with Adam in the bowers of Paradise, and with whom

Enoch walked in the solitude of the surrounding wickedness? Which of us could desire a pavilion more secure or a portion more divine than opened to Abraham in the words, “Fear not, Abram, for I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward “? Who could desire a protector more assiduous and more provident than the Guardian who stood by Joseph in the dungeon as truly as on the steps of Pharaoh’s throne; or who could seek a trustee and administrator more faithful and powerful than that great Covenant-keeper who gathered to their fathers, took to the abode of their godly ancestors, each successive patriarch, and at the same time watched so carefully the fortunes of their surviving and often sinful descendants?

Then for Man. In this little book we have man’s original rectitude and innocence; we have the account of his early fall, with its forfeiture of God’s friendship; and, both in the old-world fathers and in the races which radiated from around Mount Ararat, we have, in countless developments, the evil and worse- ward tendencies of unaided unsanctified human nature.

But at the same time we have in this little volume the two sublimest and most sustaining truths which bear /upon the history of our species; the one distinctly announced, the other more dimly foreshadowed. What is man, and whence comes he? is a question wliicli the wisest of antiquity have asked, and which was often most absurdly answered. Prometheus made a statue, then lighted a torch at the chariot of the sun, and man, the fire-kindler, became king of the other creatures. Cadmus killed a dracjon, and sowed in the OTound its teeth, and they sprang up a crop of warriors ready armed. Deucalion and his wife found themselves in a drowned and desolate world, beginning to dry up; and, directed by an oracle, they flung stones backward over their shoulder, and shortly afterwards from the soft warm mud sprang forth the various nations of mankind. But, taught by the Almighty Maker himself, Moses tells how from earthly elements God formed man’s body, and how, from God himself, and His inbreathing, came man’s soul. “The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” But what about that soul? What other soul or spirit did it most resemble? The soul of the surrounding creatures, or that of some pre-existing race of spirits elsewhere? AVonder, 0 heavens! and, 0 man, be astonished at thy own prerogative! “God created man in his own image; in the image of God created He him.” By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God; and by faith we understand that a house eternal awaits elsewhere the renewed and ransomed spirit: but surely it needs the same faith to credit this astounding declaration. To look round on man as he actually is, to look round on him as he met the eyes of Moses — brutalized, besotted, scant of intellect, — and through the disfiguring filth and wretchedness espy the immortal, the run-away child of the Eternal, it needs great faith; but he who, with Moses, knows that it is true, needs no poet to proclaim the dignity of human nature, and he need not stagger at aught which God deems fit to do for the recovery of a nature originally so exalted, and for the reinstatement of children once so dear, and still so tenderly desired.

“God made man after His own image” Behold the fact surpassing fable! Behold the faithful saying which should make each man a terror and a glory, a grief and a rejoicing to himself! Is it so? Is this understanding of mine an image of God’s intelligence? — this imagination of mine an image of God’s immensity? — this immortality of mine an image of God’s eternity? This soul which I have got, was it made on purpose to love the holy as God loves it? — to shed affection and blessing and good-will as these pour with sun-like constancy from God’s own beneficence? — was it made to commune with the Most High in lowly confidence and evernearing intimacy? Then what a work there is for thee, 0 Spirit of all grace, to bring this nature, so debauched, debased, to bring it back to its first estate! and to recover tastes pure and holy, aspirations high and heavenly, what a work is there for myself! “God made man after His own image.” That one sentence at the opening of the Bible accounts for all that follows. It shows how important is the race which was about to become the subject of a great experiment, and the man who believes this sentence — a sentence which to mental science gives new grandeur, and to man himself an awful and august significance — has no right to stagger at any interposition which Divine goodness might prompt or Divine wisdom devise on behalf of a race so illustrious in its origin and so vast in its capabilities, if withal so woful in its self-entailed ruin. “Great is the mystery of godliness, — God manifest in flesh.” But if it does not diminish the mystery, it gives the antecedent possibility when we read regarding the race thus distinguished, “God made man after His own image.”

Alongside of man’s exalted origin thus clearly revealed, Moses knew the good which God had in store for him, although in more obscure presentiment. In this same Genesis is preserved that germ of all subsequent gospels, — the promise spoken in Paradise, and which assured the disconsolate Mother of Mankind that her offspring should crush the head of the Deceiver. Here is also preserved that great promise to the Father of the selected Family: “In thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” And here too is recorded dying Israel’s prediction: “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a law-giver from between his feet, until Shiloh (the Prince of Peace or Rest -giver ■^) come, and to Him the people shall adhere,” — the nations shall gather. And whatever might be the specific form which the promise assumed to Moses’ wistful and forth-going fancy, as he looked on the sin and the misery — as he recalled the groans of the brick-bakers in Egypt and the blows of their taskmasters — as he saw on every side the trail of the serpent and the work of the destroyer, — he exulted in the hope of a great deliverer, who, breaking Israel’s yoke and giving rest to the nations, should bruise the head of the serpent and to all families of the earth be a blessino-.

Compiled from the Book of Genesis, such we believe to have been in substance the creed of Moses. It was a possession unspeakably more precious than all the wisdom he acquired in Egypt, and in conjunction with his patriotism, his gallantry, and his expansion of mind, it wonderfully fitted him for the work God designed him to do. Even before that special manifestation at the burning

1 Hengstenberg’s Christology, i. 46.

biisli, the Most Hisjh was to him no unknown God, and entering on the tremendous undertaking to which he was called as Israel’s Liberator and Lawgiver, it was of infinite value to have his spirit sustained by considerations so exalted and motives so sublime as those which must have been familiar to the mind pervaded by the sayings of that one book. Of the contents of this most comprehensive book it is hardly possible in a few flying sentences to present an epitome. Commencing with the commencement of our human history; nay, we may say commencing with the commencement of the universe — for it tells that the universe is not eternal: it had a beginning and God is its Creator — commencing with the dawn of human history, it exhibits man at home in his own world, with the production of six creative days all ready around him, the plants and animals so various, so beautiful, and so fitted for man’s use. There is rest and there is worship — for it is the Sabbath — the first in a long series. Then come work, observation, intelligence, culture, the muster of the animals named by an acute and friendly naturalist, that tilling and dressing of the ground in which man exercises his delegated faculty as a subordinate creator and improver, making that which is already “good” still better; that social converse which is the still more important culture of himself. Then follows the first sin, — the first shame, — the first flight from God’s presence. Then comes the first death, — a very dismal one, — the death of one who had brought back to earth much of the lost innocence and piety; a death amidst blows and bloodshed; a death by that dear hand which in tottering infancy the younger brother had often clasped as much for love as guidance; a death which leaves the afflicted parents doubly desolate, for their one son is in a martyr’s early grave, and their other son is the murderer. Sin worketh death; and we have the development in that old world’s depravity, till the Flood comes and clears it all away. The Ark is aground on Ararat, and for a moment there is devotion, there is gratitude. But Noah’s altar has scarcely ceased to smoke, above the dripping crags and from the sundering clouds the rainbow flag has scarcely disappeared, when on the soil of the rescued family sin is sprouting faster than blades of grass are springing from the surface of the soft and reeking earth. And by and bye we see the Tower of Babel rising, with its proud effort to lift the name of Mmrod to the stars, and form a capital for all mankind. But lo! by a strange confusion in their speech, we see the centripetal attraction suddenly exchanged for a centrifugal repulsion, and from around the stunted, unfinished tower the vexed and alienated clans are pressing outward, each along his separate radius, — to meet no more till one great speech shall reunite the fragments of the exploded family. Having sent forth on their several ways the races still so interesting: those sons of Ham, on whom a father’s fault has long pressed heavily; those phlegmatic sons of Shem, with whom India and China still are teeming; and those others with the flowing beard and flashing eye, in whom we still recognise the Arab and the Jew; and last of all, those sons of Japheth, by whom the isles of the Gentiles should be peopled — pilgrims of the square forehead, the sturdy step, and iron sinew, — having for the present sent away to harden amidst their northern mists and snows these future tutors and rulers of mankind, till such season as they should reappear and take up their residence in the tents of Shem, — the record narrows in, and leaving the history of the world, the sacred penman restricts himself to the fortunes of the peculiar people. And throughout those nine-and-thirty chapters which it

fills, that history is rather a succession of family records than the annals of a nation. Patriarch follows patriarch, and many an incidental personage flits across the scene. But even at the last the clan only musters threescore souls and ten, and it is only in the four centuries which lie betwixt Genesis and Exodus that the Abrahamic clan has grown into the great and numerous Hebrew nation.

To no historian was it ever permitted to recite events so stupendous as rise one after another in the opening chapters of Genesis, nor incidents more striking and touching or more fraught with special Providence than those which fill the remainder. And although we do not forget the protest of Heinrich Heine against Longinus and the critics who have attempted to point out the beauties of the Bible: “Vain words, your talk of its sublimity, its simplicity: vain tests of human judgment. It is God’s production, — like a tree, like a flower, like the ocean, like Man himself, — it is the Word of God; that, and no more,”^ — yet, as we have said, there is a human underside, and we cannot help forming our own inference as to an author’s dispositions from the way he performs his work, from the incidents he selects, from the scenes on which he dwells, from the conclusions which he forces his readers to deduce. Tried by that standard no author can be greater or more good. What tenderness flows forth in that tale of peerless pathos, Joseph and his brethren; what sympathy with the high-souled, pelf-spurning Abraham in his restoration of the spoil and in his purchase of Machpelah; what a love of rural quiet and pastoral simplicity in the fond minuteness with which he paints Abraham’s interviews at Mamre, Eleazar’s confi-

1 Edinburgh Review, vol. civ, 208.

dential embassy, Jacob’s flight and adventures at Bethel, at Padan-aram, at the brook Jabbok; what clear- eyed faith, what devout recognition of the Most High everywhere! And although the grandeur of the themes be itself explanation sufficient, has it not in some measure been owing to the Divine artlessness and power of the narrative that Genesis has gathered towards itself so much of the genius of Christendom? And after gazing on the ‘Deluge’ of Turner or listening to the ‘Creation’ of Haydn, after reading Yondel’s Lucifer, or Milton’s Paradise Lost, The Death of Ahel by Gesner, The World before the Flood by Montgomery, how is it that it all feels so familiar and so fundamentally true, unless it be that the original has been sketched in outlines so firm, with tints so transparent and details so suggestive, that the world could not bear the books which might be written, by expanding the great facts embodied in this Book of the Beginning? For Moses we claim that he is the true Father of History; and what a delightful study would be the annals of our species, if always written in his spirit, so devout and candid and God-recognising! Even as it is, pens the most flippant have unconsciously recorded the fulfilment of prophecy, and the most hostile witnesses have been betrayed into involuntary recognitions of God’s ever-working and aUcommanding Providence; whilst in the pages of

Sismondi and Guizot, of Merle and N’eander, of the old Thiianiis and the recent Müller, the devout student joyfully recognises the outstretched arm of that great Governor among the nations, who is wise in counsel and excellent in working.

Of good history there is already more than any one here present is ever likely to overtake; but it is a literature of that kind for which there will be scope and fitness in the leisure of a coming world. Amongst the spirits made perfect will there not be some wdio shall still look back with wistful interest to that strange and intricate scene in which they once were actors, and who, with the fuller lights supplied by the archives. of the Upper Sanctuary, will love to trace again Earth’s finished story? Even now the subject is full of interest, and, amidst all its appeals to our human sympathies, he is blind indeed who is not startled ever and anon by the sundering of the cloud, and the coming forth of a resistless and ever-watchful Sovereignty.

Still, interesting as is the past, I must confess our personal concern lies mainly with the present and the future. In reading these bygone records our indignation is often roused by instances of gTeat wickedness or stupendous folly, and we cannot help feeling chagrined and mortified when we see splendid opportunities vilely thrown away. But each of us is at this moment making history; each of us has the option of securing an everlasting abode in those regions to which Moses and all the best and wisest of past ages are already gone. Surely we don’t mean to squander our accepted time and throw away this opportunity, and so furnish angel witnesses with a new occasion for astonishment, and ourselves with the materials of unending and unavailing regret. Indeed, my dear friends, if your taste be in unison with this evening’s theme, let me make that very circumstance a motive and an argument for sparing no diligence so as to make salvation sure. In giving you the thirst for knowledge, God has taken you out of the common herd. Won’t you suffer Him to take you into a company still more select and favoured, by awaking within you the “hunger after righteousness”? If the two co-exist, ample satisfactions are in store for you; but it will be very sad to carry hence an eager, expansive intellect, but in virtue of a heart godless, sensual, and unsanctified, to find yourself in that outer darkness where a superior understanding will only prove a sorer privation and a severer punishment. There are some historic facts to which you have not sufficiently adverted, and they differ from many which you read in your favourite authors, in as far as you are personally implicated, and are yet to come in contact with the Great Agent in them. The Incarnation of the Son of God, His death at Jerusalem,

F and the commission with which He intrusted disciples before ascending into heaven, — these events are not only amongst the best -authenticated incidents in our earthly annals, but to every man who knows them they are full of anxious import. 0 be entreated to advert to them, and dwell upon them, till they become the hinges of your happier history; dwell upon them till, with its simple key, the gospel opens for you a door in your vale of trouble, and lets you out into a golden future; dwell upon them till, not in knowledge onty, but in righteousness and true holiness, your mind is renewed after the image of the second Adam; dwell upon them till Christ’s resurrection has bridged a path over your own grave, and His ascension and intercession have taught your thoughts to mount toward heaven.