The Curse of Meroz

“Curse ye Meroz, saith the angel of the Lord, Curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.” — JUDGES v. 23.

DEBORAH and Barak had gained a great victory in the plain of Esdraelon and along the skirts of the mountain of Little Herrnon. Their enemy Sisera had fled away completely routed, and the wild, fierce, strong woman who “judged Israel in those days,” and the captain of the Israelitish army, sang a splendid proud song of triumph. In it they recount the tribes who had come up to their duty, who had shared the labor and the glory of the fight. And then, in the midst of the torrent of song there comes this other strain of fiery indignation. One town or village, Meroz, had hung back. Hidden away in some safe valley, it had heard the call which summoned every patriot, but it knew it was in no danger. It had felt the shock of battle on the other side of the hills, and nestled and hid itself only the more snugly. “Curse ye Meroz, saith the angel of the Lord; curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.” It is a fierce vindictive strain. It bursts from the lips of an exalted furious woman. But it declares one of the most natural indignations of the human heart.

Meroz is gone. No record of it except this verse remains. The most ingenious and indefatigable explorer cannot even guess where it once stood. But the curse remains; the violent outburst of the contempt and anger which men feel who have fought and suffered and agonized, and then see other men who have the same interest in the result which they have, coming out cool and unwounded from their safe hiding places to take a part of the victory which they have done nothing to secure. Meroz stands for that. It sometimes happens that a man or a town passes completely away from the face of the earth and from the memory of men, and only leaves a name which stands as a sort of symbol or synonyme of some quality, some virtue or some vice, for ever. So Meroz stands for the shirker; for him who is willing to see other people fight the battles of life, while he simply comes in to take the spoils. No wonder Deborah and Barak were indignant. Their wounds were still aching; their people were dead and dying all around them; and here was Meroz, idle and comfortable, and yet, because she was part of the same country, sure to get the benefit of the great victory as much as any.

It was not only personal anger. This cowardly and idle town had not come “to the help of the Lord.” Deborah knew that the cause of Jehovah had been in terrible danger. It seemed as if it had only barely been saved. She was filled with horror when she thought what would have been the consequences if it had been lost. And here sat this village, whose weight perhaps might have furnished just what was needed to turn the doubtful scale; here it had sat through all the critical and dreadful day, looking on and doing nothing. It was all her passionate sense of the preciousness of God’s government and the danger in which it had stood which burst from her lips when she cursed Meroz.

There are many people always who are in the community and in the world what Meroz was in Palestine. For there is an everlasting struggle going on against wickedness and wretchedness. It never ceases. It changes but it never ceases. It shifts from one place to another. It dies out in one form only to burst out in some other shape. It seems to flag sometimes as if the enemy were giving way, but it never really stops; the endless struggle of all that is good in the world against the enemies of God, against sin and error and want and woe. And the strange and sad thought which comes upon our minds sometimes is of how few people after all are really heartily engaged in that struggle, how few have cast themselves into it with all their hearts, how many there are who stand apart and wish it well but never expose themselves for it nor do anything to help it.

Look at the manifest forms in which men show their will to work for God and goodness. Those of you who have had any occasion to observe it know full well by what a very small number of persons the charitable and missionary works of the church and all operations which require public spirit in a community are carried on. If there is a reform to be urged; if there is an abuse to be corrected in the administration of affairs; if there is some oppressed and degraded class whose rights, which they cannot assert themselves, must be asserted for them; if there is a palpable wrong done every day upon our streets, — most of you know how very few are the people in this city, who, apart from any private interest in the matter, are looked to as likely to take any concern for the public good. The subscription papers which one sees passing about for public objects might almost as well be stereotyped as written, so constantly do they repeat the same limited list of well known names.

These are superficial signs. But ask yourself again, How many of the people among us who are in the positions of influence in various occupations, feel any kind of responsibility for the elevation of their occupation, feel any desire of making it a stronghold against the power of evil? How many merchants feel that it belongs to them to elevate the standards of trade? How many teachers value their relation to the young because they have the chance to strengthen character against temptation? How many men and women in social life care to develop the higher uses of society, making it the bulwark and the educator of men’s purer, finer, deeper life? Every occupation is capable of this profounder treatment, besides its mere treatment as a means of livelihood or of personal advancement. In every occupation there are some men who conceive of it so. How few they are! How the mass of men who trade and teach and live their social life, never get beyond the merely selfish thought about it all! The lack of a sense of responsibility, the selfishness of life, is the great impression that is forced upon us constantly.

It is so even in religion. To how many Christians does the religious life present itself in the enthusiastic and inspiring aspect of working and fighting for God?

How almost all Christians never get beyond the first thought of saving their own souls! I think I am as ready as any man to understand the vast variety of forms under which self-devotion may be shown, and not to impute selfishness to that which simply is not unselfish in certain special forms. But, making all broad allowances, I think there is nothing which so comes to impress a man as the way in which the vast majority of men hold back and, with no ill-will but all good wishes, let the interests of their fellow-men and of goodness and of God take care of themselves. I should like to speak to-day of the curse of Meroz, the curse of uselessness, the curse of shirking; and I should rejoice in deed if I could make any young man see how wretched it is and inspire him with some noble desire to do some of the work, to fight some of the enemies of God.

Notice then first of all that the sin for which Meroz is cursed is pure inaction. There is no sign that its people gave any aid or comfort to the enemy. They merely did nothing. We hear so much about the danger of wrong thinking and the danger of wrong doing. There is the other danger, of not doing right and not thinking right, of not doing and not thinking at all. It is hard for many people to feel that there is danger and harm in that, the worst of harm and danger. And the trouble comes, I think, from the low condition of spirit ual vitality, from the lack of emphasis and vigor in the whole conception of a man’s own life. A man who is but half alive, a poor helpless invalid shut up in his room, hears the roar of human life going on past his windows, and it causes him no self-reproach that he is not in it, that he has no part or share in all this work. He does not expect it of himself. He recognizes still the positive sins. He knows that he has no right to commit murder, or to forge, or to lie as he sits there. His helplessness has not released him from any of those obligations. But he does feel released from enterprise and activity. He is not called upon to do a well man’s work. His task is only to keep himself alive. Now the spiritual and moral vitality of many men is low. What can revive it? What can put strength and vigor into it? There is a verse of St. John which, among many other things which it tells, tells this, I think. “He that hath the Son hath life,” John says, “and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.” That is a great declaration. It says that if a man takes Christ, that is to say if a man loves and serves Christ because Christ has redeemed him into the family of God, he really lives, vigor comes into him, responsibility lays hold upon him. The work of the world becomes his work. God’s tasks become his tasks. The enemies of God become his enemies. This is the meaning of countless passages which people make to mean so much shallower, so much smaller things. “God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him,” John says again. When Christ has redeemed a man, and the man knows his redemption and wants to serve Christ in gratitude, then the invalidism of the soul is gone. The man lives all through and through, and wherever Christ needs him he is ready; which merely means that wherever there is any good work to be done, he does it.

Now there are in all our cities, and this city has its full share of them, a great multitude of useless men, and of men perfectly contented in their uselessness. Many a man looks back upon Iris life, and save for the kindly offices which he has rendered to his immediate associates, he cannot remember one useful thing he ever did. He never stood up for a good cause. He never remonstrated against an evil. He never helped a bad man to be better. A merely useless man! His life might drop out of the host to-morrow and none would miss a soldier from the ranks. No onset or defence would be the weaker for his going. I know not how he reconciles it to himself. It may be that the palsy of a fashionable education has been on him from his birth. Perhaps he grew up, as you perhaps are bringing up your children now, to think that because his life was plentifully provided against necessity, there fore it was free from duty. There is nothing so pitiable as to see a boy in some self-indulgent household, who evidently came into the world with faculties to make him be, and make him enjoy being, a strong and helpful worker for God and man, having all chance and taste for using these faculties quietly, steadily crushed out of him by the constant pressure of a fashionable home. It is the child of God being slowly made into the man of the world. But however it came about, let us take the only too familiar phenomenon of the use less man who excuses his uselessness, and let us see what are some of the various forms which his uselessness assumes. I shall speak of three; cowardice, and false humility, and indolence. Let us see how dead they make a man; and how the Son of God is the true life of all of them.

1. The first source then of the uselessness of good men, or, if you please, of men who are not bad, is moral cowardice. Cowardice we call the most contemptible of vices. It is the one whose imputation we most indignantly resent. To be called a coward would make the blood boil in the veins of any of us. But the vice is wonderfully common. Nay, we often find ourselves wondering whether it is not universal, whether we are not all cowards somewhere in our nature. Physical cowardice all of us do not have. Indeed physical cowardice is rarer than we think. A war or a shipwreck always brings out our surprise when we see how many men there are that can march up to a battery, or stand and watch the water creep up the side of their ship to drown them, and never quail But moral courage is an other thing. To dare to do just what we know we ought to do, without being in the least hindered or distorted by the presence of men who we know will either hate or despise or ridicule us for what we are doing, that is rare indeed. Men think they have it till their test comes. Why, there is in this community; nay, there is in this congregation to-day, an amount of right conviction which, if it were set free into right action by complete release from moral cowardice, would be felt through the land. A man is deeply assured of Christianity. He is trying to serve Christ. He is always trying to be spiritual. If he can creep up at night and drive a spike into some cannon of infidelity or sin when no one sees him, there is something in his heart that makes him do it. He will give his anonymous dollar or thousand dollars to religious work. But he never stands out boldly on the Lord’s side, never declares himself a Christian and says that the work of his Master shall be the work of his life. Is it cowardice? He says there is no man he is afraid of; and there is none. The fear is concentrated on no individual. But is there not a sense of hostile or contemptuous surroundings that lies like a chilling hand upon what ought to be the most exuberant and spontaneous utterance of life? Have not the long years of living in such an atmosphere enfeebled the power of the native will? One sees it in old men continually, the fear which keeps the best and most enthusiastic hopes and wishes chained. One has but little expectation of the breaking of that chain in them. But it is sad to see those same chains fastening themselves on younger men. The mere boy feels them growing. He wants to be generous, pure, devoted, Christian. Every thing urges him to put his life from the first upon the side of righteousness and Christ. And what hinders him? He early learns to cloak it under various names, but the power itself is fear. Cowardice wrings the foul or profane word from the lips that hate it while they utter it. Cowardice stifles the manly and indignant rebuke at the piece of conventional and approved meanness of the college or the shop. Cowardice keeps the low standards of honor traditional and unbroken through generations of boys. Cowardice holds the young Christian back from a frank acknowledgment of his Lord.

It is easy to make an argument with such a moral cowardice. It is easy for the boy or man who finds that he is losing his best life out of fear of his fellows to reason with himself. “Come,” he says to himself; “I am failing of my duty, I am dishonoring my best convictions, I am living a lie; and all because I am afraid of whom? Of a boy or a man, or of a company of boys or men whom I cannot respect. I know that he whom I feai is mean and low in his judgments. He is wicked, and in his heart there is no doubt the misgiving of wickedness. He probably distrusts and only half believes in his own abuse or his own sneer. And yet I am afraid of him. And what am I afraid that he will do? Why, either that he will detest me or ridicule me. Suppose he does. What is the value of these missiles? Do I really care for his praise so much that to lose it would really give me pain? And then am I not wrong in thinking that he cares enough about me to waste upon me either his hate or his contempt? Do I not over estimate the space which I fill in his thoughts? Am I not doing myself wrong in order that a man or a world may think well of me, which in reality never thinks of me at all?” This is the argument which the conscious coward holds with himself. It is unanswerable. It ought to break the chains instantly and set the coward free. A man ought to cast his fears to the winds when he comes to realize that he is fearing contemptible people, and fearing that they will do to him contemptible things which in all probability they will never care enough about him to do at all. That is what many a man does realize about his cowardice; and does it set him free? Almost never, I believe. Almost never is a man made independent and brave by having it proved to him that it is a foolish thing to be afraid. No, men do not escape from their cowardice so. Nothing except the inflow of a larger consecration which oversweeps and drowns their cowardice can really put it out of the way forever. Nothing but the knowledge of God’s love, taking such possession of a man that his one wish and thought in life is to glorify and serve God, can liberate him from, because it makes him totally forget, his fear of man. “I will walk at liberty because I keep Thy commandments.” 0 those great words of David! What an everlasting story they tell of the liberty that comes by lofty ser vice. They tell of what you young people need to save you, at the very outset of your life, from cowardice. Not by despising men will you cease to fear them. People’s worst slavery very often is to things and people that they despise. Only by loving God and fearing Him with that fear whose heart and soul is love; only by letting Christ show God to you so that you must see Him; only so shall you tread your cowardice under your feet and be free for your best life.

2. We must go on to the second of the causes of the uselessness of men who might be useful, which I called false humility. Humility is good when it stimulates, it is bad when it paralyzes, the active powers of a man. It may do either. We have noble examples of humility as a stimulus; the sense of weakness making a man all the more ardent to use all the strength he has. But if conscious weakness causes a man to believe that it makes no difference whether he works or not, then his humility is his curse. Perhaps this was part of the trouble of Meroz. The little village in the hills, poor, insignificant perhaps, lay listening to the gathering of the tribes. She saw the signal fires and heard the summons of the trumpet run through all the land. She knew the summons was for her as well as all the rest. But who was she? What could she do? What strength could she add to the host? What terror could she in spire in the foe? What would Barak care for her support, or Sisera for her hostility? So she lay still and let the battle fight itself through without her. Do you not recognize the picture? Whenever men hide behind their conscious feebleness; whenever, because they can do so little, they content themselves with doing nothing; whenever the one-talented men stand with their napkins in their hands along the roadside of life, — there is Meroz over again. Once more the argument is clear enough; as clear with humility as it is with cowardice. Listen, how clear it is! You who say that you can do so little for any good cause that there is no use of your doing anything; you can give so little that it is not worth while for you to give anything; your word has so little weight that it need not be spoken for the Lord, — consider these things. First, what do you know about the uses of the Lord, of this great work which the Lord has to do; what do you know of it that gives you the right to say that your power is little? God may have some most critical use to put you to as soon as you declare yourself His servant. Men judge by the size of things; God judges by their fitness. Two pieces of iron lie together on a shelf. One is a great clumsy ploughshare; and the other is a delicate screw that is made to hold the finest joint of some subtle machinery in place. An ignorant boor comes up and takes the great piece and treasures it. The little piece he sees is little, and throws it away. Fitness is more than size. You can see something of your size; but you can see almost nothing of your fitness until you understand all the wonderful manifold work that God has to do. It is a most wanton presumption and pride for any man to dare to be sure that there is not some very important and critical place which just he and no one else is made to fill. It is almost as presumptuous to think you can do nothing as to think you can do everything. The latter folly supposes that God exhausted Himself when He made you; but the former supposes that God made a hopeless blunder when He made you, which it is quite as impious for you to think.

And remember, in the second place, what would happen if all the little people in the world held up their littleness like a shield before them as you hold up yours. Grant that you are as small as you think you are, you are the average size of moral and intellectual humanity. Let all the Merozes in the land be humble like you, and where shall be the army? Only when men like you wake up and shake the paralysis of their humility away, shall we begin to see the dawn of that glorious millenium for which we sigh; which will consist not in the transformation of men into angels, nor in the coming forth of a few colossal men to be the patterns and the champions of life, but simply in each man, through the length and breadth of the great world, doing his best.

Remember, too, that such a humility as yours, the humility that enfeebles and disarms you, comes, if you get at its root, from an over-thought about yourself, an over-sense of your own personality, and so is close akin to pride. It has run all around the circle in its desire to escape from pride, and has almost got back to pride again. Now pride is the thickest and most blinding medium through which the human eye can look at any thing. If your humility is not transparent but muddy, so that you see things not more clearly but less clearly because of it, you may be sure there is pride in it. 0 my friends, there is a humility which some men are too humble to feel, a distrust of self which some men are too forgetful of self ever to experience.

The argument, then, against allowing any sense of weakness to keep us from doing all that we can do, is perfectly conclusive. But, once again, does this argument dispel the paralysis and set men free to work? Almost never, I believe, again. Not by studying him self, but by forgetting himself in the desire to serve his Lord, does a man exchange the false humility which crushes for the true humility which inspires. What has become of the self-distrust and shyness of that gentle scholar who has turned into a Boanerges of the truth; or of that timid shrinking woman who goes unmoved through the hooting of a rabble to the stake? Both have lost themselves in their Lord. Both have learned the love of Christ till that became the one fact of their existence; and then the call of Him who loved them has drawn the soul out of all self-consciousness. They have forgotten themselves, forgotten even their humility, and are wholly His. And there is the door through which all morbid self-distrust, all the despair of conscious weakness, must find escape.

3. I shall not need to say much upon the third of the causes for men’s shirking the duties and responsibilities of life. Not that it is not important, but that it is so simple. It is mere indolence, mere laziness. Perhaps Meroz was not afraid. Perhaps she was not shy and self-distrustful. Perhaps she simply believed that the work of God would somehow get itself done without her, and so waited and waited and came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty. Ah, we are always giving elaborate and complicated accounts both of the virtues and the vices of our fellow-men which are really as simple and explicable as possible, as clear as day light. A man does a good thing and we are not content to say that he does it because he is a good man, but we must find strange obscure motives for it, some far-off policies and plans, some base root for this bright flower. Another man lets his duty, his clear duty, go undone, and again we set our ingenuity to work to guess why he does not do it. He misconceives his duty, he is too modest, he is waiting for something; when the real trouble is in a simple gross laziness, a mere self-indulgent indolence, which makes him indifferent to duty altogether. Let me go back to the picture which I tried to draw at the beginning of this sermon; a man who was born in luxury has lived in luxury, and now is coming on to middle life with the habits of his youth about him. He belongs to that strange, undefined, and yet distinct condition of life which is called society or fashion or respectability. That is a strange condition. It is not characterized by remarkable intelligence, not by peculiar education, not always by the most perfect breeding; but the main thing about it is that over it there hovers a vague air of privilege. The men and women who live in it are not looked to by other people, and do not look to themselves, for the active energetic contributions to the labor of life. It does not furnish the workers to the state or to the church. With this condition many of you are perfectly familiar. To it many of you belong, and feel its influence. Nothing is expected of you, and you do nothing. A well-bred, good-natured selfishness fills up the life of such a man. Duty? It seems as if he never had heard the word; or as if he thought that it belonged, like those other two words, poverty and work, to beings of another order from himself. Now is there any hope for such a man? 0, if he were only a fancy sketch! 0, if he were not real and actual all through the city! 0, if there were not whole hosts of boys, with the capacity in them to be something better, who are growing up with him as the object of their admiration, and becoming year by year more and more like him! Is there any hope of such a man coming to understand that it is not for such a life as he is living that God has made him? I own the only chance I see is in his coming to understand, in some real sense and meaning of those words, that God did make him. I think that is the real knowledge that is needed in our parlors and our clubs; needed there, lacking there, often quite as much as in our drinking saloons and dens of thieves. That a man’s life is not an accident, that we are here because God put us here as the master mechanic puts each bolt and shaft of the engine into the place where it is wanted; is not that the quickening, the transforming knowledge? That physical strength, those strong arms and nimble hands, are not accidents; not an accident, that quick perception and that power of endurance; not an accident, that easy temper and careless acceptance of the things of life which might be elevated into faith. Let a man know this, and his sense of fitness must be outraged every day as he hears the life, which he was made for, claiming

him, and yet goes on in uselessness. But there is only one way to really know this deeply. The only way to really know that God made us is to let God remake, regenerate us. The only way to be sure that God gave us our physical life is to let Hini.

give us the spiritual life which shall declare for the physical life an adequate and worthy purpose. The only way to realize that we are God’s children is to let Christ lead us to our Father. That is the only permanent escape from indolence, from self-indulgence; the grateful and obedient dedication to God through Christ which makes all good work, all self-sacrifice, a privilege and joy instead of a hardship, since it is done for Him.

The curse of Meroz is the curse of uselessness; and these are the sources out of which it comes — cowardice and false humility and indolence. They are the stones piled upon the sepulchres of vigor and energy and work for God, whose crushing weight cannot be computed. Who shall roll us away those stones? Nothing can do it but the power of Christ. The manhood that is touched by Him rises into life. I have tried to show you what that means. 0 my friends, it means this, that when a man has understood the life and cross of Jesus, and really knows that he is redeemed and saved, his soul leaps up in love and wants to serve its Savior; and then he is afraid of nobody; and however little his own strength is, he wants to give it all; and the cords of his self-indulgence snap like cobwebs. Then he enters the new life of usefulness. And what a change it is! To be working with God, however humbly; to have part of that service which suns and stars, which angels and archangels, which strong and patient and holy men and women in all times have done; to be, in some small corner of the field, stout and brave and at last triumphant in our fight with lust and cruelty and falsehood, with want or woe or ignorance, with unbelief and scorn, with any of the enemies of God: to be distinctly on God’s side, though the weight of the work we do may be utterly inappreciable, — what a change it is when a poor, selfish, cowardly, fastidious, idle human creature comes to this! Blessed is he that cometh to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty. There is no curse for him. No wounds that he can receive while he is righting on that side can harm him. To fight there is itself to conquer, even though the victory comes through pain and death, as it came to Him under whom we fight, the Captain of our Salvation, Jesus Christ.

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