Samuel the Seer

I have said that there is a distinction between the earlier and the later forms in the Great Gallery — that, contrary to expectation, we proceed from the ideal to the actual. We have seen the religious life beginning in that which transcends the life of the hour, seeking a larger environment than that which earth can sive. We have seen the Adams claiming a wider garden, and the Enochs aspiring to a fairer world. The story of the Tower of Babel itself, though the record of an act of impiety, is singularly illustrative of the religious tendencies of the Early Gallery; it shows us the child-man still in search of a building ‘behind the veil.’ But, as we enter further into the Gallery, we have observed a change.

We have witnessed in Moses the beginning of 239 anew régime. Religion has come down from the clouds to tread the narrow way, the common, dusty way. This Gallery tells us it has been with first faith as it is with first poetry. Poetry begins with the stars, and clothes celestial things in human forms. But by and by it descends. Its whole Azstory has been a descent — a gradual stooping from the height to the valley. Each step has been a step nearer to the commonplace. Its dawn has been with the gods of mythology, its morning with the heroes of Homer, its forenoon with Dante’s vision of human destiny, its midday with Milton’s moral retrospect, its evening with Wordsworth’s little girl sitting with her porringer beside the grave. Even such is the course which this Gallery claims for relzgzon — a path from the high to the lowly, a road from the gold to the grey, a progress from the stones of the heavenly temple to the stones of the earthly quarry.

Is the Gallery right? Yes; it is true to experience. It describes the course of faith

in the heart of every man. At the opening of life we see God in mysterious things — things which we cannot understand. We see Him in sudden death; we hear Him in the thunder-storm; we trace His footprints in the dread catastrophe. As we advance in years our standpoint is changed; we find God nearer the ground. We begin to discover Him in what we do understand. We used to see His wonders in what we believed to be abnormal; but there comes a time when the marvel of a thing is its naturalness. The Psalmist says, ‘Open Thou mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things zn Thy law’ — ‘in Thy commonplace requirements. He had always been able to find such marvels in what he believed to be outside the law — the miraculous, the supernatural, the inexplicable. But he feels that the triumph of worship only truly comes when God is reverenced in His ordinary steps and recognised in the objects of the common day. He feels that the summer of religion will only be reached in that hour when the duties of prosaic life shall be duties done to God, and when Man’s interest in the affairs of Man shall be

Q recognised as his surrender to the Father’s will.

I can almost trace the steps of gradation which mark the phases of faith displayed by the Great Gallery. At the most remote end of the Gallery stands Enoch. He has a far-away look. His eye is upturned toward the heavens. His God is ¢here, and he feels that he must ascend there to find Him. Then comes Noah. With him the Divine Spirit is no longer a silent spectator in the heavens; He moves on the face of the waters; He reveals His presence in the flood. Religion has come into contact with the earth, has shown itself as a world-power. Still, it has only touched the world on a grand scale. It has revealed itself in a big catastrophe, in a mighty revolution, in a stupendous act of Providence. Man needs more than ¢hat for his spiritual sustenance. And so, as we traverse the Gallery, the Divine Spirit comés nearer still. It meets Man in his hours of special trouble. It meets the toiling Abraham under the oak of Mamre, the fretted Isaac in his struggles at Gerar, the impoverished Jacob in his pillow of stone at Bethel. Yet Man wants more than even this. Life is not made up of moments fraught with crisis. It is made up of moments fraught with commonplace; and, if we would have a present God, He must meet us eve. And so, God draws nearer still to Man’s ordinary day. He comes to Moses in the revelation of a universal law — the law of conscience dictating the duty between man and man. Can He approach closerthan that? Yes. Zatwas the revelation of God in the community. But I want more than the life of the community; I want my own life made strong. Therefore, by and by, there appears in the Gallery a life distinguished only in this, that his physical strength is ‘inspired by God, that his bodily force is stimulated and renewed by the direct action of the Divine Spirit. In that Picture — the figure of Samson, the Divine has come into closer touch with the human than even in the Portrait of Moses. Tat was the illumination of conscience; 7Zkzs is an illumination more

condescending still — the entrance of the

Divine strength into a tabernacle of human clay.

I shall not linger, however, before the figure of Samson. I pass him by, for the simple reason that he is not the climax of the process. The climax appears in the next figure — Samuel. In Moses we have God touching the moral man; in Samson we have God touching the physical man; but in Samuel we have a deeper stretch of condescension — God in communion with the life of a child. You have seen the noonday sun, in the course of its progress, centre for a moment its illumination on one corner of a valley. Even such is the illumination of Samuel. The light of heaven which has been long impending reaches in him the corner of the valley. We see a meeting of extremes — God and the child. That Divine Life which has dwelt in the heavens, moved in the flood, throbbed in the night of Bethel, and glittered in the revealings of Sinai, is seen concentrating its whole energy on the inspiring of a little boy. It is the latest stooping of the Spirit of God

St he - — er which the Gallery has yet proclaimed. Come, and let us meditate on this bridal of the earth and sky, this newest marriage ring which God has wrought for Man! Let us try to disregard all local circumstances! Let us ignore the things peculiar to the time; let us fix our eyes on that which is universal! Let us consider the meaning of this Portrait, not to the house of Israel, not to the house of Eli, not even to that visible house of God where the Jewish Priesthood ministered, but to you and me, to the furthest ends of the world, to the heart and conscience of humanity!

In the days when the High Priest Eli was Judge of Israel, there appeared in the sanctuary of Shiloh a wonderful child; his name was Samuel. It was a dark and stormy time; there were fears within and fightings without. Israel was climbing a steep hill — arduously, painfully. Her progress was slow; she was alternately worsted and victorious — to-day left in the valley, to-morrow gaining a height. And the struggle was more arduous from the fact that there was no prophecy. It was an age of materialism. The hands of Moses were no longer uplifted on the mountain; the eyes of Moses no longer gazed on a promised glory. Religion had become a form; its sfzvzt had fled. There were few remains left of that heroic time when Joshua had fought for God, and Deborah had sung for God. The nation had lost its poetry, and had lost its faith, These had to be recreated, kindled anew at the lamp of heaven. Where was the new kindling to begin? Where was the Divine Spirit to touch the world once more? In the heart of the sage? No. In the breast of the old man? No. In the leaders of the Jewish armies? No. It was to begin in the soul of a little child. Out of the mouth of a babe in knowledge, God was to ordain strength. All Israel was startled by the tidings that there had appeared a prophetic chz/ld. From Dan to Beersheba there ran a thrill of wonder. Israel had been asking when the next Moses would appear. Here he came — in the garb of a tiny boy! Men were speechless with surprise. It was a surprise that was never to be equalled until that day when Christ was to put a little child in the centre of the apostolic band. Was he a miracle — this little Samuel? No — in the view characteristic of the Bible he is the real and normal aspect of humanity. So normal is he that Christ says we must all return to his state before we can become seers. What, think you, does Jesus mean when He declares that we can only realise the beauty of the kingdom through the eyes of a little child? Is it not simply this, that to see the beauty of anything we require a first eye? Take the Bible itself. Perhaps of all literary productions it is, from a literary point of view, the least appreciated. Why so? Just because its words are the most familiar. To see the beauties of the Bible, one would require to say to us what the prophet said to Hezekiah, ‘ Let the shadow go back ten degrees!’ We should need to be transported back into life’s morning, to divest ourselves of all preconceived opinions, to imagine that we were reading the record for the first time. That is precisely the standpoint which Christianity promises to create. It professes to make old things new, in other words, to let us see the old things as they looked when they were new, and so to give us a true sense of their power and beauty. What is this but to recreate in us the life of Samuel! What is this but to say that the true seer must ever be a child, that, however grown-up he be, it is by the survival of his childhood that he sees the kingdom of God! Little Samuel is no miracle. He reveals the normal law of faith. He is the first of the prophets because he is the first of inspired children. He isa representative maz in religion because he is a representative child. All seers of God’s kingdom have seen it by the light of their childhood. We do not drop our childhood when we become men; we carry it with us zzfo the life of men. Every sage bears within his bosom a little Samuel — an instinctive child-life which concludes without reasoning, adores without arguments, worships without symbols, prays without words. The man who listens to ¢hzs voice is a prophet of the

Kingdom.

Let us look now at the form in which this voice came to the child Samuel. We all like to witness the beginning of things. We learn more from the origin of a process than from all its future manifestations. We are permitted to witness the first hour of the religious vision of Samuel. If that first hour were something abnormal, it would not be worth considering. But it is not abnormal; it is the rule according to which all Divine vision comes. There are two things about Samuel’s illumination which are very prominent in the Picture, and which seem to me to be typical of religious illumination in general. Let us glance at each of them as they are exhibited in the Great Gallery.

The first is that the call of Samuel does not come to him as a call from heaven, but as a voice from earth. This is all the more remarkable in the light of the fact that from the very outset Samuel was placed in a religious environment. His parents wished him to be a pious child. From the dawn of his intelligence they consigned him to the care of the

High Priest Eli, in whose house he became a servant. His employment was in the things of the sanctuary. He ministered in the temple of Shiloh. What he did, we do not exactly know. Of course, it must have been work external to the actual service of the sanctuary; yet he wore a little ephod to mark the fact that he was engaged in temple duty. In any case, he was breathing every moment the atmosphere of the house of God and using every day the symbols of things Divine. We expect it will be in the discharge of these duties that his illumination will come. No. It is when the work of the day is done, when the little priest has retired to rest, that the message from heaven greets him. And it does not greet him as a message from heaven. A voice cries ‘Samuel!’ — he never dreams it is any other voice than that of Eli. He rises from his couch to get his orders from human lips; ‘I did not call you,’ says his master. He lies down again; and again a voice cries ‘Samuel!’ A second time he deems it to be only human; a second time he

is told there has been no human call. Once more he seeks his rest, and once more the voice cries ‘Samuel!’ Even then he believes it to be human; even then he deems it a summons from earthly lips. The voice of God has assumed the accents of a man.

Now, in this feature of the Portrait the artist has recorded not an abnormal, but a universal symptom of the religious life. Our deepest impressions of spiritual things come to us indirectly. It is not by a voice from heaven that a man believes himself to be in the presence of God; it is by the blending of earthly voices. When two or three circumstances, distinctively different in origin and emanating from different points of the compass, appear to converge towards one definite result, we are constrained to say, ‘ This is the will of God.’ How does a man get inspired with the belief that God has a mission for him? By imagining he hears voices from the sky? Very rarely has it been ¢hus. In the large majority of cases the sense of a Divine mission has come from observing how independent events have conspired in place and time to further an individual destiny. An Egyptian princess happens to be passing when a child is floating on the Nile river; that child in after years will probably feel that his life was preserved for something. A band of Ishmaelites is on its journey at the very spot and hour in which a boy is about to experience violence; that boy in the days to come will claim a special destiny. A ram is caught by the horns in a thicket at the very moment when a man is debating within himself what would be the most suitable burnt offering; that ram will assuredly be accepted as the object of sacrifice preferred by heaven.

There is a remarkable passage in the Jewish Scriptures, ‘Ye shall hear a voice dehind you, saying, “This is the way; walk ye in it!”’ I believe that to the Jew the voice of God ever came from behind — from the region of past experience. He followed because he felt he had been already led — led by a stream of tendencies over which he had no control, and whose united currents had been produced by

a connection he could not understand. He heard the Divine because he had first heard the human. The voice of God came to him as the voice of Eli — as the voice of earthly influences. It was in looking back that he saw their sacred character. It was in retrospect that he recognised the presence of the Spirit of God beneath those seemingly mechanical movements which had shaped his worldly way.

But there is a second feature in this call of Samuel which is worthy of our attention. From the moment in which he recognised the real origin of the message, he perceived it to be something which would disturb the calm of his life. It brought not peace, but a sword. What was this message which young Samuel received? It was the command to denounce the wickedness of the house of Eli. I do not suppose that he then heard of this wickedness for the first time; doubtless there had already rung in his ears many human complaints. But now for the first time it was borne in upon him that these human complaints were the voice of God. His conscience told him that, if he were a true minister at the Divine altar, it was incumbent on him to bring before the High Priest Eli the iniquity of his own family. When conscience spoke, Samuel resolved to obey; but consider what that resolve meant to him! To obey it, was to endanger all his worldly interests. It was likely to procure his dismissal from the service of the High Priest; and to be dismissed from the service of a High Priest would be, in the opinion of the Jewish race, to contract an indelible stain. The choice before Samuel was the choice between the rose and the thistle. On the one side was comfort for the present and an open door for the future; on the other there was a probable expulsion into the cold world and a shutting of all the gates which led to promotion.

Now, although the case of Samuel is an accentuated one, the call of duty is nearly always a call to struggle. The very idea of duty implies restraint or constraint. Duty is the middle term between compulsion and love; it is halfway between Egypt and Canaan; it is the desert. Outward force has passed, but

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SAMUEL THE SEER 26n

spontaneity has not yet come. I move voluntarily; but I move with a burden, and I move slowly. I have met my angel, but I strugele with my angel; I have seen God face to face, but I halt upon my thigh. Our moments of duty are never unconscious moments, never light-hearted moments. They have always a sense of pressure, always an obstruction at the door. The life of Samuel is, from the dawn, a life of sacrifice. The path on which his childhood went forth was a path of thorns; and he took it knowing it to be so. All who have followed his steps have had to tread the Same narrow way. In all ages Herod has sought the young child to kill it. The Divine life has always run counter to a worldly principle, and has required to make its way in conflict with that principle. The road of individual pleasure is not parallel with the road of virtue. They will diverge with you as they diverged with Samuel — at the very point where duty calls. The hour of his spiritual promotion was precisely that hour which presaged his material degradation. The experience of the first prophet will be the experience of all Christian seers.

I have confined myself to the opening of Samuel’s life, because it is in the opening of his life that he is universally representative. He was to live long, to do much, to suffer many things. He was to purify public worship, to root out idolatry, to judge the tribes of Israel, to humble the pride of the Philistine, to be the maker and the unmaker of kings. The sense of his presence in the nation was to be so vivid that it was to outlast even his life, for, after he had passed away, men were to believe in the apparition of his spectre. But these things belong to the annals of Judaism, not to the annals of humanity. What belongs to humanity is the fact that the spirit of prophecy came to him through the spirit of a little child. This is the one abiding element in the life of Samuel. It is the one element which is not connected with Shiloh, with Ramah, with Gilgal, with any local haunt whatever, but which is found in every place and at every time. The name of Samuel is

OO traditionally associated with the establishing of the prophetic school; and his spirit of prophecy came to him in childhood. That is the fact of permanent interest in this delineation of the Great Gallery; for it is still through the intuitions of the child-life that Man sees the kingdom of God.

There were three great functions in the Jewish nation whose simultaneous existence was contemporary with the life of Samuel — Pew rovuetyathemrriest, andy the: Kingwin! believe these three represent the three periods in the conception of time — yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow. The Priest is the representative of the past. He exists as a salve to the pains of memory — the memory of sins committed in days of old; his sacrifices are efforts to wash these away. The King represents the present. He exists to guide the hand at the actual hour, to give the law which shall regulate the immediate course of action. But the Prophet is the representative of the future... He exists to tell, not merely of forthcoming events, but of eternal principles. It is his - mission to reveal the issues of right and wrong — to proclaim how, by an inevitable law, the one will bring joy and the other pain. And therefore it is that the organ of the prophetic life is ever the spirit of the child. Childhood is the time that looks forward. Old age habitually looks dack; it is the time for memory. Manhood generally looks round; it is the time for observation. But childhood looks forward; it is the time for hope. Judaism provided for all three; she comforted the soul on every i

side. Her Priest comforted the memory; he

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suggested an expiation of the past. Her King

gave strength for present weakness; he surrounded her with defensive bulwarks. Her Prophet pointed her on to a bright morning, to a day when the harvest sown in tears should be reaped in joy, and when the desert should be glad and blossom as the rose. The nation equipped with these is equipped indeed.

Y Father, prepare a place for the child- life that lingers in my heart! Prepare a place for that instinct which points toward

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to-morrow! Thou hast prepared a place for my yesterday — Thou hast cancelled the dark deeds of my past. Thou hast prepared a place for to-day — Thou hast promised strength for the hour. But I have a need beyond my yesterday, beyond to-day; I have a yearning for to-morrow. Shall this be the only part of my soul for which there is no environment! Thou hast provided for memory — Thou hast suffered my heart to see its past glorified. Thou hast provided for the vision of to-day — Thou hast sent the energy with the emergency and the refuge with the storm. But is there to be no provision for hope, O my Father! Thou hast a voice to greet my ear when I turn dackward; Thou hast a voice to greet my ear when I turn vound; hast Thou no voice to greet my ear when I look forward! Shall the door of my future be the only unopened door! Why, then, hast Thou taught me to £uock there! When I knock at the door of memory, I am answered; I can undo much that tarnished my yesterday. When I knock at the door of to-day, Iam answered;

I can help to move the wheel that moves the world. But when I knock at the door of to-morrow, shall there be no answer but the delusive echo of my heart! Shall hope be a blind-alley — the one blind-alley of the universe! Shall aspiration be winged — for no atmosphere! Shall faith be fledged — for no flight! Shall foresight be given — for no future! Shall there be longings on the sea — when there never was land! Shall there be a sense of prophecy — when there has been no word of promise! It

cannot be, O my Father!

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