Elijah the Impulsive

There are three men whom the Bible Gallery dissociates from the idea of death — Enoch, Moses, and Elijah. Of each of these it is virtually declared that no one can picture for them a burying-place. Enoch has left no record of a closing life; Moses has left no trace of a physical decay; Elijah has left no sign of an extinguished fire. It is not, I think, by accident that the Great Gallery has dissociated these three forms from the idea of the dark valley. These three forms represent three qualities which have no historical limit, which are found side by side in every age — the spirit, the conscience, and the heart. Enoch represents the spirit — the craving for Divine communion. Moses represents the conscience — the eternal

law of human duty. Elijah represents the heart — the power that acts from the impulse of the moment. These three phases of mind cannot be localised; they are historically immortal. We cannot say that spirituality belongs to one century, conscience to another, impulse to a third. We cannot even say that within the memory of civilised man these three have developed. Spinoza is not in advance of Plato; Paul is not morally the superior of Moses; Luther is not more intense than Simon Peter. In all ages of civilised time man has exhibited equally these three phases — the spiritual, the moral, and the intuitive. They have been, within this limit, not only deathless, but seemingly changeless. The Gallery has proclaimed their immortality. It has incarnated each in the person of a separate life, and then it has shown us that life standing apart from the elements of decay. Enoch has no tomb; Moses has no shroud; Elijah has no setting to the chariot of his sun.

There is nothing which localises a man like the record of his death. When you announce the date of a man’s death, you fix the limit of

U his personal development in the present world. When you announce the date of his marriage, or the date of his first publication, you give no clue to his ultimate mental standpoint. But the inscription on the tombstone is the latest possible record concerning the man; it stamps indelibly his century upon him; it marks the final stretch of his environment. Here lies the szguzficance of this record of the Gallery! When it shows us Enoch translated, when it conceals the body of Moses, when it reveals Elijah ascending in his chariot of fire, it virtually says: ‘Do not regard these men as belonging to a particular century. Look at them as symbolising those three phases of the human mind which are the same in all centuries. View them as embodiments of the fact that there are three permanent elements in humanity — the devotional, the moral, and the instinctive. Consider them as revealers of the truth that, whatever else may faint or grow weary, these three will never die — the breathings of the spirit, the commands of the

conscience, and the impulses of the heart.’

I have attributed to Elijah the third of these positions. I regard him as distinctively the man of impulse, the man who is prompted by instinctive dictates. His life is.one of sudden movements, of surprises. He is more like a lance than a sword. He does not fence; he darts. He breaks forth suddenly from the silence, and as suddenly vanishes. Everything about him is abrupt; his beginning and his ending are abrupt. He comes without introduction, and he goes without warning. He appears before us like Melchizedek — without father or mother or descent. We see no childhood. We discover no home. We recognise no domestic interest. He comes before us as the Christ of St. Mark comes before us — full-grown, developed, equipped for his mission. He stands forth all at once in the political arena. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we are confronted by a spectral form denouncing idolatry, predicting vengeance. Not in the valley does he first appear. We see no trace of one who needs to climb. When we earliest meet him, it is at the top of the hill. He hurls his rebuke right at the throne. Reformers as a rule begin with the masses and creep up gradually to the classes. Elijah begins at the social summit. He stands in the court of Ahab, in the court of Jezebel; our first vision of him is in the presence of kings. He bursts upon us in full meridian. There is no gradation between the depth of silence and the blare of trumpets — yesterday he was voiceless; to-day he is thunder. It is written of John the Baptist, ‘He was in the desert till the day of his showing unto Israel.’ That could be written of Elijah. His development is quite hid from us. There is no boundary line between his desert and his glory. We do not see him rise; we behold himrisen. A few minutes ago there was darkness all round; suddenly we are in the presence of a great fire whose kindling has been invisible to us, and whose origin we do not know.

It is my opinion that the history of Elijah, as recorded in the Great Gallery, is the history of all impulsive minds. The course of all such

minds is a process not of increasing, but of subsiding flame. I do not mean that they ever diminish the actual amount of their heat; but they diminish the amount of their heat in any one direction. All impulse is at first onesided. It sees only a single way — the drastic way. It looks at the barren fig-tree and says, ‘Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground!’ In after times it loses its haste — not from declining zeal, but from increasing vision. It sees that there are other ways of dealing with the fig-tree — that zeal may be intense without being drastic. This, if I mistake not, is the course of Elijah — a gradual - subsiding from the roar into the whisper. It iS a voice growing softer, becoming ever more calm — not because the heat has lost its passion, not because the soul has drooped its wing, but because the eye has seen more clearly the hope of ultimate success.

Let us examine this process in the life of Elijah — this gradual subsiding of noise. He begins most vociferously. Like the Baptist, he comes out of his desert and shouts, ‘ Repent!’

His motive, however, is different from that of the Baptist. The Baptist denounced loose living; Elijah denounces idolatry. The Old Testament Prophet is more allied to the John who stood before Queen Mary than to the John who stood before King Herod. To John Knox, indeed, he presents a strong parallel. Elijah, like Knox, is the child of a Protestant reaction. He appears as the champion of a faith which he believes to be the primitive faith — the worship of an invisible God. Men had sought to worship God in a material form, to see Him enshrined in some object of human sense. Elijah calls them to come back — back to the forest primeval, back to those grounds of Eden where God was distinct from the trees of the garden. Elijah is the uncompromising Protestant of his time, an opponent of the image in the sanctuary. But his weapons as yet are purely physical. He brings no arguments; he exhibits no reasons. The message he delivers is a menace, ‘ Abandon your ideals, or die!’ He recognises but one force — outward compulsion, ‘You have bowed

down to idols; you will have drought and famine!’ — that is the burden of his message. There is no appeal to philosophy; there is no invitation to a controversy; there is no attempt to exhibit the inherent nature of the sin. There is simply a call to arms — a command to extirpate those who revered the forms of Nature.

Elijah, then, displays at the outset the full amount of his fire — his fire concentrated ona single point. The problem is, how to get that fire distributed. We do not wish to see it extinguished; we do not even wish to see it reduced; we want to see it diffused — spread in different directions — made less onesided. The effect of all onesided emotion is a collapse of the man who feels it. It is so with Elijah. Where do we next meet with him? In a desert place by the side of the brook Cherith. What has brought him there? The fear of King Ahab, says the Bible student. I do not believe it. Has he not just been in the presence of Ahab, bearding him to the face, denouncing his idolatry, proclaiming his retribution! If Elijah had been a timid man, then was the time for fear. Could you imagine a man who braved Ahab to his face running off in terror when Ahab had turned his back! No — not in terror. But I could imagine him doing so in physical prostration. In fact, no other explanation can be given. Why should this brave, bold man, who had met the hour of danger with unblanched cheek, be found, when the crisis was past, lurking in a desolate spot by the brook Cherith! It can only be accounted for by nerve-exhaustion — by the process of reaction from strong emotion. Elijah at the brook Cherith is an illustration of that principle which has ruled in all minds of onesided impulse. If he had been divided between anger and sorrow and pity, he would have experienced no mental reaction; the alternations of feeling would have saved him from collapse. But he abandoned himself to a single impulse, and the inevitable result was the prostration at the waters of Cherith.

And now I have to observe that this reaction was the finest training which the man could possibly have received. It gave him his first lesson in something he had much need to learn — the superiority of mental force to material force. He had been conquering Ahab by physical strength; but immediately afterwards he is himself conquered by a silently-working influence — a power impalpable to sense, independent of weapons. He has been prostrated by a process working quicker than famine, quicker than drought, quicker than pestilence — prostrated by the very sweep of his own mental energy. Was not this a message to his soul that he had mistaken the comparative strength of the natural forces! Did it not say to him that he had chosen the least powerful agency when he selected drought and famine as the ministers of God! Did it not tell him that he should have appealed to the mznd of Ahab — that he should have tried to exhibit rather the inner than the outer majesty of God! Elijah was to be taught that the best cure for idolatry was not the exhibition of the’ Divine hand, but the exhibition of the Divine heart, that God was better than the idol, not, because He could break the idol, but because

He could give what the idol could not — help

in the day of trouble.

Elijah, then, must be taught that the highest glory of true religion, and what distinguishes it from false religion, is its power to minister. And this, by the brook Cherith, is God’s lesson to his soul. The ravens unconsciously bring him food. Unable in the famine to find grain, they bear to the spot the bodies of animals which they have slain, and deposit them there for their future use. Elijah inherits the fruit of their labours. He appropriates the spoil they have gathered; but he regards them as his unconscious almoners. Yet, by his countrymen the raven had always been deemed an unholy thing. It was ill-omened. The lamb, the dove, and the goat were objects of Divine association; the raven was not — men did not present it in sacrifice. But here God presents it in sacrifice — tells Elijah to receive it as His minister. And then there comes a strange call to Elijah which perhaps I may be allowed to paraphrase: ‘Elijah, there are better modes of teaching My service than breaking and bruising. You have been ministered unto by creatures which you deem unholy; will not you minister unto such! If I can make sacrilegious things My instruments, shall you be afraid to touch them! Will you not best conquer them by showing them the beauty of holiness! Come, and I will tell you how to show the beauty of holiness to one of those whom you call sacrilegious. There is a widow in great want in the country of Tyre and Sidon. She is beyond the boundaries of your land. She belongs to a heathen population. She worships Me not after the pattern of your fathers. But she has a body of like passions with you. She has felt the hunger which you have felt — the hunger which the ravens have fed. Go, and minister to her as the ravens have ministered to you! You will reveal to her the power of your God more clearly by that deed than by all the storms of denunciation and all the instruments of destruction.’ Do we not see that the aim of this call is to broaden Elijah — to lead him to the belief

that the absence of true religion is not so much something to be punished with famine as something which proves famine to be already there. He is to be made to feel that the man or woman so afflicted is primarily an object, not of anger, but of pity. He is to be led to realise that the subjects of this malady are experiencing a sense of want, and therefore are objects of charity rather than marks for vengeance. That is the reason why every stage of Elijah’s course is a humbling stage. He is constantly met by some privation; every morning of hope is followed by a night of despair. Why so, we are inclined to ask; why should God obstruct the missionary work of His servant? Simply because the obstruction of the work is, in his case, the advancement of the man. What he needs to know, above all things, is the sense of want — the sympathy with human weakness. He has been born with too much independence in his heart. His native instinct is towards self-reliance. What he deems easy he thinks everybody should deem easy. The lesson he

needs from life is an experience of individual

ELIJAH THE IMPULSIVE city,

feebleness. Elijah is the natural opposite of David. David had conflicting currents in him, and therefore he felt weak; Elijah had originally only one current, and therefore he felt strong. The aim of the Almighty is to send new currents through him, and soto make him feel more conflict. He is not humanitarian enough, because he is not near enough to the ground. He does not make allowance for human frailty, because he is too confident of himself. We must be taught self-distrust, that he may learn the needs of Man. The greatest convert made by Elijah’s mission was to be — Elijah.

Not all at once did this conversion come; it was gradual. When next the curtain rises, he is already in some measure liberalised. He consents to meet the idolaters at an CEcumenical Council on Mount Carmel. That was a large concession from a man of his uncompromising spirit. This was not the method in which he had first met Ahab. Then he had allowed zo discussion; he had

simply said, ‘Accept the doctrine or receive the scourge!’ Now it is otherwise. He proposes a test of truth — -a mental test — the comparative power of prayer. Let us try, he says, which of our prayers will impart most fire to life! That was a fair field of battle; what can be a better test of religion than its power to impart vital fire! It was a field on which Elijah was sure to win. No unspiritual worship is ever kindling; love alone can illuminate the commonway. Elijah triumphed in the argument; he showed what on his side had been wrought by prayer. It would have been well had he rested with that victory. But the militant instinct was not dead within him. The meeting closed in bloodshed. What happened I do not exactly know; the Picture in the Gallery leaves something to the imagination. I suppose that Elijah, heated by his new kind of triumph, harangued the crowd and rhetorically called upon his countrymen to root out from among them these corrupters of the national faith. I suppose that the * crowd, mistaking rhetoric for prose, and interpreting the exhortation to extirpate a principle as the command to slay its adherents, rushed frantically and tumultuously on the prophets of Baal and gave them the crown of martyrdom. That Elijah designed the deed, I do not believe; that he regretted it, I firmly hold. Yet it was the fruit of his onesided passion, and it brought a dark night to close a bright day. The martyrdom he had given to Baal was znadeed a crown; violence always helps the cause on which it tramples. The clamours of the land rose against Elijah. To a man conscious of the justice of his deed this would have been little; but Elijah’s inner man rose against /zmsel/f. The prophet of God fled. From whom did he flee? Was it from Ahab? / Was it from Jezebel? Was it from the friends ) of the martyred men of Baal? No; it was — from his own inner man, Elijah saw his other / self — the self that was bound for heaven. It I was as yet only a child; but it made him tremble. It shook his nerves; it paralysed his self-confidence. He ran to escape the child, but the child ran with him; the child was his angel sent from God. He ran to Beersheba; he found the child at Beersheba. He fled into the Arabian desert; he met the child there. He lay down to die, under a juniper tree; the child sustained him. He came to Horeb and hid himself in a mountain cave; the child suddenly became full-grown, and Elijah recognised his true self,

For now there bursts upon his view a wondrous vision — the vision of his own life; and, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, he finds that he has been on the wrong way. He hears a roaring wind; he says, ‘Is it Thou, Lord?’ — there is no answer. He feels a trembling of the earth; he says, ‘Is it Thou, Lord?’ — there is no answer. He sees a ball of fire shot into the air; he says, ‘ Is it Thou, Lord?’ — there is no answer. He catches the sound of a still, small voice, so low that he can hardly detect it; he says, ‘Is it Thou, Lord?’ — and the answer comes, ‘ It is I.’

Could anything more completely reveal the plan of the Gallery in delineating the figure of Elijah! The design is popularly thought to be the exhibition of a physical heroism. It is the reverse. It is the exhibition of a process by which a great soul was made meet for heaven by altering its ideal of heroism from the physical to the mental. The plan of the Picture is to reveal a work of transition — a work in which the original mountain became a valley and the original valley became a mountain. In the cave of Horeb the transition was complete. The old Elijah was buried there, and the new Elijah emerged full-grown. The child had conquered the man and left his body in the cave; the still, small voice had triumphed over the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. Henceforth I see a change in Elijah. His alternations of hope and despair have vanished, and in their room there has come an equable calm.. He is more’ trustful in adversity; he is more merciful in prosperity. His later denunciations are rather against inhumanity to Man than against errors in creed or ritual. He avenges, and rightly avenges, the wrongs of Naboth; but, for the first time in the record of his life, his vengeance is mixed with leniency — a leniency all the more remarkable because it was exercised towards his consistent and inveterate enemy, Ahab. No man can resist the conclusion that the Elijah who emerges from the cave of Horeb is an altered being. He is no longer a flaming sword; he is a human voice — wakened by human sympathies, tuned by human feelings. He has been made more fit to meet Moses on the Mount; the power of action has been joined to the power of waiting.

The working of this change was doubtless mainly from within. But it was not wholly so. That voice in the cave of Horeb said many things; but it said one thing which, to my mind, was specially helpful to the future development of Elijah — it directed him where to find a human friend. If there was one thing Elijah needed to mellow him, it was that! He seems never to have felt the influence of home ties. We read of no brother or sister; we hear of no wife or child. His life throughout had been one of war, of public commotion, of political and religious strife.

Superiors he had, inferiors he had; but, so far as I know, he had hitherto possessed no equals. There had been no comrade of his heart, no companion of his soul, none to take his hand and say, ‘We are brothers.’ A man in such a position is in want of one-half of life’s music. Was it not well to send him the friend Elisha! When the voice sent him to Elisha, it sent him to a new school — a school in which he would meet a kindred mind and experience at the last those ties of human sympathy to which ‘the days of his actual childhood had been strangers. There, in the companionship of Elisha, we will for the present leave him — ripening for a higher destiny and preparing for enrolment in a loftier band than the prophets

of ancient Israel.

THANK Thee, O Lord, that to Elijah and

to me Thou hast revealed a new and better

way. I thank Thee that the still, small voice has taken the place of the wind, the earthquake, and the fire. I used to think that Zaw would redeem Thy world. T thought that stern penalties would repress the course of crime. [| thought the thunders of Sinai would make the sinner pure. I thought the vision of the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone would put out the love of evil. Thou hast taught me better, O my Father! Thou hast taught me that the love of evil can only be extinguished by another love. My heart cannot be conquered by the hand. If it is centred on the Prince of Evil, it will not be cured by the zmprisonment of that prince; I should love him in his prison, I should love him in his bonds. If I am to cease loving him, I must have a mew prince — the Prince of Peace. Send me this new Prince, O my Father; nothing but Christ will put out Barabbas from my heart! I love wrongly, but none the less do I love intensely; nothing but axother love will set me free. Famine will not; Carmel will not; wind and earthquake and fire will not; the burning lake itself would not extinguish my love! Therefore, my Father, let me love again, let me love anew! Send into my heart

a fresh ideal! Send me a sight of the ‘altogether lovely’! Send me a vision of the ‘chief among ten thousand’! Send me a picture of Him who is ‘fairer than the children of men’! Break the old ideal by the vision of a higher beauty! Let my night fade in Thy morning, my thorn vanishin Thy flower! One leaf of Thy summer’s bloom will disenchant me of the winter’s charm. The idols will be ‘broken in the temple of Baal’ when I see Thy King ‘on the holy hill of Zion.’