Noah the Renewer

As we pass to the next figure of the group there is, as it seems to me, a point of development well worthy of attention. In the two preceding figures we have seen the human soul struggling with the defects of its environment. In neither of these cases has the soul really conquered; it has only escaped and flown away. Abel has a higher ideal of sacrifice than Cain; but Cain is stronger than Abel. All that can be done with Abel is to transplant him, to remove him from the evils that are coming on the earth. Enoch is walking on a higher plane than his contemporaries — walking with God. But one man cannot stem the torrent of a nation’s iniquity; all that can be done for Enoch is to translate him, to carry

him into a purer air where he will have go THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN

freedom to pursue his walk unmolested. But with the figure of Noah we are brought face to face with a new conception. The old conditions are there, the old struggle is there; but the result is different. Hitherto, the problem has been solved by the translation of the maz; it is now to be solved by the translation of the world. Hitherto, the only sequel has been the removal of the man from his environment; there is now introduced a new solution — the renewal of the environment to suit the man. For the first time in the Great Gallery, we are confronted with the idea of reform. Noah is not the first to protest, but he is the first to reform. Enoch’s walk was a protest, but it did nothing for the world; it only saved himself. But with Noah there begins the first of a series of efforts to save the world — to translate, not the man, but the earth. That the seed of the woman should be carried into the wilderness where the dragon cannot hurt it, is doubtless a consoling thing; but it would be something more consoling still if the seed of the woman

should bruise the ead of the dragon!

NOAH THE RENEWER gI

I have said that Noah represents the beginning of such efforts. It is well to emphasise the point. The popular notion is that he represents xothzng — that he died with the antediluvians. We think of him as having been the hero of a unique and unparalleled catastrophe, and as therefore outside of our daily experience. No man has suffered so much from the flood as Noah. It has drowned his reputation. It has quenched his fame as a representative man. The flood has infected his memory with the mist of its own antiquity. The more universal we make the deluge, the more local we make Noah — the more do we isolate him from the common experience of mankind. We come to think of him as a man in a miraculous environment — a man whose life-tragedy lay in circumstances that have never occurred since, and will never occur again; and we feel that, whatever may have been his interest to his generation, his influence has perished for posterity.

Now, the truth is that, in so reasoning, we have entirely mistaken the real point of signig2 THE REPRESENTATIVE MEN

ficance in Noah’s experience. The tragedy of this man’s life is not the flood at all. From any historical point of view, from any artistic point of view, the least interesting feature about him is precisely his sojourn in the ark. His interest for posterity lies in the dbuclding of the ark, not in the sailing of it. It lies in the fact that he was the first who made an effort at reform. He was not the first of dissatisfied men. Enoch was dissatisfied. But Enoch was content to make his escape from the earth and leave things as they were. Noah was not thus content. He saw things in as bad a light as Enoch did; he deplored them as much as Enoch deplored them. But Enoch’s goal was not enough for dzm. Ata certain stage of despair, to drop the curtain and be done with the world is a very easy thing; but at no stage is it the highest thing. The highest thing is to refuse to accept the position of the world as final, to insist on remaining within it until its sin is washed away. That is the attitude of Noah. He is

the sad spectator of a scene of moral corruption. His heart is heavy with the burden of a degenerate race. Yet he refuses to abandon the rdle of a declaimer. He clings to the hope that when the ship is shattered by the storm, there may be left entire a single plank which shall come forth purified by the waters, and become the nucleus of a new vessel destined for wider and nobler service.

What, then, was this vision of corruption which Noah saw? — that is the first question which lies before us. It is very graphically and very characteristically answered by the sacred narrative, ‘ All the imaginations of the thoughts of man’s heart were only evil every day.’ This is not the description we should have expected. It is characteristic of the Bible, but it is not characteristic of human nature. We should have thought that an ancient narrative wishing to expose the wickedness of a short-lived race would have begun by making a catalogue of its actual crimes. So would any other ancient narrative in the world. But the Bible is on the very threshold true to its future self. It strikes here a chord from which it never deviates — the chord of inwardness. With sur-.

prising modernness, it refuses to indicate corruption by a catalogue of deeds done. It goes to the root of the matter — to the deeds ot done, the deeds in the imagination. That is the refrain of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. Paul cries to the Philippians, ‘Whatsoever things are pure and lovely and of good report, think of these things!’ We expect him to say, ‘Do these things!’ But he has simply reproduced the message which was given to primitive humanity, ‘ Beware of your zdeal!’ There is not a more profound sentiment in all ethical literature. The radical difference between a good man and a bad man lies in what they ¢kznk, The boundary line between virtue and vice is situated in the ‘imagination. The germ-cell of a man’s character is his ideal, his answer to the question, ‘What makes life worth living?’ So said this early artist. He looks at the streaming crowd and cries, not ‘What are they doing!’ but ‘What are they thinking of!’ — ‘What are they dreaming of!’ — ‘What are they enamoured of!’ He does not ask what their hand is touching, but what their eye is seeing. He draws his colours from within. Perhaps the man amongst them who has least violated the law appears to him the most hopeless subject; for the measure of each is determined, not by the height of his deeds, but by the height of his imaginings.

The danger, then, of this age was the danger which besets the young men of every age — an unworthy ideal of glory. What was, in the view of this artist, this unworthy ideal of slory? It was the admiration for the Portrait of Cain, the preferring of the physical to the mental. No one can read the early chapters of Genesis without being impressed with the fact that the memory of Cain has become the world’s ideal. The recurrence of his name in the names of his successors would alone bear evidence of this. When we hear one called Cainan, another designated Tubal-Cain, what does that imply? Clearly this, that he was the hero of the people, the man after whose

likeness parents moulded their children. But there is higher evidence than that. The memory of Cain had found its way, not only into the names of his successors, but into the literature of the succeeding age. There arose in that age a great poet, a poet the rhythm of whose words has not been drowned by the noise of the deluge. A fragment of his verse has come over the flood, and is known to us as ‘The Song of the Sword.’ It is sung to his two wives, perhaps in accompaniment to one of those musical instruments which had their origin in his family. The striking feature of this fragment is its inspiration by the memory of Cain. Brief as it is, Cain figures there — figures in his violence, takes a heroic place in his very deed of shame. He appears as the successful homicide — the homicide who secures immunity by his very crime, and is protected by that which should have assailed him. The poet has evidently caught fire from a current enthusiasm — the admiration for brute force successfully exerted and followed by no catastrophe on the person of the delinquent.

Now, when a man’s example finds its way into literature, that man has conquered his age; he has won an empire compared to which the power of the monarch grows pale. And if it be a dad example, words cannot describe the detriment which an age suffers. When the poets of a nation chant songs of the sword, when they sing in rolling numbers the glories of oppression, when they ring the triumphs of might victorious over right and of tyranny trampling upon truth — it is then that there comes to life, and especially to the life of youth, the greatest danger that can meet a human soul — the danger of mistaking evil for good.

Now, this was the danger of that old world. It had caught the fever of a false enthusiasm. Its disease was a disease of the imagination — an admiration for the thing least admirable. The danger of the Jew has always been an image, graven or ungraven. It has come, not from the object, but from the reflection of the Opiect in Nis, eye.) 50) was ity here. ‘There were giants on the earth in those days,’ cries the narrator. There was no harm in that,

G assuredly! But then, he naively adds that these giants ‘were of old the men of renown, There the harm began! This race, as I understand it, had fixed upon the physical development as the one end in life. They had enthroned in their imagination the men of bodily might, the men of muscle, the men of bone and sinew. They had recognised as the crown of human glory the qualities that could crush, the qualities that could break and bend. They had begun to experience that sentiment which they were to bequeath to their descendants — the offence of the cross. They had come to look upon meekness, mercy, compassion, as unmanly things. Their admiration for crushing strength was beginning to act on the body-politic. It was becoming the woman’s motive for choosing a husband — the ground of her sexual selection. Not

obscurely is this hinted in the fifth chapter of.

Genesis. As I read its record, 1 feel myself in the presence of a shrewd utilitarianism proposing to regulate the marriage-tie on

purely prudential principles,

Unfortunately, the course proposed was not really prudential. The motive of this people was that which afterward found expression in the Tower of Babel — to secure permanence for their race. It had never occurred to them that permanence cannot be secured on a merely physical basis, that to build on such a basis was to build upon the sand. The suggestion of danger came from a voice outside — the J/ast voice which was likely to influence the zwside. There appeared a man who would now be called a street-preacher. The second epistle which bears the name of St. Peter calls him ‘a preacher of righteousness.’ The expression is significant. It indicates that the mission of Noah was not that of a soothsayer, of a man who cried, ‘ There is a flood coming on the earth; come into my ark and you will be saved!’ No, to read it thus is to read it wrongly. No one can study the Picture without coming to the conclusion that the original aim of Noah was to avert the flood. He was not a prophet in any other sense than Jonah was a prophet. He was not

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magically to foretell the inevitable occurrence of an event. Rather was he to proclaim that its occurrence was xzo¢ inevitable — that it might or might not happen, according to the righteousness of the community. Let me try to exhibit this point; it has been habitually lost sight of, and by losing sight of it we have reduced the personality of Noah from the height of a teacher to the stature of a magician.

Out from the giants of the antediluvian world, there strides this silent, unobtrusive figure. Silent and unobtrusive he has hitherto been. His name suggests this; ‘Noah’ means ‘rest.’ Amid the bustle of his age he has been marked out, perhaps stigmatised, as ‘the quiet man.’ Nobody looked for a reaction through him. On the contrary, his contemporaries expected that he would loyally follow in the worldly path of his forefathers. ‘He shall comfort us concerning the work of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed.’ Such was the hope which centred round his life. I understand the words to mean, ‘ His piety shall profit us, his prayers shall bring good harvests.’ Yet this is the man who becomes a thorn in the side of that old world! There he stands — a solitary figure over against a multitude! He plants himself suddenly in the highway and raises into shrill accents that voice which hitherto had been silent. The note of his preaching is Reform. He calls to his countrymen: ‘You are ina delusion. You think you are building on the solid earth. I tell you that you are separated by a thin crust from a flood of waters. You and [J are in the path of an overwhelming tide, and I do not mean to stay there; I must have something to breast the coming waves. Will you not avert their coming! Will you not realise before it is too late that if you crush out mind by matter you have broken the only embankment that restrains the sea! Will you let in a rush of waters that will drown society, engulf order, submerge law, swamp the paths of peace, overwhelm the meek and gentle, bury fathoms deep the aspirations of the heart!’

Such I believe to have been the original

message of this earliest of preachers — before even to his own mind, it took concrete form. Even when it did take concrete form, the message of Noah was a moral message. The ark of safety which he proposed to build for the world was at no time the ark of gopher-wood. The ark of gopher-wood was never meant for the safety of the world, but, as the writer to the Hebrews says, ‘for the saving of his own house’; it was only to be used when the world refused to be saved. The edifice he proposed to build for his countrymen was not a ship to save men from the flood; it was a structure to prevent the flood from coming. He was no clairvoyant looking into the future and beholding an inevitable catastrophe in to-morrow’s sky. The danger he saw was xot in the future; it was in the present. The district was unclean — unclean in its streets, unclean in its houses. He saw that such

corruption would involve a plague, and he

prepared a hospital in case of that plague.

Yet he felt that the real cure was not the devising of the hospital, but the cleansing of the causeway — not the minimising of the pesti-

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ea a er ee lence when it came, but the prevention of the pestilence from coming. To read Noah otherwise is to misread him — to misread on the threshold the nature of Bible prophecies. The prophecies of the Bible are never announce- ments of what shall be; they are announcements of what must be if things remain as they are. I will not admit a single exception to this. When the prophet cries,‘God will judge Assyria!’ — ‘ Egypt shall not escape!’ — ‘Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ what does he mean? That if Assyria and Egypt and Nineveh fail to cleanse their streets, they will get the plague. It is not meant that the plague will come irrespective of the cleansing. Do you doubt this? Take one crowning instance as the proof of all. The fall of Jerusalem was predicted in detail; yet at her eleventh hour a greater than all her prophets said that He would have gathered her children under His wings if, even in this her day of tribulation, she had known the things that belonged to her peace. Accordingly, the tragedy of every Jewish reformer lies in his hours of waiting — waiting for the spiritual dawn. This is‘Noah’s tragedy — the tragedy of the mother watching the symptoms of the sick child. His eye is not on the coming flood; it is on the ebb and flow of Man’s fitful fever. His eagerness is not that his prediction should be fulfilled; it is that it should zot be fulfilled. His desire is that the limb may not need to be amputated; he waits for signs of amendment. It is for this he has to labour so long — not for the completion of the wooden ark. The Divine power which could bring a flood of retribution might well have brought the ark on its bosom. But this preacher had to wait for something which Divine power could zot bring, without destroying Man more effectively than by the deluge. He had to wait for something which must be voluntary — a change in the human soul, the dawning of a new day in the heart of the creature. Such a dawn must be free — not forced; it may be prayed for, but it must be waited for. The tragedy of Noah’s life is that solitary vigil.

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He is to my mind the most solitary figure ever painted on the canvas of history — except, perhaps, One. Noah’s solitude is solitude in a crowd — and it is all the deeper on that account. We see an eager man in the heart of an eager multitude; but the eagerness of the man is not on the same ground as the eagerness of the multitude. The man is bent on the things of the spirit; the multitude is intent on the life of the flesh. There can be no solitude more intense than an experience like this. The desert is not so lonely, the pathway of the forest is not sodrear. To be the spectator of an unsympathetic crowd is the climax of lonesomeness.

If I were asked to photograph the life of Noah in one expression, I would say that its characteristic is solitary waiting. From beginning to end this is its leading feature. As with the life of Enoch, there are three risings and fallings of the curtain. We first see the man in the midst of the world, lifting a solitary protest against the life of that world. It is the lonely vigil of a single human soul through the watches of a night lit up by the lamps of revelry and heated by the fires of licence; it is Faith watching and waiting for the dawn. Then the scene changes. The man is lifted above the world — almost translated like Enoch. He is floated in the air on a lonely sea — a sea whose waters have covered every rood of land and have buried in their depths that giant strength of which earth was so proud. But even in this vast solitude this human soul is waiting — waiting for an earth renewed, waiting for the green leaf to reappear, waiting for the emergence of the mountain’s brow. He is sending forth the raven and the dove as his messengers to bring ‘him tidings of the reappearing land. Then comes the third vision, and it is different from both. The night is gone and the waters are gone. The world has risen baptized from its corruption, but with the weariness of a weaned child. The old life is past, but the new is not yet come. And there stands Noah — solitary, waiting still! For the first time in his vigil he waits under a rainbow. The new life has not come, but hope has dawned. Light is in the east; morning is in the air; the breath of spring is pulsating in the ground. Everywhere there is the joy of a Jeginning. Everywhere there is the sense of a fresh start in life. Everywhere there is the proclamation of a second chance for Man — a chance of emancipation from the old heredity, of liberation from the yoke of yesterday, of freedom from the ancestral stain. When the last curtain falls it leaves Noah waiting; but he is waiting under the rainbow.

THANK Thee, O Lord, that even where

corruption has risen into a flood, it has never conquered the world! I thank Thee that one stream of holiness has ever been more powerful than an ocean of iniquity! I thank Thee for that promise made by the rainbow that, however hereditary be the course of sin, it shall never overflood the earth! Often do I marvel at the fulfilment of this promise. I have heard the floods lifting up their voice

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with a great noise; I have seen the waves of unrighteousness cover the land. I said in my heart, ‘God is conquered; evil has prevailed; faith has been a delusion!’ But as I watched and waited, the deluge became the delusion; the waves sank, the winds lulled, the waters dried up, and Ararat raised her head to greet the sun! Why is it that, when the waters of sin are so deep and the streams of purity so shallow, the streams have always proved mightier than the waters? It is because holiness is more hereditary than zzholiness. Thou hast no rainbow of promise for the propagation of evil; it has only the promise of the fourth generation; it gets weaker as it goes. But love, Zy love, has the rainbow! Though it were only one spark in a rayless night, though it were only one seed in a barren soil, though it were only one throb in a lifeless pulse — it has the rainbow! There is no “mzt to its power of descending! When I tread it in the dust, it blossoms; when I crucify it, it is crowned; when I bury it, it rises from the dead; when I degrade it, it sits upon a throne; when I depress it, it is exalted; when I clothe it in rags, it assumes white raiment; when I bring it to Calvary, it hails the Easter Morning! I thank Thee, O Father, that no cross can kill Thy Christ; I bless Thee that Thy rainbow-promise is to the flower — not to the flood!