Abraham the Cosmopolitan

There is, as it seems to me, a strong analogy between the figures of Enoch, Noah, and Abraham. They are all, in a sense, translated men — men who have been lifted above their immediate surroundings and led to anticipate other surroundings. Enoch has dreamed of heaven; Noah has dreamed of a land beyond the sea; Abraham is to dream of a land beyond the years. To this last has been accorded a great distinction. The most mature of all the Gospels declares that he anticipated the Christian Era — ‘ Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and he saw it, and was glad.’ In what sense is it meant that Abraham foresaw the day of Christ? Not in the sense of a clairvoyant; that would

have been no real revelation of Christ. The 110

:: f; 6 only way in which I can foresee the day of another is by living the life of that day. There are days in the heart of winter which may be said to anticipate the summer — days of sunshine, days of warmth, days of calm. So is it in the winter of the moral world. There are hours in which humanity seems to make a leap into other centuries and other scenes. There are men who are before their time. They stand upon a hill and see the other side. They narrowly miss being heralds of the future. They only miss that destiny because their age is not ripe for them. Like Paul, they are ‘born out of due time’ — born too soon. They have an Easter vision while it is yet winter, and therefore the winter loves them not. They are not looked upon as premature, but as immature — as unripe fruits of the tree of life, whose branches ought to be cut down to prevent disease and death. They are in advance of their age, and therefore they are the victims of their age. They are ever the men of sacrifice.

Such a man is Abraham. He is born too soon. The father of a vast multitude, he is himself a lonely figure — above his surroundings, unappreciated by his age. And why is this? It is because he has conceived an idea to ‘which his age is a stranger — an idea the working out of which z¢se/f involves sacrifice. We are in a great mistake about the life of Abraham. We think of it as a brilliant morning followed by a splendid noonday and a stormy night — as an existence whose dawn and whose meridian were marked by personal triumph, but whose evening had to bear the cross. A more untrue description of the artist’s thought cannot be conceived. This life is all cross together — morning, noon, and night. It is from beginning to end a life of sacrifice. Mount Moriah is not what we imagine — an unfortunate accident which disturbed his sunshine at the last. No; it is only the dark close of a dark day, the latest step of that long ascent which had begun in Ur of the Chaldees with the climbing of a steep hill.

Let us consider this beginning. A youth in the land of Ur conceives the desire to emigrate. It comes to him in the form of a Divine command — in the sense of a destiny, ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee; and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.’ Now, the popular view is that this is the record of a young man’s amdztzon. We figure Abraham as a youth tired of his mean surroundings, eager to get out from the narrow precincts of a paltry village into the life and air of the metropolis — a man wishing to make his fortune and seeking for a wider field of labour. We figure him so, and so figuring him, we make light of his velzgion. We say, ‘Who would not obey a Divine command like that — a command to better one’s self, a com- “mand to be prosperous, a command to have purple and fine linen and sumptuous faring every day; would not any man be pious on these terms!’

But we have entirely misinterpreted the

H meaning of the artist. The Picture he seeks to draw is exactly the opposite of that which our mind has sketched. It is not that of a young man striving to be rich; it is that of a youth who in the enthusiasm of a great cause is willing to be poor. It is not the delineation of a life which is impressed with the narrowness of its surroundings and longs for wider room; it is the unselfishness of a life which feels the largeness of its room and pities the narrow surroundings of others. Abraham is not the man of a village seeking a metropolis; he is the man of a metropolis seeking to extend a village. Ur of the Chaldees was no home in the desert; it was a centre of civilisation, a seat of worldly prosperity. The dream which there burst upon the soul of Abraham was the hope of being a secular missionary, a colonist of waste places. He looked out from a scene of culture upon a scene of surrounding barbarism, or, at least, of surrounding primitiveness. There came to him the thought that his culture was a gift from God — a gift not to retain, but to bestow. Was it not the part of a benefited nation to bless those lands which had not been benefited! If he had a lamp of blessing, it was surely given that he might share it! Had he any right to sit contentedly beside his fire while others were cold!. Should he not go out into the cold and teach others how to make a fire! Would not his own comfort durvz him if he monopolised it! Was it not his duty to leave his country and his kindred and his father’s house — that he might plant the blessings of civilisation in countries and kindreds and houses which were still untouched by its light!

The truth is, I regard the Portrait of Abraham as the earliest attempt to represent a cosmopolitan man — a man seeking to make the world a recipient of his own blessing. You will go wrong, in my opinion, if you find his antitype in the youth who seeks to agerandise himself. You will find it rather in him who is eager to spend himself — to pour out all the treasures of his life for the good of humanity. He is the forerunner of that great missionary band which, whether in the sphere of religion or of culture have been the pioneers of a new era to lands that were outside the pale — the forerunner of Duff, of Livingstone, of Moffat, of Carey, of Stanley, of Nansen, of Sir John Franklin — of all in every age who have travelled and explored for purposes of human development. Abraham is the man with the cosmopolitan spirit — the man who realises the common rights of the human race and seeks to secure them for the race. This will always be his proudest distinction and his highest glory.

And it will also be found to have been the root of his sacrificial life. No man in the days of Abraham could be a cosmopolitan without incurring the command, ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house!’ To be a cosmopolitan is now a noble thing; it was then a suspected thing. Man had not learned the rights of human nature. He had not learned that the fact of being a sufferer itself confers the right to be succoured, shielded, comforted. The morality of each nation was national. To

be touched with sins and sorrows outside was unpatriotic. Patriotism was the highest virtue; the love of country was the highest love. When a man’s inner nature said to him, ‘Get thee out of thy country!’ and when for the benefit of other countries he felt constrained to obey that voice, he was likely to go alone. By his act of cosmopolitan sympathy he had divorced himself from zatzonal sympathy. If the brook insists on widening into an ocean, it will thereby cease to be a brook. No doubt it will make a grand exchange; but an eye untrained to the vast will prefer the narrower precincts and look with regret on the enlargement of the waters. Even so was Abraham regarded. The cosmopolitan impulse that came upon him was an enlargement of spirit; it transformed a brook into a sea. But, for that very reason, it was a curtailment of his sphere among contemporaries. It exposed him to social ostracism. It separated him from his age. It expelled him from current sympathies. It caused him to be looked upon as a visionary, as a dreamer, as a man unfit for his kind. The path selected by Abraham was a path which the world of his day did not deem heroic.

Look now at this phase of Abraham’s life in the light of the later saying that he saw the day of the Lord. Is not the initial movement of this man’s life precisely the initial movement ascribed to the Messianic course of Jesus! Paul declares that the first thing Jesus did was to ‘empty Himself’ — to select a path of impoverishment and privation. ‘He who was rich, for our sakes became poor,’ are the suggestive words in which he emphasises the sacrifice involved in the cosmopolitan path of the Son of Man. From beginning to end the charge against Him was the fact that His mission was more than national; that He deemed the welfare of humanity an object of higher interest than the welfare of His country. Could any period of past history mirror that fact in anticipation more clearly than the experience of Abraham! If you read it as we have read it, as I believe the artist meant it to be read, you will see in it a forecast shadow of the Gospel delineation. Here is a man who might have been rich taking a course which involved his becoming poor. No doubt he is promised large possessions; but these are only promised — they had to be accepted by faith. What had to be accepted as fact was present privation — hardship, weariness, distrust by old friends, coldness from strangers, isolation from the life of all. All this was involved in the cosmopolitan path of Abraham. It was a lonely path, a thorny path, a hitherto untrodden path — a path which was only to be trodden in its fulness when the feet of the Son of Man should overstep the boundaries of nations.

The life of Abraham, then, begins with an experience which, in germ, is identical with that of Jesus. On the threshold of his ministry I am struck, too, by the analogy between the first three trials of Abraham and the three temptations of Jesus. Taking the order of these temptations from the narrative of St. Matthew, they correspond to the order of the trials of Abraham. Of course, it is an undesigned coincidence; it is neither prophecy on

the part of Genesis nor reproduction on the part of the Gospel, but it is ali the more striking on that account. Look at the experience attributed to Jesus. The tempter comes to Him and says, ‘Command that these stones be made bread’; it is an appeal to the physical nature — the sense of outward want. The scene changes, and there is a new appeal — what I might call an appeal to the imagination. Christ stands on a pinnacle of the temple, and a voice cries, ‘Cast thyself down — try to reach your goal by the road of physical power. Then comes the final trial — the moral conflict of the soul. Before the eye of Jesus there stretch two fields of possible possession — the one rich and luxuriant, the other at present a bleak and desert waste, and between these two He is called to choose. The tempter emphasises the glory of the luxuriant field, ‘All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’

Abraham too, as it seems to me, has these three trials at the outset of his ministry. He is first assailed by famine; the bodily nature is made on the very threshold to protest against the enterprise; it is a temptation to abandon the work. Then comes a temptation, not to abandon, but to accelerate it by an exercise of physical power. It appears in the subtle effort to win the favour of Pharaoh by a worldly policy. Nor does Abraham come forth scatheless from the trial; he does cast himself down from the pinnacle of 4zs temple. But the third temptation is destined to redeem him, to wash him white. To him as to the future Messiah, there: comes the call to an act of choice between worldly possessions. You will find it in the eleventh chapter of Genesis. Two fields stretch before the eyes of Abraham — the one fertile, the other seemingly barren. His kinsman Lot! is in search of the fertile field; he looks upon it with longing gaze as a source of independent empire. He would choose it if he could; but the choice lies not with him; it lies with Abraham. Will Abraham permit it? Will he allow a vassal to get the richer possession? Will he

1 This is one of the characters whom I hope to treat independently in a subsequent volume.

suffer a dependant to receive the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them while he himself is ¢onfined to the seemingly barren waste? Remember where Abraham’s temptation to the rich kingdom lay. It lay where Christ’s lay — not in covetousness but in usefulness. What could the pioneer of civilisation not have done with such a kingdom! Might not the cause of humanity be helped by riches! Might not the labours of the missionary be aided by the possession of private means! Might not the influence of the new movement be rendered more powerful if it were felt to come, not from the valley, but from the hill!

Does Abraham, then, choose the richer possession? No; he selects the apparently barren one. Why? Because he does not want his followers to become a nation through out-door relief. God was to make of him a great nation. The race which he was to develop was to be developed by se/f/-culture — not by culture from without. To use his own words, no man was to say, ‘I have made Abraham

rich. And so he gave up the mountain for the valley. He went down — down to privation, down to wandering, down to a life without a home, down to days of marching and nights of weariness. And with that selection of the valley there came to him another hour of the day of Jesus. When Christ took the lowly path in preference to the high one, ‘many of His disciples walked no more with Him.’ So is it here. The man enriched by Abraham’s own abstinence becomes the attraction. There is an exodus from the vale — an exodus from the camp of Abraham to the camp of Lot. The prospect of the loaves is too tempting. The chivalry of the master has itself provided the servant with the chance for desertion. Why seek a land in the future when there was a land here and now! Why journey through endless plains when there was a rest at the door! Was not home better than hardship, quiet superior to struggle, abundance preferable to scarcity! It was surely folly to pursue a dream when the waking reality stood before the eyes!

And so, the camp of Abraham was thinned.

His humanitarian scheme received a chill — a chill which came from the heat of his own generosity. This was the saddest hour of his life, as I think the corresponding period was the saddest hour in the life of Jesus. Yet, as to the soul of Jesus this hour was the prelude to a great revelation, so to the spirit of Abraham it was the forerunner of a vision of glory; here again was the experience of the missionary to anticipate the Day of the Lord. Abraham too was in the hour of his seeming failure to have a scene of transfiguration. While he stands dejected on the desert waste, there flashes before his sight a wonderful vision. An empire rises to his view — an empire such as Man had never seen. It stretches to all ends of the earth — north, south, east, west. It embraces all ages of time — it is to endure for ever. It comprehends all varieties of men — its inhabitants are to be as the dust of the earth for multitude. Above all, it is a kingdom whose foundation is to be laid in righteousness — a kingdom bestowed by God, chartered by the will of heaven, ‘unto thee will I give it. Such is the vision which in his hour of sadness floats before the eyes of Abraham. From the place where he stood he saw the promised land; and the place where he stood was transfigured. It lost its obscure character; it became a centre, a metropolis, a highway for the nations. He beheld it already clorified — transformed from a field of tents into a city of palaces within whose walls are gathered the worshippers of the living God. The scene passed, and Abraham descended into common day. He came down into life’s rough reality. And the reality was rough indeed. Around him was a growing corruption. The plains of Sodom were a sink of iniquity. They seemed to breathe derision upon his dream of moral glory. Yet, here again, if chronology did not prevent it, we should almost persuade ourselves that we heard the coming tread of the Man of Nazareth. We remind ourselves that it is after Christ’s vision of transfigured glory that He meets the demoniac on the plain, and that the power of healing lay with the Heart which had seen the glory. We hear the question asked by the disciples who had remained below, ‘Why could not we cast out the demon?’ and we feel the answer to be, ‘Because you did zot see ‘ the glory.’ All this passes before us as we stand in front of the Picture of Abraham. This man is strengthened for Sodom by the vision of the glory. In sublime accents he lifts up his voice to plead for the doomed land. Almost, for a moment, we should imagine that we heard Christ weeping over Jerusalem! I say ‘almost’ and ‘for a moment. Do not think that the day of Abraham ever reached beyond the dawz of Christ’s day. With all its analogies of experience, it was still the analogy between the child and the man. The tears of Abraham over Sodom do not really equal the tears of Jesus over Jerusalem. The pity of Abraham was pity for the righteous; the pity of Jesus was pity for the fallen. Abraham beheld gold amid the clay, and lamented that the gold should perish wz the clay; Jesus beheld the clay wzthout the gold, and wept because its wealth had never come. Abraham prayed for the ten righteous men who might possibly be

CO eee left in Sodom; Jesus shed tears of agony over those degenerate thousands who crowded the streets of Jerusalem. The reign of absolute mercy had not yet begun; the Gospel of unconditional grace was still afar off. It was as yet rather charity than love — rather the suspending of judgment than the following of condemnation by forgiveness. Abraham was only in the dawn; but he was in the dawn. He had caught a glow of the sunrise — of human possibilities; he had gathered fresh hope for Man. It was for other ages to extend his labours.

And here the cosmopolitan picture shades into another. Have you ever marked the peculiarity in the delineation of this figure of Abraham? The ordinary course of life is to begin in the interior and then spread out ‘toward the sea. But Abraham’s life begins by the sea, and then makes its way to the interior. Most of us are individuals first and cosmopolitans afterwards; Abraham is a cosmopolitan at the beginning, and an individual at the end. His life opens on the pathway of the nations.

He feels that he has a mission to the masses. The destiny which floats before him is a worlddestiny. His first visions are visions on a large scale. He contemplates not men, but kingdoms — not units, but multitudes. His aim is to found an empire — an empire for God and righteousness. His eye is on things which suggest the boundless; he looks at the stars of night and dreams of magnitudes. Such is the morning; what of the afternoon? Here all is changed; the broad sea becomes a narrow lake. The man who at the opening of the day has only an eye for multitudes subsides at evening into the family circle. The starry dome is exchanged for the precincts of the tent. The sacrificial character remains; but its sphere is altered. It ceases to be a sacrifice for the zazzons; it becomes a surrender to the hearth. Its range at morning was humanitarian; towards evening it has become a household fire. The life which began with obedience to the mandate, ‘ Get thee out of thy country!’ culminates in a submission of the

will to a threatened family bereavement. Into this inland experience our study follows him not. It is an experience which has had special interest for the ¢heologian; to us its only interest is its bearing on the succeeding Portrait. We will leave Abraham where we found him — standing by the humanitarian sea.

THANK Thee, O Lord, for my glimpses

of the coming day! I thank Thee that there are prophetic moments in which I have sight of what zwz// be! Why should I zot have such moments! Hast Thou not given to the swallow the vision of a summer which is yet far away! Hast Thou not given to the bee the vision of many mansions that are to come! And shall my soul have no guide toward zt¢s morrow; shall my heart have no prophecy of the undawned day! My Father, Thou hast not left me thus comfortless. To me, as to Abraham, there have come intimations of a larger country and premonitions of a wider brotherhood. As I have strayed below the stars, I have asked myself if these alone have unity. I have asked if there is no law that can so bind human lives. I have said, ‘Is Thy blessing alone for Esau — for rough material things; hast Thou no word for Jacob — no bond of the spirit!’ And as I said it, I knew that it was a voice from Zee, a prophecy from Thee. I bless Thee for that prophecy, O my God! Henceforth the stars say to me, ‘So shall thy seed bel’ Hasten, my Father, this day of Thy Christ! Unite the souls of men as Thou hast united the orbs of heaven! May the bells of union ring across the snow! Ring out the separation of countries and kindreds! Ring out the pride of race and the jealousy of privilege! Ring out the passion for monopoly and the lust for special power! Ring out the wars that sever the cities of the plain! Ring in the bond of brotherhood, the law of love, the harmony of helpfulness, the chord of compassion, the fulness of fellowship, the music of mercy, the chant of charity, the symphony of now silent souls! I deszve to hear it; and when I hear it I shall be glad.

Ee —