Isaac the Domesticated

Side by side with the figure of Abraham stands in the Great Gallery the form of his son Isaac. Yet nothing can exceed the contrast between these figures. One would imagine that they were painted by two artists of different lands. No ancient nation but Israel could have exhibited such variety in its types of heroism. Abraham, spite of his cosmopolitanism, has an element in common with the ideal of the old world. He is the type of masculine strength. He represents human activity — man cleaving his way by the sheer manipulation of energy. But Isaac is distinctively a female type. He reveals human nature in a passive attitude — precisely that attitude which the old world did not like. In passing from

Abraham to Isaac, we seem to be passing from a mountain torrent to a stagnant pool. We come from the running into the rest, from the hurry into the hush, from the sound into the silence. Abraham is the father, and Isaacis the son; yet the sphere of the son seems more curtailed than that of the father. We expect generations to be progressive, to branch out as they grow. But here, as the generation grows, it would almost seem as if the original branches were lopped away and the tree of life were diminished. As the two figures stand before us we are tempted to say, ‘ Abraham is the young man and Isaac the old. In coming from the father to the son, we have come from the world into the nursery, from the guidance of nations to the care of children. Abraham has the foreign mission; Isaac has the home mission. Abraham has to civilise a world; Isaac has to train a family. Abraham plants colonies; Isaac digs wells. Abraham overawes his opponents; Isaac shrinks from conflict. Abraham treads a political arena and restrains wrong; Isaac walks within his own house and restrains himself.

But, conceding the full force of the contrast, are you sure that it indicates an anti-climax? Admitting that Abraham’s sphere is the world and Isaac’s the domestic altar, are you certazx that the latter is the scene of a diminished energy? I am myself quite certain of the contrary. I feel convinced that service becomes more arduous in proportion as the sphere narrows. I have often been struck with these words of Jesus, ‘He that is faithful in that which is least, is faithful also in much.’ They are not the common measurement. The common measurement is, ‘He that is faithful in that which is large, is faithful in that which is small.’ On what ground does Christ invert the order? On the ground of deep spiritual insight — insight which experience has confirmed. Many a man has been great in the winter blast and fretted in the presence of the summer shower. Many a man has borne his cross in public with splendid magnanimity and sunk beneath it in the silence of his own room. Many a man in the exchange and in the forum has an admirable command of temper, who yet in the precincts of his home is a bully and a tyrant. Many a man is the soul of chivalry to strangers, and the essence of rudeness to his own sisters or daughters. Why is this? The short and easy answer is that there is hypocrisy in the human race. I do not think that is the explanation. I take the reason to be the principle enunciated by Jesus. The wider sphere may be more prolific in influence, but the narrow one is richer in sacrifice. It is richer in sacrifice because it is more barren of stimulus. It reveals no cloud of witnesses. It displays no prizes for success. It offers no prospect of outward plaudits. The virtues of the home circle are spontaneous virtues. They have nothing to cultivate them from without; they must grow by their own strength, or not grow at all.

There is a remarkable passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews in which it is stated that Jesus ‘suffered outside the camp.’ I take the idea to be that the trials of a captain are greater when they are unappreciated by the army — when they have to be borne in the silence of

ISAAC THE DOMESTICATED ews

his own breast. The life of Isaac is from beginning to end a suffering in private. His was that form of sacrifice which does not show, which wins no reputation for heroism. But just on that account it had a value all its own. The sacrifices of Abraham were on the line of the world’s march, and they received the stimulus which comes from being conscious of the world’s eye. The sacrifices of Isaac came from the unaided heart. They were the product of an unassisted will. They were the revealing of private sentiments, of strength exhibited in seclusion. In Isaac we have the impression not of hearing, but of overhearing. We seem to be listening to a beautiful singer who imagines himself unheard; and we give him the credit of the imagined solitude. We feel that his singing comes purely from devotion to the music. He is like an artist painting in a desert — painting in the firm belief that none will ever see his work. We bow reverently before the evidence of unconstrained devotion, of unalloyed love for that which is intrinsically fair; and we feel that the absence of witnesses has itself contributed a fresh homage to the worship of truth and beauty.

I think you will find that in the delineations of the Great Bible Gallery each life has one typical incident — one event which in small compass expresses the whole essence of the character. Peter is typified by his sea-walking — his alternate moments of buoyancy and sinking. John is epitomised in his rest on the bosom of Jesus. Paul is summed up in his Adriatic voyage — tossed between the intellectual waves of Asia and Europe. Elijah is typed in his chariot of fire. David is photosraphed sweeping the strings of the harp — weaving the discords of Israel into a great and glorious harmony. Abraham has his keynote in the command to leave his country for a larger country — for the citizenship of the world. Isaac ¢oo has his typical incident, the event which sums up his whole life. What is that? It is the sacrifice of Mount Moriah. As a mere incident it would have little significance; its importance lies in the fact that in one touch of the pencil it portrays the character, the life, the distinctive destiny of the man. Let us consider this.

When the scene of Isaac’s life opens, he is a youth. But it is not with the wonted attributes of youth that he is introduced to us. Youth is wont to manifest itself in the effort at ‘independence; Isaac appears before us bound. Our first sight of him is the sight of an unresisting victim on an altar of sacrifice. His father Abraham has bound him there in the belief that heaven had commanded it. But you will miss the point if you imagine that the attitude of Isaac is that of a mere victim. It is that of acquiescence. The light in which he is brought before us is that of filial obedience, not of constrained obedience. He is seen umresistingly submitting to an act because it is the work of his father. He does not understand the wisdom of the act any more than his father understands it. What he does understand is that he is obeying his father. The obedience is with him a voluntary deed, a surrender of zwz//. In the deepest sense, Isaac has bound Azmself to the altar. He has submitted to self-effacement for the sake of his family. That submission is, I say, the type of his whole life. He is always bound to a domestic altar. From first to last he is offered up in sacrifice to the will of his family. At every turn of life he is forced to give up the public for the private sphere, to exchange the gaze on the ocean for the walk by the stream. He is the forerunner of all domestic drudges, of all who lose promotion through the impediments of home. Isaac is the bird that is prevented from soaring by the requirements of its nest. When he puts out his wings to fly, he finds ever that he is bound fast to a family altar — that identical altar to which early in life’s morning he was bound by his father Abraham.

We see a remarkable instance of this in the first revelation which Isaac receives from heaven. It is the revelation to a young man, but it is very unlike that form of inspiration which we poetically associate with youth. We associate youth with the wings of the morning, with the promise and the power of a majestic flight. We hear God speaking to every young man in his aspiration to rzse, to break from his narrow limits and soar to higher spheres. So had the voice come to Abraham, ‘ Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, into a land which I will show thee!’ That is the typical revelation to the spirit of youth. But what would you think if your son were to say to you one morning, ‘I have been offered a lucrative appointment of commanding influence, but I intend to refuse it; God has revealed to me that my sphere is one of humble service and commonplace duty!’ Would you not deem it an incongruous thing that a lad with the world before him and with the possibilities of the world in his view, should voluntarily elect to shut himself in a cellar!

Now, some such want of enterprise seems at first sight to be involved in the revelation claimed by Isaac. There is a famine in the land of Gerar, the humble place of his abode. This is, in other words, to say that it was a place with no prospect of promotion. The eyes of the young man naturally turned to Egypt. It was a centre, a place of possibilities, a thoroughfare for the nations. The census periodically tells us that our villages are gradually being depopulated by migration into the towns. From a cosmopolitan standpoint, Gerar was a village and Egypt a town. The natural impulse of Isaac was to emigrate, to seek the centre. What prevented him? He said he had a prohibitive revelation. He maintained that the voice of the Lord had come to him with the command, ‘Thou shalt not go down into Egypt; dwell in Gerar!’ Could he be right in his conclusion! Could such a message come from God! Is it not a breach of religious art to represent it so! Is not the Picture of Abraham more true to the Divine ideal than the Picture of Isaac! Why should a Divine revelation be described as coming for the express purpose of curtailing the energies of a man!

But in asking this we are under the delusion that a curtailed sphere is a curtailed energy.

It is not; a service is more arduous in proportion as it is humble. My own opinion is that there is nothing which demands so much religious strength as the sense of a shut gate. Let us try to put the’ experience ‘of Isaac in a modern dress; you will find that probably this was also its original dress. Let us say that this young man at the moment when he was about to step into a wider arena was prostrated by sudden illness — an illness which permanently enfeebled his capacities for outward work. Let us say that for an hour he fretted and fumed over the narrowing of his destiny, and cast a longing eye on the Egypt which he could not enter. Let us say that then there came into his mind a thought which breathed an unspeakable calm, ‘Is not this sickness the voice of God, is not this door shut by God!’ I say that to be calmed by such a thought is the greatest triumph religion ever secured. It is easy to hear God’s voice commanding you to go out; but it needs faith to recognise it when it bids you go in. When Paul hears a voice, ‘I will send you far hence

to the Gentiles,’ he can readily say, ‘It is the

Lord’; but when Isaac hears a voice, ‘ Stay at home!’ he may well ask,‘ Who speaks?’ It is a grand thing in Isaac to recognise the Lord’s voice in the accident that maimed him. It is a grand thing that he is able to say, ‘The altar to which I am bound is z¢se/f my destiny. We deem that man godly who can accept a wider field of labour; but I think the man requires more godliness still who can accept as a gift from God the curtailment of a field which he believed to be all his own. What, then, is this corner to which Isaac is limited? It is the most commonplace work in the world. He has exchanged the firmament for the farmyard. His father Abraham had swept the horizon with the eye of faith and read his destiny in the stars of heaven. The gaze of Isaac is on the ground; his eye rests on pools of water. Read that passage so remarkable in its prosaicness, which occurs in the twenty-sixth chapter of Genesis: ‘Isaac digged again the wells of water, which they had digged in the days of Abraham his father; for the Philistines had stopped them after the death of Abraham: and he called their names after the names by which his father had called them. Is this the occupation of ahero! It does not seem so. But.if you look deeper into this dusty soil, you will find diamonds — the most sparkling diamonds of Isaac’s life. Nowhere to my mind does his character shine out so resplendent as in this commonplace passage. We see again a man bound to a domestic altar- — the altar of filial love. Again he offers himself, as a sacrifice, to his father Abraham. Abraham is dead, but his memory lives, and his memory is potent with Isaac. It is not often that a new generation aims at elorifying the generation that has passed away. We are all apt to have a patronising pity for the wells which our fathers have dug — to feel how much better our workmanship would have been. But here is a man on fire with the love of yesterday! His whole aim is to glorify the past — even at his own expense to glorify it. He disclaims originality for his workmanship. He says, ‘These wells were made by

my father; I have no credit in their construction; I am only restoring the work which he did, and which after his death the Philistines undid. There is something very grand in the self-effacement implied in the words, ‘He called them by the names which his father Abraham had called them.’ Plagiarism would have been very easy; by no possibility could it have been detected; the signs of the original hand had been all obliterated. What made Isaac disclaim the authority? It was filial love. He was sze/Z bound to the altar of his father. Still, in spirit, was he standing upon Mount Moriah. Still was he offering himself to a parent’s service. Still was he surrendering his own life to crown the life that gave him birth. There is no more beautiful episode than the naming of these commonplace wells!

I am not at all sure that this self-effacement on the part of Isaac came from a quiet nature; nor do I think this is the conception of the artist. I think he wants us to contemplate Isaac as a very strong man. ‘There are two

kinds of self-effacement — very different from each other, but equally implying power. There is a self-effacement which consists in taking on, and there is a self-effacement which consists in giving up. The first was that of Abraham. His surrender was not so much a parting with possessions as a sharing of possessions. If he gave up his country and his kindred, it was for a larger country and a wider kindred. His watchword was not ‘abnegation,’ but ‘sympathetic appropriation’; he took on him the burdens of others. But Isaac belongs to the second order. His sacrifice takes the form of personal divestiture. It is true he has to give up nothing but his will. Neither on Mount Moriah nor afterwards is he required to divest himself of an actual garment. His sacrifice is all inward — all of the will. What he gives on Moriah is not his life, but his willingness to surrender it; what he gives in Gerar is not a possession, but his consent to abstain from it. Yet the man who can give his will has given everything. He who can empty himself of his dearest desire has reached the acme of self-abnegation — a K height of abnegation to which nothing could add. And there is nothing which could accomplish such a work but energy, the perfection of mental strength. It is a strong thing to lift your brother’s burden and put it on your own shoulders; but to lift your own joy and put it away from you, to refuse to stretch out your hand to grasp a coming gain, requires, I think, a nerve stronger still.

A fine instance of this occurs in the waiving of his partiality for his best loved son Esau in favour of the less loved son Jacob. We speak of Abraham offering up his son Isaac; did it ever strike any one that Isaac offered up his son Esau? We almost seem to find the influence of heredity — the two acts are so much alike. In both cases it is a surrender of will; in both it is a surrender to what is believed to be the Divine pleasure. Isaac, like Abraham, has a son whom he loves. He sends for him to bless him. But it is in the days of his old age,and his eye has become dim. His hands are guided to the head of the wrong man; he gives the blessing to Jacob that was meant for

Esau. Immediately, he accepts the accident as the will of God. Though it is dead against his own will, though it is the result of a cruel deception, he receives it as the decree of heaven. With a determined fatalism he crucifies his own desire in obedience to what he deems the counsel of eternity. It is in vain that Esau pleads. His father’s heart is with him; but his creed is stronger than his heart. That creed is the belief that whatever happens becomes God’s will — even though it has been produced by bad agencies. The misguiding of the blind man’s hand was a sin; but the touch of that hand was a fact. Being a fact, it had passed into the hands of God. It had become part of the universe. Man could not revoke it; anger could not annul it; regret could not gainsay it — it was henceforth the will of heaven.

Now, the question which I put is this, Did the artist mean this Portrait to be the representative of sentimental weakness? Is it not clear he meant the reverse! To me the fisure of Isaac suggests rather one of Cromwell’s Ironsides than one of earth’s weaklings. The blood in his veins is akin to that of the Puritans. His was the surrender of a will, not the crushing of a will — there is a great difference between these two. The crushing of a will brings vacancy; the surrender of a will is itself an exercise of will-fower. To my mind there is no more majestic spectacle than that of the old blind man bereft of all the qualities which constitute pagan greatness, yet ruling his clan with authority unbroken. It is one of the finest tributes to the majesty of inward strength which has ever been painted by any literature. It is a tribute to f/emznzine strength, bearing strength, passive strength — a tribute which was not to be excelled till the Son of Man built on the Mount His monument to the greatness of a surrendered will, and inscribed on it the words, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!’

And is it not a sense of this feminine type of greatness which has constrained the artist

in Genesis to give woman a place so high!

Nowhere is the Bible so modern as in its opening pages. The domestic hearth of the Book of Genesis hardly seems an ancient picture. There the kingdom of woman is recognised. There she is the head of the home — I had almost said, the head of the Patriarchs, At a time when elsewhere she is either a drudge or a plaything the Gallery of Genesis has represented her as free. Nay, she is there more than free; she is compelling. Woman would almost seem to give the law to man. Sarah dominates Abraham; Rebekah sways Isaac. It would make no difference though you could prove that the empire only existed in the fancy of the artist. The value lies in the thought, the idea, the aspiration. Tipiiesin the ifact that in these davs there were minds that aspired to the emancipation of woman, minds that saw afar off the recognition of her equal rights with man. And they saw this because they saw more. Their appreciation of the claims of woman came from their appreciation of passzve strength. They thought her worthy to be exalted, because they thought the domestic virtues worthy to be exalted. They had an anticipative vision of the Mount of Beatitudes, an impression that the time would come when the virtues of the valley would be hailed as the virtues of the hill. The fruit of that vision is the enthroning among the patriarchs of a distinctively feminine soul — a soul whose greatness lay in self-denial and whose majesty was his willingness to take the lower room.

THOU who on the mount hast blessed

the virtues of the valley, let me enter

into that blessing! Let me stand on the hill with Thee and see the exalting of lowly things! I used to think the Isaacs of life were unfit to survive. I thought they had no force, no character, no strength to breast the storm. I thought they would be swept away by the first wind that blew. I was wrong. Not undesignedly does Isaac precede Ishmael in Thy Gallery! The Isaacs have had the znward strength; theirs has been the kingdom of heaven, theirs has been the inheritance of the earth, theirs has been the fame of being called the children of God. I passed them by on the way; I rejected them as stones for my building; but they have become the chief pillars in 7hy house. I thank Thee that Thou hast made a crown for Calvary! I thank Thee that Thou hast wreathed the brow of patient pain! I thank Thee that Thou hast a palm for the unrepining! No more can I behold the invalid with condescending pity. No more can I view him as a lame man before a shut gate. His weakness is itself his possible gate to glory. Thou hast made his pain his portal. Thou hast called his waiting work. Thou hast deemed his silence service. Thou hast regarded his patience as praise. Thou hast accepted his tearlessness as tribute. Thou hast received his faith as a fighting. Thou hast hailed his valley as a victory. The hearts that have sung in the night are the heroes of 7/y Pantheon; in this Thou hast fulfilled the promise, ‘In Isaac shall thy seed be called.’