Sarah the Steadfast

IT AM told in the Book of Genesis that before God said, “Let there be light,” ‘’Let there be a firmament,” “Let there be dry land,” He “created the heavens and the earth;” in other words, He began, not with the parts, but with the whole. I believe that in the study of any subject the order of thought must follow God’s order of creation; it must begin with the whole. In the study of a moral portrait our starting point should be the general impression — not the isolated features. That is the only fair and legitimate means of stamping a picture with its distinctive and representative quality. Begin with the completed view, and work downwards. Begin, not with the analysis of eye or ear or hand, but with the survey of that combined effect where the details are lost in the consummation and the eccentricities of feature are overshadowed in a common harmony.

I have found the truth of this in a study of the portrait of Sarah. If I had taken special days of her existence I should have been perplexed what epithet to give her. In the light of one day I might have called her “Sarah the Imperious,” in the light of another “Sarah the Sceptical,” in the light of a third “Sarah the Cruel.” But all these are accidental days; they are but the variations in a single air, and that air is the tune of a whole life. It would be unfair to judge the tune by its variations. We must look at the deep sea beneath the waves. And what is this sea? What is that quality in the mind of Sarah which lies below all other qualities, and which subsists when others change? (It may be expressed in one word — steadfastness. The abiding secret of this woman’s greatness is the fact of her own abidingness. J Others are great by their brilliancy, by their talent, by their beauty. Sarah has all the qualities; but none of them is made her crown. She has the sparkle which wins love; but not on that rests her epitaph. She has the physical lovehness which commands admiration; but not on that reposes her glory. She has the mental power which sways masses; but not on that does her empire stand to-day. /The one quality by which she lives in our memory is the steadfastness of her conjugal devotion, j From morn to eve, in storm and in calm, in shadow and in sunshine, in the flush of youth and amid the falling leaves of autumn, she is ever by her husband Abraham’s side. Prosperity does not divorce them; adversity does not divide them; time only deepens the intensity of their union.

There is one point in this which in relation to the Bible Gallery is to my mind highly significant. It is the fact that the Bible’s first dehneation of female steadfastness is in the sphere of the conjugal. We should have expected it to be in the sphere of the lover. When a modern novelist wishes to illustrate this quahty he generally depicts it before marriage. He takes for granted that the reader will appreciate most a steadfast devotion between two lives which have not yet been joined by the wedding ring. The Bible places in the front ground a post-nuptial steadfastness. And I must say that in this I agree with the act of the Hebrew Galleiy. I think the continued devotion of married lives is more to be emphasized than that of lovers. Pre-nuptial love is an age of romance, and romance courts the opposition of fortune. What amorous youth does not figure in his soul a thousand adventures of danger in which he will be the hero; what amorous maiden does not picture in her heart a thousand trials of fortitude in which she will prove her loyalty! But nuptial love grows practical. It settles down. It seeks no posts of danger. It is not, like its predecessor, tempted to manifest its devotion by casting itself from the pinnacle of the temple. Its prayer is rather that of the psalmist, ‘’Lead me in a plain path because of my enemies.” Dangers are barriers. Difficulties are hindrances. Obstacles are’ impediments to the wings. The result is that married love, where it persists, is the highest test of steadfastness. It may not require to submit to more sacrifices than romantic love; but it feels the real pain of the sacrifices it is submitting to. Romantic love sees Hfe’s battle from a hill; the wearer of the nuptial ring beholds it from the plain. Let me illustrate what I mean from the picture.

Here is a young man — Abraham. He is living in Ur of the Chaldees — a seat of ancient civiHzation. He is himself a youth of high poetic instincts and not without a dash of that dreaminess which belongs to these instincts. He has had long waking dreams under the stars. There has risen within him an impulse which now would be called missionary, which then would be held visionary. He will go out from his country and from his kindred and from his father’s house to seek a new country and build a new house. He will go forth to plant a colony in some region as yet to him unknown. He will go where God leads him. He will make no preUminary plan; he will map out no geographical course; he will be led by the Divine hand blindfold. To his contemporaries, to his fellow-countrymen, it seems a wild delusion, the insanity of genius. But that is not the worst. He is not asking his countrymen to join him; he can afford to discard their opinion. But there remains to be dealt with something of a far more serious naturesomething which disputes the message of the stars and complicates the spirit of his dream.

He has formed an attachment to a maiden of extreme beauty — a native of his own land and connected with himself by blood. She is called Sarah, and her name denotes elevated rank. Will this damsel join her fate to his in an enterprise so hazardous? Will she leave father and mother, sister and brother, the friends and comrades of her youth, to follow the fortunes of a visionary young man who has not a possession in the world and who has no prospect but his dreams? Will she go out like himself without knowing whither she is bound, and trusting merely to what men would call the chances of life? That is what Abraham asks himself, that is what impedes the current of his great missionary resolve. Doubtless he would have left Ur of the Chaldees years before but for the haunting dread of parting with Sarah.

At last, one day — of which indeed there is no record — he takes his courage in his hands and opens out his soul to Sarah. I feel sure he makes a clean breast of it. I know he never would ask her to be his wife without telling her of the precipice along which their united lives were to lie — without inquiring, in the spirit of an old Scottish song, ‘’ Canst thou forget the courtly scene where thou wert fairest of the fair!” And we all know what in Abraham’s case the answer was — Yes. This beautiful woman makes a great surrender. She gives up home, friends, country, for the love of one man. She gives up certainty for uncertainty, possession for chance, acquaintances for strangers, civilization for unculturedness, the amenities of the city for the hardships of the desert. One is disposed to say, ‘’The steadfastness of love can go no farther than this.”

But that is not my opinion, and it is not the opinion of the artist. Sarah is yet only in the romantic stage, and it is her romance that makes the choice. It is a choice perfectly sincere, but it is hardly sacrificial. It is exactly the kind of thing which romance longs for, craves for. In its first young dream love cries out for manifestation, and it courts manifestation in what the world would call a path of sacrifice. Its watchword is self-abandonment and the revelation of self-abandonment. Sarah accepted the sacrificial robe as her most becoming dress. It is for romance ever the most becoming dress. But just on that account it is not the test of love’s tenacity. The test of love’s tenacity is the power to accept an wibecoming dress — a dress whose soiledness may threaten to mar the beauty, and whose many rents and tears are more suggestive of friction than of freedom. That is the test which is the culminating evidence of the steadfastness of a woman’s love; and it came to Sarah, not in the romantic choice of her youthful years, but in the weighted struggles incidental to the marriage ring. The glory of these struggles is that Sarah’s love surmounted them all, although they were all of an unromantic cast and all threatened to assail the citadel of her heart. I wish to follow Sarah through the struggles and the victory of her married life; we shall see that it is there she has left her abiding monument.

When the scene first opens on the married life of Abraham and Sarah, they are having an experience which their romance had not bargained for — the poverty of the land. They have passed from Ur into Haran and from Haran into Canaan. In Canaan there has arisen a great famine. Personal poverty may create a stimulus to work; but the poverty of the land kills all stimulus. For a married pair I can imagine no duller experience than poverty of the land. It means a famine of everything. National scarcity involves a national stagnation — a stagnation of public amusements, a stagnation of private festivities, a stagnation even of social intercourse; it is the last set of circumstances one would choose for a honeymoon. We should have thought this was the time for the missionary zeal of Abraham — the time when the world looked dark, and there was no temptation to Hfe’s vanities. We should have expected that he would have made this the day and hour for the inauguration of his great scheme of human amelioration — that like his descendant Joseph he would have bestirred himself for the relief of humanity. On the contrary, his only feeling seems to have been a chafing under personal discomfort and a desire to get away. Before his eyes there swims the glory of the land of Egypt — a land of riches, a land of plenty, a land where man can forget his cares. One asks with surprise, almost with dismay, “Is this the Abraham who on the plains of Chaldea had devoted himself to a life for God!”

But you forget, the man Abraham is not yet complete — he is only in the making. Do you think the father of the faithful could have been created in a day! No; he was at first the child of a holy imagination, of a lofty poetry. When imagination comes into contact with cold reality there is always a shock and sometimes a fall. I think this must have been Sarah’s first real sorrow — not the famine in the land but the famine in Abraham’s soul. She sees her ideal husband in a new light. She had seen him in Ur of the Chaldees flaming with the poetic impulse to abandon himself for the sake of humanity. She beholds him in the land of Canaan with his fire cooled down, with his poetry extinguished under the heel of prosaic fact. Remember, poetic natures are far more apt to be thus unmanned than cold, phlegmatic natures; it is they alone who experience the collision between the spirit and the flesh. Sarah remembers it. She has her first sorrow; but it breaks not the chord of her first love. The man whom she sees is still the man of Ur — the man of her girUsh dreams, the man of bold and buoyant confidence. True, he is under a cloud and the cloud distresses her; but her eye looks beyond the cloud to the normal shining of her husband’s soul. She says in her heart, “The sun will rise to-morrow.”

She has need of all her hope; for meantime the gloom deepens. The complaint which has come to Abraham is one which seems occasionally to beset high-strung natures — a reaction of the nerves producing extreme timidity. It came more than once to Elijah; it came often to Simon Peter; it came now to Abraham. There has broken upon him a timidity approaching to abject fear; in obedience to its impulse he is flying from the famine into Egpt. But as he nears Egypt his terror increases; it passes from abject fear into cowardly selfishness. He says to Sarah: “We are going into a country where I shall suffer by your beauty. Men will envy me the possession of you; they will lament that you are wedded, bound; they will seek to kill me that you may be free. You can save me if you will. Pretend that you are already free. Conceal the fact of our nuptial bond. Represent your relation to me as something which does not involve inalienable possession — something which will not interfere with the passions of other men. Affect a less stringent tie; say you are my sister.”

It would be difficult to imagine a deeper sinking of a lofty soul. Let us understand where it lies. It is not in the eclipse of faith — sad as that undoubtedly was. It is not in the stooping to a falsehood — pitiful as was the moral descent. It is not even in the attempt to make his wife partaker in the lie — dark as the deed must seem. There is something more lowering and more distressing than any of these; it is the eclipse in Abraham’s heart of the wifely relation itself. His request is nothing less than that Sarah should take upon herself an infinitely greater peril in order to save him from the danger of losing life. A more terrible strain upon a woman’s conjugal love is not to be conceived. Yet this noble woman stood the strain. She surrendered herself to the solacing of her husband’s despair. To bring him peace of mind she acceded to his desire. She consented to a deception; but it was a deception that led right down into a deep vault of self-sacrifice. She put her trust in God and threw herself into the breach of danger. Her whole aim was that the weapon should miss her husband’s breast. If it came to the worst she could die — die by her own hand; but he would Uve on and his life would yet be glorious. For, never mistake what it was that kept alive this woman’s love. It was the certainty that the present Abraham was not the real Abraham. She saw the man of the past; she saw the man of the future. The man of the present was only under a cloud. That cloud was, after all, the shadow of God — a temporary inaction imposed by the Almighty. It would pass by and by, and the day would dawn and the birds would sing.

I do not think this woman Sarah has ever got justice. She is one of the finest specimens of tenacious married love whom it has been my privilege to meet. Her trials are all unromantic — things that bring no stimulus with them. Hitherto she has encountered commonplace famine, the ecHpse of a husband’s energy, and the seeming decline of a husband’s care; yet she has remained undaunted in her first devotion. But to her, as to Job, new trials are coming. Let us follow her down the stream. By and by the cloud clears from Canaan, and Abraham and Sarah return. But before leaving Egypt Sarah makes a purchase which transforms an accidental visit into a turning-point of life; she buys a beautiful Egyptian slave named Hagar and carries her into Canaan. Years pass, and for Abraham prosperity dawns. His energy revives; his zeal comes back; his flocks multiply; his riches grow. But side by side with the prosperity, beat for beat with the pulse of Abraham’s joy, there throbs in Sarah’s heart a pulse of pain. It is a purely impersonal pain. There is not a trace of selfishness about it; it is all for her husband, and it grows with her husband’s good fortune. There is as yet no heir. Has he given her his love only that she may wreck his prospects — nay, wreck God’s mission for his life! What need to build a kingdom when he has no inheritor; what use to plant a colony when his name must die! He has asked her to share his fortunes, and she has spoiled them; he has asked her to share his ambition, and she has marred it. In the secret of her soul Sarah wrings her hands in sadness. Outwardly she is gay; she is dispensing hospitality; she is entertaining her husband’s guests. But the world knows not, he himself knows not, the unselfish bitterness of the heroic spirit by his side. Nowhere to me is this woman so grand as in the festive hour with the heavy heart.

Suddenly, a thought comes to Sarah. It is her own suggestion — not Abraham’s. She is the real sufferer, and it is all for him. She says to her husband, “Take my slave Hagar as a second wife.” Why does she propose her slave? Because she says to herself, “If an heir should come through Hagar he will still be my son, not hers; Hagar has no personality apart from me; she is a bit of myself; she will be my slave even after maternity; the motherhood will all be mine.” She does not want her husband to be really a bigamist; she loves him too much for that. She offers him one too lowly to be a rival. I understand her, I sympathize with her, I shake hands with her across the years. I can read the line of subtle thought which made her act as she did, and I appreciate both her and the artist.

But Sarah has miscalculated something. She has said that even maternity will not make Hagar less her slave. In body perhaps not; but in spirit it will break her bonds. It proves so. Ishmael’s life begins to dawn, and in an instant Hagar feels free. Sarah is more eager than ever to emphasize the slavery; we always emphasize what we are not quite sure about. The commands are more imperative; the burdens are more heavy; the work is more arduous. Friction arises in the home. Abraham looks on easily; lions in the path are often lambs in the household. For the first time in the records of this family there is a domestic explosion. Sarah upbraids Abraham, not on the ground of infidelity — for there is none, but on the ground of supineness — of tamely standing by while her household authority is being ignored by a menial. It is the earliest assertion in the world of the rights of woman, and, whether you place it on canvas or in history, it is a thought before its time.

There she stands — this champion of the woman at home! There she stands with blazing cheek and flaming eye, proclaiming to her house and to all houses that she is mistress of her own abode, that by her fireside she will have no competitor! It is essential to her peace that Hagar should be, not a person, but a thing. She will not recognize her as Abraham’s helpmeet. She will have no polygamy in her dwelling. Her husband will be hers alone — hers even in Hagar’ s maternity. Hagar shall be her instrument, but not her rival; in her own domain Sarah will be despotic queen. Even so, brave Sarah, fight on! You are fighting our battle — civilization’s battle, the battle of womanhood! We recognize you as our pioneer; we admire and honour you!

The combat ends in favour of Sarah. One day, Hagar is missing; she has fled into the desert. The next, or the next but one, she is back again; the angel of prudence has advised her to return. She comes back in humility, and her generous mistress receives her on the old terms. There is another lapse of time; and then the unexpected happens. When nearly all hope had been abandoned, a real heir is born to Sarah. His advent is greeted with jubilation. He is the child of laughter; there is merriment at hearth and board. But the laughter is not all joy; the jeer of scorn mingles with it. Hagar is there and her boy Ishmael; they sneer at the puny child Isaac. I have always felt he must have been a dehcate child; the events of his after-life indicate it. We can imagine the sore heart of Hagar contrasting the fragile look of Isaac with the magnificent physique of her son Ishmael, and we can hear the laugh of derision with which she would say, “And this is Abraham’s heir!” It is too much for Sarah. Woman can stand much; but when you touch her in her motherhood the tiger wakes within her. Sarah has at last reached her Umit of endurance. No longer can she suffer beneath her roof the presence of this Egyptian and her boy. They must go out from her; they must find their way to their own kith and kin. Short and summary is the warning. Mother and son are sent out into the desert to breast the bleak world, alone. Ye who think Sarah was harsh in her method, remember that even her act of dismission was an act of concession: it set the Egyptian free. She had no need any more to run away. Imperial Sarah cries, “I make you a present of your liberty; leave my house for evermore!” For my part I say Amen. I admire and honour the deed of this woman. She has purified her home. She has washed clean her household hearth. She has relighted her nuptial fire. She has swept her rooms of the least taint of polygamy. She has obtained over her husband a drastic and final dominion in the sphere of the dwelling-place. There we shall leave her — empress and dictator of the home! She has bound her husband with a cord of love which will not be loosed even when he lays her down in the Cave of Machpelah. For us she rests, not in Machpelah, but in the secret of her own tent. There we shall ever see her — the champion of the rights of woman, the advocate of female liberty! There we shall ever hear her — proclaiming the sanctity of the hearth and the inviolable clasp of the marriage bond! The influence of many empires may be forgotten; but the portrait of Sarah in the Old Bible Gallery should be to the latest civilizations a thing of beauty and a joy for ever!

I bless Thee for this portrait, O my God. I am glad that at the opening of the Gallery Thou hast placed a picture of fair womanhood wearing no bonds. I am grateful for the primitive vision of a mistress of the home. May the world never outgrow this picture; may it be the guiding-star for all time! May the hearth of Sarah ever be brightened by her own hand! May the nuptial torch be trimmed by herself alone! Keep unsulHed her marriage ring! Let no Hagar break the unity of her family circle; may her husband’s love be steadfast to the end! May her own love be steadfast — steadfast in the most trying things, the commonplace things! When the romantic has given place to the practical, may love not be killed thereby! May it not be damped by the rain, scorched by the heat, exhausted by the burdens of the day. If Abraham sometimes seems to lose his glow, may Sarah not lose hers! May she remember that man has more toil than woman and is subject to more weariness of the soul! Let her make allowance for the clouds in the masculine sky I Let her believe that her first impression was the true one! Let her hold fast to the ideal of her youth! May her devotion be undimmed by the desert! May her fondness not faint in the famine! May her care not corrode in the conflict! Cherish her by chastity; protect her by purity; defend her by fidelity; keep her by constancy of heart! Then shall her evening and her morning be one cloudless day!