Miriam the Gifted

‘THE three last chapters have exhibited in regressive order three phases of family life. In Sarah the emphasis is laid on the relation of marriage; in Rebekah, the keynote is struck in the proposal of marriage; in Rachel, the narrative is opened by the courtship preliminary to marriage. All these are forms of sexual love. But I am coming now to a picture which is distinguished by the absence of any such idea; it is that of Miriam, the sister of Moses and Aaron. She stands before us in an absolutely unsexual relation; there is neither marriage nor proposal nor courtship. From dawn to dark she remains with us in single blessedness. Her interests are not matrimonial; they are national. Her mission is not domestic; it is patriotic. Wherever she does take up domestic affairs she is hurt and blemished by them; her only chance for purity is to keep to another sphere. Miriam, the unmarried, is a heroine in an age when female celibacy was not a consecrated thing, in a book where the nuptial tie is counted the glory of womanhood. I think it grand that with its natural bias in another direction, the Old Gallery should have left us a picture like that of Miriam — the picture of a woman who from girlhood to old age was kindled by other fires than those of Hymen, and who preserved her spirit of youth by a power altogether distinct from sexual love!

What was that power? It was the gift of poetic inspiration. Miriam was the first woman of the Gallery who rose to the intellectual plane. Sarah was sacrificial; Rebekah was devout; Rachel was placid; but all these Uved in a practical atmosphere. Miriam rises into the aesthetic; she is a poetess and a musician. In her for the first time in this Old Gallery there dawns the conviction that woman has another outlet into the heart of man than that of sexual love — that she may become to him a mental inspirer, an intellectual guide. This daughter of Israel devotes herself to a new problem not how to please, but how to raise, men. She will appeal to their inward nature; she will speak to their souls. She will create a vision of the beautiful which will shame them into emulation. She will minister to her people by minstrelsy. She will sing to them the songs of her own weaving in chords of her own music. She will lift them from the dust by strains of exaltation. She will become a third force in the social fa*bric. “Moses is law, Aaron is religion; she will be art. In addition to the policeman and the priest there will be a new power in society — the power of human feeling, the influence of poetic fire.

You will observe that on this early canvas Israel is true to her subsequent ideal of art. Miriam does not desire to be a poet for the sake of poetry, a musician for the sake of music; it is for God’s sake, for humanity’s sake. She feels a gift within her; but she feels that she only holds it in trust. She has no personal right to it — that is to say, she has no right to use it for her own person. It is something to be consecrated, set apart for the service of the sanctuary. Miriam’s gift of song is typical of all Israel’s sense of beauty.

We are accustomed to hear the Jew distinguished from the the Greek by the comparative indifference of the former to artistic loveliness. That is not the case. The difference between the Jew and the Greek is not in their estimate of artistic beauty, but in the field where they plant that beauty. To the Greek it is an end in itself; to the Jew it is a minister to God. With the latter every art is consecrated to worship. His poetry makes psalms; his music makes psalters; his architecture makes temples. If he discouraged sculpture it was because he feared it would become wm:onsecrated. His very love of physical nature was a religious love. His Bible is full of references to the forms of the outward world; but I do not know of a single passage in which a form of physical nature is praised for its own sake. It is either viewed as a vehicle by which man ascends to God, or as a chariot by which God descends to man. Nothing is painted to show its colour, nothing is sung to reveal its harmony, nothing is written to display its genius; all is for the glory of God.

To Miriam, or to the picture of Miriam, belongs the inauguration of this special form of artistic culture. She is the first of the sweet singers of Israel; and she sings for God. She uses her gift for the elevation of human souls into the heavenly life, and she becomes in this the forerunner of all the Hebrew poets. She is the founder of what I may call the school of intellectual benevolence — the ministration to humanity by the power of mind. Almost from the dawn of her being she revealed this bias of her nature. Her recorded life opens with a scene of thrilHng interest. There has come into play with full force the demand for the survival of the fittest. All the land of Egypt is arrayed against a people whom it has subjected to slavery — the children of Israel. It dreads the manifest increase of their population; at all hazards it resolves to diminish their numbers. It is literally against the “children” of Israel that it turns the sword. It proposes to eliminate every male child that shall be born, by a process of simple extinction — submersion in the river. Nowhere is the principle of evolution revealed in such a terrible form as in this picture of the Old Gallery. All the adult strength of a country is hurled against the inmates of the nursery with a view to cut another people down. It is the mustering of gigantic animal forces for the suppression of incipient national life. And all these gigantic forces are worsted and laid low by the hand of one girl and two grown women! A mother, struck by the beauty of her new-born child, hides him for three months from the destroyer. When she can keep him no longer, she resolves to appeal to the rivers mercy; she sends him out upon the Nile nestled in an ark of bulrushes. An Egyptian princess comes down to bathe in the waters. Attracted by the strange spectacle of a floating ark, she sends her maid to pick it up from the Nile; and when it is opened she finds the child. She too is arrested by its beauty, and she expresses her admiration aloud. She says: “This is a babe whom I would save from the fate of his comrades; as I have none of my own I should like to adopt him.” She is speaking only to herself; but she is thinking in words, and she is overheard. A little girl is on the bank; it is Miriam, the child’s sister.

When I say, ‘a little girl,” I am measuring her by the standard of the artist. She might actually be fifteen; but, in the delineations of the Gallery, life moves much slower than at present, and fifteen will stand for eight. Miriam is what would now be called a little girl; but at no time would she be called a superficial girl. Of the three females in the transaction the mother, the princess, and the young sister, the last is by far the most advanced in mind. The ark left to itself would have only postponed the catastrophe. The princess left to herself would have saved the child’s life at the expense of its nationality. But little Miriam by a stroke of precocious genius preserved the nationality as well as the life of the child Moses. The mother and the princess were both attracted by tenderness of feeling. Miriam had also tenderness of feeling, but it was blended with something of a stronger mould — a power of suggestion, a depth of shrewdness, a fertility and readiness of resource, which placed her, even in girlhood, on a height entirely her own. She saves the situation by what I have called an act of “intellectual benevolence,”

Little Miriam stands upon the bank and hears the princess say, “I will adopt this child.” And Miriam says to herself: ‘’Would this be really a boon for my brother Moses? Should I like to see him transformed into an Egyptian? Slave as he is, he has a nobler because a diviner lineage than Pharaoh’s daughter. Will he ever learn that lineage? Cannot something be done to reveal it?” And here a thought flashes through the soul of Miriam. She says to the princess: “It is a pity that your royal highness should be troubled with this babe’s helpless years. I know a woman of our race who is a splendid nurse for children. Let me bring her and put this child in her hands in trust for you. When it is old enough to appreciate your love she will give it you back.” And the princess listens with approval; she bids her go and fetch the woman. Miriam brings her own mother — the child’s own mother.

Consider the penetration of the girl. Why does she not say, “I am his sister, and the nurse I propose is his mother?” Most grown people would have said that; it would have seemed a commendation of the course suggested. But

Miriam had too much nous for that. Her benevolence ran along the lines of intellect. She knew that the seeming recommendation would have been a barrier — would have cut the scheme in two. She felt instinctively that the Egyptian princess, earnestly desirous to adopt this boy, would have looked with great distrust on the interposition of a mother’s love, would have repudiated a preUminary association with the influence of a parent’s heart. And so Miriam kept silence. It is the only deception in the Bible which I thoroughly approve. Sarah’s needs to be allowed for; Rebekah’s requires to be condoned; Leah’s must in memory be reprobated. But Miriam’s has been the saving of Israel, nay, the making of Israel. // has been the real ark of bulrushes. The physical ark might have given a son to Egypt; but the reticence of Miriam has assigned a law-giver to the Jewish race. The greatness of this people according to its own records has its origin in a female intelligence. And now for many years there is a dropping of the curtain. When it rises again it is upon a new scene. Egypt has vanished and another world has dawned. The slaves have become free. Again they stand upon the banks of a water; but it is no longer the water of the Nile river; it is that of the Red Sea. They stand upon these banks triumphant; they have emancipated themselves from the Egyptian thraldom. And their emancipation finds vent in song. Miriam is again their mouthpiece; but it is Miriam grown to womanhood, and she addresses no longer the daughter of Pharaoh but the God of her own father. Her accents are those of praise. She has become the poet of her time, and her poetry is consecrated to the heavenly life. Her people are about to take their way through a dreary desert, and she would fain lead them on with songs of cheer. But she knows that the most powerful songs of cheer are songs of memory. She knows that nothing kindles man’s hope for the future like his survey of the past; and it is to the past she turns. Instead of painting the glories of a promised land, she dwells upon a deUverance that has already come. She points not to grapes of Eshcol hanging on the trees of to-morrow, but to a vanquished sea lying on the bosom of yesterday. And this is right; the intelUgence of the girl has survived in the woman. It is a memory that gives wings to hope. Expectation gets its pinions from experience. If Israel is to hope for a land flowing with milk and honey, it must be, not by looking forward, but by looking back. Even the faith in a future life gets its wings from memory — from the records of God’s care for man. The greatest stimulus for the crossing of Jordan is the fact that we have already crossed the Red Sea. It was wise in Miriam to begin with that sea and over its prostrate waves to sound her first timbrel.

Again the scene changes, and a new act of the drama opens. We find ourselves in a totally different environment from either of the foregoing. We have passed from the Nile river; we have passed from the Red Sea; we have entered into the heart of the wilderness. And we have left behind also the song of triumph. A cloud has settled over the singer — a moral cloud. Miriam has had a spiritual fall; she has contracted an inward stain. The spectator of the picture is horrified — not at her, but at the artist; it seems an unjust thing to make such a good woman stumble. But the Bible is a strange book. It puts a blot upon all its portraits, and it does so not by mistake but by design. Its blots are as much a bit of the art as are its beauties. About these Bible blots there are two things which have struck me. Let me state them one by one.

The first is that the blot on a Bible character usually falls in its middle stage. Its morning is bright; its evening is placid; but its midday is apt to be overshadowed. We see Abraham in his youth as a life of heroic resolves — filled with hopes unspeakable, inspired with courage unbounded. We see Abraham in his old age triumphant in the spirit of sacrifice — revealing on the heights of Moriah the fullness and the fervour of his faith. But when we meet Abraham in his midday we encounter a surprise. It is neither the man of the morning nor the man of the evening; it is a poor shattered creature trembling at every wind that blows, unable to lift his soul from the abyss of the coward and the temptations of the craven. That is a fair specimen of the portraiture of Bible heroes.

The second thing which strikes me about the blots of the Bible is that they come just in the place where we should not expect them to fall. We should think, for example, that a brave soul like Abraham, when he did err, would have erred by foolhardiness, that a fiery spirit like Elijah would have burned his hand by rashness. It is the reverse. Both of these men are vanquished in their own castle — Abraham by terror of the Egyptian, Elijah by the coldness of despondency. Miriam’s own case is an example of this kind. She falls just where we should not have expected it; she rebels against Moses. Her mission had been to protect Moses, and she had realized that it was so. She had saved him for his country; she had sung his triumph over the shores of the Red Sea. Was it not of all acts the most inconsistent — to rebel against the policy of her life! We can understand Aarons share in the revolt; that was the jealousy of the Church toward the State. But Miriam had always viewed Moses in a religious light — as a chosen emissary of God. What had happened to dispel the spirit of her dream? Something had happened. Inconsistent as the act was, it had its root in a motive which was thoroughly on the lines of Miriam. Miriam’s abounding passion was the love of country. Her love of country was greater than her love of Moses. Her early fear had been that Moses might be separated from his land. The same fear recurs to her to-day. She dreads that her brother, no longer an infant but a distinguished man, will be as effectually drawn from the service of his country as he would have been if adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter. It is no longer Pharaoh’s daughter that is the object of terror. It is a woman of Ethiopia — the wife of Moses himself — a foreign, dark-skinned woman with the blood of a mean ancestry in her veins and a hatred of the worship of Israel. This latter feeling she had amply manifested in the very presence of her husband by her vehement resistance to one of the existing religious rites. Haughty Miriam, pious Miriam, conservative Miriam, had no love for her sister-in-law; yet she would have let her pass but for the dread of her influence on Moses. That dread haunted her like a nightmare; morn, noon and evening it assailed her with speechless horror. She thought Moses was about to become untrue to his mission — about to separate himself from his brethren. She aspired to take his place as leader of the camp. It is thought an act of ambition. I believe there was not a ray of ambition in her soul. It was an act of substitution. She wanted some one to take the place which, in her opinion, Moses was vacating. She offered herself in humility — as a compensation for the defection of a brother. She felt like those of an after-time, who were “baptized for the dead” — raised up to finish the work which the dead had been unable to do.

The fault of Miriam was an error of judgment. She underrated the mental power of Moses. Perhaps it is difficult for an elder sister who has been the guardian of her brother’s youth, to appreciate the full force of his genius. Miriam may have retained a sense of patronage for the man whose opening years she had helped to supervise. To the multitude he was under a cloud — wrapped in a veil of mystery. But to Miriam he was a brother, and a younger brother — a brother who owed his position to herself, and whose first steps she had guided over the threshold of Ufe. Is it strange that the instinct of correction should have survived — that when she saw him, to her mind, do wrong she burned to put him right, that when she believed the skein to be dropping from his hands she raised it in her own hands and sought to complete its unwinding?

You will observe, this aspiration of Miriam is the greatest assertion of woman’s rights that has yet been made in the Gallery. Eve has aspired to the full compass of her own garden. Sarah wants the undivided possession of a husband’s love. Rebekah desires the direction of her children’s capacity towards a profession suited to each. All these aims are within the woman’s kingdom. But Miriam oversteps them all. She aims at the man’s kingdom — at the kingdom of her brother Moses. She aspires to a state power, to a voice in the government of the people. She fails; but in the very next representative female portrait a woman is described as reaching that height which the feet of Miriam had been unable to attain.

In seeking an influence over the outside world Miriam was premature. She was before her time and therefore she was unsupported. Her revolt was a purely individual matter. She did not head a rebelHon; she was one of but two rebels — her brother Aaron being the other; and Aaron himself sailed in a different boat. Miriam was single-handed and I believe she was single-hearted. But the age was not ripe for the reins of secular life to be held by a woman, and she received universal censure. She was brought before a tribunal. She was told that poets had no right to claim revelations from the Almighty, or seek to be leaders of His people. She was subjected to a temporary disgrace. She was expelled from the congregation of the Lord for seven days. She was placed during that time in the position of a moral leper who could not be touched without spiritual uncleanness. She had to bear the sorrow of seeing Israel’s march to the promised land arrested — arrested on her account, arrested during the days of her banishment. Her effort at a change of ministryended in her humiHation.

And yet I would not say that Miriam was altogether defeated. She failed, and rightly failed, to shake the power of Moses; but I am by no means sure that she did not shake the power of his Ethiopian wife. Every heretical movement, even where it is put down, has an effect upon the existing system; it directs attention to a neglected element. Miriam’s outbreak was silenced; but it had rung a warning bell — a bell which Moses of all men would be the last to disregard. Miriam came out of her cloud with an unstained reputation. She I’esumed her leadership by the side of her two brothers. She lost nothing of her respect among the ranks of Israel. She kept an honoured name not only through the marches of the wilderness, but through the long march of Jewish history, and men ever spoke of her as Miriam the Prophetess. This they would not have done if they believed she had prophesied of a non-existent danger. It was beyond question that the marriage of Moses had been a foolish one. It had been contracted in the days of his national coolness — before the fire of the burning bush had flashed enthusiasm into his soul. The burning bush had come; but the waters of Marah remained. There was bitterness in his own household — bitterness to the camp of Isreal. When a man’s wife is opposed to the religious rites of his country, he is perilously near to the forgetting of that country. Who knows but in some moment of home perturbation he may have been kept loyal and true by the protest of his elder sister I

Miriam never reached the promised land; she died in the wilderness. She died almost when the goal was won; at the opening of the fortieth year of Israel’s wanderings — by only a very short time predeceasing her two brothers. It seems a sad thing to have fainted so near to the crown. Yet I think a “death in the desert” was a fitting close for such a life as hers. Miriam was a bird of song, and songs are sweetest in the night. Miriam was meant to sing in the wilderness and for the wilderness; and when the wilderness was past, her work was done. Her mission was to cheer the desert; and when the end of the desert was reached her task was over. Not inappropriately, she passed away at the eleventh hour of Israel’s journey. Her mission of song had been a mission of sacrifice. She had been placed there for the sake of the footsore and weary; when the feet were about to rest and the weary about to be strong, she had finished the work which was given her to do. It was well that the time of her death should have been the close of her sacrificial mission. Over the grave in which she sleeps at Kadesh we feel disposed to write an epitaph whose words shall reproduce a strain of Patmos, “She sang the song of Moses; but it was also the song of the Lamb.”

Lord, we need Miriam in our wilderness of time; give us women of song — women of good cheer! Our homes would be dark without our Miriams. Many a man among us would be conquered in the march if he were not refreshed by draughts from home. Everincreasingly give Miriam song for the wilderness! Give her song for the nursery that her children may start life with joy! Give her song for the fireside that her husband may brush his cares away! Give her song for the district visit that poverty may be cheered by hope! Give her song for the in- ^rmary, that pain may be forgotten in mental brightness! Give her a word of comfort for every form of downcastness! Give her promises for the penitent, balm for the broken, encouragement for the crouching, help for the homeless, fellowship for the fallen, recognition for the ruined, sustenance for the stricken, love for those who have parted with light! Let her sing over every Red Sea the message that the Red Sea is a scene of triumph! Let her sing over every coming Jordan the message that beyond the Jordan lies the promised land! Let her tell of the good time past and the good time yet to be — the bright spots in memory and the brighter spots in hope! Let her song rise for others even when she herself is sad; may she distribute the wine of Cana under the shadow of her cross! Then will her music be perfected by sacrifice; then will men look on her and say, ‘’To her the song of Moses is the song of the Lamb.”