Ni Ruth the Decided

It may seem a strange thing that I should select Ruth as a type of decision. At a first view she appears the type of everything the contrary, We think of her as a preeminently gentle nature, one of the quiet voices of the world, a soul that does not strive nor cry nor make itself heard in the streets of the great city. Often have I been tempted to express surprise that the strong age of the judges should have produced a spirit so silent. But if we look deeper I think we shall find that she is the very child of her age, the true daughter of a race of heroes. Silent indeed she is, and gentle beyond measure; but I do not think that is incompatible with extreme decision of character. The formula which I have found true in life is this, the gentle are not always decided, but the decided are always gentle. Where gentleness is at the root of the nature it may tend to produce a pliancy of the will — to prevent robustness in the resolves of the heart. But on the other hand, where the will is already firm, its expression will certainly be marked by gentleness. If you examine the cases of vehement and violent assertion, you will find that for the most part they originate in a mental doubt on the subject felt by the speaker himself. Where the mind is made up, the voice is calm, and the words commonly few. Ill-temper has often its root in the fact that a cause has weak points; we spread the canvas to divert the eye from the leakings. Pilate asks the Son of Man if He is a king. He answers, It is as Thou sayest. There is no vociferation, because there is no mental doubt. The Christ has so absolutely recognized His Divine prerogative that He feels no need to assert it. He is convinced that it will assert itselj, in spite of Him, unconsciously to Him, independently of Him. He raises no shout, because He knows that a city set on a hill cannot be hid.

Ruth, then, was very gentle just because she was very decided. Her freedom from bustle in her absence of doubt, her conviction that things can only take one course and that this must be, not hurried, but waited for. Thus far the picture is consistent with itself. BVit the spectator is presently arrested by a second paradox. He is startled by the fact that the representative of female decision is mg.de to act on so narrow a stage. We should have expected for her a scene of thrilling interest, some great crisishour of history on whose result hung the fate of nations. On the contrary, we have a narrative of extreme simplicity, if it can be called a narrative at all. There is almost a total absence of outward incident. There is no battle or lightning or murder. There are no wars or rumours of war. There is no call to choose between martyrdom and apostasy. There is no striking ordeal to be faced, no path of lions to be chosen, no fiery furnace to be trod. The events are outwardly of infinitesimal importance, seeming to involve nothing in their train. In looking at the great thing to be represented and the almost contemptible scene of representation, one is tempted to cry. To what purpose is this waste?

But if you look deeper, you will find that the artist of the Bible Gallery has here not been untrue to himself. Indeed, in the picture of Ruth he has only given special expression to one of the pecuUar features of Bible dehneation, to a Uterary phenomenon which, so far as I know, is unparalleled in ancient history. If I might be allowed to express its nature epigrammatically, I should say that the scenes of the Bible Gallery are in their highest manifestation dramatic without outward incident. Ruth is no exception to a rule; she is only the emphatic colouring of a feature which is widely prevalent. There are scenes in history which are free from dramatic incident, there are scenes in history whose outward situation makes their dramatic interest complete; but the pecuHarity of the Bible is that it can be dramatic with almost no scenery at all. Let me illustrate what I mean.

Here is a picture of the agonized Abraham impelled to surrender this son to death. Who impels him? We look round in search of the constraining forces. On the Mount of Moriah we see none. There is no foe in shining armour.

There is no exacting of a tribute. There is no hint of a crime which must be expiated by blood. Whence, then, comes the tragedy? It is all from within — from the heart of Abraham himself. The dialogue is between the movements of his own soul. His struggle is a struggle of will. He has heard the voice of a command, ‘’Offer thy son as a burnt-offering,” but it is no outward voice; it is a mandate of the spirit. The spirit says, “Thou canst not withhold a gift from the Giver of all good;” the human will answers, “Can I part, even for Him with the child of my affection 1” These are the voices that make the drama, these are the combatants that constitute the tragedy. It is a drama of the inner man, a tragedy of the soul. It has no outward events, no historical personages, no trials imposed by a human hand. It is a scene of blood and horror; but it is painted from within.

Again, Jacob is in the silent night, and there wrestles a man with him until the breaking of the day. But when the spectator looks round, he sees no man; he sees only Jacob, a solitary figure wringing his hands in the darkness. Where is the wrestling, where the combat? It is all inside. The struggling man is Jacob’s own conscience. His second self has come up before him as a phantom of the night, his accusing self, his better self. He is confronted by his evil deeds of yesterday, his supplanting of his brother, his deceiving of his father, his crooked poUcy towards his uncle. There is no sign of outward danger, no footfall heard of an approaching foe. Externally, the very darkness is a protection. But there is a battle within, a man wrestUng within. The soul of Jacob has risen up in dialogue against himself; and there lies the drama. One man has become two. Jacob has seen his angel, his coming self, his life that will be to-morrow; and the ideal brightness of to-morrow emphasizes the darkness of to-day.

Once more. Take the greatest of all Bible tragedies, the Garden of Gethsemane. Where lies that tragedy? Put a Roman at the Garden gate, and he will say, ‘’I see no cause for it” I doubt if Peter, James and John saw any cause for it. The grief of Jesus came out from without. It was not generated by fear. It was no apprehension of the Jewish priesthood, no dread of the Roman legions, that woke the anguish of that hour. It was something impalpable to sQjise, something the world could not see. It was the perception of human sin and human misery, the pressure on His soul of iniquities not His own and privations from which naturally His spirit would have been free. This greatest of all Bible tragedies, this greatest of all the tragedies of the world, is one in which there is seen neither the fire nor the wood; it is a sacrifice kindled wholly from within, the voluntary offering by a human heart of its own blood and tears in expiation of the sins of man.

The story of Ruth, then, is no exception to a rule. Her life is on the lines of Bible art; it is dramatic without external incident. She is the representative of female decision of character; but the decision is made in a seemingly insignificant act, and the deed affects an outwardly infinitesimal sphere. Ruth’s decision is made in a case of love; but it is what would be deemed the most unheroic kind of love. We could imagine spheres of love in which there was grand room for decision of character. We can figure the patriot bleeding for his country or the philanthropist toiling for the poor or the romantic youth braving infection to visit the sick bed of his betrothed. But I doubt if any artist outside the Bible ever painted decision of character in the resolution to follow the fortunes of a mother-in-law. That is what the Sacred Gallery has done. It has taken, to illustrate female decision of character, the most unheroic form of love — the love for a mother-in-law, the devotion to an object that is often supposed to awaken jarring. The Bible always selects the discarded stones and makes them the head of the corner. We have seen how it has selected the most unromantic forms of love. In Sarah it has exhibited a wife’s commonplace trials. In Rebekah it has displayed a mother’s domestic annoyances. In Rachel it has painted a maiden waiting with hope deferred. In Miriam it has depicted an unmarried woman loving only the souls and not the aspects of men. In Deborah it has revealed the love of a parish visitor manifesting itself in the rebuke of sin and the condemnation of wrong.

And now in Ruth it gives us a picture of love bctv^een two females, one elderly and ‘the other young, love in a sphere where there would seem to be no possibility for romance and from which all chance of chivalry would appear to be excluded.

Let us briefly enumerate the circumstances that cluster round this last picture. The village of Bethlehem is visited by famine. Driven to consternation, one of the families resolves to emigrate. It consists of a man Elimelech, his wife Naomi, and their two sons Mahlon and Chilion. They come into the land of Moab, a transition which means much more than a modern emigration from England to America. England and America are divided by the Atlantic; but Israel and Moab were separated by something to which the Atlantic is but a mill-pond, a difference in religion. To the Jew there was no land so distant as the land of a foreign worship. He measured all distance by the distance from his God. It was therefore a tremendous voyage which was taken by this family of Bethlehem, a voyage not to be estimated by miles, not to be 18o RUTH THE DECIDED

gauged by the intervention of lands or seas, but to have its boundaries determined by the whole length and breadth of a universe of mind.

In the new and heathenland the emigrant family prospered not. In a few years Naomi was a widow and was left in very destitute circumstances. Her two sons instead of supporting their mother took wives, natives of the foreign country and adherents of the alien worship. Very soon these young men also sank by the wayside, weary with the burden and the heat of noonday toil; and, like their father, they left nothing. To all appearance Naomi was desolute. Husband and children were gone; poverty was extreme; the place of sojourn was a land of strangers; the voices of the old sanctuary were silent. Her heart and spirit were broken; her conscience was up in arms. The God of her fathers, she felt, had deserted her for her desertion of Him. She must retrieve the past; she must go back, back to the old soil, back to the favour of her God. But she will go alone. She will have no one to be a sharer in her burden, in her poverty, in her ignominy. She calls her

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two daughters-in-law, Ruth and Orpah, to bid them farewell. She tells them of a blank life before her which they cannot share. She releases them from all ties, from all obligations. She points out to them that their whole chance of fortune Hes in their remaining in Moab. She lays special stress on the dismalness of their matrimonial prospects in the land of Canaan, among a people who hate foreigners and hold their own caste to be supreme. She even hides one little ray of sunshine which might possibly come to her in her native land. She has a rich kinsman living in Bethlehem who might perhaps help her. But will she tell this to the young women? No, she is too proud for that. There is no pride like the pride of those who have lost their money. They are eager to show that they do not count themselves the worse for that and that if any one takes them up he must take them up with their poverty. Naomi has made her poverty itself a matter of pride; she says in effect, “I remain what I was in spite of these rags.” She is determined that the widows of her two sons shall respect her for no borrowed plumes. She is reticent about all possible riches, about all high relationships, about all memories of better days. Her parting words to Ruth and Orpah are practically these, ‘’Think of me as I am.”

And now the unexpected happens. One of the daughters-in-law voluntarily elects to make a sacrifice which is not asked. With a resolution conveyed in suppressed fire, Ruth refuses to quit the side of Naomi. The words in which the resolve is uttered constitute the most determined, the most decisive, the most unhesitating confession of love in all literature. We have chronicled our confessions of faith; I think it a pity we should not chronicle our confessions of love. If we did, Ruth’s would stand preeminent. It is a wonderful love, for an ancient world. It is the love of a woman for a woman. Male suitors are passed by, ignored, neglected. Deliberately and instantaneously friendship is preferred to passion, and the devotion to a female placed before the chance of homage from a knight of chivalry. It is a love involving deep privation. There are two kinds of sacrifice, the taking on of new sorrows and the putting off of old joys. And of these two I think the last is the greatest. If my heart keeps its pristine joy, it is comparatively easy for me to enter into your circumstances; but to part with my original gladness is to part with a wing of sympathy and to impede its natural flight. Ruth’s sacrifice is all privation of original joy. She gives up everything, her country, her social caste, her relations, her chances, her associations of worship, the cherished companionship of one who acted otherwise. She gives them up with a resolution terrible in its quietness, proved to be unbreakable by the very gentleness of the words of surrender. ‘’Entreat me not to leave thee nor to return from following after thee! For where thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge. Thy people will be my people and thy God my God. Where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me.”

And Ruth gives practical proof of the depth of her resolve. She accompanies Naomi to Bethlehem; she arrives at the time of barley harvest; and the season suggests to her a chance to display her sincerity. She virtually says to Naomi: “Though I dwell with you I will be no burden to you. I intend from this hour to work for my living which shall also be your living. I will relinquish all pride; it will be vanquished in my love. See, the harvest is calling me, your God is spreading for me, for you, a table in the wilderness; let me go and glean in yonder field!” Why glean? Was it not a pauper’s work, the lowest stage of social subordination? Why be content to gather the accidental ears that fell? Why not offer herself as a reaper, a real contributor to the harvest? Would it not have been more dignified both for herself and for Naomi? It would; and I have often wondered why Ruth did not do so. Shall I hazard a conjecture? I think this truly noble young woman was not clever and was quite aware of the fact. I think she took the only post she felt herself fitted for, took it with a full knowledge of its social ignominy and with a thorough acceptance of her own nothingness. There are many beautiful gems enclosed in very mean caskets. Ruth was intellectually neither a Miriam nor a Deborah; but she had one of the truest hearts that ever beat in mortal clay. I am glad that in its Gallery of Women the Bible has found a corner for one that represents so many, a woman whose intelligence is simple and whose mental grasp is insignificant but who vindicates the glory of her sex by an unselfish purity of soul.

Naomi accedes to the request of her daughterin-law; she sends Ruth into that particular field. Little did Naomi know where she was sending her, right into the arms of Providence! Little did she dream who had become the master of that field, who had purchased it during the years of her absence! It was her own rich kinsman, Boaz, the man whose relationship she had studiously concealed. Very pathetically are the events unfolded. Boaz comes into the field one morning and salutes the reapers with a friendly welcome. His eye lights upon a girl who is gleaning. She is poorly clad but she is unmistakably above her surroundings. There is a dignity in the mien which tells of better days, a refinement in the expression which speaks of other environments. Boaz is arrested, caught, thunderstruck. Who is that? he asks. He is told; and he realizes the kinship. But he does not tell it to Ruth; and he is right. The hope of rich patronage spoils development; he wants this high-minded young woman to keep her moral independence. He only aims to retain her in his vicinity. He bids her abide in his own field. He tells her to come daily to the common meal. Above all, he is eager to preserve her from coarse contact. “Stand fast by my maidens!” he cries, itself a fine testimonial to the moral superiority of the woman in that day. But it is more than that. Boaz feels that it is not good for a young woman to be alone. None should begin life in a desert. There are moments which should be devoted to solitude; but they are for the midday, not for the morning. The morning needs companionship. Hours of reflection can only follow experience, and experience is reached, not in the solitude, but in the crowd. Ruth will have her time for reflection by and by; meantime she needs a Friendly Girls’ Society. The glass in which I learn my own nature is not that which reveals my own image, but which depicts the image of another. It was a sound panacea for self-revelation that Boaz gave to Ruth when he said, “Stand fast by my maidens!”

And so there is created between these two a strange blend of love, a blend which the Bible Gallery alone can make romantic. On the one side there is the spirit of protection; on the other there is the spirit of gratitude. On the one side there are the mellow fruits of October, on the other there arc the opening buds of early May. On the one side there is the experience attained by a year that has reached its autumn; on the other there is the crudeness of a time that is only in its morning. Such a meeting of the gold and the grey does not promise romance. Yet in the Bible Gallery this is the ideal love, the love not only of Ruth and Boaz but of the human and the Divine. It is the love in which the Ancient of Days meets with the creature of an hour, the love whose one side is salvation and whose other is gratitude, the love whose heavenly approach is pure pity and whose earthly response is the impulse of a thankful heart. I do not wonder that in the pictures of the Bible Gallery this ideal love which crowns the whole should have claimed a special corner for an earthly portraiture.

It is rather singular to observe in this connexion that according to the Bible artist Ruth and Boaz became by their marriage the ancestors of the Messiah. The strangeness lies in the fact that in the subsequent delineation of the Son of Man it is Ruth and Boaz that specially reappear. Here again we have the mellow fruits of October thrown into the lap of the opening month of May. Here, within one life, we have the blending of the old and the new, the wisdom of the sage and the spirit of the child. Here, we have the sedateness of autumn and the elasticity of spring, the depth of counsel and the enthusiasm of expectation, the guidance of the master-hand and the pulsations of the aspiring heart. Here, we have the sense of ripe fullness side by side with something which is supposed to be its opposite, the feeling of being ever young, the impression of eternal life.

But, in the Son of Man there is a reappearance of Ruth and Boaz more effectual than any of these. Ruth and Boaz in the union of their actual lives represented the marriage of the Gentile and the Jew. Ruth was the child of Moab, the daughter of a foreign soil, the votary of a heathen religion; Boaz was a genuine son of Israel who had never separated from the parent stem, whose blood had never been tinged with intermixture from without. Their union symbolized the meeting of extremes, prefigured an age of charity when the hearts of men should be larger than their creeds and the spirit of nations bigger than their boundaries. In the soul of Jesus the wedding-bells of Ruth and Boaz are rung once more. Here again Moab and Israel meet together. In the heart of the Son of Man the Gentile stands side by side with the Jew as the recipient of a common Divine fatherhood. What is it but the sound of wedding-bells that He hears when He cries, “Many shall come from the east and the west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of God I” What is it but the footsteps of Ruth that He discerns when He exclaims, “Other sheep I have which are not of this fold!” What is it but the tread of Moab in the field that catches His ear when He makes the qualification for approach to Him not human possession but human need, “Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest!” The marriagebells of Ruth at Bethlehem were the same bells wlyich sounded at the marriage-supper of the

Lamb.

I thank Thee, O Lord, that amid the women of Thy Great Gallery there is one that shines only by her heart. There are those, like Miriam, who shine by genius; there are those, like Deborah, who shine by work; there are those, like Rebekah, who shine by foresight; there are those, like Rachel, who shine by beauty. But I am glad that Thou hast set apart a corner for the heart alone. I am glad Thou hast chosen Thy specimen of female decidedness from a simple act of love. I am glad Thou hast revealed a type of womanly heroism in one who was not clever, not gifted, not sparkling, not loud or showy, not even strong in practical working, but merely a domesticated girl clinging to a domestic affection. Thou hast painted in gold the portrait of a gentle soul who gently said, “I will” and swerved not from her whispered resolve. I am thankful for that picture, O my God. Blazon it in all our dwellings; hang it in all our rooms; enshrine it in all our hearts! Let it be a message to those who are not clever, not gifted, not sparkling, not strong in practical results! Let it tell them that Thou hast a sphere of woman’s heroism distinct from any of these, the sphere of those who simply will to do! Let it tell them that though they may not be Sarahs or Rebekahs or Miriams or Deborahs, there remains for them another mansion of Thy house, the mansion where Ruth abides! Let it tell them that Thou hast a wreath for the choice of the heart even though the hand be feeble, that Thou hast a crown for the resolute will even though the mind be slender, that Thou hast a place for love’s devotion even though the sphere be humble! Say to the Spirit of Ruth, “Stand fast by my maidens!”