Hannah the Pious

^TpHE type of the pious woman has never been extinct in humanity; but perhaps it is the most varied of all types. I have selected Hannah as its initial specimen — its ideal in early times. There is one thing which strikes me at the very outset, and that is the difference between the early ideal and the mediaeval ideal. The pious woman of mediaeval Europe is a very different character from Hannah. Hannah’s piety consists in serving God with a view to worldly benefit; the woman of the European Middle-Age seeks to serve God with a view to get rid of the world altogether. The saint of Hannah’s day keeps herself pure that she may have the blessings of this life; the saint of mediaevalism keeps herself pure that she may have the blessings of another. Hannah says, “God will make those who worship Him useful members of society”; the woman of the Middle-Age exclaims, “God will make those who worship Him to be separate from all society — will cause them to dwell apart with Himself alone.” I have no hesitation in saying that the type of Hannah, although further off from the present time in years, is nearer to it in spirit. There is nothing so like the very early ideal of piety as the very modern one. No man of our day would think of looking at religion as a mere preparation for another world. He would view the other world as a continuation of this and regard religion as a social force preparatory to both. To the modern mind religion, where it is sought at all, is something desirable for the well-being of the human race as a race — for the prosperity of its cities, for the protection of its institutions, for the union of its members, for the manliness of its individuals, for the consolidation and the maintenance of its social order; it is sought for the welfare of the world.

Now, this is that type of piety which reigns in the heart of Hannah. Hers was no asceticism, no wish to get away from the world; it was a wish to possess the world and to possess it more abundantly. The circumstances of her life are soon told; the incidents are few. She lived in Ramathaim-Zophim. In some respects her lines had fallen in pleasant places. She was in constant communion with the religious ordinances of her country. She had a devout husband — a rare privilege in that day. She enjoyed that husband’s undivided love — though not his undivided allegiance. He had another wife — a fact which was not deemed at the time inconsistent with his piety. But Hannah was the favourite; on her the rich gifts were bestowed, on her the fond endearments were lavished. Most women in that age of storm and stress would have been content with her lot. But Hannah was profoondly miserable. One thing had been denied her; she had a house but she had no home.

That is a distinction which applies to the Jew, though not to the Englishman. The proverbial expression among us is, “to be head of the house.” The ideal of a daughter of Israel was, “to be head of the home.” Hannah had no child — no part in the coming generation. It was a matter of indifiference to her husband; but to her it was wormwood. We cannot wonder at her sentiment. Remember that in this ancient gallery the woman’s kingdom is not her house. No manage could give it, no retinue, no equipage, no number of servants or entailment of lands. The woman’s kingdom was the woman’s family, and when she had no family she had, like Deborah, to adopt a nation, Her empire was her motherhood; her metropolis was her nursery; her colonies were her children’s children. For every woman, married or single, the ideal of the complete life was that expressed afterwards in the words of the psalmist, “God setteth the solitary in families.”

Hannah is not fit for the task of Deborah. She cannot become a parent by adoption, she is a simple, humble woman who must receive her sphere, not make it. What remains for her then? Only one chance — prayer. She will ask God for a woman’s kingdom — for the privilege of being the head not merely of a house but of a home; she will beseech the Giver of all good to raise her into the empire of motherhood. ‘’How unscientific,” you say, “is this piety of Hannah — to ask an interference with the law of nature!” I doubt very much if that was what Hannah asked. It seems to me that what she would say to herself was this: “I have an impulse to pray to God for the gratification of my desire. What if this impulse comes from God Himself 1 What if it is His own voice speaking to me and telling me what to ask I I have no idea what is before me; but God has. What if He should have deigned to enlighten my darkness by revealing the coming thing in the form of a desire — by the prompting of a prayer! Should I not be wrong to disregard this impulse? Who, knows that, instead of being my groping into the future, it may not rather be the future groping towards me! Who knows but that it may be the Spirit of God saying to my soul, This is My will; ask this!”

I do not say that Hannah would put this sentiment so logically. I do not think she would reason about it at all. But I believe it would come to her and to every pious Israelite in the hour of prayer as an instinctive impression. My ground for thinking so is the testimony of St. Paul — a man thoroughly familiar with the modes of thought current among his countrymen. Paul declares in so many words that he regards successful prayer not as originally man’s request to God, but as God’s prompting of man. He says, ‘’The spirit helpeth our infirmity, for we know not how to pray as we ought.” Our infirmity is our ignorance. The future is veiled from us. The prayer that proves successful is the first lijting of the veil. It is God’s voice breaking through the mist and saying, “There is a haven in advance of you; make for it, and you will be sheltered from the storm.” Paul says that even where a prayer is wordless it may be prophetic of deliverance, ‘’The Spirit maketh intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered.” He means that there are times when we have no language but a cry, but that even this wordless groan may be a voice from the Father of Spirits telling us that we are in need of something, that what we need is coming, and that we ought to press forward to meet it. The doctrine of Paul clearly is that successful prayer is God’s prophecy.

Poor Hannah, then, even in an unscientific age may have acted quite scientifically in the hour of her devotions. She knew nothing about the laws of nature; but she knew of a law as inexorable as that of nature — the Will of God. She believed that God had foreordained whatsoever comes to pass and that “no human effort can alter His decrees. Professor Huxley could not ask more uniformity in the order of things than Hannah would have been prepared to grant. But Hannah did not know what the order of things was; and she wanted to know. She wanted to get in advance a glimpse of the Will of God. She wanted to know whether it was according to that Will that she should attain the object of her desire. She proposed to take her own impulse to prayer as a possible sign that it was so. She proposed to regard her religious aspiration as something which, for aught she knew, might be a preliminary and premonitory voice from heaven saying, “This is my will concerning you; make your request for this.” Her prayer, as all prayer is, was a venture — a plunge into the darkness. She did not know what God would deem good for her. She could only say, “I feel an impulse to ask for this; who can tell that the impulse is not a mandate from Him who foresees all things!”

There are one or two elements about the prayer of Hannah which are worth marking because, being the first flower of the species which the Gallery has preserved, it is likely to contain the original germ of pure piety. For one thing, look at the attitude in which Hannah is presented to us. It is an attitude of prayer, but prayer of a very peculiar kind. It is an exhibition of songs without words. Her lips move, but there is no sound. Her prayers are all internal; she is what we popularly call speaking to herself. She creates the impression that she is intoxicated. Why so? Because this was not an ancient mode of prayer. Men in those days thought that the value of a petition lay in its words — that they were heard for their much speaking. A wordless supplication must have seemed a contradiction in terms. A woman who earnestly moved her lips and said nothing would be looked upon as in a state of temporary aberration, of which drink might be the cause. All people who are before their time are thought to be behind it; they are charged by their contemporaries with folly. Hannah was before her time in the development of the idea of prayer. She had reached a great truth which the rest of the world waited for, that prayer is simply a wish of the heart directed heavenward, that its potency lies in the depth of the desire. “Have you said your prayers to-night?” asks the modern mother of her child. Hannah could have answered No, without losing her piety. Hannah’s peculiarity was that she never said her prayers; she prayed without words; she breathed a wish in her soul and sent it up unspoken right to the throne of God. It is a unique experience for the age of the Judges; the piety of Hannah is a ripe flower in an almost sterile field. Even our conceptions in modern life often lag behind her. We have not altogether arrived at her standard of prayer. We still reverence the form more than the spirit; we still deny to the spirit the sacredness which we attribute to the form. Let me illustrate what I mean.

You meet a friend on the first of January and you say, “A Happy New Year!” What have you expressed in that utterance? “A courteous wish,” you say, “a polite secular desire for the welfare of my neighbour.” But in reality you have done much more than that. What makes you think this is a secular desire? It is the fact that it contains no words of prayer. Yet a prayer it certainly is and could be nothing else. To whom do you breathe the wish, “A Happy New Year”? I do not ask, jor whom; that is quite a subordinate question. But, suppose your desire is for a happy new year to me to whom do you address that wish? Can it be to any but One — the searcher of all hearts — the Almighty Himself! Can any one give me a happy new year but the King of Kings! Is it within the compass of human power, is it within the range of natural agency! The truth is, the desire you express on this occasion is either a mere utterance of the lip or it is an earnest supplication. There is no middle view. If it is a wish at all, it is a wish uttered to heaven, for it can only be heard by the Lord of heaven, and it can only be answered by

Him that sitteth on the throne. It is a case for the faith of Hannah — a case in which an act is to be discerned as an act of prayer even where there is not the form of prayer — in which a letter is to be sent to God even when the Divine address is not on the envelope nor the Divine greeting in the superscription.

But the peculiarity of this prayer of Hannah does not merely lie in the mode of its expression; it consists also in the unusual form of help it received from the sanctuary. Look again at the picture. Hannah has gone up to the altar at Shiloh to present her yearly offering. The high priest EH is struck with the earnestness of her prayerful countenance. He has no idea what she wants; he only knows that she wants something and wants it with the whole strength of her nature. What does he do under these circumstances? Does he say, “My daughter, what is the request you wish to bring before God?” No; he looks at her and says, “God meet the desires of your heart!” We stand appalled at the boldness of this priest. We all expect aid from the sanctuary; but this seems unreasonable aid.

Imagine you met a stranger in the street and said to him in passing, “May God grant whatever you desire!” The man himself might start with horror — might feel as if you had struck him a blow. Perhaps at that moment he was treasuring some dark wish — hoping for the death of a fellow-creature, longing for the misfortune of a human rival. Would he like to see his wish crystallized, stereotyped, made a permanent and potent thing working out deliberately the harm that had only been conceived spontaneously! The large majority of strangers in the street would shrink from such a prayer as that. Why, then, does this remarkable old picture make it Eli’s prayer for Hannah?

Because Hannah is no stranger to Eli. The picture is beautifully consistent with itself. Eli sees a woman whose spirit is already sacrificial. She has come to the sanctuary for the purpose of sacrifice. She has surrendered her whole soul to the will of God. She hopes, indeed, that she will receive an answer to her prayer; but the music of the hope lies in the fact that it will be God’s answer. She would not desire the privileges of the home if it were not for the sake of building a house for God. Her attitude is purely sacrificial. Eli does not know what she wants, but he knows she wants nothing for herself alone. This is the reason why he expresses an unqualified hope that the thing in her heart may be granted her. If I had a preliminary knowledge of your nature, I could express the same unqualified hope for you. To any man or woman whom I knew to be supremely unselfish I should give a carte blanche for unlimited prayer. I know that the prayer of such a man or woman would never be limited to anything personal. They could never desire what was contrary to the Kingdom of God, could never seek aught that would mutilate a fragment of the universe, could never crave an individual boon if they discovered that it would wring the heart of a man or impede the movement of an insect’s wing. I may explain what I mean by a very striking and a very mysterious passage of the New Testament. Our Lord says in the Fourth Gospel, “If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you.”

Here is the promise of an unlimited answer to prayer, and at first we are startled by it. But it is a promise to men with unlimited hearts — hearts steeped in the spirit of sacrifice. Observe how steeped in that spirit they must be before they can become heirs to this promise. “If ye abide in me, and my works abide in you.” There must be a double relation — a communion of the soul with Christ and a communion of Christ with the soul. If there is this twofold communion between the soul and the unselfish life, our Lord says that a man may ask what he will. He means that such a man will ask very little. He may well get an unlimited exercise of his desires, for his desires themselves will be very few. He will seek nothing, wish nothing, that would hurt his brother, nay, that would hurt his enemy. His desire will be coextensive with the desire of the universe — with the will of Christ for the salvation of mankind. He may be safely allowed the freedom of all his prayers, for all his prayers together will never seek less than the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, will never accept less than the fullness of Him that filleth all in all. You may entrust such a man with the treasures not only of the Bank of England, but of the Bank of Heaven.

I now come to a third pecuharity about the prayer of Hannah when viewed in the light of the old world. And this time it lies, not in the manner of the prayer, not in the ecclesiastical help given to the prayer, but in the mode of answering the prayer. In ancient times the expectation was that a prayer, if answered at all, would be answered from the outside — by a direct response from heaven. Here, on the contrary, the immediate response is given from the heart of Hannah herself. There is seen no open heaven, there is heard no voice from the blue. The prayer of Hannah had been a song without words; the immediate answer is also a song without words. A song, indeed, is the most appropriate metaphor. Her first reply from heaven is a great joy in her own soul — a joy which is altogether unaccounted for by any change in her outward fortunes. There has come to her no affirmative answer; there has reached her no verbal expression of Divine approval. There has visited her no angel messenger of hope to tell that her petition will be granted. The gladness that has dawned on her spirit is inexplicable from without. It comes from the spirit alone. It is a peace that “passeth knowledge” — that defies explanation from any source outside itself. It has no corroboration from the external world. It has no indication in the course of passing events. It has no justification in the rise of actual sunshine upon Hannah’s dwelling. The surrounding soil is the same as yesterday; but the feet that tread it are renewed. Hannah had been miserable, forlorn, depressed; she becomes joyous, birdlike, buoyant; that is all that appears to the eye of the spectator. The answer to the prayer begins by a change within.

Now, this is a thoroughly modern flower in an old garden. The modern view of prayer’s answer is that it works through human agency, in other words, that God commits its fulfilment to the intervention of secular form. So it is here. Instead of sending Hannah a direct promise, God sends her a draught of mental health. He makes her glad — glad for no reason, if you will — glad

*vithout an adequate cause in outward fortune — but glad through that most sure of all channels, the power of Divine grace. Will any one say that this inward joy was no help to the fulfilment of her prayer! All answers are helped by joy. If a voice cries to the world, ‘* Come ye unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” the world can only respond through hope. It will get rest when it comes; but it must get hope before it comes. It cannot travel by absolute right; its labour and its ladenness would overmaster it; it needs at least one star. Hannah’s preliminary joy was on the line of her desire’s fulfilment. She wanted to be the head of an empire of home — to be the parent of a strong and robust race who would carry her name down the ages and plant her principles in many lands. What is the preparation for such an heredity? Is it grief — chronic melancholy such as had weighed down the soul of Hannah? Assuredly not. That which weighs down the soul weighs down the body too; the resurrection of the flesh depends on the ascension of the spirit. God never works through an unprepared medium. If He says, “Bring me a minstrel,’* He makes the minstrel tune his harp ere He inspires him to sing. Hannah has come with an unstrung harp — a soul out of tune. God will not play on an instrument like that. He will set it right first. He will revive within it the conditions of melody. He will bind up the broken strings. He will lift the drooping heart into an attitude of joy; and on the cords of that renewed organ He will bid His message flow.

Hannah’s outward prayer is ultimately answered. She becomes the head of an empire of home. She becomes the mother of many children. She becomes, above all, the parent of one child who is alone sufficient to perpetuate her name — the great Samuel. When her desire is fulfilled she bursts into song. The Bible delights to represent its pious women as gifted women, for, to the Bible, piety is not an emptying, but a replenishing, of human nature. The song of Hannah is altogether remarkable. It is free from all personality. When a soul is delivered from trouble and breaks into a hymn of thanksgiving, its thanksgiving is commonly a record of its own benefits. But Hannah’s song is purely unselfish. She thinks of herself as the type of many, and it is for the many she thanks God. She pours forth her soul in gratitude, not merely because she as an individual has received an answer to her prayer, but because the fact contains a promise of God’s nearness to all earnest hearts. When she utters her song she puts herself in the place of every pious spirit; she lives in the experience of the religious, and she blesses God for His kindness to them. For, what is the burden of this hymn of Hannah? It is the same as that put, centuries later, into the mould of the Virgin Maiy. It is, like the latter, an anticipation of the Messianic Day. It is a thanksgiving for the elevation of the humble, or religious, forces. Hitherto, in the reign of the Judges, the proud, or warlike forces had been predominant. The strong had overborne the physically weak. It had not been dreamed of in the philosophy of that time that there might exist in physical weakness a strength compared to which the armies of the world were but as a grain of sand. It had not dawned on the human consciousness that there might lie within the human heart and lie there by reason of its humility a power of endurance, a tenacity of purpose, an unconquerableness of resolve, which could put to the blush all political combinations and leave in the shade all the counsels of kings. This was the truth which Hannah’s life revealed, and it was its revelation that she prized. She rejoiced, not so much, that she had received a personal crown, as that in the crown which she had received she was the forerunner of a multitude which no man could number, and who were destined to fulfil the promise of a coming -beatitude, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

O Lord of grace and goodness, keep alive Thy grace and goodness in the women of our land! Preserve a hallowed spot where the piety of Hannah may dwell! I would not have it hallowed by exclusion from the world; I would not have it walled in from the highway of human toil. I would have Hannah’s flower planted not in the garden but in the city. Plant it in the middle of the street! Let it grow on ground which the crowd is treading; let it spring on soil where the wheels of commerce roll! There was a time when Thy pious servants cried, “O that I had the wings of a dove! for then I would fly away and be at rest.” No longer would I hear that cry, O Lord. I do not want Hannah to get wings. I do not want her to fly away. In the days of old Thy saints rose up at once into heaven; they waited not for death; they abandoned the world on their baptismal morning. But now I fain would keep them here, for I need them here. Do not take away our Hannahs the moment Thou hast made them good! It is when they are made good we need them most below. Deborah may sweep the rooms and Miriam may sing the songs and Ruth may earn the wages and Rachel may attract the eyes; but all these will be in vain if Hannah be not there. Place Hannah in our homes! May her reverence be reflected; may her prayers be powerful; may her devotion be diffused! May the children hear her chimes; may the husband catch her holiness; may the friend be infected with her fervour! May she clear life’s clouds; may she hallow life’s happiness; may she stir life’s sympathies! May she make duty our delight, and work our worship, and service our singing and pleasure our piety! The kingdom of earth will be the kingdom of heaven when Hannah rules the home.