The subject is a simile. The life of man is likened to a wilderness journey, with its distresses and its alleviatior s. The title might be — "Relief from the Distresses of the* Desert Journey "
The Desert.
The Nearer East is dominated by the desert, just as Britain is by the sea. Behind all the thoughts of the Eastern there hovers some desert image or idea, and his characteristic moods of thought and feeling perplex the Western with the suggestion of a stony and artificial kind of desert beauty. If, as Robertson Smith has shown, Palestine appealed to its inhabitants always in unconscious contrast with the desert, then it was indeed a veritable Garden of the Lord, a land flowing with milk and
' J. H. Jowett, io Ghriitian World fuljpit, Iv. p. 84.
ISAIAH 173
honey, a place of sacred trees and water springs which the Lord had blessed.^
There are countless men and women, says Jowett, to whom the pilgrimage through life is a pilgrimage over burning sands. There are some people — ^I have found them in my own congrega- tion— who do not like me to announce that hymn which says, " Earth is a desert drear." Aye, but it is to a countless host ! They have gone on like pilgrims, trudging along the desert sands, and they have been lured by mirage after mirage, which have only planted them into fresh deep abandonment and disappoint- ment.
Notwithstanding all that we may say concerning the beauty and the blessedness scattered broadcast round about us ; notwith- standing that we believe, and hold as for our lives, the " happy faith that all which we behold is full of blessing," it needs but a very short experience of this life and but a superficial examina- tion of our own histories and our own hearts in order to come to the conclusion that the world is full of strange and terrible sadness, that every life has dark tracts and long stretches of sombre tint, and that no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light and flings no shadows on the canvas. There is no depth in a Chinese picture, because there is no shade. It is the wrinkles and marks of tear and wear that make the expression in a man's portrait. " Life's sternest painter is the best."
Our life, says Spurgeon, is liable to many storms. (1) Mental storms. A rushing mighty wind of doubt comes sweeping down from the mountains of speculation, driving everything before it. (2) Outward trial and trouhle. Doubtless, he says, there is a skeleton in every house. God will not let His song-birds build their nests here. (3) Spiritual distress on account of discovered sin. " I can truly say that I know of no pain that can be felt by the body that is comparable to the terrible pangs of conscience when the searching breath of the eternal spirit goes through the soul."
The distresses of the desert are divided by the prophet into four classes.
* J. Kelman, From Damascus to Palmyra, p. 176.
174 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
I. Stormy winds — " a hiding place from the wind." 1. A most troublesome invasion is that of the desert wind, laden with blinding clouds of dust, that gather the foul debris of the villages, and become as disgusting as they are distressing to throat and eyes. These winds rise suddenly, as if upon a signal, and then as suddenly die away, leaving the village in a kind of surprise, as if awakened from a nightmare, and still confused.
IF The wind rises almost always at nightfall, and in its moaning the dullest soul must hear mysterious voices. Sometimes, as on the sea, it rises to a tempest ; the sand moves in whirling and bending pillars that gleam light yellow against the indigo of- thunder-clouds beyond. Nothing in Nature, perhaps, has a more ominous and menacing aspect than those tremendous shadows with the dance of the sand-devils before them like the Bacchanalian heralds of approaching destruction. In some of his finest lines Eobert Browning has expressed the doom of Judgment Day by aid of the metaphor of a desert sand-storm —
Oh, brother, 'mid far sands
The palm-tree-cinctured city stands,
Bright-white beneath, as heaven, bright-blue,
Leans o'er it, while the years pursue
Their course, unable to abate
Its paradisal laugh at fate !
One morn, — the Arab staggers blind
O'er a new tract of death, calcined
To ashes, silence, nothingness, —
And strives, with dizzy wits, to guess
Whence fell the blow. What if, 'twixt skies
And prostrate earth, he should surprise
The imaged vapour, head to foot.
Surveying, motionless and mute,
Its work, ere, in a whirlwind rapt.
It vanish up again ? ^
IT On March 21st we went over the flat desert to Wady Werdan. In the afternoon a violent storm of wind came up ; the sand drifted so that it was almost impossible to open our eyes, and we could hardly make way against the gale. How the top-heavy camels kept on was a puzzle, for with so wide a hold on the wind they seemed as if they must go over. We struggled up to the shelter of some sand-hills, in the lee of which there was less wind but more sand. To pitch tents was a hard matter ; the pegs