T[ Drummond's exposition of revelation, as also of evolution, needs to be supplemented by only one remark which, when he wrote his articles [on science and religion in the Expositor and the Nineteenth Century], it was not possible to make with confidence. Eecent researches into the origins of the Old Testa- ment have proved that the factor in the extraordinary develop- ment of moral and religious truth, which is so discernible in the history of Israel and in their gradual ascent to the loftiest heights of spiritual knowledge, from the low levels of life which they had once occupied with their Semitic neighbours, was the impression upon the people as a whole through the wonderful deeds of their history and the experience of their greatest minds, of the character of God. But to impress the character of God upon a people so sensitive and so responsive is revelation in its purest and most effective form.1
(1) At first men thought of God as outside the drama of
1 G. A. Smith, The Life of Henry Drummond, 244.
JEREMIAH xn. 5 47
history — the spectator, the playwright; if acting at all, only occasionally, at set times and for specific purposes, but not Himself involved in His inner life in the fortunes of the human actors He set in motion. This was, on the whole, the dominant Greek conception, and it recurs again and again in Christian history. God is the onlooker, sympathetic indeed, and well disposed, whose great calm we may hope to share in the good time coming when this life is over, and the other which lies beyond has begun.
(2) But the prevailing Christian conception is very different. It is not merely that God is in history, immanent as well as transcendent, actor as well as spectator, but that He is involved in His inmost life in the fortunes of the human participants. He not only acts, He cares. When Israel sins, the burden falls not on man only, but on God. He is like the husband whose wife has committed adultery, the father whose children have rebelled against him. If He punishes, it is not because He is indifferent or angry, but because He earnestly desires their moral good. There is no suffering of theirs in which He does not share. " In all their affliction he was afflicted ; ... in his love and in his pity he redeemed them ; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old."
TJ It is no argument against the love of God that the world is a world of pain, provided, as we know to be the case, that God Himself has elected to suffer more than the greatest sufferer, and that there is a worthy end to it all.1
Tf The deeper these thoughts sank within me, the more complete became my dissatisfaction with the shallow theories through which human thinkers have striven to bridge over contradictions which God has left unreconciled, and to reply to questions which He has been pleased to leave unanswered. That death of anguish which Scripture declares to us to be " necessary," though it does not explain wherein its dire necessity resides, convinced me that God was not content to throw, as moralists and theologians can do so easily, the whole weight and accountability of sin and suffering upon man, but was willing, if this burden might not as yet be removed, to share it with His poor, finite, heavily burdened creature. When I looked upon my agonized and dying God, and turned from that world-appealing sight, Christ crucified for us, to look upon life's most perplexed and
1 Bishop Brent.
48 THE PRIDE OF JORDAN
sorrowful contradictions, I was not met as in intercourse with my fellow-men by the cold platitudes that fall so lightly from the lips of those whose hearts have never known one real pang, nor whose lives one crushing blow. I was not told that all things were ordered for the best, nor assured that the overwhelming disparities of life were but apparent, but I was met from the eyes and brow of Him who was indeed acquainted with grief, by a look of solemn recognition, such as may pass between friends who have endured between them some strange and secret sorrow, and are through it united in a bond that cannot be broken.1
Mist on the hills, all mist,
And never a hill-top kissed "With the fire of the hidden sun :
Mist in the leafy dells
And the open rolling fells, And the work of the day is done.
Mist on the moaning sea,
Where the waves toil hopelessly And the land is a shadowed death:
Mist on the river's breast,
And every branch is dressed In the gauze of its clinging breath.
Mist in the mind of man,
However he try to scan The track of the coming years:
Is there mist in the mind of God,
And never a footstep trod But is wet with a rain of tears ? 2
II.
The Kesponse.
1. There is no attempt at explanation. God never explains Himself in a ready-made fashion. God explains Himself through life. God explains Himself by deeds. The complaint is answered by a counter-complaint. Jeremiah's charge against God of in- justice is met by God's charge against Jeremiah of weakness. " If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, 1 Dora Greenwell. 8 D. H. S. Nicholson, Poems, 6.