1 A Living Witness : The Life of Adele Kamm (1914), 115.
2 W. M. Taylor, The Limitations of Life, 367.
JEREMIAH xlviii. n 155
I would not ask Thee that my days Should flow quite smoothly on and on :
Lest I should learn to love the world Too well, ere all my time was done.
I would not ask Thee that my work Should never bring me pain nor fear;
Lest I should learn to work alone, And never wish Thy presence near.
I would not ask Thee that my friends Should always kind and constant be;
Lest I should learn to lay my faith In them alone and not in Thee.
But I would ask Thee still to give, By night my sleep — by day my bread,
And that the counsel of Thy Word,
Should shine and show the path to tread.
And I would ask a humble heart, A changeless will to work and wake,
A firm faith in Thy Providence,
The rest — 'tis Thine to give or take.1
IL
The Penalty of Stagnation.
1. This sterile, stagnant Moab, the good wine of whose life is vitiated by inaction and indolence, is surely the text for a thousand sermons. There are sins to which God shows no mercy; and this is one. Other sins do seem for a while to succeed. This one is always obviously fatal. Is there anything more pitiable than a people of fine possibilities sunk in moral degeneracy and decay ? Nothing can live on these terms. These are the peoples who sink and soak in vice, whose brain-power withers, whose physique suffers, whose liberties and rights decay, whose whole social organization is full of rottenness and disease.
TJ The great Oriental empires, Assyria and Babylon and Persia,
1 Alfred Norris.
156 THE DISCIPLINE OF CHANGE
European empires like Eome and Spain, took their rightful place of ascendancy through toil and struggle ; then rotted at the heart, smothered by success, and shrivelled at a touch of God's east wind. Plutarch, in his life of Alexander the Great, describes how he and his Macedonian troops became lax and flaccid amid the wealth and riot made possible by their wonderful victories. Alexander himself, from the extreme temperance and control of his youth, became self-indulgent, was sometimes almost mad with wine, and died of a carousal. The once hardy soldiers became dissolute and riotous, and the huge fabric of his empire crumbled down into dust.1
^f Hawthorne's dream of a railroad to the Celestial City ended in disillusion. Mr. Smooth-the-way, the conductor, showed him- self at the last in fiend's form ; and the engine-driver was none other than Apollyon, who would deceive you into the belief that you can escape the fatigues and perils of the pilgrimage. The immortal garland, says Milton, is to be won not without dust and heat. There is no experience to be gained otherwise, no real beauty of Christian faith and character. Your taste will remain in you, and your scent be not changed. But if God has His will and His way with us, He will do His work of progress, of purifica- tion, till at the last He who is at once the Vine and the Vintner shall present the fruit of His vineyard — the wine of our faith and love — to the lips of His Father in the Kingdom of the redeemed.2
2. But even for the stagnant nation Jeremiah has a message of hope. Moab cannot save himself by the sword. He settled on his lees. He purged himself of none of the evils that were in his midst. He grew lewd, drunken, boastful, mammon-serving, pleasure-hunting; and in his fall he uttered in the ear of the world the tragic cry of a victim to the softer vices of an enervated and demoralized generation. How, then, is Moab to recover his soul, his purity, his character, his tone and flavour as a people ? He must be emptied from vessel to vessel. He must be visited by the Eternal Vintner, who will not spare him either the crush- ing of his grapes or the agitation by which his wine is to be clarified. The God over all is too wise to err, too good to be unkind, and the last unkindness would be to leave Moab to stagnate, settled upon his lees. Here is an interpreter who can reconcile cataclysms and upheavals and catastrophes with the process necessary to produce the higher order. To him the 1 Hugh Black, Comfort, 73. s C. Silvester Home.
JEREMIAH xlviii. n 157
seeming cruelty of Moab's fate is actual kindness to Moab's soul. What people call the " malice of events " is the mercy of Provid- ence. Moab in the hands of his enemy is Moab in the hands of God.
There are tears in this man's heart for Moab, and they drop upon his pages. Noble words are here, not of vindictive hatred, but of human-hearted compassion for even merited suffering. Even while he sees that it is pride that has done it, contempt of God's will, which is the same for all nations, he pays his tribute of humanity. This broken people moves him to honourable sorrow. Their military pride is humbled to the dust. " They shall howl, saying, How is it broken down ! how hath Moab turned the back with shame ! " Yet there is a possible way back out of captivity, for this breaking of the vessels and emptying of the wine is the one and only method of Moab's redemption. This visitation may even yet be the salvation of a people.