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Sweet were the days when I was all unknown, But when my name was lifted up, the storm Brake on the mountain and I cared not for it. Bight well know I that Fame is half-disfame, Yet needs must work my work.
The conspirators knew the weakness of their king. They said to him, " King Darius, live for ever." We " have consulted together to establish a royal statute, and to make a firm decree, that whosoever shall ask a petition of any God or man for thirty days, save of thee, 0 king, shall be cast into the den of lions." It was, in fact, a proposition to deify the king. He was overcome by their flattery. The proclamation was drawn up, and the royal seal was affixed, making it "a law of the Medes and Persians, which altereth not."
TJ The weak King blundered into the snare so dexterously spread at his feet. Not the faintest suspicion crossed his mind of the insidious design which underlay this piece of flattery. It pleased him to imagine that for a whole month, in all the provinces of his kingdom, men would be praying to him as to a god. And the proposal did not strike him as being in any way ridiculous. Among the Medes and Persians, the divinity that " doth hedge a king " was something more than a figure of speech. The monarch was regarded in some sort as an incarnation of Ahura Mazda, the Supreme Deity. His decrees were infallible, and could not be repealed. He dwelt in the privacy of his palace, secluded from the eyes of the profane crowd ; fenced round by an etiquette fantastic in its stringency. The sculptures of Persepolis show the monarch wearing a peculiar kind of shoe, so as to elevate him above the stature of common men. The Persian kings, like the Emperors of Borne, were formally deified after death ; their tombs became a kind of temple, where sacrifice was regularly offered. Thus Darius saw nothing absurd in his courtiers' proposal, and readily gave his assent.1
2. Now it is evident that the Jews at Babylon might have conformed to this edict without any apparent sacrifice of principle. It did not touch the central doctrine of their faith ; they were not commanded by it to worship any other God, they were not re- quired by it to pay any Divine honour to the king. It was a negative, not a positive, decree. No royal mandate could touch
1 P. Hay Hunter, The Story of Daniel, 295.
260 OPEN WINDOWS
their private devotions or check the free aspiration of their souls after God. The pious Jew might still hold converse with Jehovah ; no law of Mede or Persian could render impossible that devout resolve of the Psalmist : " My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips ; when I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches." Persecution was not attempted; open apostasy was not required. Indeed, we can conceive that a spiritually-minded Jew might even have thanked God for the decree as not practically affecting his own religion, and yet, by a month's suspension of idolatrous rites, striking a heavy blow at the false faith of his conquerors. Why, we may ask, should Daniel have fallen into a trap it was so easy to avoid ? He need not drop one petition out of his daily prayers. He need not by word or gesture pay blasphemous honour to the new sovereign. Why should he obtrude his disobedience ? Why should he expose himself to the skulking enemies who laid their treacherous ambush, and were bent upon his ruin? Was he courting martyrdom in its most awful form, as we know that some early Christians courted it with such enthusiastic self- devotion that at last the Church was compelled to anathematize the needless sacrifice of her sons ? Was he reckless of the life so precious to his countrymen, who looked to him as their chief bulwark and champion, and whose hopes must have been bound up with the perpetuation of his influence ?
There is something unspeakably sublime in the line taken by that Hebrew courtier. No fanatic was he, no headlong zealot, but the wisest and most diplomatic of statesmen and the farthest- sighted of men. Calmly and deliberately, with no false pride and no miscalculation of the danger, but perfectly aware of the risk, and counting all the cost to himself and to others, he " went into his house ; (now his windows were open in his chamber toward Jerusalem;) and he kneeled upon his knees three times a day, and prayed, and gave thanks before his God, as he did aforetime."
^| What was it Luther meant when in the face of pope and council he insisted that the human intelligence must be freed ? " Unless I be convicted of error by the Scriptures or by powerful reasons, neither can nor will I dare to retract anything. Here
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stand I. I can do no otherwise. God help me." Oh the power and revelation of that word, Dare ! It was the serious utterance of a brave, religious, human soul. So it has appealed to all human souls always. But it was the utterance of a soul conscious of God and of its own mysterious self. " I dare not retract," it said. It was no outburst of wilfulness. The two compulsions, the com- pulsion to tell God's truth to men, and the compulsion to come near to God Himself, held him so fast that he could not escape. There was no wilfulness. It was not that he would not be the slave of authority. He did not dare to be. It was not so much that he refused the obedience of men as that he gave himself heart and soul to the obedience of God.1