HOSEA ix. 10-17: cf. iv. 11-14.
Those who at the present time are enforcing among us the revival of a Paganism--without the Pagan conscience--and exalting licentiousness to the level of an art, forget how frequently the human race has attempted their experiment, with far more sincerity than they themselves can put into it, and how invariably the result has been recorded by history to be weariness, decay and death. On this occasion we have the story told to us by one who to the experience of the statesman adds the vision of the poet.
The generation to which Hosea belonged practised a periodical unchastity under the alleged sanctions of nature and religion. And, although their prophet told them that--like our own apostates from Christianity--they could never do so with the abandon of the Pagans, for they carried within them the conscience and the memory of a higher faith, it appears that even the fathers of Israel resorted openly and without shame to the licentious rites of the sanctuaries. In an earlier passage of his book Hosea insists that all this must impair the people's intellect. _Harlotry takes away the brains._[569] He has shown also how it confuses the family, and has exposed the old delusion that men may be impure and keep their womankind chaste.[570] But now he diagnoses another of the inevitable results of this sin. After tracing the sin, and the theory of life which permitted it, to their historical beginnings at the entry of the people into Canaan, he describes how the long practice of it, no matter how pretentious its sanctions, inevitably leads not only to exterminating strifes, but to the decay of the vigour of the nation, to barrenness and a diminishing population.
_Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the first fruit on a fig-tree in her first season I saw your fathers._ So had the lusty nation appeared to God in its youth; in that dry wilderness all the sap and promise of spring were in its eyes, because it was still pure. But _they--they came to Ba'al-Peor_--the first of the shrines of Canaan which they touched--_and dedicated themselves to the Shame, and became as abominable as the object of their love_. _Ephraim_--the _Fruitful_ name is emphasised--_their glory is flown away like a bird. No more birth, no more motherhood, no more conception!_[571] _Blasted is Ephraim, withered the root of them, fruit they produce not: yea, even when they beget children I slay the darlings of their womb. Yea, though they bring up their sons I bereave them_, till they are _poor in men. Yea, woe upon themselves also, when I look away from them! Ephraim_--again the _Fruitful_ name is dragged to the front--_for prey, as I have seen, are his sons destined._[572] _Ephraim_--he _must lead his sons to the slaughter_.
And the prophet interrupts with his chorus: _Give them, O LORD--what wilt Thou give them? Give them a miscarrying womb and breasts that are dry!_
_All their mischief is in Gilgal_--again the Divine voice strikes the connection between the national worship and the national sin--_yea, there do I hate them: for the evil of their doings from My house I will drive them. I will love them no more: all their nobles are rebels._[573]
And again the prophet responds: _My God will cast them away, for they have not hearkened to Him, and they shall be vagabonds among the nations_.
Some of the warnings which Hosea enforces with regard to this sin have been instinctively felt by mankind since the beginnings of civilisation, and are found expressed among the proverbs of nearly all the languages.[574] But I am unaware of any earlier moralist in any literature who traced the effects of national licentiousness in a diminishing population, or who exposed the persistent delusion of libertine men that they themselves may resort to vice, yet keep their womankind chaste. Hosea, so far as we know, was the first to do this. History in many periods has confirmed the justice of his observations, and by one strong voice after another enforced his terrible warnings. The experience of ancient Persia and Egypt; the languor of the Greek cities; the "deep weariness and sated lust" which in Imperial Rome "made human life a hell"; the decay which overtook Italy after the renascence of Paganism without the Pagan virtues; the strife and anarchy that have rent every court where, as in the case of Henri Quatre, the king set the example of libertinage; the incompetence, the poltroonery, the treachery, that have corrupted every camp where, as in French Metz in 1870, soldiers and officers gave way so openly to vice; the checks suffered by modern civilisation in face of barbarism because its pioneers mingled in vice with the savage races they were subduing; the number of great statesmen falling by their passion, and in their fall frustrating the hopes of nations; the great families worn out by indulgence; the homes broken up by infidelities; the tainting of the blood of a new generation by the poisonous practices of the old,--have not all these things been in every age, and do they not still happen near enough to ourselves to give us a great fear of the sin which causes them all? Alas! how slow men are to listen and to lay to heart! Is it possible that we can gild by the names of frivolity and piquancy habits the wages of which are death? Is it possible that we can enjoy comedies which make such things their jest? We have among us many who find their business in the theatre, or in some of the periodical literature of our time, in writing and speaking and exhibiting as closely as they dare to limits of public decency. When will they learn that it is not upon the easy edge of mere conventions that they are capering, but upon the brink of those eternal laws whose further side is death and hell--that it is not the tolerance of their fellow-men they are testing, but the patience of God Himself? As for those loud few who claim licence in the name of art and literature, let us not shrink from them as if they were strong or their high words true. They are not strong, they are only reckless; their claims are lies. All history, the poets and the prophets, whether Christian or Pagan, are against them. They are traitors alike to art, to love, and to every other high interest of mankind.