Those, who have never heard an angry Oriental speak, have no idea of what power of denunciation lies in the human throat. In the East, where a dry climate and large leisure bestow upon the voice a depth and suppleness prevented by our vulgar haste of life and teasing weather, men have elaborated their throat-letters to a number unknown in any Western alphabet; and upon the lowest notes they have put an edge, that comes up shrill and keen through the roar of the upper gutturals, till you feel their wrath cut as well as sweep you before it. In the Oriental throat, speech goes down deep enough to echo all the breadth of the inner man; while the possibility of expressing within so supple an organ nearly every tone of scorn or surprise preserves anger from that suspicion of spite or of exhaustion, which is conveyed by too liberal a use of the nasal or palatal letters. Hence in the Hebrew language _to call with the throat_ means to call with vehemence, but with self-command; with passion, yet as a man; using every figure of satire, but earnestly; neither forgetting wrath for mere art's sake, nor allowing wrath to escape the grip of the stronger muscles of the voice. It is _to lift the voice like a trumpet_,--an instrument, which, with whatever variety of music its upper notes may indulge our ears, never suffers its main tone of authority to drop, never slacks its imperative appeal to the wills of the hearers.
This is the style of the chapter before us, which opens with the words, _Call with the throat, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet_. Perhaps no subject more readily provokes to satire and sneers than the subject of the chapter,--the union of formal religion and unlovely life. And yet in the chapter there is not a sneer from first to last. The speaker suppresses the temptation to use his nasal tones, and utters, not as the satirist, but as the prophet. For his purpose is not to sport with his people's hypocrisy, but to sweep them out of it. Before he has done, his urgent speech, that has not lingered to sneer nor exhausted itself in screaming, passes forth to spend its unchecked impetus upon final promise and gospel. It is a wise lesson from a master preacher, and half of the fruitlessness of modern preaching is due to the neglect of it. The pulpit tempts men to be either too bold or too timid about sin; either to whisper or to scold; to euphemise or to exaggerate; to be conventional or hysterical. But two things are necessary,--the facts must be stated, and the whole manhood of the preacher, and not only his scorn or only his anger or only an official temper, brought to bear upon them. _Call with the throat, spare not, like a trumpet lift up thy voice, and publish to My people their transgression, and to the house of Jacob their sin._
The subject of the chapter is the habits of a religious people,--the earnestness and regularity of their religious performance contrasted with the neglect of their social relations. The second verse, "the descriptions in which are evidently drawn from life,"[261] tells us that _the people sought God daily, and had a zeal to know His ways, as a nation that had done righteousness_,--fulfilled the legal worship,--_and had not forsaken the law_[262] _of their God: they ask of Me laws[262] of righteousness_,--that is, a legal worship, the performance of which might make them righteous,--_and in drawing near to God they take delight_. They had, in fact, a great greed for ordinances and functions,[263]--for the revival of such forms as they had been accustomed to of old. Like some poor prostrate rose, whose tendrils miss the props by which they were wont to rise to the sun, the religious conscience and affections of Israel, violently torn from their immemorial supports, lay limp and windswept on a bare land, and longed for God to raise some substitute for those altars of Zion by which, in the dear days of old, they had lifted themselves to the light of His face. In the absence of anything better, they turned to the chill and shadowed forms of the fasts they had instituted.[264] But they did not thereby reach the face of God. _Wherefore have we fasted_, say they, _and Thou hast not seen? we have humbled our souls, and Thou takest no notice?_ The answer comes swiftly: Because your fasting is a mere form! _Lo, in the very day of your fast ye find a business to do, and all your workmen you overtask._ So formal is your fasting that your ordinary eager, selfish, cruel life goes on beside it just the same. Nay, it is worse than usual, for your worthless, wearisome fast but puts a sharper edge upon your temper: _Lo, for strife and contention ye fast, to smile with the fist of tyranny_. And it has no religious value: _Ye fast not_ like _as_ you are fasting _to-day so as to make your voice heard on high_. _Is such the fast that I choose,--a day for a man to afflict himself? Is it to droop his head like a rush, and grovel on sackcloth and ashes? Is it this thou wilt call a fast and a day acceptable to Jehovah?_ One of the great surprises of the human heart is, that self-denial does not win merit or peace. But assuredly it does not, if love be not with it. Though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Self-denial without love is self-indulgence. _Is not this the fast that I choose? to loosen the bonds of tyranny, to shatter the joints of the yoke, to let the crushed go free, and that ye burst every yoke. Is it not to break to the hungry thy bread, and that thou bring home wandering poor?_[265] _when thou seest one naked that thou cover him, and that from thine own flesh thou hide not thyself? Then shall break forth like the morning thy light, and thy health_[266] _shall immediately spring. Yea, go before thee shall thy righteousness, the glory of Jehovah shall sweep thee on_, literally, _gather thee up. Then thou shalt call, and Jehovah shall answer; thou shalt cry, and He shall say, Here am I. If thou shalt put from thy midst the yoke, and the putting forth of the finger, and the speaking of naughtiness_--three degrees of the subtlety of selfishness, which when forced back from violent oppression will retreat to scorn and from open scorn to backbiting,--_and if thou draw out to the hungry thy soul_,--tear out what is dear to thee in order to fill his need, the strongest expression for self-denial which the Old Testament contains,--_and satisfy the soul that is afflicted, then shall uprise in the darkness thy light, and thy gloom shall be as the noonday. And guide thee shall Jehovah continually, and satisfy thy soul in droughts, and thy limbs make lissom; and thou shalt be like a garden well-watered,_[267] _and like a spring of water whose waters fail not. And they that are of thee shall build the ancient ruins; the foundations of generation upon generation thou shalt raise up, and they shall be calling thee Repairer-of-the-Breach, Restorer-of-Paths-for-habitation._[268] Thus their _righteousness_ in the sense of external vindication and stability, which so prevails with our prophet, shall be due to their _righteousness_ in that inward moral sense in which Amos and Isaiah use the word. And so concludes a passage, which fills the earliest, if not the highest, place in the glorious succession of Scriptures of Practical Love, to which belong the Sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, the Twenty-fifth of Matthew and the Thirteenth of First Corinthians. Its lesson is,--to go back to the figure of the draggled rose,--that no mere forms of religion, however divinely prescribed or conscientiously observed, can of themselves lift the distraught and trailing affections of man to the light and peace of Heaven; but that our fellow-men, if we cling to them with love and with arms of help, are ever the strongest props by which we may rise to God; that character grows rich and life joyful, not by the performance of ordinances with the cold conscience of duty, but by acts of service with the warm heart of love.