Expositor's Bible: The Song of Solomon Part 12

[177] iii. 15.

[178] iii. 16.

Reviewing the whole course of his wretched sufferings from the climax of misery, the man who has seen all this affliction declares that G.o.d has cast him on from peace.[179] The Christian sufferer knows what a profound consolation there is in the possession of the peace of G.o.d, even when he is pa.s.sing through the most acute agonies--a peace which can be maintained both amid the wildest tempests of external adversity and in the presence of the fiercest paroxysms of personal anguish. Is it not the acknowledged secret of the martyrs' serenity? Happily many an obscure sufferer has discovered it for himself, and found it better than any balm of Gilead. This most precious gift of heaven to suffering souls is denied to the man who here bewails his dismal fate.

So too it was denied to Jesus in the garden, and again on the cross.

It is possible that the dark day will come when it will be denied to one or another of His people. Then the experience of the moment will be terrible indeed. But it will be brief. An angel ministered to the Sufferer in Gethsemane. The joy of the resurrection followed swiftly on the agonies of Calvary. In the elegy we are now studying a burst of praise and glad confidence breaks out almost immediately after the lowest depths of misery have been sounded, shewing that, as Keats declares in an exquisite line--

"There is a budding morrow in midnight."

[179] iii. 17.

It is not surprising, however, that, for the time being, the exceeding blackness of the night keeps the hope of a new day quite out of sight.

The elegist exclaims that he has lost the very idea of prosperity. Not only has his strength perished, his hope in G.o.d has perished also.[180] Happily G.o.d is far too good a Father to deal with His children according to the measure of their despair. He is found by those who are too despondent to seek Him, because He is always seeking His lost children, and not waiting for them to make the first move towards Him.

[180] iii. 18.

When we come to look at the series of pictures of affliction as a whole we shall notice that one general idea runs through them. This is that the victim is hindered, hampered, restrained. He is led into darkness, besieged, imprisoned, chained, driven out of his way, seized in ambuscade, hunted, even forced to eat unwelcome food. This must all point to a specific character of personal experience. The troubles of the sufferer have mainly a.s.sumed the form of a thwarting of his efforts. He has not been an indolent, weak, cowardly creature, succ.u.mbing at the first sign of opposition. To an active man with a strong will resistance is one of the greatest of troubles, although it will be accepted meekly, as a matter of course, by a person of servile habits. If the opposition comes from G.o.d, may it not be that the severity of the trouble is just caused by the obstinacy of self-will?

Certainly it does not appear to be so here; but then we must remember the writer is stating his own case.

Two other characteristics of the whole pa.s.sage may be mentioned. One is the _persistence_ of the Divine antagonism. This is what makes the case look so hard. The pursuer seems to be ruthless; He will not let his victim alone for a moment. One device follows sharply on another.

There is no escape. The second of these characteristics of the pa.s.sage is a gradual _aggravation_ in the severity of the trials. At first G.o.d is only represented as a guide who misleads; then He appears as a besieging enemy; later like a destroyer. And correspondingly the troubles of the sufferer grow in severity, till at last he is flung into the ashes, crushed and helpless.

All this is peculiarly painful reading to us with our Christian thoughts of G.o.d. It seems so utterly contrary to the character of our Father revealed in Jesus Christ. But then it is not a part of the Christian revelation, nor was it uttered by a man who had received the benefits of that highest teaching. That, however, is not a complete explanation. The dreadful thoughts about G.o.d that are here recorded are almost without parallel even in the Old Testament. How contrary they are to such an idea as that of the pitiful Father in Psalm ciii.!

On the other hand, it should be remembered that if ever we have to make allowance for the personal equation we must be ready to do so most liberally when we are listening to the tale of his wrongs as this is recounted by the sufferer himself. The narrator may be perfectly honest and truthful, but it is not in human nature to be impartial under such circ.u.mstances. Even when, as in the present instance, we have reason to believe that the speaker is under the influence of a Divine inspiration, we have no right to conclude that this gift would enable him to take an all-round vision of truth. Still, can we deny that the elegist has presented to our minds but one facet of truth? If we do not accept it as intended for a complete picture of G.o.d, and if we confine it to an account of the Divine action under certain circ.u.mstances as this appears to one who is most painfully affected by it, without any a.s.sertion concerning the ultimate motives of G.o.d--and this is all we have any justification for doing--it may teach us important lessons which we are too ready to ignore in favour of less unpleasant notions. Finally it would be quite unfair to the elegist, and it would give us a totally false impression of his ideas, if we were to go no further than this. To understand him at all we must hear him out. The contrast between the first part of this poem and the second is startling in the extreme, and we must not forget that the two are set in the closest juxtaposition, for it is plain that the one is intended to balance the other. The harshness of the opening words could be permitted with the more daring, because a perfect corrective to any unsatisfactory inferences that might be drawn from it was about to be immediately supplied.

The triplet of verses 19 to 21 serves as a transition to the picture of the other side of the Divine action. It begins with prayer. Thus a new note is struck. The sufferer knows that G.o.d is not at heart his enemy. So he ventures to beseech the very Being concerning whose treatment of him he has been complaining so bitterly, to remember his affliction and the misery it has brought on him, the wormwood, the gall of his hard lot. Hope now dawns on him out of his own recollections. What are these? The Authorised Version would lead us to think that when he uses the expression, "This I recall to my mind,"[181] the poet is referring to the encouraging ideas of the verses that immediately follow in the next section. But it is not probable that the last line of a triplet would thus point forward to another part of the poem. It is more consonant with the method of the composition to take this phrase in connection with what precedes it in the same triplet, and a perfectly permissible change in the translation of the 20th verse gives good sense in that connection. We may read this:

"Thou (O G.o.d) wilt surely remember, for my soul is bowed down within me."

Thus the recollection that G.o.d too has a memory and that He will remember His suffering servant becomes the spring of a new hope.

[181] iii. 21.

CHAPTER XII

_THE UNFAILING GOODNESS OF G.o.d_

iii. 22-4

Although the elegist has prepared us for brighter scenes by the more hopeful tone of an intermediate triplet, the transition from the gloom and bitterness of the first part of the poem to the glowing rapture of the second is among the most startling effects in literature. It is scarcely possible to conceive of darker views of Providence, short of a Manichaean repudiation of the G.o.d of the physical universe as an evil being, than those which are boldly set forth in the opening verses of the elegy; we shudder at the awful words, and shrink from repeating them, so near to the verge of blasphemy do they seem to come. And now those appalling utterances are followed by the very choicest expression of confidence in the boundless goodness of G.o.d! The writer seems to leap in a moment out of the deepest, darkest pit of misery into the radiance of more than summer sunlight. How can we account for this extraordinary change of thought and temper?

It is not enough to ascribe the sharpness of the contrast either to the clumsiness of the author in giving utterance to his teeming fancies just as they occur to him, without any consideration for their bearings one upon another; or to his art in designedly preparing an awakening shock. We have still to answer the question, How could a man entertain two such conflicting currents of thought in closest juxtaposition?

In their very form and structure these touching elegies reflect the mental calibre of their author. A wooden soul could never have invented their movements. They reveal a most sensitive spirit, a spirit that resembles a finely strung instrument of music, quivering in response to impulses from all directions. People of a mercurial temperament live in a state of perpetual oscillation between the most contrary moods, and the violence of their despair is always ready to give place to the enthusiasm of a new hope. We call them inconsistent; but their inconsistency may spring from a quick-witted capacity to see two sides of a question in the time occupied by slower minds with the contemplation of one. As a matter of fact, however, the revulsion in the mind of the poet may not have been so sudden as it appears in his work. We can scarcely suppose that so elaborate a composition as this elegy was written from beginning to end at a single sitting. Indeed, here we seem to have the mark of a break. The author composes the first part in an exceptionally gloomy mood, and leaves the poem unfinished, perhaps for some time. When he returns to it on a subsequent occasion he is in a totally different frame of mind, and this is reflected in the next stage of his work. Still the point of importance is the possibility of the very diverse views here recorded.

Nor is this wholly a matter of temperament. Is it not more or less the case with all of us, that since absorption with one cla.s.s of ideas entirely excludes their opposites, when the latter are allowed to enter the mind they will rush in with the force of a pent-up flood?

Then we are astonished that we could ever have forgotten them. We build our theories in disregard of whole regions of thought. When these occur to us it is with the shock of a sudden discovery, and in the flash of the new light we begin at once to take very different views of our universe. Possibly we have been oblivious of our own character, until suddenly we are awakened to our true state, to be overwhelmed with shame at an unexpected revelation of sordid meanness, of despicable selfishness. Or perhaps the vision is of the heart of another person, whose quiet, una.s.suming goodness we have not appreciated, because it has been so unvarying and dependable that we have taken it as a matter of course, like the daily sunrise, never perceiving that this very constancy is the highest merit. We have been more grateful for the occasional lapses into kindness with which habitually churlish people have surprised us. Then there has come the revelation, in which we have been made to see that a saint has been walking by our side all the day. Many of us are very slow in reaching a similar discovery concerning G.o.d. But when we begin to take a right view of His relations to us we are amazed to think that we had not perceived them before, so rich and full and abounding are the proofs of His exceeding goodness.

Still it may seem to us a strange thing that this most perfect expression of a joyous a.s.surance of the mercy and compa.s.sion of G.o.d should be found in the Book of Lamentations of all places. It may well give heart to those who have not sounded the depths of sorrow, as the author of these sad poems had done, to learn that even he had been able to recognise the merciful kindness of G.o.d in the largest possible measure. A little reflection, however, should teach us that it is not so unnatural a thing for this gem of grateful appreciation to appear where it is. We do not find, as a rule, that the most prosperous people are the foremost to recognise the love of G.o.d. The reverse is very frequently the case. If prosperity is not always accompanied by callous ingrat.i.tude--and of course it would be grossly unjust to a.s.sert anything so harsh--at all events it is certain that adversity is far from blinding our eyes to the brighter side of the revelation of G.o.d. Sometimes it is the very means by which they are opened. In trouble the blessings of the past are best valued, and in trouble the need of G.o.d's compa.s.sion is most acutely felt. But this is not all.

The softening influence of sorrow seems to have a more direct effect upon our sense of Divine goodness. Perhaps, too, it is some compensation for melancholy, that persons who are afflicted with it are most responsive to sympathy. The morbid, despondent poet Cowper has written most exquisitely about the love of G.o.d. Watts is enthusiastic in his praise of the Divine grace; but a deeper note is sounded in the Olney hymns, as, for example, in that beginning with the line--

"Hark, my soul, it is the Lord."

While reading this hymn to-day we cannot fail to feel the peculiar thrill of personal emotion that still quivers through its living words, revealing the very soul of their author. This is more than joyous praise; it is the expression of a personal experience of the compa.s.sion of G.o.d in times of deepest need. The same sensitive poet has given us a description of the very condition that is ill.u.s.trated by the pa.s.sage in the Hebrew elegist we are now considering, in lines which, familiar as they are, acquire a fresh meaning when read in this a.s.sociation--the lines--

"Sometimes a light surprises The Christian while he sings: It is the Lord who rises With healing in His wings.

When comforts are declining, He grants the soul, again, A season of clear s.h.i.+ning, To cheer it after rain."

We may thank the Calvinistic poet for here touching on another side of the subject. He reminds us that it is G.o.d who brings about the unexpected joy of renewed trust in His unfailing mercy. The sorrowful soul is, consciously or unconsciously, visited by the Holy Spirit, and the effect of contact with the Divine is that scales fall from the eyes of the surprised sufferer. If it is right to say that one portion of Scripture is more inspired than another we must feel that there is more Divine light in the second part of this elegy than in the first.

It is this surprising light from Heaven that ultimately accounts for the sudden revolution in the feelings of the poet.

In his new consciousness of the love of G.o.d the elegist is first struck by its amazing persistence. Probably we should follow the Targum and the Syriac version in rendering the twenty-second verse thus--

"The Lord's mercies, verily they cease not," etc.,

instead of the usual English rendering--

"It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed," etc.

There are two reasons for this emendation. _First_, the momentary transition to the plural "we" is harsh and improbable. It is true the author makes a somewhat similar change a little later;[182] but there it is in an extended pa.s.sage, and one in which he evidently wishes to represent his people with ideas that are manifestly appropriate to the community at large. Here, on the other hand, the sentence breaks into the midst of personal reflections. _Second_--and this is the princ.i.p.al consideration--the balance of the phrases, which is so carefully observed throughout this elegy, is upset by the common rendering, but restored by the emendation. The topic of the triplet in which the disputed pa.s.sage occurs is the amazing persistence of G.o.d's goodness to His suffering children. The proposed alteration is in harmony with this.

[182] iii. 40-8.

The thought here presented to us rests on the truth of the eternity and essential changelessness of G.o.d. We cannot think of Him as either fickle or failing; to do so would be to cease to think of Him as G.o.d.

If He is merciful at all He cannot be merciful only spasmodically, erratically, or temporarily. For all that, we need not regard these heart-stirring utterances as the expressions of a self-evident truism.

The wonder and glory of the idea they dilate upon are not the less for the fact that we should entertain no doubt of its truth. The certainty that the character of G.o.d is good and great does not detract from His goodness or His greatness. When we are a.s.sured that His nature is not fallible our contemplation of it does not cease to be an act of adoration. On the contrary, we can wors.h.i.+p the immutable perfection of G.o.d with fuller praises than we should give to fitful gleams of less abiding qualities.

As a matter of fact, however, our religious experience is never the simple conclusion of bare logic. Our feelings, and not these only, but also our faith, need repeated a.s.surances of the continuance of G.o.d's goodness, because it seems as though there were so much to absorb and quench it. Therefore the perception of the fact of its continuance takes the form of a glad wonder that G.o.d's mercies do not cease. Thus it is amazing to us that these mercies are not consumed by the mult.i.tude of the sufferers who are dependent upon them--the extent of G.o.d's family not in any way cramping His means to give the richest inheritance to each of his children; nor by the depth of individual need--no single soul having wants so extreme or so peculiar that his aid cannot avail entirely for them; nor by the shocking ill-desert of the most unworthy of mankind--even sin, while it necessarily excludes the guilty from any present enjoyment of the love of G.o.d, not really quenching that love or precluding a future partic.i.p.ation in it on condition of repentance; nor by the wearing of time, beneath which even granite rocks crumble to powder.

The elegist declares that the reason why G.o.d's mercies are not consumed is that his compa.s.sions do not fail. Thus he goes behind the kind actions of G.o.d to their originating motives. To a man in the condition of the writer of this poem of personal confidences the Divine sympathy is the one fact in the universe of supreme importance.

So will it be to every sufferer who can a.s.sure himself of the truth of it. But is this only a consolation for the sorrowing? The pathos, the very tragedy of human life on earth, should make the sympathy of G.o.d the most precious fact of existence to all mankind. Portia rightly reminds Shylock that "we all do look for mercy"; but if so, the spring of mercy, the Divine compa.s.sion, must be the one source of true hope for every soul of man. Whether we are to attribute it to sin alone, or whether there may be other dark, mysterious ingredients in human sorrow, there can be no doubt that the deepest need is that G.o.d should have pity on His children. The wors.h.i.+p of heaven among the angels may be one pure song of joy; but here, even though we are privileged to share the gladness of the celestial praises, a plaintive note will mingle with our anthem of adoration, because a pleading cry must ever go up from burdened spirits; and when relief is acknowledged our thanksgiving must single out the compa.s.sion of G.o.d for deepest grat.i.tude. It is much, then, to know that G.o.d not only helps the needy--that is to say, all mankind--but that He feels with His suffering children. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews has taught us to see this rea.s.suring truth most clearly in the revelation of G.o.d in His Son, repeatedly dwelling on the sufferings of Christ as the means by which He was brought into sympathetic, helpful relations to the sufferings of mankind.[183]

[183] Heb. ii. 18, iv. 15.

Further, the elegist declares that the special form taken by these unceasing mercies of G.o.d is daily renewal. The love of G.o.d is constant--one changeless Divine attribute; but the manifestations of that love are necessarily successive and various according to the successive and various needs of His children. We have not only to praise G.o.d for His eternal, immutable goodness, vast and wonderful as that is; to our perceptions, at all events, his immediate, present actions are even more significant because they shew His personal interest in individual men and women, and His living activity at the very crisis of need. There is a certain aloofness, a certain chillness, in the thought of ancient kindness, even though the effects of it may reach to our own day in full and abundant streams. But the living G.o.d is an active G.o.d, who works in the present as effectually as He worked in the past. There is another side to this truth. It is not sufficient to have received the grace of G.o.d once for all. If "He giveth more grace," it is because we need more grace. This is a stream that must be ever flowing into the soul, not the storage of a tank filled once for all and left to serve for a lifetime. Therefore the channel must be kept constantly clear, or the grace will fail to reach us, although in itself it never runs dry.

There is something cheering in the poet's idea of the morning as the time when these mercies of G.o.d are renewed. It has been suggested that he is thinking of renewals of brightness after dark seasons of sorrow, such as are suggested by the words of the psalmist--

"Weeping may come in to lodge at even, But joy cometh in the morning."[184]

[184] Heb. ii. 18, iv. 15.

This idea, however, would weaken the force of the pa.s.sage, which goes to shew that G.o.d's mercies do not fail, are not interrupted. The emphasis is on the thought that no day is without G.o.d's new mercies, not even the day of darkest trouble; and further, there is the suggestion that G.o.d is never dilatory in coming to our aid. He does not keep us waiting and wearying while He tarries. He is prompt and early with His grace. The idea may be compared with that of the promise to those who seek G.o.d early, literally, _in the morning_.[185]

Or we may think of the night as the time of repose, when we are oblivious of G.o.d's goodness, although even through the hours of darkness He who neither slumbers nor sleeps is constantly watching over His unconscious children. Then in the morning there dawns on us a fresh perception of His goodness. If we are to realise the blessing sought in Sir Thomas Browne's prayer, and