SUNDAY READING.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 October 1922, Page 9

SUNDAY READING.

A CURSE ON A COWARD. “Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord; curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty.”—Judge, v, 23. (By Rev. A. H. Collins, New Plymouth.) The Book of the Judges makes strange reading for modern men, and for a simple reason. The record covers a period of special turbulence and insecurity, a low and lawless time. The land had no settled government, no central and controlling authority. The twelve tribes dwelt apart, and were not always friendly. The key to the situation is supplied by the passage: “In those days there was no king in Israel ; every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” And because his conception of right and wrong was rough and rudimentary, his conduct was of the same type. In short, the Book of the Judges chronicles some of the darkest deeds in one of the darkest days of the nation—a time of anarchy and confusion, tempered not by a policeman, but by a judge.

Moreover, the text is a snatch of an old battle-song, which has been preserved in the prose part of the history. The song is probably much older than the prose in which it lies embedded. The ballads of any nation are the earliest efforts in literature. Hombr’s poems express the genius of Greece. The Vedic hymns are the earliest forms of Indian literature. The ballads of Bestoalf and Caedmon are the first attempts at Saxon writing. So, in the Judges, we have preserved some of the tribal traditions, the national songs and crude inscriptions of a dim and shadowy past; rough fragments that register the slow climb of the people out of semi-bar-barism into semi-civilisation —out of lowtoned ethics into higher standards of social justice and settled order. THE CORRECT VIEWPOINT. The antiquity of the record supplies the viewpoint from which the whole book must be regarded. We ought not condone the awful crimes which are recorded on the plea that they are found in the Bible, and were committed by the men of Israel. A crime is a crime, whether done by Jew or Gentile, whether written in the Bible or out of it.

Of these ancient ballads, the war song of Deborah is one of the finest. True, the spirit it breathes is fierce and grim. It breathes of vengeance and slaughter*; it exults in savage war; it glorifies acts of treachery and blood; it is unrelieved by one touch of pity and charity, such as Jesus Christ taught. The writer sees nothing in conflict with morality and religion, in deeds that shock our moral sense.; but, as I have said, the book reflects a low and and lawless age, and these things are written, not as examples for our imitation, but as warnings for our avoidance. They are not lighthouses, hut fog-bells. They do not express the mind of the master, but the crude moralities of primitive tribes. Recall the situation. The. land was onlpartly occupied by Israel. The aboriginals still held the valleys, and ever and anon sallied forth to expel the

result was a series of petty, sanguinary wars. But Israel had no king, no national councils, no army; and in times of menace leadership fell to some bold spirit who rallied the scattered forces and summoned them against the common foe. One of these extemporised leaders was Deborah, an ancient Joan of Arc, who led the van. against Sisera. Deborah sent a kind of fiery cross through the kind, and called the men of Israel to battle for freedom. Of the twelve tribes, six responded; the rest held back for various reasons, and some refused point-blank. “Gilead abode beyond Jordan;” Dan “regained in ships.” Morez “came not to the help of the Lord against the mighty,” and on Meroz Deborah pronounced a solemn curse. MADE OF STERN STUFF. But there was one woman made of stern stuff. Jael caught the spirit of the time. Jael struck for freedom, and Deborah sings her praise with a lilt. By an appeal to his passions, Jael inveigled Sisera to her tent, and when sleeping lifted her tent peg and drove it through his temple! It was treachery, and it was murder. It violated the sanctities of hospitality, and, worse still (if worse can be), is this woman’s goulish gloating over the agony of Sisera’s mother, who watched and waited for her son’s return.

It is useless to attempt a defence of Jael’s deed. It was dark, and bloody; it was deeply stained by fraud and cunning, and the wrong of it is emphasised by savage and vindictive joy. And the song of Deborah does not alter the character of it one iota. It was the kind of hymn our heathen fathers sang, as shfeld clashed against shield in fierce hand-to-hand conflict in the long ago. It was wrong, and we ought not to praise it. That men should ever hav* regarded it as a pious deed only serves to show how false and mistaken men’s thoughts of God can be. “Ye have hotird that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:’ but I say unto you, ‘Resist not him that is evil.’ That is the Christian standard.” THE CURSE ON MEROZ. But what of the curse pronounced on Meroz? Well, I see no use in denying that spirit was evil. Deborah’s meaning is plain. She expressed a deep and solemn imprecation on the ease-loving villagers, who held back in a national crisis. The curse was something like that which Joshua pronounced on any who should rebuild the walls of Jericho, and in one sense the malediction has not failed, for Meroz stand-; “pilloried on infamy’s high stage,” before all the world. Meroz is the historic example of ignoble and cowardly sloth. Nobody respects Meroz.

But. the real curse lies deeper than that. The real penalty that falls on any failure in i the path of duty lies in the deterioration | of character, in the loss of power, in the | smiting of conscience or, what is worse, a conscience that ceases to smite. The curse on moral cowardice is loss of sensitiveness, a dimmer eye for truth, and a feebler pulse of goodness—what Drummond called “degeneration.” I have already said 'it. is not our province to call down curses on any man; our. hands' are not. clean enough. “Vent geance is mine; I will repay, saith the ; Lord.” But, make no mistake, a curse does fall on sloth, on selfishness, on any | failure t-o do our duty. There is a wide J difference between announcing a curse and

pronouncing a curse. I may be convinced of the wrongness of a certain course cf conduct. I may feel intense moral indignation against the wrongdoer. I may remonstrate and even rebuke, but I have no right to call down maledictions on anyone. When I say to a child, “If you touch fire it will burn you,” or to youth, “If you trifle with the law of purity you will pay the price,” or to ‘the drunkard, “If you keep on drinking it will inflame the tissues of your brain,” I am not breathing a malediction. lam simply enumerating a law of God. DISUSED FACULTIES PERISH. In the same way, when I tell the theorist and the critic who spins verbal gossamer and plays “Sir Oracle,” but does nothing to help the world, “You are cursed with a curse,” I am simply proclaiming a law of God, which says that a man who will not do what he can will wake up one day to find' he can’t do what he would.

Disused faculties perish. . . Who was Meroz? I don’t know. Nobody seems to know. He stands for a type. “The Canaanite” may stand for rough, evil, brutal things. The conflict between Israel and the Canaanite may jy-aho. perpetual struggle between r'ght and wrong. And Meroz? Well, Meroz may stand for all those who help the enemy by standing off and doing nothing: men and women whose thinking is faultless, but whose action is nil; men and women who see what needs to be done, but dawdle and stay at home and do nothing. Meroz did not turn traifor by joining the host of Sisera. That might have been risky, and it would have involved the painful necessity of making up his mind.

The sin of Meroz was the sin of the donothing. Read this way, how modern this old-time story is! Sunday-schools? Quite so! The young people must receive Scripture instruction, but ! Foreign missions? Of course I believe in them, but ! Social reform? Exactly; but you see, Socialists are so noisy and so extreme! Prohibition? Certainly; but, you know, temperance people are so fanatical! A caricature? I wish it were so, but it isn’t. I do not underrate the powers of evil: they are vast, alert, aggressive, almost omnipotent ; but we could sweep them all away if we could get rid of the Meroz spirit. We could staff every Sunday-school and evangelise the world in this generation, if we stopped playing Meroz. “The conversion of the world waits the will of the Church,” said Dr. Dale. So with the liquor traffic. If the traffic remains to blight and curse the Dominion, it will not be because of powerful vested interests, not because of its organisation and its fighting fund. It will not be because of the timidity or indifference of politicians. It will not be because of the New Zealanders who are enslaved by King Alcohol. If the Trade continues, it will be attributed to none of these things; it will be due to the great mass of those who wish the temperance cause well, and yet—do nothing!