When the positivist young man told the minister that he would never believe anything that he could not understand, the old man replied that his creed, then, must be very short. And the reply was well within the truth, which is, perhaps, more fully expressed by the German paper in which I lately saw this conversation reported— “She: 'So you believe in nothing'? He: 'I believe in nothing that I cannot understand.' She: 'Well, that comes to the same thing!'” The reply might have been meant satirically, but it is sober, sound philosophy, for all that; we can really understand nothing until we first believe something.
It is especially true that it is “by faith we understand” in reference to heavenly things, whether they be physical or spiritual. For instance, in regard even to physical things in the heavens, are there not thousands of ships at this very moment safely and surely guiding their courses by the positions of the stars? When their navigators look in the Nautical Almanac that can tell them for years ahead where such and such a star will be at such a moment, not one in a thousand of them, perhaps, understands how it has been made out. If any of them comprehend the method of the calculation, they cannot stay to work it out for themselves. Yet they dream no more of doubting their nautical almanac than of doubting their existence. Any of their calculations, or of the astronomer's whom they trust, are based first of all on belief in the figures and statements of other men who have proved them. It is through faith they understand. At the bottom it is on that basis that they safely convey and protect the thousands of lives and millions of value entrusted to them.
Men say that they do not understand how a perfect and omniscient God can repent. Yet when I read that “the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto the people” after the impassioned and devoted intercession of Moses for them, I find it easy to believe exactly what is stated; and if I cannot understand how it is so, I find it tenfold more difficult to understand how it could be otherwise. And this is true of a large class of scripture difficulties. When it is difficult to conceive how the original statement can be true, consider for a moment how much more difficult it is to conceive anything else of the matter to be true. Is it difficult to believe that God was filled with anger against the wickedness of Israel, and yet that He exercised forbearance toward them when His beloved and honored servant offered to give himself up in their stead? Perhaps it is difficult, but it is impossible to believe otherwise, that is assuming the main historical events to be true, of course.
Then something consists in rightly apprehending the meaning of the word “repent.” In general, in scripture, it does not mean remorse or contrition, as so many think, but simply a change or revolution in the attitude of the mind. “Godly sorrow leadeth to repentance,” but that shows it is not the same thing. There is, indeed, a secondary use of the word repent, as where we are told Judas repented (a different Greek word is, however, used). That is the vain remorse of baffled sin. In any such senses as regret or remorse in reference to His personal actions, we are assured that God “is not a man that He should repent.” There is no inconsistency in these statements for people of ordinary intelligence. (The Learned Critic is not included here, of course. His intelligence is extraordinary—whether upwards or downwards who shall say?— At any rate a language has not yet been invented sufficiently explicit for him.)
There is far more honor in accomplishing great work with small and apparently inadequate means than with strong and suitable instruments, so we are not so much struck with the fact that Shamgar and Samson delivered Israel, as that the one did it with a common ox-goad, the other with the jaw-bone of an ass. God, who constructs the basin of an ocean by means of the minute encrinitæ, or builds up a thousand miles of rocks on the Australian coast by the agency of coral insects, reveals the glory of His power and wisdom, chiefly by accomplishing work vast and stupendous, by instrumentalities feeble and despised.
It was thus in the Israelitish history. Those whom He took up to promulgate and preserve the knowledge of the true deity on the earth were not a band of angelic beings, but a nation of men quite as sinful as any that ever had existed. It suits modern criticism to speak well of them as a nation whose fitness caused their survival, and their evolution of a religion gradually from a low to a high standard. But ancient criticism had a different opinion; according to the author of Religio Medici, it held that “the Israelites were turned out of Egypt because they were scabbed.” The truth, as usual, holds its own even way between the extremes: they were about the same as their fellow-men, not much better nor much worse. Human nature is much the same wherever you find it. As to the Israelites, having a tendency to develop upwards, however, the facts seem peculiarly the other way. The greatest height they ever reached of pure and lofty devotion was on the banks of the Red Sea. A very short time afterward they fall into the vilest orgies of idolatry. It was with people like these that God has transformed the face of the earth. instruments that continually broke in His hand; and that is full of encouragement for His servants now. All this is too obviously typical to need comment.
On this occasion, when they fell down before a golden calf He turns to cast them away, but listens to the intercession of Moses and retains them. The advocacy of Moses then takes another character. He makes their very wickedness a ground of appeal to Jehovah to go with them. “I pray thee go amongst us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and sin, and take us for thine inheritance.” It is not that we are so good that He cannot do without us, but we are so bad we cannot do without Him If this be presumption, it is the presumption of faith; and I wish we had more of it.
In truth it was one of the finest pieces of advocacy even in God's records. He first carries his point on the grounds of the Judge's goodness, when it was the people's badness that was really in question; and then he turns round and makes the very badness of the people a fresh basis of appeal—this time ad misericordiam and in forma pauperis—for fresh clemency. Moses had said that he was not eloquent and of course believed it, but that was only because of the innate modesty and diffidence of his great nature. He had indeed a massive and magnificent character. “Great, not as a hewn obelisk, but as an Alpine mountain.... unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the heavens; yet in the clefts of fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers." If he seemed at times to be rock, then it was after the similitude of that rock at Fontainebleau, la roche qui pleure; from its hard and rugged face the tears continually falling that fertilize the ground which it protects.