CHAPTER X . "And Jehovah said unto Moses, 'Make thee a fiery serpent (Nachash) and set it upon a standard: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeketh it, shall live.' And Moses made a serpent of brass and set it upon the standard: and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitter any man, when he looked upon the serpent of brass, he lived."-NUMB. xxi. 8-9. : "... and he (Hezekiah) brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it; and he called it Nehushtan (that is a piece of brass)."2 KINGS Xviii. 4. "T HERE are idols of the Temple, as well as of the Cave and of the Tribe." So spoke one to whom England owes much for the sane and unflinching course he held in the days when Oxford seemed to have fallen under the spell of the clerical party. There are serpents of the wilderness which have lost their primal significance and have become mere centres for the idolatries of the pious. There are holy things that have outlived their usefulness and cumber the way of holiness, mere stumbling-blocks in the path of the seeker after truth. Who will overthrow the idols? Who will break the serpent in pieces? Who will remove the stumbling-block out of the way? Clearly the duty of removing those things that have been seen to have lost their spiritual force, and are now hindrances, not helps, to real religion, ought to fall upon the leaders of religious thought. It ought not to be left to the irreverent hands of the Sons of Belial. And yet if the accredited leaders of religious thought are too feeble or too blind, too much wrapped up in their organisations and their ceremonials, too much afraid of offending their own order or the powers of this world, then the task must fall to those who are in no sense leaders, but who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Should any one who considers himself a faithful adherent of the Church of Christ doubt the progressive nature of revelation, or revolt at the proposition that that which may be right and divinely ordered for the men of one age may be wrong and contrary to the Divine order for men of a later age, let him reflect on the history of the brazen serpent. The entire narrative, so far as it has been preserved, is quoted above. Moses, acting, as we are told, under Divine command, makes the brazen serpent and sets it up upon the standard. Hezekiah was the great king of whom we are told that he did that which was right in the eyes of Jehovah, and trusted in Jehovah the God of Israel, so that after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, who clave unto Jehovah and departed not from following Him, but kept His commandments which Jehovah commanded Moses. And Hezekiah, acting equally under Divine command, destroyed the brazen serpent, derisively declaring that Nachash was merely Nehushtan-a brazen bauble. None of the commentators, the doctors, the Fathers, none of the Councils, orthodox or unorthodox, has ever even remotely suggested that the destructive act of King Hezekiah was other than rightly and divinely ordered. For those who look to authority for guidance there cannot be any higher justification than this for an act of necessary iconoclasm-the destruction, open, avowed, contemptuous, of an eikon, an image, a symbol, which had outlived its good purpose and become an object of materialistic adoration, to be incensed and bowed down to. In our days the spent pietisms of the past loom large in the worship as well as in the dogmas of current Christianity. Things which were in their day as useful ensigns in the wilderness have become fetiches in the temple, perverting the heart of the worshipper and diverting his gaze from the vision of the Divine. Men who in the twentieth century should be following the Christ are enslaved to Jewish modes of thought, hypnotised to pagan rites that have crept into Christianity in the course of its decadence from pristine simplicity, wedded to beliefs that clearly were never held by the Apostles. And all the while they conscientiously and devoutly follow these things, hallowed for them by long and sacred association, they are entirely unconscious how utterly and irrevocably the objects of their devotion have fallen into the position of that brazen serpent, have outlived their purpose and are but stumbling-blocks to faith; are literally idols of the temple, to be broken and cast out and banished with Idols of the cave and of the tribe. But who, without giving offence to some of the most devout and heavenly-minded of living souls, can break to pieces the idol which thus surviving its usefulness and sitting in the temple of God has itself become worshipped as a thing Divine? The and are now hindrances, not helps, to real religion, ought to fall upon the leaders of religious thought. It ought not to be left to the irreverent hands of the Sons of Belial. And yet if the accredited leaders of religious thought are too feeble or too blind, too much wrapped up in their organisations and their ceremonials, too much afraid of offending their own order or the powers of this world, then the task must fall to those who are in no sense leaders, but who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Should any one who considers himself a faithful adherent of the Church of Christ doubt the progressive nature of revelation, or revolt at the proposition that that which may be right and divinely ordered for the men of one age may be wrong and contrary to the Divine order for men of a later age, let him reflect on the history of the brazen serpent. The entire narrative, so far as it has been preserved, is quoted above. Moses, acting, as we are told, under Divine command, makes the brazen serpent and sets it up upon the standard. Hezekiah was the great king of whom we are told that he did that which was right in the eyes of Jehovah, and trusted in Jehovah the God of Israel, so that after him there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, who clave unto Jehovah and departed not from following Him, but kept His commandments which Jehovah commanded Moses. And Hezekiah, acting equally under Divine command, destroyed the brazen serpent, derisively declaring that Nachash was merely Nehushtan-a brazen bauble. None of the commentators, the doctors, the Fathers, none of the Councils, orthodox or unorthodox, has ever even remotely suggested that the destructive act of King possessed by a Son of man who had descended from heaven must be unique, and that God had so loved the world that He had sent His unique Son; whosoever, therefore, should believe the heavenly things revealed in Him might through Him learn that he was not doomed to destruction but to immortality, not to judgment, for that was already passed, but to salvation; for reprobation equally with approbation consisted in the revelation of light in the darkness. Now all this, so far as it is a commentary at all upon the simile of the brazen serpent, demonstrates how purely the allusion was a simile. The episode of the serpent in the wilderness, familiar. as it must have been to the "Master in Israel," recalled to him an objective symbol which had been set up upon a standard or pedestal for a plague-stricken people to gaze at that they might be awakened from the stupor of death. If the simile suggested anything it intimated that the Son of man, heaven-descended; should be set before a sin-stricken world as an objective symbol of Divine life, at whom gazing the stricken one might be awakened from the stupor of moral death further, if perhaps the context is to be read into the simile, that he might realise that death and judgment were already passed, that Divine love as of a Father must be reckoned as amongst the things now revealed, with life and immortality. The scholars, who have not always seen the true inward bearing of things, have had much to say of the brazen serpent in relation to the serpent-worships of primitive man as now discovered by ethnologists in so many divers countries and races. And of all this there has been little that is helpful. The brazen serpent erected by Moses may have been as literally |