LXXIV. TOBIT. THE COMBINATION OF FEELING AND THE SENSE OF DUTY. S. MATT. x. 16. "BEHOLD, I SEND YOU FORTH AS SHEEP IN THE MIDST OF WOLVES: BE YE THEREFORE WISE AS 1. THERE is a charm about many of the characters of the Apocryphal Books which it is hard to analyze, though impossible to be indifferent to. Among them I know of none so remarkable as that of Tobit. No one hears his character read without feeling strangely attracted towards it, yet the reason of the attraction is hard to assign. The beauty of it consists in a certain simplicity of life and manners, mingled with a half suppressed and touching expression of feeling which charms and fascinates us. In the sacred tale we hear of men-evidently good, manly and noble, daring to speak out those very feelings and natural principles which all are realising, yet few have the courage to express. Among all the sacred narratives whose incidents and characters peculiarly express this feeling, few are more replete with it than that of Tobit. We all feel the charm of the narrative when in autumn we return to the touching lessons. We ever remember Tobit and his wife waiting for the return of their son,the long expectation,—the open window,—the blind eyes, the exquisite toning down of the utterance of love. Now before I go further to analyze the history of this feeling, or find parallels among ourselves, I will give some of those passages which seem especially to produce it. The opening description of Tobit's care for the dead, shadows it forth. "When I saw abundance of meat, I said to my son, Go and bring what poor man soever thou shalt find out of our brethren, who is mindful of the LORD; and, lo, I tarry for thee. But he came again, and said, Father, one of our nation is strangled, and is cast out in the marketplace. Then before I had tasted of any meat, I started up, and took him up into a room until the going down of the sun. Then I returned, and washed myself, and ate my meat in heaviness, remembering that prophecy of Amos, as he said, Your feasts shall be turned into mourning, and all your mirth into lamentation. Therefore I wept and after the going down of the sun I went and made a grave, and buried him. But my neighbours mocked me, and said, This man is not yet afraid to be put to death for this matter: who fled away; and yet, lo, he burieth the dead again." Again, the well-known return of Tobias, adds another touch to the picture. "Now Anna sat looking about toward the way for her son. And when she espied him coming, she said to his father, Behold, thy son cometh, and the man that went with him. Then said Raphael, I know, Tobias, that thy father will open his eyes. Therefore anoint thou his eyes with the gall, and being pricked therewith, he shall rub, and the whiteness shall fall away, and he shall see thee. Then Anna ran forth, and fell upon the neck of her son, and said unto him, Seeing I have seen thee, my son, from henceforth I am content to die. And they wept both." The power of this description seems to exist in a certain suppressed poetry, whose subjectmatter is the natural affections and impulses of domestic and daily life: the full recognition of these, and at the same time that reserved expression of them which leaves much. to the suggestion of the reader. It is like a luminous atmosphere through which the light of some glorious body shines, but yet so subdued and mellowed as to suggest rather than reveal its existence; and which charms the eye and mind by the mere fact of its intervention. In these holy narratives and passages there is a continual recognition of the guidance and providence of GOD, and yet in such a way as to lead the reader to look on it rather as the necessary thread which unites the acts of men's lives, than any line separate from the regular detail of their existence. But there is another cause of this quiet beauty, the co-existence of natural feelings in all their force and expression with the high worldwise and heroic daring of men who occupy the front rank of their day among those who influence and direct mankind. The king does not forget his father-the patriarch remembers the dying hours of his aged parent; nor only remembers these things, but also recognizes them as the moving impulse of all actions. There is always something arresting in this. Few objects affect us more sensibly than the manifestation of natural affection through the rude guise of the rough and uneducated labourer, or the continual recognition of God as the guide and guard of every action of life by those who seem by their own energy and power alone to be able to direct and control its events. 2. All this is true in the history of Tobit. There are other well known occasions in Scripture in which we are affected by similar emotions, where the combination of simplicity and grandeur conspire to form the truly pathetic. Amongst others the scene between Abraham and the angels at his tent door is one. The recognised influence of nature; the august position of the patriarch; the tent in the wilderness; the boundless realms of ruddy desert which spring away towards the east; the patriarch's wife at the door; these seen in contrast with the military power of Abraham, |