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النشر الإلكتروني

CHAPTER XII.

A TRAMPLED FLOWER.

God scatters truths on every side,
Freely among his children all;

And always hearts are lying open wide,
Wherein some grains may fall.

There is no wind but soweth seed

Of a more true and open life,

Which burst, unlooked-for, into high-souled deed,
With way-side beauty rife.

"By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace." — HEBREWS 11 : 31.

In this lecture, we have a new character introduced to our notice, who, being dead, yet speaks; Rahab, who " perished not with them that believed not," or were disobedient to the warnings they received; and whose faith was seen in the circumstances connected with her reception of the spies with peace.

What strange variety of character is brought within the horizon of the Gospel! Men of every nation, and tribe, and country, are its subjects. The great vineyard has every variety of tree, and fruit, and flower. There is not a land on which the sun sends his beams that waves not with the fruits of the Gospel, nor any specimen of the human race that may not be found in the happy and holy fold of the great and the good Shepherd. Illustrious patriarchs, like Abel, Enoch and

Abraham, are in its glorious muster-roll. Devoted women, as Sarah, the mother of Moses, Rahab, once the harlot, the woman of Samaria, and she that washed his feet with her tears, reclaimed by love, and transformed into monuments of grace, are found in that catalogue. Vast multitudes that crossed the sea, men, and women, and children, of different degrees of faith, of hope, of sorrow and of joy, were all numbered in the shining list of those whose faith became the victory that overcame the world, working by love and purifying the heart.

The history of Rahab is interesting; I need not say it is difficult and delicate; but it is a subject beautiful, instructive, and strikingly exhibitive of the power of the Gospel of Christ Jesus. Two confidential persons, we read in the book of Joshua, were selected by Joshua to visit Jericho, and from thence to bring back a report to the commander of its strength, its resources, and its population. It was the frontier, or capital city of Canaan. It was inhabited by the Canaanites, a depraved and abandoned race. These spies entered the city, into which they found easy and unexpected access. They sought for a place of refuge or shelter from the inspection of the police, and a covert from the suspicions that the entrance of Jews, who were known enemies of the capital, would naturally create. They found the house of a person despised for what she had been; for she had ceased to be what she once was; and, in this sequestered house, the spies, secluded from the rest of the social circle, found a shelter and a home. A report spreads (for it was difficult to elude the watch of a police such as they had in ancient times; or, rather, a rumor reaches the city authorities), that Jewish spies had been seen surveying the capital, taking its dimensions, measuring, probably, the depth of its trenches, and the strength of its walls, with a view to its destruction, if such an attempt should seem feasible. Still worse, the rumor spread that these spies had

entered the house of Rahab. Instantly the gates are closed ; the detective police are sent after them; the possibility of their retreat is cut off; their capture and destruction seem imminent. These officers, on visiting the house of Rahab, of course inquired first, as the narrative suggests, whether such persons as spies from the camp of Joshua had been seen within the walls of Jericho, and if they had visited or were in her house; and, of course, they required, at the risk of her life, that she should instantly deliver them up. If she had been, at this moment, an unprincipled person, her first dictate would have been to betray those who had cast themselves on her compassion, and under the shelter of her roof, and, for a consideration which would have been ample, to give up the spies to the vengeance of their foes. She did not do so. She gave a plausible, but untruthful excuse; not simply an equivocation, but a statement positively untrue. We must not disguise or seek to palliate what is strictly sinful, or to vindicate a character otherwise bright from an obvious stain. We must hail the good, and accept it, and acknowledge the evil, and reject it. By a false and untrue statement she covered them, and declared that they were not there; that they had gone another way; and, what shows that she could not have been a notoriously bad character, the detective police, not very easily cheated, as we know, accepted her statement as true, and believed every syllable she uttered, with apparently implicit confidence. These two traits should show that, if she had great faults, she may not have been without great excellences; and that the faults were forgiven by the blood of Jesus, and the excellences that merged them shone forth with richer lustre because of the humbling recollections in which they were embosomed. To give a very short summary of all that occurred, she hid the spies under the flax-stalks that were drying on the flat roof of her house, situated on the walls, and outside; and, on the departure of the police, she

opened the gate, and let her guests go free; only she exacted a promise, first, for her own life, very naturally; but, what was still more beautiful, and indicated the Christian frame of mind of this woman, she exacted a pledge that they would be kind to her parents (she was at this time about seventeen years of age), and to the friends that were connected with them; all which they pledged. And, in due course, we read, that whilst the walls fell beneath the earthquake that upheaved them below, and the houses of Jericho crushed the inhabitants in their ruins, that frail house, under which grew in silence the transplanted flower, stood firm as if it had been based upon the everlasting rocks; all the attributes of Deity, like the mountains around Jerusalem, shielded and protected it.

Some have tried to show that the proper translation of the word which is here rendered "harlot" is "hostess." Now, those who have done so, as Moses Stuart, an accomplished Hebrew scholar, have drawn the Hebrew word from a wrong source, or, rather, have overlooked the proper derivation of it; it does not and cannot mean hostess; we must conclude, from the whole history, that “hostess or "innkeeper” is not the proper translation, and that the translation, as given by the apostle James, when he alludes to her, is the right and true one only, recollect, such she had been, but such she had ceased to be; and "such were some of you, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." In other words, the epithet attached to her name originally would cleave to it after the character that deserved it was gone; the reproach clung to her character, after the evil it represented had been put away; her name could not be mentioned without the early discord being heard Rahab, the Christian, but once the harlot.” I have not demonstrative evidence of this, and therefore all may not accept this solution; but it seems at least a very

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natural and a very plausible one.

One can only regret in

this, as in other cases, what is so true, and what the great poet and reader of human nature has so well said:

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It is very strange that our consciousness of sin in ourselves should make us the less sympathize with others, and more prone to condemn our neighbors. It looks as if we felt that, under the shelter of a brother's condemnation, our own iniquities should be more rapidly merged. The solution of her past history seems to be this: The customs of India are not modern or recent; and certainly, if antiquity can prove a thing to be true, India's religion must be the true one. In India, the native parents devote their daughters, in their earliest infancy, to the practice of the most vile and sensual rites and worship, in certain of their pagodas. These daughters, often the most beautiful, are separated to the sensual purposes of licentious worship from early years. India witnesses, in these victims, its beautiful flowers corrupted at their earliest buddings. The most revolting sensuality is consecrated by religion, and made part and parcel of its ritual. One needs but to know the world, to believe how truly the Spirit spake three thousand years ago, when he said, "The heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; but in such cases, let it be remembered, the daughters are the victims, the parents are the criminals. The guilt of the parent is the misfortune of the child; and when the child in such circumstances sins, pity is the emotion we should feel for her, and condemnation and reprobation the sentiment we should entertain for the parents. I believe this practice of India is just one of the old habits of the Canaanites. The Canaanites were the inhabitants of Jericho. It is my conviction, gathered from the character of Rahab, and all that

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