CHAPTER III SOME PROPHETS OF THE INNER WAY I THE PSALMIST'S WAY EMERSON'S friend, Margaret Fuller, coined the phrase, "standing the universe." "I can stand the universe," was her brave statement. But long before Concord was discovered or "the transcendental school" was dreamed of a school of Hebrew saints had learned how to stand the universe. Canaan, with all its milk and honey, was never a land arranged by preëstablished harmony as a paradise for the idealist. It enjoyed no special millennium privileges. Whatever rainbow dreams may have filled the mind of optimistic prophets were always quickly put to flight by the iron facts of the rigid world which ringed them round. The Philistines were pitiless neighbors. Like Gawain, they were spiritually too blind even to have desires to see. Coats of mail, gigantic spear heads, iron chariots, and Goliath champions were their arguments. How could a nation like Israel be free to work out its spiritual career with these crude materialistic Philistines always hanging on its borders and always threatening its national existence? When the Philistines were temporarily quiet there were Moabites, or Edomites, or Syrians ready to take a turn at hampering the ideals of Israel. And worse still was ahead. From the time of the battle of Karkar (854 B.C.) on, the armies of Assyria had to be reckoned with. Here was another pitiless foe; efficient, militant, inventive, with a culture and religion suited to its genius, but as ruthless as a wolf toward everything in its path. It smashed whatever it struck and in the course of events Jerusalem was ground in its irresistible mill. When a "return" was granted under the Persians, and the national and religious life was restored in Jerusalem, new difficulties swarmed. During the long period of "restoration" the half-breed peoples in Palestine with their low ideals threatened to defeat the hopes of the returned exiles and made their feeble beginnings as difficult as possible. Then, again, the new nation was hardly firm in its refound life when it had to meet the forces of Hellenism which rose out of the expansion policies of Alexander. A culture incompatible with the ideals and passions of the Hebrews broke in and surrounded them. It was a different enemy to any they had yet met but no less irreconcilable. Under the Hellenized kings of Antioch all the hopes and ideals of this longsuffering race were put in jeopardy, and the very existence of the chosen nation was in desperate peril in the period of the Maccabean struggle. But through all these centuries of warfare with alien peoples, and during all these hard periods of strain and anguish, there existed a school of saints who were learning how to stand the universe and who were teaching the world a way of victory even in the midst of outward defeat. Their "way" was the fortification of the soul, the construction of the interior life; and the literature which they produced has proved to be one of the most precious treasures of the race. The gold dust words of these saints are scattered through most of the early books of Israel, for in all periods the poets of this race were mainly busy with this central problem of life, the problem of standing the universe. But it is in the collection which we call the Psalms that we find the supreme literature of this inner way of fortification and victory. "Thou restorest my soul," is the joyous testimony of one of these saints, and this testimony of the best loved member of this school of saints is the key to the Psalmist's way of triumph in general. In the confusion of events and the irra tionality of things - die Ohnmacht der Natur- he felt his way back, like a little child in the dark feeling for his mother, until he found God as the rock on which his feet could stand. The processes of reconstruction traced out. The logic of this way back to the fortification of the soul through the discovery of God is not given in detail. The moments when we shift the levels of are never life are never quite describable. But somehow when the way outside goes on into the valley of the shadow of death, and the table is set in the face of enemies, the soul falls back upon God and is restored. "I could not understand," another Psalmist declares. Everything was baffling. The wicked seemed to prosper and the righteous to suffer. The world appeared out of joint and the whole web of life hopelessly tangled; "but," he adds with no further explanation, "I came into the sanctuary of God and then I saw.' It is like the final solution in the great |