There can be no doubt that the Egyptian experience had much to do with the making of the Hebrew people. The union in a common misery and in a common deliverance bound them together and prepared them for their destiny. Had the Egyptian experience been more kindly, the Hebrews might have been absorbed in the complex population of the Nile valley and never have contributed their part to the world's life. The sacred writers believed that the numbers of the people increased in accordance with the promises to the fathers, and the bitterness of the bondage was the occasion for their departure to their destiny in Canaan.
1. The sense of destiny is strong in this history. It is a thought that is writ large in the Bible. The Hebrews cannot be exterminated, for God has destined them to a glorious future. So the prophets preached, believing in a Golden Age when Israel should be God's people indeed. And the New Testament has the same conception: “All things work together for good to them that love God.” Jesus declares in Gethsemane with marvellous equanimity that twelve legions of angels could save Him from His enemies. It is a great faith a thousand times justified. We must not be fatalists, but in our measuring of causes and calculating of effects we must not leave out God. He is greater than Pharaoh.
The distinction between the outer and the inner view of destiny is, as regards its practical effects, one of the most important points in ethical controversy. It was the latter aspect that braced the life of Stevenson. Destiny was constantly present to his imagination, yet its effect was always quickening and tonic. The man's mind and will sprang to the great alliance with the mind and will of the universe, and wrought out actions and character as in a veritable sense inspired and chosen of heaven. No soul is ever great without the sense of this alliance. To explain even the most commonplace experience wholly in terms of one poor little human life, is to show that one has never realized the meaning of life at all. There is always the surd, the unexplained and inexplicable element beyond all that. The recognition of this is the first requisite of true manliness, and a belief in predestination of some sort is the necessary basis for any healthy view of life. Thus does the thought of destiny perform at all times a double function in the world: the bad it commits to badness, slackening all their powers of resistance, and thrusting them ever deeper into the evil of their choice; the good it braces for action, until, claiming it for their own, they are competent to face and conquer anything that life may set before them. The latter was Stevenson's course, summed up with even more than his usual appositeness in the phrase, “to waylay destiny and bid him stand and deliver.” The result in character was one of the most brilliant records of human courage which are to be found anywhere in the biographies of British men.1 [Note: John Kelman, The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson, 217.]
2. And so we learn the meaning of hardship. How much pleasanter it would have seemed to Israel to enjoy the fertility of Goshen, and to increase and multiply without hindrance in the goodly land of Egypt! A kindly Providence would have given them favour in the sight of their neighbours. Yes, and Israel would have been a nonentity in Egypt, with no place to display her strength. Satisfied with flesh-pots she could have produced no prophet. But we always murmur at the hardships that are pushing us out. We chafe at our troubles. And so should we miss our destiny.
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
Life itself-life dreadful, severe, monotonous, as well as life exciting, adorable, delicious, is what we need. It is the experience which we fear and yet have to conquer which helps us, not the experience which we clasp to our heart. We have to do the duties which bore us, to adjust ourselves to peevish and froward people, that we may realize that we are capable of boredom, and that we may learn that we are ourselves prejudiced and unreasonable. The strife, the censure, the annoyance which takes the heart out of one, the necessity of yielding and compromising, the fear of pain and sorrow, the failure, the blunder, the loss-these are the things which purify and strengthen, and not the pleasant loitering in the meadow beside the stream. It is the power of recollecting, combining, imagining, the power of knowing exactly what we dislike, and of reconstructing the design of life without it, which brings us suffering. But the wonder and the largeness of life all consist in the fact that it is so different from anything which we could have designed and executed. So much more unexpected, so much more imaginative, so much stronger, bigger, freer, more vehement-more real, in fact. We think of ourselves when we are young and hopeful, as we think perhaps of Odysseus, moving on through life patient, inventive, gleeful; we subtract the horror and the danger, the nakedness and the hunger, because we anticipate throughout the triumph and the victorious homecoming, ultimate triumph and the consciousness of it-that is what we demand.
And instead, what do we find?-a complex labyrinthine place, full of blind alleys and high-walled glooms; tracts of it pleasant enough, no doubt, where the road is level and grassy, and the trees dangle their fruit over the wall; but then we come to be aware of death girdling the horizon whichever way we look, like an encircling sea; and there are ugly things lying in wait, giants and pitfalls, and padding fiends with hollow voices, “great stenches,” as in the Pilgrim's Progress, that lie across the road.
The error is, not if we feel heroic-it is all the better if we can do that-but if we feel romantic, anticipate ultimate triumph, believe that we shall find life at last golden and serene, all its victories won. Instead of that we must face disaster and failure, and last of all we know not what, by which we shall be shattered once and for all; we need not dwell in these thoughts, nor bemoan our hard fate; all that is a weakening and a wasteful thing; and the more we practise to be serene and undismayed, the less will all calamity hurt us. But we need not believe calamity and stress and pain to be wholly horrible things; we must observe them, fearlessly, feel them deeply, bear them patiently, and then they will yield their sweetness and their strength.1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Thy Rod and Thy Staff, 223.]
3. As we enter into the lesson of faith, we feel the great truth of God's care for the oppressed. We think of ourselves on the side of Israel trusting Jehovah in spite of difficulties. Let us be careful that we are not on the side of Pharaoh. Dr. C. R. Brown has strikingly used Exodus narratives to point the lesson of modern industrial oppression. It is unhappily true of our own day that task-masters are over the poor, even the women and children, to make “their lives bitter with hard service.” The modern Pharaohs shall not escape the day of reckoning.
“Have ye founded your thrones and altars, then,On the bodies and souls of living men?And think ye that building shall endure,Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?With gates of silver and bars of goldYe have fenced My sheep from their Father's fold;I have heard the dropping of their tearsIn heaven, these eighteen hundred years.”“O Lord and Master, not ours the guilt,We build but as our fathers built;Behold Thine images, how they stand,Sovereign and sole, through all our land.Our task is hard,-with sword and flameTo hold Thine earth forever the same,And with sharp crooks of steel to keepStill, as Thou leftest them, Thy sheep.”Then Christ sought out an artisan,A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,And a motherless girl, whose fingers thinPushed from her faintly want and sin.These set He in the midst of them,And as they drew back their garment hem,For fear of defilement, “Lo, here,” said He,“The images ye have made of Me!”1 [Note: Lowell, A Parable (Poetical Works, 108).]
