1. Now followed a period of thirty-nine years in which the children of Israel wandered to and fro, entangled in the wilderness. The life of Caleb, during those weary years, is recorded in the single sentence, “He wholly followed the Lord.” In other words, he was doing his duty and biding his time. Not for a moment did he lose his confidence in the promise of God. Nor was he discontented or over-eager for action. He who “wholly follows the Lord,” knows how to labour and to wait. So Caleb kept his soul in patience. He acquiesced in the postponement of his own heaven. He concealed his aspiration. He hid his contempt for the sordid throng. He gave no hint that he was above their business. He joined them on their own level, in their own work. He took up his brothers' cares-cares about inferior things. He put his hand to the duties of the desert when his heart was up in Canaan. He saw the people dropping out, one by one, until the entire generation that had come out of Egypt lay in graves along the way. He saw Moses climb to his lonely sepulchre, and heard his last farewell: “Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” And still the faith of Caleb failed not.
2. Then came the crossing of the Jordan, the taking of Jericho, the driving out of the native tribes and the distribution of the land. The deadly plague which befell the ten, and the nearly forty years' wandering which befell the people, the preservation of the lives of Caleb and Joshua only of all the nation above twenty years of age who came out of Egypt, followed by the ultimate conquest of the land, had been a sufficient vindication of the faithfulness of God and the truthfulness of Caleb and Joshua. Now, however, that the land was to be distributed among the conquerors, and there were still a few unconquered, although greatly weakened, districts-and notably the main stronghold of the Anakim of the south, within whose walls the last chief of the tribe held out against the conquerors-Caleb went to Joshua, his old comrade, repeated the story of forty years before, referred to the promise of Moses that he should possess this stronghold, and pleaded that the privilege might be given him to take it.
His case was a very strong one, his record good and fair. He had been frank when truth was unpopular and hard to speak, and loyal when defection was widespread; he had experienced Providential help and deliverances; he had retained the capacity, and won the moral right, to essay the capture of Hebron; he was an efficient man, but he was in absolute dependence on the sufficiency of God. His estate that was to be was still occupied by the enemy. He was not about to enter upon a peaceful occupation; it was a conquest that lay before him. The Lord had preserved his life during these forty years-preserved it, as he believes, that he might be permitted to conquer the sons of Anak.
3. It makes the blood run fast in a man's veins to read the courageous words of the grim old soldier. He stands there before Joshua and says: “I am this day fourscore and five years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, and to go out and to come in. Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the Lord spake in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakim were there, and cities great and fenced: it may be that the Lord will be with me, and I shall drive them out, as the Lord spake.” There is nothing in the Bible more wonderful in its way than Caleb's testimony at eighty-five years of age. Nor was this a mere boast. The old man was not self-deluded in the matter of his strength. He was ready for war, ready to storm the stronghold of Hebron. Jubilant in prospect of driving out the Anakim, Caleb had youth's strength and valour and optimism in extreme old age.
One day when Signor had ended a delightful talk with Sir William Richmond, as this sympathetic friend was leaving the studio he said to me that he found Signor's interests and range of thought wider even than they were. “Well, to grow still at seventy-eight is youth,” he added. Sir James Knowles spoke in much the same terms, and gave me his interpretation of the saying, “Whom the Gods love die young”; which was, that in mind they never grew old. Of this Sir James Knowles wrote to me later: “I am so glad you like my interpretation of that old proverb. This is how I put it down:-
‘Whom the Gods love die young,' the proverb told;
The meaning is they never can grow old
However long their list of labours past;
God-given youth is with them to the last.
You have the proof of this before your eyes every day, and long may it be so! I send him my best regards.” Once, speaking of his own feeling, Signor told me the only difference he found in himself as he grew older was this-“I am interested in more things, and I feel younger instead of older. I know I am quite as eager, quite as much striving for improvement in my work, as I was at the beginning of life.”1 [Note: M. S. Watts, George Frederic Watts, ii. 238.]
Therefore I summon age
To grant youth's heritage,
Life's struggle having so far reached its term:
Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a god though in the germ.
And I shall thereupon
Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new:
Fearless and unperplexed
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to indue.2 [Note: Browning, Rabbi ben Ezra.]
4. There is something very noble in Caleb's conception of a possession worth the having as that which involves toil and heroism on our part. God's best gifts are after all given on these conditions. It is “to him that overcometh” that the choicest blessings of the Apocalypse are given. The inheritance of the saints in light, like that of Caleb, is to be the inheritance of the conqueror. Caleb had caught this essential aspect of a noble life. The reward of the man who has done well is that he shall do more.
The fire had been smouldering in the heart of this man for forty-five years; and now in sight of the mountain it flamed up. All that time he had been waiting for an opportunity to have at the giants; and now that the hour had come, he proved himself no idle boaster. He drove the giants from one town to another, and finally they seem to have made their last stand in a strong town called Kirjath-sepher. In his eagerness to gain this town he offered the hand of his daughter Achsah to any warrior who should obtain possession of it, and the prize was claimed by Othniel. It was followed, in the striking story, which breathes in every word the spirit of a remote antiquity, by the grant with it of the “upper and the nether springs,” that the city might not be, in any sense of the word, a barren and unfruitful heritage.
Of all the Israelites who received their inheritance in the Land of Promise, Caleb appears to have been the only one who succeeded in entirely expelling the native occupiers of the country. The Israelites generally seem to have made but poor headway against their strong and mighty foes, with their chariots of iron and fenced walls. Repeatedly we encounter the sorrowful affirmation that they were not able to drive them out. But Caleb was a notable exception. What though Arba was the greatest man among the Anakim (Jos_14:15), what though his three grandsons, Sheshai, and Ahiman, and Talmai, the sons of Anak, were prepared to yield their lives rather than give up possession (Jos_15:14), Caleb drove them out-not he indeed, but the Lord, who was with him, and gave him a victory that must have otherwise eluded even his strong hands. The man who “wholly followed the Lord” was alone wholly victorious.
Nowhere is thoroughness more needed than in religious work, nowhere is slackness more prevalent. There are Christians who serve Christ as diligently and faithfully as they do their earthly work, and they shall not miss their reward; but many of Christ's servants would not be tolerated for a week by any other master. The poorest joint-stock company in the land is better served by its directors than many congregations are by their office-bearers. There are no teachers anywhere so ignorant and so casual as certain Sunday-school teachers; there is no clerk in a dry-goods store dare treat his duty as lightly as some of the voluntary officers of the Christian Church. They will absent themselves without leave and without excuse; they will never inquire how their work is being done or whether it is done at all; they will not take the trouble to prepare themselves to do it, and they are not concerned when it fails in their hands. They will place their pleasure and their fancies, and their social engagements, and their imaginary ailments before their Christian duty. And it would be difficult to say how little must be the burden, how short must be the time, that they would be willing to count an obligation upon them and would be prepared to face. One is sometimes inclined to propose a general resignation of the Christian staff, and then an invitation to all who are prepared to do Christ's work as well as the work of the world is done, and it might be that three hundred thoroughgoing men like the Band of Gideon would do more for Christ than ten times the number of irresponsible casuals.1 [Note: John Watson, The Homely Virtues, 57.]
5. How much longer Caleb lived after he claimed Hebron for his inheritance we do not know; but the language he uttered in his eighty-fifth year is very remarkable. What a sublime retrospect! He can look back on the voyage of his life and say, “I wholly followed the Lord.” Such a retrospect can be won only by years of fighting the good fight. The people also acknowledged his faithful service. “Joshua blessed him,” we read of Caleb in his mellow old age (Jos_14:13). Joshua prayed for the aged hero and saint. Joshua sought God's anointing for the venerable soldier of Israel. Caleb reaped a harvest of sympathetic prayer. Joshua not only prayed for Caleb but commended him in the sight of Israel. He held him up to honour. He enthroned the brave veteran on the approbation of the people. So the man of complete devotion to God received honour of man.
In February 1889, when he reached his seventieth birthday, Lowell was entertained to dinner by his friends in Boston. Describing the event in a letter to the wife of his English friend Leslie Stephen, Lowell says: “I was dined on my birthday, and praised to a degree that would have satisfied you, most partial even of your sex. But somehow I liked it, and indeed none but a pig could have helped liking the affectionate way it was done. I suppose it is a sign of weakness in me somewhere, but I can't help it. I do like to be liked. It gives me a far better excuse for being about (and in everybody's way) than having written a fine poem does. That'll be all very well when one is under the mould. But I am not sure whether one will care for it much. So keep on liking me, won't you?”1 [Note: Letters of James Russell Lowell, ii. 410.]
19th Feb. 1826.-J(ames) B(allantine) came and sat an hour. I led him to talk of Woodstock; and, to say truth, his approbation did me much good. I am aware it may-nay, must-be partial; yet is he Tom Telltruth, and totally unable to disguise his real feelings. I think I make no habit of feeding on praise, and despise those whom I see greedy for it, as much as I should an under-bred fellow, who, after eating a cherry-tart, proceeded to lick the plate. But when one is flagging, a little praise (if it can be had genuine and unadulterated by flattery, which is as difficult to come by as the genuine mountain-dew) is a cordial after all.
13th May 1826.-I think very lightly in general of praise; it costs men nothing, and is usually only lip-salve. They wish to please, and must suppose that flattery is the ready road to the good will of every professor of literature. Some praise, however, and from some people, does at once delight and strengthen the mind, and I insert in this place the quotation with which Lord Chief Baron Shepherd concluded a letter concerning me to the Chief Commissioner (Adam): “Magna etiam ilia laus et admirabilis videri solet tulisse casus sapienter adversos, non fractum esse fortunâ, retinuisse in rebus asperis dignitatem.” I record these words, not as meriting the high praise they imply, but to remind me that such an opinion being partially entertained of me by a man of character so eminent, it becomes me to make my conduct approach as much as possible to the standard at which he rates it.2 [Note: The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 128, 192.]
