1. A new note is sounded which is even more clearly enunciated by Ezekiel than by Jeremiah-the note of personal responsibility. This was due to the altered political conditions which demanded a change in the religious modes of thought. The old religious ideas were based on the fundamental conception of the race or the clan as the unit of social life as well as of worship. The individual had no place in relation to God save in and through the clan and its common sacra. But the Assyrian invasions of the Palestinian lands and their races since the eighth century had gradually broken up the nationalities and deported the races from the old homes and only possible seats of religious life. It was necessary, therefore, that religion should be based on something deeper and more permanent than the integrity of the clan and its local sacra. This needful reconstruction of ideas was accomplished by the prophets. For race-religion they substituted personal religion. In the old religion sin and guilt belonged to the race or family. The solidarity of race or family was expressed in the old tradition, reflected in Deu_5:9-10, that God would visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. This, of course, operated with wholesome effect as a warning against transgression lest the sons should suffer. And, since the law of inheritance is an established fact of experience, this old conception did not in reality die out. It lived on in later Judaism and in exaggerated forms. The hopes of the nation were based on the piety of David, for whose sake God would continue to be long-suffering. Even in the days of Christ, the Jews relied on the righteousness of holy ancestors and said, “We have Abraham to our father.” But a powerful reaction had set in against this old conception in the time of Ezekiel, and no prophet ever gave it more clear and emphatic expression than he. He even denies that the individual ever dies for the sins of the father: “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” Neither Noah, Daniel, nor Job could have rescued by their righteousness any but their own souls.
After the fall of Jerusalem, the Jewish nation no longer existed as a nation; only scattered individuals were left. If the prophet believed that the religion of Israel was to have a future, and if he had a mission to work for that future, he must take account of these individuals. From among them the new Israel must be built up; they must be stimulated to faith and hope, else they would lapse into heathenism; and they must be inspired with true ideals, else they might make the religion of Israel worse than heathenism. Hence Ezekiel, in the celebrated eighteenth chapter and elsewhere, declares that individuals will not be hopelessly involved in the ruin of the nation, or in the guilt of their ancestors, or even in the consequences of their own past sins. With the new Israel in prospect each individual may at that moment choose good or evil, and by that choice may determine whether he shall be admitted into the Kingdom of God or excluded from it. The exigencies of a supreme crisis thus led Ezekiel to a formal and explicit enunciation of the principle of individual responsibility.
We have to make a choice and to make it at our peril. We are on a pass, blinded by mist and whirling snow. If we stand still, we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road, we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? “Be strong and of a good courage.” Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. Above all let us dream no dreams and tell no lies, but go our way, wherever we may land, with our eyes open and our heads erect. If death ends all, we cannot meet it better. If not, let us enter the next scene with no sophistry in our mouths and no masks on our faces.1 [Note: J. Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 354.]
2. In two directions the sense of responsibility is capable of development-in motive and in content. In proportion as it takes a deeper hold of the human heart, it receives a richer content and a wider sphere of influence. The motive is that with which it grips the heart; the content is the circle over which it reigns. The deeper the tree strikes its roots, the broader are its branches and the vaster its shade. So the more deeply men are gripped by the love and sense of what is right, the more fully and extensively will they apply that principle in ordinary life. Thus the richness of the content and the wideness of the circulation of duty depend in the first instance upon the motive. In the days of Ezekiel it was the fear of God's holiness; in the era of Christian thought it is the love of God's Holy Name. But who can deny that the moral conception and ideal of the prophet prepared the way for the conception and ideal of Christ? The sense of responsibility was exalted, refined, intensified by the teaching of the Master, who exemplified in His life the purest motive and the widest range of duty; but when we remember how much we owe Him for the fuller and grander light we possess, we must not forget those courageous pioneers of the cross, the fearless watchmen on the hills of Israel, staunch shepherds of a faithless flock, who held up the torch of God's holiness in the night of Israel's sin and despair, appealing strongly to the Israelites to cast away their sins, to make them a new heart and a new spirit, and pleading in a softer key, in the name of the Lord Himself, “For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God; wherefore turn yourselves, and live.”
Commentators complain that nobody reads Ezekiel now. It is not certain that St. Paul read him, for he nowhere quotes him. But the redemptive conceptions of the two writers are the same, and appear in the same order: 1. Forgiveness-“I will sprinkle clean water upon you”; 2. Regeneration-“A new heart and spirit”; 3. The Spirit of God as the ruling power in the new life-“I will put My Spirit within you”; 4. The issue of this new principle of life, the keeping of the requirements of God's law-“That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Rom_8:4); 5. The effect of living “under grace” in softening the human heart and leading to obedience-“Ye shall remember your evil ways and loathe yourselves”-“Shall we sin because not under law but under grace?” (Rom_6:1-23; Rom_7:1-25). And, finally, the organic connection of Israel's history with Jehovah's revelation of Himself to the nations.1 [Note: A. B. Davidson, The Theology of the Old Testament, 343.]
3. We need Ezekiel's teaching to-day in many ways. The individual is always tempted to hide from himself, or hide from his brother. In a very awful sense the latter is true of him now, because
Man is parcelled out in men
To-day, because for any wrongful blow,
No man, not stricken, asks, “I would be told
Why thou dost strike”; but his heart whispers then,
“He is he, I am I.”
But this is true of him, because the other is true of him also, that he hides from himself. He is more and more tempted to rely upon the State, or upon the Church. He would hand over all his responsibility to the politician and the priest; but not so are we to outwit the truth of things. Man belongs to himself and to God, and to no other, in the final issue. “Bear ye one another's burdens”-in his relation to his fellow-creatures, “for every man shall bear his own burden”-in his relation to God. Whatever a man may suffer from one or the other, or both, his hell is not from his parents or from his past, while he has the power, by God's help, any moment-any brief, immeasurable moment-to cut his soul loose from the things that are behind, and set sail for the Paradise of God. “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.… When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive. Because he considereth, and turneth away from all his transgressions that he hath committed, he shall surely live, he shall not die.” A man is master of his fate the moment he lets the mercy of God find him.
Man has the power of choice-he determines the character of his own conduct. He has what Shakespeare calls
A free determination
'Twixt right and wrong.
He is the arbiter of his own destiny. There are those who are teaching differently to-day. Not that it is a new form of teaching by any means. It is merely the old revived. Blatchford's excuse for “the bottom dog”-his plea that men ought not to be blamed-is at least as old as Omar Khayyám, the Persian singer of the eleventh century. Listen to him and see if some modern voices are not like his echo:
We are no other than a moving row
Of magic shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the sun-illumined lantern held
In midnight by the Master of the Show;
But helpless pieces of the game He plays
Upon this chequer-board of nights and days,
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.
Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the road I was to wander in,
Thou wilt not with predestined evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin!
It means what you have heard, what some of you may have whined out in cowardice, “I can't help it-I'm not responsible, I was driven to it.” Of course, we are not so stupid as to imagine that a man's will is not influenced by his heredity or his environment. We are as alive to that as anybody; but we refuse to believe that man is merely a theatre, and his motives and impulses agents. We hold that man has power by his reason and conscience to examine, compare, estimate, and give the casting vote and verdict in favour of a certain course of conduct. He is not driven hopelessly and aimlessly along it by some force which he cannot control. Reason ought to preside over impulse and passion. No man need be a slave to circumstance, appetite, or heredity. Behind all these influences there is the man himself, who may reign as king in the province of his own conduct.1 [Note: J. E. Wakerley, The Making of Moral Manhood, 126.]
In one passage in Dr. Rainy's introductory lecture on his appointment as Professor of Church History in the New College he pleads for moral freedom as the great fact and factor in history.
“It is very natural,” he remarked, “to say, Give me the laws of the process-give me the constant which is human nature-give me the variable which is the changing circumstance and inheritance of each age-and I will show you what each generation could not help being, thinking, and doing. But here we must affirm, in the field of history as in the field of morals, the great fact of responsibility. We must affirm it, not denying anything that can be shown as to the constant operation of social forces, but still affirming this. We must assert that the true way of stating the problem is to say that at each stage the constant is the influence of circumstances as then existing and the inheritance of the past as then received, and the variable is man-man with a something, however overlaid and bound, that is never to be reached, at least is never to be expiscated by any calculus: not to speak now of that other variable-the inscrutable administration of grace.… History-and most of all Church history-renounces the proper charm and glory of her own marvellous story, when she fails to make room for the freedom and responsibility of man, when she fails to make room also for the freedom of God.”2 [Note: P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, i. 204.]
