We shall not be alone, we suppose, in the frequent experience of laying down with disappointment some new publication and turning with real relief to a promising second hand work, to find that the old is certainly better. So it proved to be in our own case when we devoured with delight in a matter of days a recent Christmas gift. For those who like to fill the odd half hour with a biblical topic complete in itself, this is just the thing: twenty-four sections averaging twelve pages each; studies, often arising from what seem the most unlikely “texts,” which originated as addresses, probably all delivered in Westminster about forty years ago.
Those for whom a weighty theological treatise would be indigestible need have no fear; the touch is still light wheh the moral is deep, the aim being gently to lead the wanderers homeward; the fearful, sceptical and cynical, back to faith; and to arouse a people who once treasured in the main the Word of God, to the tremendous spiritual realities which surround them. There is so much in the modern world pulling away from the Word and ways of Him Who inspired it, that even those whose profession is to be in fellowship with the Father and the Son may still find appetite stimulated and soul regaled by the style of Hubert L. Simpson, the brilliant essayist whose three still earlier works (at which we should like to look later, if God permit) certainly refreshed some of us, even in our early zeal ” in the Truth ” forty years ago.
The essays in the present volume’ range from fair to excellent; the majority very good. “Sons of exhortation” should find many a fruitful seed of thought, and readers of either sex be happy if they succeed in adding to their treasures of books that have helped, a copy from the shelves of some second-hand bookseller. Those passages which are hot in harmony with the Truth theologically, being easily identified, are just as easily passed by.
That the reader may appreciate his reason for deviating in style from that which customarily characterises the works of most of his colleagues of the cloth, the author prefaces his own with four quotations from earlier pens, and these he leaves to bear relevant witness :—
Johnson : ” I think it a pretty book: hot very theological indeed; and there seems to be ah affectation of ease and carelessness, as if it were not suitable to his character to be very serious about the matter.”
Boswell: ” He may have intended this to introduce his book the better among genteel people, who might be unwilling to read too grave a treatise. There is a general levity in the age. We have physicians now with bag-wigs; may we not have airy divines, at least somewhat less solemn in their appearance than they used to be?”
“My dear child, you must believe in God in spite of what the clergy tell you.”— Benjamin Jewett to Margot Asquith.
“All the clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in God.”—Edith Sichel.
The title of the book is simply that of the first study. All Bible readers are familiar of course with the way in which the Lord raised up one “satan” after another to the defectionist, Solomon; Hadad, of the royal house of Edom, being the first recorded: One wonders how many of those who may have read the eleventh chapter of the first Book of Kings, perhaps at least once a year for very many years, would have dreamed of seizing the very tail end of the record concerning Hadad, “—howbeit let me go,” and turning it to exhortational account?”
Howbeit being what is nowadays termed H.L.S’s operative word! Infant fugitive from Joab’s annihilation sword in David’s time, succoured by Pharaoh, married to the Queen’s sister, his son brought up with Pharaoh’s own sons, YET—as soon as he hears that David and Joab are dead, is seized with ” a great and nameless longing ” for the hills of home. For our own part, (had we given any further thought at all to that seemingly inconsequential ehdihg to Hadad’s reply to the protesting Pharaoh—and to the account we should, I think, have been confined to the reflection that the “unseen fingers tugging at his heart-strings” were those of the Hand of Providence now manipulating a “satan” into position against the son of ah illustrious father in whose footsteps he had failed to walk. But for the author, those recollections of childhood in the homesick Hadad, of which, with delicate reserve, Hadad cannot bring himself to speak to Pharaoh, become an “inner compulsion . . . more to him than cold reason,” and a marvellous reminder of the way in which “this old Book which knows our every heed, summons us to the feet of Him who made and loves that hungry heart of man.” Thus “the nameless longing” becomes “this strange heart’s hunger” for a higher allegiance: a yearning in the exile heart of man for a deeper peace. “The worldling will always think that there is something crazy and queer about the man who is hot perfectly content with Egypt,” but ” a fetter is still a chain though it be made of gold.”2
The next scene is set in Samaria, at the time when the Syrians, in spite of kindness received, had come again, bent oh the city’s destruction, this time by siege and starvation.3 Not only were unclean and atrocious things being sold at fantastic prices as food for the few who could afford them, but that terrible thing had happened which God had warned would be their wretched lot if they apostatised: they were eating their own offspring. But one woman, willing enough to satisfy her hunger at the expense of another’s son, angered his mother by hiding her own when the compact she had proposed required him oh the morrow. The aggrieved woman seeks out the king who is passing by oh the wide path high up oh the wall top and cries out, “Save, my lord the King.” He feels himself mocked, being helpless. Only the Lord can help her, he tells her. She must know his barnfloor and winepress are long empty—” What’s got you?” he says, in effect. Then she blurts out the harrowing story, hearing which he rends his royal clothes . . . but the Spirit records one more fact, over which in our thoughtlessness we are apt to hurry along, heedless of the little matter preserved in this book of remembrance; of the profound effect it must have had on those who looked; ahd of the wonderful significance for all the world which the author sees therein—for this is the type of ” text ” for which he keeps ah ever-open eye:—
“And as he passed by upon the wall the people saw, and behold he had sackcloth within upon his flesh.”
H.L.S. is not concerned that this is Jehoram, son of Ahab and Jezebel; with his threatening anger at God’s prophet Elisha; nor with the foretold death of the king’s attendant who doubted the promised salvation of Samaria, seeing it but not sharing it. His concern is with that moment of revelation in which the people glimpse that their king is touched with a feeling of their infirmity, and that (as they had never guessed) in all their affliction he was afflicted. Pain, weariness and wounds can be forgotten in the service of a king who stoops to share the sorrow of his subjects. This he develops beautifully under the title, The Revealing Rent, along the line that what men thought was blind unpitying force behind the starry firmament is seen to be in fact a suffering Father at the heart of all things, for through the rent on Calvary they can see the sackcloth that veiled the sun. Not as the woman who hid her son at the moment of sacrifice, He gave His. ” We must build our tabernacles, not upon the Mount of Transfiguration, but upon the Mount of Disfiguration — where his visage was so marred more than any man.” What a field of fertile thought for the Breaking of Bread!
The next address is aimed to benefit the rebels against organised religion who ask, “Why Attend Church?” Those who feel so sure of themselves; twenty-five, or a little past; “a wonderful age to be, with the heady ferment of yeasty ideas bubbling in our brains, and the great world to conquer.” Perfect for his purpose is the case of the young king who did that which was right in the sight of the Lord as his father had done — but whose otherwise excellent character was marred by what, in the record, follows another significant ” howbeit!” Two short sentences only, but seen by the author to be closely related as regrettable cause and evil consequence:—”. . . howbeit he entered not into the temple of the Lord. And the people did yet corruptly.”4 That young man was probably reacting, of course, from the excessive piety of his father, King Uzziah, in whom it led to presumption of priestly privilege and appropriate puhishment. Smitten with leprosy, he had needed no thrusting out from temple (and from government), and the young Jotham possibly ” conceived an ineradicable aversion from the place where the terrible punishment occurred.” Thus the father overdid religious exercise; the son abandoned it altogether. But both, were wrong. The bearing to-day, when stained glass windows have shut out the light of heaven, is obvious. “Many a father with a reputation for piety has given his children a distaste for God’s House5 and the privileges of divine worship, because he has not mingled sweet reasonableness with the inculcation of divine truth.” The eyes of hundreds were on Jotham. They copied his outward actions but had not his ability to maintain rectitude without the fellowship and communion of the sanctuary. Hence, ” the people did vet corruptly.”6
Faith’s Reactions captions a study of the situation when Jesus having withdrawn apart to a desert place near Bethsaida, is followed by the multitudes, whom he welcomes; he speaks to them of the Kingdom of God7 and heals all who require it—but, the day began to decline . . .8 And he suffers the interruption of the twelve as if he required their reminder to consider their present needs: to get to the villages and farms for lodgings and food. ” You feel the drop in the temperature, and the chill evening air.” And when he says, “You supply them,” they wax sarcastic about their each fetching and carrying food for over four hundred people! That gives Mr. Simpson the opportunity to do his best about the folks to-day who think as the disciples must have done, that Jesus could say and do many wonderful things, but on world economics has his limitations. But in the upshot, whereas they thought they had made the discovery that there was not much daylight left, “it was the declining day in the desert which discovered them.” The author does his best under the impression that it depends on the ” Church ” as to whether Christianity fails ” in the afternoon of its high day,” not knowing it is almost midnight. . . But the Morning cometh, and with it the Master, who, in the glory and wisdom and power of his Father will prove quite equal to the satisfaction of all human needs, be they spiritual or natural, social or economic — and THAT was the lesson the unexpected miracle was wrought to teach. Readers with a true knowledge of the Kingdom may well use this situation with telling effect.
From Night to Light is appropriate enough as concerns ” Nicodemus, he who at the first came to him by night,” and thereby ” captured the imagination of the early Church and the heart of the author of the Fourth Gospel,” who refers to him on three occasions.9 H.L.S. believes that the general opinion has been wrong in supposing that there was any hint of prudence, much less of cowardice, in the fact of that visit by night. The problems vexing his thoughtful mind without solution could best be dealt with privately; so turning out his lamp he goes at a time and to a place where he was sure to find Jesus more or less alone. And already Nicodemus was convinced by the ” signs ” (and not alone he, for he said, ” We know. . .”) that Jesus came from God! Well might John put on record the fact that he at the first came. It was truly remarkable, and must have meant much to the Master. And what a talk that was! Surrounded by darkness he found much light. Next time we see him is in the fury-filled Council Chamber, after the police reported why they just couldn’t arrest him! He comes out openly with a protest, but is immediately smothered “with scalding sneers about provincialism, ‘Are you one of that Galilee gang too?'” Finally, when what Jesus had told him by night had come to pass, and he had been “lifted up” as was the serpent by Moses—in addition to the disciples, ” there came also Nicodemus with 100 lbs. of myrrh and aloes!” How moving is the author’s conjecture of this man’s regrets! How powerful the lash for those who ” hang about the fringe,” losing their opportunity, when “Christ wants not their appreciation, but the strength of their right arm and the consecration of all their gifts.”
1 The Nameless Longing, by Hubert L. Simpson. Hodder & Stoughton. 305 pp. First pub. 1930.
2 Those who like to mix a little exposition with exhortation should note (1) that the A.V. of 1 Kings 11:14 is misleading in seeming to infer the stirring up of an adult adversary. The R.V. corrects this and reads ” raised up.” (2) Verse 15 commences a ” throw hack ” to David’s day to show how God raised up Hadad the Edomite to be a satan to Solomon: through exile in infancy—and the call of homeland much later ! The dramatically abrupt ending of v. 22 leaves a great deal to the imagination, which the LXX (therein styled 3 Kings) assists by adding the words, ” So Ader ” (Hadad) ” returned to his country; this is the mischief which Ader did, and he was a bitter enemy to Israel, and he reigned in the land of Edom. “-Bagster’s translation. See also Speaker’s Commentary.
3 2 King’s 6:24.
4 2 Chron. 27:2.
5 A knowledge that God’s ” House ” is not made with hands, and that the “Church” is not attended but attends, does not render the message any less applicable.
6 It is possible, of course, that the two matters following “howbeit” are not related, and that Jotham followed his father’s example save that ” he entered not into the temple “to burn incense. If so, the address remains good but requires a fresh “text”!
7 Sharing the myopia of the Apostasy, H.L.S. translates this, “God’s reign,” believing the Kingdom to be present divine rule in man’s soul.
8 Luke 9:10-12.
9 John 3:1, 2; 7:50; 19:39.
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)