Deuteronomy 4:5-6 Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me… You see from this that the fame and wisdom of Israel are to be tested solely by her obedience to the laws of God. For every nation under the sun there is no other criterion. Mankind has many tests: God has but one. If the ideal of the nation be righteous, she will be great and strong. If the ideal of the nation be base or evil, she will sooner or later perish because of her iniquity. I. The ideal of many nations has been delight in WAR. They have not cared to have any annals which were not written in blood. Such a people were the Assyrians of Scripture. In the hall of Sargon, that king has had himself represented stabbing and butchering his captives with his own hands; and, in the one domestic scene found among these sculpturings of horror and bloodshed (you may see it in the British Museum), the son of Sennacherib is seated in a vine-clad arbour at a feast, opposite to him is his queen among her maidens, and close behind the queen hangs from the branch of a palm tree a ghastly human head, with an iron ring driven through the lip. Well, did it prosper, this bloody city? Read the prophet Nahum for answer, and you will see how soon it passed away in fire and sword, amid the wrath and hatred of the nations. And did war-loving Egypt fare better? We see the serried ranks of the numberless archers, we read the pompous enumeration of the victories of her Rameses; but Egypt snapped like one of her own river reeds before the might of Persia, and the fellaheen have scooped their millstones out of the face of the Rameses, the most colossal statue in the world. II. But there has been another ideal of nations — not war in its cruelty, but general GLORY; not the tyranny and vengeance of armies, but their pomp and fame. This, until she learnt wisdom by bitterly humiliating experience, was the ideal of France. The nation which follows glory follows a "will-o'-the-wisp'' which flickers over the marshes of death; the nation which follows duty has its eye fixed on the polar star. III. Again, any nations in the East, from natural slavishness and insolence of temperament, in the West from unwarrantable fetish worship of the mere letter of Scripture, and even that grossly misinterpreted, have cherished the grovelling idea of ABSOLUTISM — the crawling at the feet of some royal house, the deification of some human divinity. So it was under the cruel despotisms of Asia; so it was under the wicked deified Caesars; so it was for whole cycles in China; so it was till quite recently in Russia. From this debased notion — that mankind has no nobler destiny than to be made the footstool of a few families; that kings have a right Divine to govern wrong; that nations ought to deliver themselves, bound hand and foot, to the arbitrary caprices of men who may chance to be as despicable as a Sardanapalus, a Nero, or a John — the blood, and the good sense, and the God-fearing manhood, and the mighty passion for liberty in the breasts of our fathers saved us. IV. Other nations, again, many of them, have had as their ideal the GAINING OF WEALTH and thirst for gold. Of all false gods, at once the meanest, and the one who most assumes the air of injured innocence and perfect respectability, is Mammon. What has this kind of wealth ever done for men and for nations? Was ever any man the better for having coffers full of gold? But who shall measure the guilt that is often incurred to fill them? Men do not disbelieve Christ, but they sell Him. By individual superiority to Mammon, let us help England to rise superior to this base idolatry. "You glory." said Oliver Cromwell, "in the ditch which guards your shores. I tell you, your ditch will not save you if you do not reform yourselves." V. Once more; it some nations have had a false idea of absolutism, many, and especially modern nations, have had a false ideal of LIBERTY. There is no ideal more grand and inspiring than that of true freedom. But what is freedom? It is the correlative of order; it is the function of righteousness. Its home, too, like that of law, is the bosom of God; its voice the harmony of the world. Liberty is not the liberty to do wrong unchecked. To be free is not synonymous with infinite facilities for drunkenness, any more than it is synonymous with infinite facilities for burglary; but to be free, as Milton said, is the same thing as to be pious, to be temperate, and to be magnanimous — "He is a freeman whom the truth makes free; And all are slaves beside." The description "every man did that which was right in his own eyes," which is rapidly becoming our national ideal, is a description not of heroic freedom, but of hideous anarchy. A man's liberty ends, and ought to end, when that liberty becomes the curse of his neighbours. "Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" VI. WHAT, THEN, IS A GREAT NATION'S ONE AND ONLY TRUE IDEAL, IF IT IS TO BE INDEED A WISE AND UNDERSTANDING PEOPLE? The frivolous may sneer and the faithless may deride, but it is duty and it is righteousness. That is as much the law of Christ as it is the law of Sinai. If a nation be not the uplifter of this banner it is nothing, and it is doomed in due time to fall. And that is why the Bible, when men will read it by the light of truth and not of pseudo-religious theories, is still the best statesman's manual. For it will teach him several things. It will teach him that progress is the appointed, inevitable law of human life, and that it is a deadly error to suppose that we are sent into the world only to preserve and not to improve; and it will teach him to honour man simply as man, and to regard all men, from the highest to the lowest, as absolutely equal before the bar of justice. It will teach him that always and invariably the unjust gains and the immoral practices of the class must be put down in the interests of the community, and that the interests of the community are subordinate always to those of the nation. And it will teach him that the true glory of nations lies, not in the splendid misery of war, but in the dissemination of honourable happiness, and the encouragement of righteousness, and the suppression of vice. And it will teach him that the true wealth of a nation is not in gold and silver, but in the souls of strong, contented, and self-respecting men. When statesmen have learnt all these lessons they will not be long in learning others. Nations will aim at only such conditions of life and government as shall make it easy to do right and difficult to do wrong. Statesmen will not toil for reward; they will hold allegiance to the loftiest ideal of their faith in Christ dearer than all the glories of place and all the claims of party. Like Edmund Burke, they will bring to politics "a horror of clime, a deep humanity, a keen sensibility, a singular vivacity and sincerity of conscience." Like Sir Robert Peel, they will, amid all the chequered fortunes of their career, be able to turn from the storm without to the sunshine of an approving heart within. They will not be afraid to cut against the grain of godless prejudice; they will not be sophisticated by the prudential maxims of an immoral acquiescence: they will sweeten with words of justice and gentleness the conflicts of party; they will be quick to the encouragement of virtue; and they will be firm and fearless to the prompt, inflexible suppression and extirpation — so far as powers of government can do it — of all open and soul destroying vice. (Dean Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the LORD my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. |
    |