07 - Upward
CHAPTER VII
UPWARD
Man’s erect attitude is the mark of his dignity as the highest form of life on our planet. The lower vertebrates have their spines either parallel with the surface of the earth, or forming an acute angle with it. Man alone stands at right angles with its plane, as though to intimate that he alone must rise above it to live his true life. His is the attitude of aspiration. In the human body the higher organs lie in the upper part of its structure. Normally we are more alive, sensitively, intellectually, and morally, in that quarter. It is only in an abnormal condition that our vital activity finds any lower center than the head and the heart. It is a decline toward the mere animal. The law of gravitation makes it hard to rise and easy to sink. It is proverbially easy to “fall off a log.” That in us which seeks to be master of circumstances, to overcome difficulties, and to assert our dignity as men, relishes a climb, just because it demands effort and persistence. The Alpine clubs, which attack every unsealed height and are turning to the Caucasus and the Himalayas after exhausting Switzerland, represent a profound instinct in our human nature. Their achievement in itself has small value, but the achieving brings exhilaration. On the other hand, a fall which passes the bounds of our control is a most unwelcome experience. Whoever has taken a great and involuntary plunge will never forget the horror of it, and probably will recall it as a nightmare in his sleep for years. For these reasons, and perhaps others besides, the human race has come to treat motion upward and downward as symbols of moral advance or retrogression. Uprightness itself, apart from movement, it accepts as symbolic of manly integrity, while it describes the vile things of life as low, base, despicable; that is, fit to be looked down upon. And as forms of faith in the unseen seek there what is morally superior, man looks up for his gods, and not downward, the only exceptions being those which reign in the regions of the dead, as Pluto among the Greeks, the dei inferni of the Romans, and the heli of the Norse mythology.
These analogies have entered so deeply into our thought and speech that even when we come to recognize that upward and downward are purely relative terms, and that what is upward to us is downward to our kindred in Australia, we continue to think and speak in the old groove, and to talk of heaven as above us, and of hell as beneath us, as did the Roman poet: —
“Facilis descensus Averni, Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere adauras, Hoc opus, hie labor est.” This form of thought had much to do with the shaping of the religions of the world. At every point in their history we find men looking upward for an object of worship, but looking higher and yet higher as they toil after the unseen. These religions, indeed, may be defined as man’s efforts to climb upward to God, while the gospel is the stooping of God to man.
I. A very early form of paganism looks up to and worships the tree. This is connected with the fact that the tree was the first home of man, throughout a large part of the world. Mr. Landor found tree-dwellers in the Philippines. The ordinary type of house in Burmah, and most of the islands southeast of Asi?, is evidently a modification of that which was built in the branches of a tree, on a platform above the reach of wild beasts and wilder men. In the west we find that houses planted on the solid earth were. in many instances, built around a tree. It was thus with the home of Ulysses in Ithaca. In the Volsunga Saga, the royal hall of the Volsung king is built around a great tree, into whose trunk Odin drives the sword, which is to be the property of the hero who can ’draw it out. This shows that even in the north the tree may have been the first home. The tree thus inhabited was a sacred thing, and an object of worship as the protector of the home and its occupants. In some cases it fed and clothed them. It retained its sacred character, and was looked up to as something divine, even after the house had come to earth for its foundation. Two forms of this tree cult are found in the idolatry which the Hebrew people sometimes adopted from their neighbors. The “ashera” or “grove” was a row of wooden pillars (trees with the roots cut off, but their branches probably retained) which were planted beside the altars of the moon-goddess Astarte, “the Queen of heaven.”
Besides this, as the prophets tell us, they worshiped false gods “under every green tree.” The sacred oak grove of Dordona is the monument of a similar worship in early Greece. Caesar says that in his days the Germans had no temples, but worshiped their gods in sacred groves, and offered human sacrifices by hanging men on the trees of the grove. Sacred trees played a great part in the Druidic worship of the British Islands, and survivals of this are found in sacred oaks and thorns, now under the protection of the fairies, who are said to send disaster upon any one who cuts down one of these trees.
II. The tree might perish by the lightning stroke, or by natural decay, and the heart craves an imperishable deity. The next objects of man’s reverence were the “everlasting hills,” as the loftiest and most unchanging features of the earth’s surface. On their summits there reigned a peace and a silence which awed those who climbed them. There the air blew free and pure.
They lifted up their protecting bulks between the valleys and the storms. They were the most ancient landmarks, which sundered tribe from tribe, and kept the peace between them. To the wanderer, they pointed out the location of his home, and they reminded him of the days of his childhood, when they had seemed an appendage to his father’s house. Fusi-yama is thus invested with an especial sanctity in the eyes of the Japanese. It is reproduced in every garden, and introduced into every landscape. One of my Japanese students told me he could not restrain his tears when it came into sight, as he was returning for the first time from America. Nor was this sacredness of the mountains obliterated when the conception of the gods as personal beings, existing in human form, displaced the early worship of natural facts and forces. In the summits of the mountains the gods made their home. Olympus, in Thessaly, close by the scene of the first union of the Hellenic tribes for a common defense, came to be regarded as the home of Zeus and the other deities of Greek worship. In the mountain gorge at Delphi was the shrine where Apollo gave out the oracles, which directed the whole movement of the Greek people, until the self-seeking of its priests undermined confidence in its utterances.
III. Higher still were the visible heavens, and the heavenly host — sun, moon, and stars. The worship of the sky itself had begun before the Aryan race broke up into its Asiatic and European branches. Dyaus-piter, Zeus-pater, Jupiter, in Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin, mean “Fatherheaven;” and while the first holds a very subordinate place in the Indian Vedas, the second and third stand at the head of the deities of the west. The worship of heaven is one of the most solemn functions of the Emperor of China, whose highest title is “Son of Heaven.” The calm and the purity of the firmament, its wondrous shapes of beauty and tints of color, its peace under most conditions, and its scope as embracing all things, suggested divine honors for it. The Semitic race, however, was drawn more to the worship of the heavenly bodies. Their existence in the silence of the great celestial spaces, the grand order of their movements, their beneficence as givers of light and heat, their control of the succession of the seasons, their freedom from decay, and the belief that their conjunction foretokened, if it did not procure, the fates of those who were born at that instant, all seemed to identify them with the Intelligence which controls the affairs of men. Tradition fixes upon the open plains of the Euphrates and Tigris Valley as the earliest home of astronomy and astrology; and the worship of the host of heaven would be a natural resort for those who had no mountain to look up to, especially if they had been removed by a sudden and forced emigration from their homes in the upland country, and from their ancient sanctuaries of tree and hill. The Semitic mind, however, demands a personal god as the object of its worship, and through this demand we find Baal (or Moloch) the sun god, Astarte (or Ishtar) the moon god, and Chiun (Amos 5:26) the Saturn god, standing out as distinctly marked personalities, without any loss of their position in the sky. These gods, made in the image of man, shared in his baser as well as his better instincts, and the latter were subordinated to the former. Their worship became an orgy such as Elijah witnessed on Mount Carmel, or an indulgence of sensual passions, or a sacrifice of human beings to propitiate their favor.
Sabaism, or the worship of the host (Tsabaoth) of heaven, is the Semitic form of paganism, traceable from Uz in the south to Syria in the north, and from Assyria in the east to Carthage and Cadiz in the west. It was therefore the form of idolatry to which the Hebrews were especially tempted, both because of their mental affinity with those peoples, and through their proximity to the religious centers where this worship was practiced. Their first contact with Sabaism occurred toward the close of their wanderings in the wilderness, when the Moabites and Midianites, apparently at the suggestion Balaam, enticed them to join in the worship of Baal-peor, through the unchaste orgies which characterized Semitic Sabaism. From this time to the captivity of Jerusalem by Nebuchadrezzar, a period of a thousand years (with the exception of the two centuries between Samuel and Ahab), we find this vile and cruel form of idolatry appearing and reappearing among the Hebrews. It won a great victory through the marriage of Ahab with Jezebel, but reached its height during the apostasy of King Manasseh, Avhen altars to Baal and Ashtaroth stood in the very courts of the temple, and the Valley Hinnom was profaned by human sacrifices. Jeremiah, its greatest enemy after Elijah, scourges it in his prophecies, declaring there were as many altars for it as there were streets in Jerusalem, and that the people had forgotten the name of God even in their oaths, and substituted that of Baal. Stephen reminds the Jews of this as the sink of idolatrous iniquity into which their fathers had sunk, quoting the prophet Amos. Yet Mosaic worship survived it, and it disappeared after the Exile. As Andrew Lang says, the unique thing in Hebrew history is that the people encountered every temptation which had degraded primitive faith into superstition in other peoples, and overcame these through the influence exerted by their inspired prophets. The Scriptures discredit all attempts to find God through this looking upward to natural objects, whether tree or hill or sky. But just as they use freely the language which treats upward and downward as symbols of the noble and the vile, so they employ the cognate symbolism of nature in speaking of divine relations.
I. It is remarkable how prominent the tree is in the earHest chapters of the Mosaic record.
Whether the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life in the midst of Eden, are symbols or facts, they fit into the primitive mode of thought, but to correct its errors. The tree is not put forward as a sacred thing in itself, but as the instrument by which a divine Being higher than itself deals with men.
Throughout the early history of the elect people we hear nothing, indeed, of tree-worship, but of the constant selection of the tree as the background of home, and also of sacred acts. Abraham made his home under the oaks of Mamre, the Amorite, his friend as well as neighbor.
Jacob hid the teraphim *’under the oak which is in Shechem.” The angel which called Gideon to judge Israel “came and sat under the oak which was in Ophrah,” and after their interview “Gideon built an altar there unto Jehovah, and called it Jehovah-shalom.” After his death, and the murder of all his legitimate sons but Jotham, “the men of Shechem... made Abimelech king, by the oak of the pillar that was in Shechem” — the same tree as was standing “by the sanctuary of Jehovah” in Shechem, when Joshua set up under it a great stone as a witness against all who departed from the words of God’s law.
II. The prominence of the mountains and hills in the Bible cannot escape any attentive reader. The story, from Sinai to Olivet, from the giving of the law to the Ascension, may be said to run over the mountains of Palestine, with the exception of the seventy weary years of the Captivity on the mud-flats of the Tigris Valley. The last book of the Canon is placed on the island of Patmos, one of a group of mountains half sunk in the ^gean Sea; and for its last vision the apostle is carried “in the Spirit to a mountain great and high,” that he may behold the holy city.
It seems to have been the divine purpose to take the mountains as the fitting background for the great scenes of sacred history. On Sinai (or Horeb), which rises about seven thousand three hundred and seventy-five feet above the Red Sea, the law was given; Elijah received the impressive lesson that divine power differs in kind from physical force; and Paul studied out the problems of law and gospel (Galatians 1:17; Galatians 4:25). From Mounts Gerizim and Ebal, after the conquest, the blessings and the curses of the law were proclaimed to the Hebrew people. The tabernacle was set up by Joshua at Shiloh, on a hill which rises two thousand three hundred and thirty feet above the surrounding plain.
After the capture of the ark by the Philistines, the tabernacle seems to have been removed to Nob, a city of the priests, which overlooked Jerusalem (Isaiah 10:32) from the north. This was superseded when David brought the ark from Kiriath-jearim to Jerusalem, and Solomon built the temple on Mount Moriah, about two thousand five hundred and fifty feet above the sea level. Moriah and Zion were the twin mountains of the Holy City, the latter the home of the house of David, while the former was the place of the divine presence. They might be said to stand for church and state, and much is missed by a popular confusion of Mount Zion with the site of the temple. The site of Jerusalem as a sanctuary among the hills and built upon the hills, was especially dear to the devout Hebrews. They were under no delusion as to its relative height. The difficult Sixty-eighth Psalm contrasts Jerusalem with the loftier heights of Hermon and Bashan, and says:
Why look ye askance, ye high mountains. At the mountain which God hath desired for his abode? In their eyes it was “the mountain of the Lord;” “the mountain of the Lord’s house;” “the holy hill” of Jehovah, where they were called to worship his holiness, and a symbol of his protection of his people:
I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains, From whence shall my help come? My help cometh from Jehovah, Who made heaven and earth.
They that trust in Jehovah are as mount Zion, Which cannot be moved, but abideth for ever. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, So Jehovah is round about his people.
It is a recent discovery of the Egyptian Exploration Society that the Tel-el- Yehudiyeh, or “Mound of the Jews,” in Egypt, is the ruin of the Jewish temple erected by Onias, son of the high priest Onias III, about 160 B. C, with permission of King Ptolemy VI.; and that it was mounted on an artificial hill, raised by human labor some sixty-eight feet above the flat land of the delta, and secured by a wall of brick some twenty feet thick. It reproduced the temple at Jerusalem on a scale of one half the size. The Jews in Egypt seem to have felt that it would be no house of God, unless they could say, “Let us go up to it.” In the New Testament, there is the same choice of the mountains as the fitting scene of gi’eat events. Our Lord preaches the great Sermon of the Foundations on a mountain side, coming down to meet the multitude, which came up to hear him. In that, he compares his church to a city set on a hill, which cannot be hid, just as Jerusalem was. He was transfigured before the three disciples on an unnamed mountain, meeting the great representatives of law and prophecy, whose story is bound up with the mountains. When he spent the night in prayer to his Father, he “went out into the mountain” for that purpose, and when he was crucified it was on Mount Calvary, the ... green hill far away Without the city wall, of Mrs. Alexander’s hymn. After the Resurrection, “the eleven disciples went into Galilee, unto the mountain where Jesus had appointed them,” and met him there. “From the mount called Olivet, which is nigh unto Jerusalem,” he ascended to his Father, and passed from the region of sense to that of faith.
Yet while our Lord made use of the mountains as the fitting scene of great transactions, and employs the associations which they offer, he warns us that this is relative and even temporary. The woman of Samaria, who stood in sight of Mount Gerizim and was jealous for its honor, said, “Our fathers worshiped in this mountain; and ye say, that [on Mount Moriah] in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus answered, “Believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father... The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshiper shall worship the Father [who is a Spirit], in spirit and truth.” This was the great proclamation of the spirituality of the presence and service of God. Local associations and backgrounds have their use, but they are not finalities, and shall cease when men get beyond the need of them.
III. Sometimes the Scriptures seem to speak of the visible heavens as the home of God, but always with rejection of the notion that they are worthy of our worship. Especially, they put him forward as the creator of heaven and of earth, in a way unknown to any other ancient literature, and subordinate the heavenly bodies to him as their maker and master. He is Jehovah of hosts, never one of that host. He has given to sun and moon their place in the heavens, and they are the witnesses of his greatness and his wisdom. His throne is in the heavens, and from heaven looks down upon the children of men. By this localization, men are enabled more easily to feel his personality, and to recognize his rule. On the other hand, we find along with these statements others which correct their imperfection as expressions of God’s greatness. *’The heaven of heavens cannot contain thee,” says Solomon in the prayer at the dedication of the temple. The Psalmist says: —
Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me, And thy right hand shall hold me. The greatness of God in comparison with the littleness of the creature, as it is stated in the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, is one of the sublimest themes of Hebrew poetry, and the heavens are expressly included in the list of the things which are dealt with after his pleasure. The New Testament uses the same language, for the most part, as the Old in this regard. Men are forbidden to “swear by heaven, for it is God’s throne.” They are bidden to pray to “Our Father in the heavens,” to distinguish him from human fathers upon the earth. The Son of man “came down from heaven;” he “beheld Satan fallen as lightning from heaven;” he will come to judgment “on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory;” he is “the high priest, that hath passed into the heavens.” Heaven and earth shall pass away, to be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. How are we to understand these expressions? Not of the visible sky, which we know to be a mere appearance of a celestial roof, produced by the water suspended in our atmosphere. Many understand them to mean that there is, at some distance not ascertained, but above us and beyond the range of our sight, a place which is the especial center or focus of God’s presence, and to which he will welcome his people after death. They believe that if one left this earth and proceeded for the right distance and in the right direction, he would find heaven, just as if he went in the direction of the star Alpha Centauri the twenty billions of miles which measure its distance from us, he would reach that star. When this belief is stated distinctly it arouses in us a certain repugnance, which is not removed by any qualifications as to the omnipresence of God. We feel that we have lost something by putting heaven to an immense distance from earth, and bringing all intercourse between them to a form of celestial telegraphy at an inconceivable distance. Nor does it correspond to much that is said in the New Testament about the relations of the two. We are told by Peter that “the heaven must receive” our Lord “until the times of [the] restoration of all things;” but the same apostle had heard our Lord say, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
There is a series of passages in the New Testament which seem to bring heaven near to our human hfe, and to exclude the idea of its immense distance from us. At our Lord’s baptism “the heavens were opened to him,” or “rent asunder,” and “a voice came out of the heavens,” which was the voice of the Father declaring his delight in his Son. We find that the same voice “out of the bright cloud” bore the same testimony at the Transfiguration; and that it came a third time as Jesus taught in the temple — “a voice out of heaven” to declare before Gentile and Jew that the Father’s will was in perfect accord with that of the Son (John 12:27-32). We learn that at Pentecost the “sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind” came from heaven; that Stephen in sight of the martyr’s death was permitted to see in heaven, and beheld his Lord “standing on the right hand of God;” and that Saul’s conversion at the gates of Damascus was through “a light from heaven, above the brightness of the sun,” and the voice which won him to obedience and commissioned him for his work. And John in Patmos, after receiving the messages to the seven churches, saw, and beheld a door open in heaven, wherein a throne was set, and One sitting upon the throne.
These are the passages which come the nearest to disclosing to us the relation of heaven to earth, and its influence upon the lives of men. None of them suggest that our inability to behold the content of heaven is due to its vast distance from us, and not to our spiritual imperfection. They seem to teach that heaven is shut to us because we are not yet fit for the vision of its spiritual realities, and will be “opened” to us when we attain to that which the Master promised to Nathanael and Philip: “Ye shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man” — the true Jacob’s ladder, which binds heaven and earth. An opposite error to that which removes heaven to an immense distance, is that which makes it to exist only in the human spirit, as a personal experience. This notion has been very common among the Mystics. Thus Johann Scheffler writes: — â–
How far is it to heaven? Not very far, my friend; A single hearty step will all thy journey end.
Hold there! where runnest thou? Know heaven is in thee; Seekest thou for God elsewhere, his face thou’lt never see. The same view also commends itself to rationalists. “Are we still, like children,” says Orville Dewey, “fancying that heaven is a beautiful city, into which one needs only the powers of locomotion to enter? Do we not know that heaven is in the mind; in the greatness and elevation and purity of our immortal nature?” Heaven is a thing more real and objective than is any state of the human spirit, and lies without us as well as within us. So we are taught by the disclosures of the New Testament about it. It was not a state of the spirit which was opened to our Lord at his baptism, or to Stephen in his death hour, or to Paul in his conversion. In the last case especially we see the inadequacy of this subjective notion of heaven. The persecutor’s inner state was not in harmony with the light and the voice from heaven, but was to be made such through them.
I find the view I have tried to present in the writing of some of our Christian poets, while in most of our hymns the more material conception of a distant region beyond the skies is dominant.
Mr. T. D. Bernard writes: — Not in some distant world unknown, Not in the lofty skies. Not o’er the ocean vast and lone, God’s kingdom lies. As near its unseen presence comes As air that circles round; Along our paths and in our homes Its voices sound.
Mrs. A. T. D. Whitney writes of the angels of the children: — The world is troublous, and hard and cold. And men and women grow gray and old; But behind the world is an inner place, Where yet their angels behold God’s face.
Susan Coolidge (Miss Woolsey) asks as to the soul leaving the body: — Does it travel wide? Does it travel far, To find the place where all spirits are? Does it measure long leagues from star to star? With a rapture of sudden consciousness, I think it awakes to a knowledge of this — That heaven earth’s closest neighbor is. That ’tis but a step from dark to day, From the worn-outtent and the burial clay, To the rapture of youth renewed for aye. And that just where the soul, perplexed and awed, Begins its journey, it meets the Lord, And finds that heaven, and the great reward Lay just outside its prison!
Samuel Longfellow dwells on a natural analogy: — The sea is but another sky, The sky a sea as well; And which is earth, and which the heavens, The eye can scarcely tell. So when for us life’s evening hour, Soft passing, shall descend, May glory born of earth and heaven The earth and heavens blend.
Flooded with peace the spirit float. With silent rapture glow, Till where earth ends and heaven begins The soul shall scarcely know.
Harriet Beecher Stowe feels the nearness of heaven in her sense of her nearness to those who have left her by death: — â–
It lies about us like a cloud — A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye May bring us there to be. Its gentle breezes fan our cheek;
Amid our worldly cares Its gentle voices whisper love And mingle with our prayers.
Sweet hearts around us throb and beat, Sweet helping hands are stirred. And palpitates the veil between With breathings almost heard. The silence, awful, sweet, and calm.
They have no power to break; For mortal words are not for them To utter or partake.
If the conception of heaven as a part of space, and that of heaven as a state of the spirit, be both of them inadequate and misleading*, what is the central thought as to its nature which will avoid these faults? It is that of heaven as a fellowship or society, which unites God and his sinless or redeemed creatures. It is our Father’s house because the Father is there. It is the Saviour’s purpose, *That where I am, ye may be also,” which foretells its blessedness to his people.
Heaven is the full realization of that “fellowship with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ,” which John sets forth as the inmost life of the church of Christ. It is the central spiritual fact of the whole spiritual universe, which knows no distance from any man’s spirit except that which he makes by sin, and which even breaks through the bounds sin has set, to seek and find the lost. This fellowship we cannot but think as in space, that being the “form of thought” into which we put all our pictures of what is outside our minds.
Heaven must be something vague and indefinite to us, unless we think of it as being as concrete and placed, as was the home we were born into. Yet we must guard against a localization, which shuts God out of immediate relation to all existences.
We call this relation his omnipresence, but the word is not a happy one, and does not correspond to scriptural usage. Rather than conceive of God as present ever3rwhere, and thus diffused like a vapor through all space, we should think of all things as present to him, Coleridge says. Thus we escape a tendency which may land us in pantheism.
Heaven on man’s side, is the loyal and loving realization of the fellowship to which God invites all his rational creatures. His will is our peace; his service our liberty; his presence our heaven.
“Thou art the source and center of all minds, Their only point of rest, Eternal Word! From thee departing, they are lost, and rove At random, without honor, hope, or peace. From thee is all that soothes the life of man. His high endeavor and his glad success. His strength to suffer and his will to serve.”