EFFECTS OF MODERN WARS.

:

249

ferers and actors during the European war of the last generation have given us. Thus Niebuhr* illustrates Isaiah (while Isaiah illustrates him by announcing the laws which govern the new as well as the old events) in his account of that dull comfortable existence which was described as the golden age of thirty years ago;' of 'the aimless striving after something beyond' which then arose, and which, combined with the universal effeminacy, led to the miserable results' which they all experienced as their subsequent condition of the dissolution of all civil bonds and institutions being completed:' of 'ninetenths of the landowners' (which in Germany includes the cultivators) both in town and country ruined, yet who must still go on paying contributions-it cannot be otherwise till they are cut down to the bone;' while ‘many, many thousands of our youths, of our men, are shedding their blood, are pining away their lives in hospitals, or in want and wretchedness :'-of an innocent country' (Holstein) 'abandoned to pillage, reduced to misery,' apparently to be 'deliberately turned into a desert by an unprincipled policy and rapacity,' and its prosperity 'fruitlessly destroyed, like some unhappy victim, whose fate it has been to experience only those sorrows which humiliate and enfeeble, and has no opportunity to make those sacrifices, by which individuals and nations are purified and exalted:'of life dragged along as a weary burden :'-of 'armies entrusted to boys, because they are the sons of princes; divisions to generals who have outlived captivity,'—while the statesman who feels in himself that he could counsel and lead, remains in the background, not only because of a thousand miserable considerations, but because the hour of dissolution is not yet come, in which he would press forward of the error of fancying that the general misfortunes and the approaching danger have produced a grave and solemn tone at the Court and seat of government;' where all amusements go on just as usual: people look on the war as a subject of conversation, find fault with the English, abuse the Russians, comfort themselves with saying that the French are not so bad,' &c., &c. and * Life and Letters, translated by Miss Winkworth.

250

NIEBUHR'S DESCRIPTION

'there is an everlasting talk, mostly without the slightest comprehension of the matter,' among these courtiers and rulers, while men like Niebuhr must listen and not speak out their whole mind,' however their blood may boil with indignation :'-of 'the senseless prating of those who talked of desperate resolves as of a tragedy:'-of the ‘untiring malice and inexhaustible wickedness' of the political intriguers, who have plunged this unhappy country into ruin,' while 'all true help is shamefully cast aside;' the utter blindness of the king which allowed the progress of political disunion' to proceed to such extremity; the 'lasting hindrance to all comprehensive undertakings arising from the mediocrity and baseness that can scarcely even now be dislodged from their present position of power;' and 'the vanity of the idea that a better day must follow the night of incapacity and little-mindedness :' -of the 'bitter grief and comfortless affliction' which prompts him constantly to ask himself whether we are really living in the same age of the world that we did formerly, or whether all before us is not, as it seems to our eyes, chaos and night, a universal destruction of all that now exists.' He feels, too deeply to be inclined to say much about it, that the dreadful decision of a great judgment-day of the world is at hand:'-'Now must begin either universal death and putrefaction, or the heavings of a new life: but where are its germs:'-' this is the time when the elect are proved; he who has endured to the end, will have a bright evening to his life, but for the present, happy . . . are they who have learnt in other ways and former times to bear the cross-he 'begins to cherish the encouraging belief that many hearts have grown stronger and purer through danger and suffering, and that on all sides there lives a spirit, though straitened and repressed, whose power must increase :'though it is so much the most probable that they will have to endure the double sorrow of seeing this flame which has been secretly growing more intense, extinguished by oppression,' that he can only almost believe that if God would take pity on them, they might, though with bitter grief and pain, attain to something much better

OF THE STATE OF PRUSSIA.

201

than their former state,' yet he urges his friend to 'become the advocate among others of that which as yet scarcely begins to stir in the bosom of night, but of which the existence is certain let them not regard what still exists on the surface of things, and is the tottering wreck of an age gone by:'-the patriot may see the many elements of good striving for life,—of a better spirit than existed in happier time;' the Christian may trust that a Comforter will come, a new Light when he least expects it,' and that 'all the sorrow of this era will lead on towards truth if we are only willing.' And when 'deliverance is offered to them by the manifest and wonderful providence of God,' who has 'smitten' the oppressor with blindness; there is first the recognition that this deliverance has come after God has chastened us sufficiently for our deep-rooted sins,' and that unless it finds each of us ready to devote his life to its attainment, we cannot be saved;'and then we have the picture of this requisite moral and religious acceptation of their salvation, 'the ground cleared and ready to bear fruit,' 'love dwelling in every heart, and all ready to welcome whatever was noble and good,' and 'good will and good ideas ripening universally with good deeds and if the 'morality,' 'patience,' 'discipline,' 'humanity,' which makes us as well as Niebuhr 'feel a true reverence' for 'an army so pure,' were once and for the first time, 'during the whole war,' broken down by 'the great privations they had to suffer' after the battle of Laons, the young officer who reports it could not sleep for grief; the field-preachers took for their text, What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul, and exhorted the men to return to the patience and honesty they had shown till lately; the brave fellows wept bitterly, and promised with a loud voice to do so; while General York reminded them of the sacredness of their vow . . . . that they ought to be as good as they were brave. ordered one man to step forward from and took their hand upon it that they would suffer anything rather than be guilty of any excesses.' We may make such abatements as we think cool judgment demands from the glowing colours of the

each company

252

ZSCHOKKE ON SWITZERLAND.

patriotic picture; its value as an illustration of Isaiah will not be diminished.

Zschokke thus moralizes on the French occupation of Switzerland: There are times-the Divine Providence has so ordained it-there are times when it is needful that the iron rod of doom should be stretched forth to arouse the nations of the earth from their senseless brooding over material interests and sensual wants; and to save them from the gradual brutalization into which they are frozen by the influence of forms no longer vital; or from the degradation to mere mechanical motion and existence. National wanderings, crusades, and civil wars, have ultimately left behind them greater blessings than those which they destroyed. There must be times of death and destruction, to make room for new life. The devouring selfishness of the powerful would crush the weaker part of the human family, and cripple with its impious weapons the free wings of the soul, if from time to time the thunder-voice of a higher Will than man's did not proclaim, as of old, through the storm-clouds of Sinai, the voice of Jehovah; Thou shalt have none other gods than me!' Such were the thoughts that chiefly occupied me as I travelled with Tscharner towards Aarau.'*

*Zschokke's Autobiography, English Translation, p. 71. In Tholuck's preface to his Commentary on the Romans (if I remember rightly), and in a paper of Krummacher's in the Reports of the Evangelical Alliance, there are like descriptions of the moral and religious effects of the war of freedom on the people and the king of Prussia.

The above pages were written in 1852. Since then there have been great wars in America and Europe full of the like moral significance. 1873.

CHAPTER XVII.

ISAIAH XXIII. THE PHOENICIANS

-

HISTORICAL NOTICES THEIR TRADECARRIERS OF PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICS-RELATIONS WITH ISRAEL.-THE TYRIAN HERCULES-THEIR RELIGION POLITICAL, NOT NATURAL.-SIEGE OF THE ISLAND-TYRE BY SHALMANESER-BY NEBUCHADNEZZAR-BY ALEXANDER PRESENT STATE. AUTHORSHIP OF THE PROPHECY. -THE DISPENSER OF CROWNS.-THE QUEEN OF CITIES DISHONOURED.-TYRE FORGOTTEN SEVENTY YEARS-SHALL SING AS AN HARLOT.

THE fertile and well-watered plain which undulates from

the foot of Lebanon to the sea, along the north-west coast of Palestine, was the land of the people called Sidonians by the Hebrews and by Homer, but Phoenicians by the later Greeks and the Romans. Sidon (the Fishery) was the most ancient of their cities: the Book of Joshua calls it the great,' while it gives the epithet of 'strong' to Tyre, of which the tradition was, that it was founded 240 years before the building of Solomon's Temple, by fugitives from Sidon, then besieged by the king of Ascalon. Successive colonies filled the plain with great and fair cities,' from Tyre to Aradus, each of which seems to have had its own king, or judge, though in the time of David and thenceforward we find Tyre, and the king of Tyre, in apparent superiority over the whole people. They were a Canaanitish race; and their land-first promised to Zebulun--was allotted to Asher, to whom, however, it remained (as Gesenius elsewhere says) an inheritance in partibus infidelium; for in the days of the Judges, the Sidonians not only continued to dwell careless, quiet, and secure,' but became the oppressors of the Israelites. † Lebanon supplied timber for the Sidonian ships, near Sarepta were iron and copper mines, the sea yielded them the shells and the sand with which to make their purple * Genesis xlix. 13; Joshua xix. 28, 29. Judges xviii. 7; x. 12.

*