A Handful of Stars

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Excerpt: ...of Matthew Arnold's placard, must consider whether, in the interests of that very evangelism for which they are so justly jealous, they can afford to supersede the stately passages that make men feel their desperate need of a Saviour. This, at any rate, is the way in which Micah used the story of the conversation between Balak and Balaam. By means of it he sought to reduce the people to despair. And then, when they had fallen upon their faces and covered themselves with sackcloth, he made one of the noblest evangelical pronouncements that the Old Testament contains: 'He pardoneth iniquity because He delighteth in mercy: Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.' But the people would never have listened hungrily Pg 135 to that glad golden word unless they had first realized the sublimity of the divine demand and the incalculable extent of their shortcoming. VI We each have a blind spot. We see truth fragmentarily. If only the excellent lady in the Scottish church could have seen, in the minister's text, what Huxley saw in it! But she didn't; and, because she was blind to its beauty, she called it 'the worst text in the Bible!' And if only Huxley could have grasped those precious truths that were so dear to her! But he never did. He could only shake his fine head sadly and say, 'I do not know!' 'I would give my right hand,' he exclaims, 'if I could believe that!' Mr. Clodd adorns the title-page of his Life of Huxley with the words of Matthew Arnold: 'He saw life steadily and saw it whole.' That sad shake of the head, and that passionate but melancholy exclamation about giving his right hand, prove that the tribute is not quite true. Huxley, as he himself more than half suspected, missed the best. When Sir George Adam Smith, in his Book of the Twelve Prophets, comes to this great passage in Micah, he prints it in italics right across the page: What doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with...