CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
LOT THE LINGERER
THE figure of Lot has already met us in travelling through the life of Abraham. But in a book of representative men he cannot be dismissed with an accidental interview. To be seen fairly, a man should be seen by his own light. His portrait should be taken when he is standing alone. A face of average comeliness will look very plain when it is placed beside one of extreme beauty; yet, when seen apart, it may have a charm of its own. Lot makes an excellent foil to Abraham. Abraham's is a face of extreme beauty, and any ordinary countenance will suffer if placed beside it. But it does not follow that Lot himself might not contrast favourably with many on his own plane. In point of fact he did exhibit a certain beauty of aspect when he was not in the presence of Abraham. When he stands in the midst of Sodom, he looks so remarkably well that his name has been handed down to [ 136 ]
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posterity as one of the world's superior souls; he is called 'just Lot.' Let us consider, then, the man in himself. What is his place among representative men? What class does he stand for amid the various orders of humanity?
That is the one question, the crucial question.
Everything else about him is accidental; but the point of Lot's contact with a common phase of human nature, the sphere in which he meets with an experience repeated in all time—this is the abiding thing, this is the permanent element in the man.
There are two words in the Bible narrative which seem to me to express in one brief sentence the place of Lot amid the phases of humanity—'Lot lingered.' I would say his distinctive position is that of the man who falls behind in the march of civilisation. He does not go back; he never could be classed among the lapsed masses. His characteristic is, that at a certain point of the road he stands still and allows his comrades to move in advance of him. Lord Macaulay, in one of his Essays, raises the problem, Why has the navy of Spain declined? He solves it by the answer that it has not declined, but that the increase of other navies has left it in the rear. Whether this be
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the solution as regards Spain, I cannot tell; but it is the answer which may be given to all who put the same question regarding the tardiness of that ship of life which we call Lot. It is behind the others, not because it has lost speed, but because the others have gained speed. Lot is in many respects like the Chinese
Empire; he has not fallen back into barbarism, he has simply failed to keep pace with civilisation. He stands where he was. In a metaphorical sense he has become what his wife is said to have become in a physical sense
—a pillar of salt. He has been crystallised into an inert mass which marks only one stage of a journey.
This man was, originally, marching abreast with humanity. He had joined the band of Abraham—that first missionary band among the sons of men. He had attached himself to the cause of those whose object was to carry the blessings of culture into lands of darkness and to bear the lamp of knowledge into scenes of ignorance. It was a stream of high civilisation, which was seeking to irrigate the nations.
Nothing could have been more fair than Lot's morning; it promised a fine afternoon. But for him there has come no afternoon; his day is
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still but beginning. The afternoon has come to others. It has come to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, but not to him; he stands yet where he first stood—on the confines of that missionary march which he had been expected to pursue.
Now, there is nothing unusual in this. It is quite a common thing to see a whole community of men left behind by a stream of civilisation ; you cannot pass through any city without seeing it, you cannot pass from the city to the country without observing it. In every age of culture there are to be seen those who have lingered behind, who remain yet in the primitive condition of ages long ago. But I wish to direct attention to a new light which the case of Lot throws upon these. The common saying is that the men left behind are the physically unfit. Those who pursue the march are thought of as the strong, the active, the able-bodied; they who have lingered on the road are taken to have been the weak, the frail, the lives destitute of animal vigour. But in this case of Lot, it is entirely the reverse. Lot is left behind, not because he has too little of the physical, but because he has too much. He is left behind because his animal nature is stronger than that of his comrades. Abraham and those
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who follow him are animated by a sacrificial impulse; they survive by a crucifying of the . flesh. Lot is left behind by reason of a fleshly impulse and an inability to resist that impulse.
He is not driven to the wall; he believes he is driving others to the wall. He looks upon himself as the really progressive man of the company, the only man who is truly making his way in the world. In his own eyes he is the object of natural selection, the chosen favourite of fortune. It is by and in the exercise of a physical passion that this man is interrupted in the race of life.
What was this physical passione It was avarice. It was the glitter of a great possession that arrested the steps of Lot and chained him to the place for evermore. He saw a fertile field, and he said, 'I will make this mine; I will settle down here.' Every race has, in my opinion, a special sin. Rome has her pride; Greece has her voluptuousness;
Babylon has her extravagance. I think the special sin of Israel was avarice. I think avarice is the sin attributed to the man in the Garden of Eden—the primeval Adam covets a tree not his own. The trait becomes hereditary ; it is repeated all down the stream. We see
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Cain envying a brother's prosperity. We see Jacob aspiring to another's birthright. We see
Esau selling his soul for a mess of pottage.
We see Achan hiding a Babylonian garment.
We see Gehazi accepting unlawful gold. We see Dives—the parabolic representative of the national sin—allowing a starving beggar nothing but the crumbs from his table. When
Paul says 'the love of money is the root of all evil,' he has his eye upon his own land. The native of another land might have given another root; the Roman might have stigmatised pride, or the Greek sensuality. But to Paul the Jew the root of evil was the sin most contagious to the nation—the love of money, the spirit of avarice.
Now, this was the sin which has caused Lot to linger. He has been made stationary by avarice. It is through a grasping spirit that he has been shunted from the line of progress.
That grasping spirit was developed, not by the experience of want, but by the hour of prosperity. As long as the missionary band of - Abraham was in struggle, it remained in unity. In the day of storm and stress it revealed no discrepancy. Abraham and Lot walked together with seemingly equal steps as long as [ 141 ]
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it was shadow; it was the dawn that displayed their inequality. While their life was a common struggle in the wilderness they had but one interest—the desire to maintain life. But when the storm and stress subsided, when the sun of prosperity began to shine, when the vision of golden fields flashed before the eye with the promise of coming harvests, when the desert broke forth into singing and the wilderness blossomed as the rose, then it was that the difference of the men appeared. It was in prosperity that the lives parted asunder. It is prosperity that reveals our power of being generous, or our want of that power. Poverty makes the open heart and the narrow heart indistinguishable; but the rising sun of fortune shows their contrasted colours. Is it not written of the wheat and the tares, 'Let both grow together until the harvest'—the time of prosperous ingathering. In the time of undergroundness, in the day of struggling growth, wheat and tares are undiscriminated; but when the harvest is come, when the buried life emerges, when the field is waving with yellow corn and plenty crowns the year, then the wheat and the tares are severed, and Lot and Abraham assume their separate spheres.
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Now, I want just to remark parenthetically that many a lingerer on the road of culture owes his backward position to the flush of prosperity rather than the blast of adversity.
Those who occupy the rear are indebted for that place more frequently to absorption in physical pleasure than to the experience of physical weakness. Some, doubtless, have been crushed out of the way—not, I think, the majority. The majority have been rather the violent than the men taken by violence; they are those who have grasped with too much insistence at a present object and ignored the things of the future. The main cause of arrest in human development has been avarice for the object of the hour. Lot is not an exceptional case; he is a fair specimen of his class. Arrested development has more root in moral obliquity than either in intellectual stupidity or in physical incapacity. The larger number of its victims have become its victims by yielding to the animal impulse which prompts to seize the present moment in preference to all other moments. They have been dominated by a malady which is distinctly moral; they have succumbed to avarice; and avarice is a form of sin.
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It is my opinion, indeed, that, if keenly analysed, every sin wil be found to be some form of avarice. All self-indulgence, all debauchery, all licentiousness, all jealousy—even love's jealousy, are but the forms of the one passion—the desire for personal monopoly.
If this passion were exercised to the full, I conceive it would constitute what is called
'the sin against the Holy Ghost.' If the fruit of the Spirit be the love of humanity, the absence of the Spirit must be the exclusive love of self. Perhaps no human soul has ever reached that absolute stage of privation. I think we are saved from committing the sin against the Holy Ghost by the fact that no man's avarice is complete, that even the most loveless soul has a little corner in its heart kept vacant and kept green for somebody.
But, while all sin is a form of avarice, the name of that vice is usually limited to a particular phase of the desire for monopoly— the coveting of material possessions. This is the form which it has always assumed in the Jewish economy. We have taken Lot as its representative and Lot's lingering as its typical result. And now there arises a question.
Why is it that this man, type as he is of hi [ 144 ]
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nation's besetting sin, and condemned through that sin to an arrest of development, has yet come down to posterity with the epithet of 'just'? He is lauded in spite of his lingering, he is commended notwithstanding his covetousness. Why? Should we not have expected unqualified opprobrium! Whence this tone of respect? Whence this ascription of justice to a man of avarice?
I answer, because there is an avarice which is conipatible with justice and because Lot belongs to that particular school of avarice. In the sphere of worldly possession I recognise three classes of men—the generous, the avariciously fraudulent, and the avariciously just.
The generous man is eager to spend; the avariciously fraudulent man will sink all principle for the sake of gain; the avariciously just man is bent on being rich within the range of principle. To this last order belongs Lot. You would never class him in the list of thieves and robbers. He would die sooner than steal.
His is a thoroughly legal mind. His motto is, _ 'Render unto every man his due.' Nothing will induce him to fall below the claims of justice. But he would be equally pained to go beyond them. He will give to no one less than
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his due, but to no one will he give more. He might be described characteristically as the man who never gives discount. Justice is his watchword, but it is justice pure and simple, never sinking into fraud but never rising into generosity. Twenty shillings in the pound is his ideal—not nineteen, not twenty-one. He will do what is right, but not what is kind, not what is overflowing. His verdict is, "Io the law and to the testimony'; if he has agreed with you for a penny a day, you will not prevail on him to add a single farthing.
The Epistle to the Hebrews says that in the upper sanctuary there is a place set apart for 'the spirits of just men made perfect'—which I understand to mean 'the spirits of just men made generous.' That is the place in the future heaven which I would appoint for Lot. He was on earth a just man; he never transgressed the principles of justice by deficiency. But he ought to have transgressed them by excess. It was well to give no less than his neighbour's due; but he should have been able to give more. The perfection of the heavenly state requires that justice should be supplemented by generosity. The state of the avariciously just in the present world is high in compari- [ 146 ]
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son with the state of the avariciously fraudulent. Yet I should say that the latter will be
| more easy to convert than the former. A fraudulent man knows that he is wrong; but it is very difficult to convince a man of bare justice that he is anything less than a saint. Like the Pharisee in the temple, he will give a catalogue of all the debts which he has duly paid, and will thank God that he is superior to other men. Victor Hugo in Les Misérables has introduced a very striking portrait which gives expression in an exaggerated form to the difficulty here indicated. I allude to the portrait of the constable Jabert. This man has always been scrupulous for observing and enforcing the exact letter of the law. The rigid fulfilment of this undeviating routine has become a conscience with him. One day he is betrayed into an act of leniency towards a prisoner. His remorse for that leniency is so great that he commits suicide. The pain of transgressing the law of justice by performing a generous deed has been too much for him; it has been as great as would have been the pain of transgressing the law of justice by performing a deed of meanness. He has felt himself as much degraded by his act of mag- :
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tp nt a nanimity as if he had.perpetrated an act of baseness. The incident is only an exaggerated illustration of the self-complacency which belongs to the avariciously just.
The crucial instance of Lot's character is his appropriation of the lion's share in the partition of territory with Abraham. The incident illustrates both his justice and his ungenerosity. He did not take the land by force. He was told by Abraham to make his choice of a locality; he selected the finest spot. Legally, he might easily say, 'I have done no wrong.'
Measured by law, he certainly had not; measured by grace, he had. I would describe his choice of the lion's share as, not illegal but ungracious. It was within the rights of law, but it was outside the limits of generosity. Why had Abraham given him a choice at all? Because Lot's servants had been a torment to Abraham, had created strife and wrangling within the band. Lot should have remembered this, and should have moderated his desires.
He should have remembered also that Abraham's was the mission field and that the mission field ever deserves the best. Lot was choosing land for his own benefit; Abraham was choosing land for the benefit of the king- [ 148 ]
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dom of God. All this made Lot's choice ungraceful, ungracious. The selfishness of the choice has brought its own penalty—stagnation. The failure of Lot did not come from the territory in which he settled down; it came from the fact that he did settle down. If Lot had made his possession a mission field, it would have thriven; but, instead of adapting it to culture, he adapted himself to its want of culture. Any piece of ground, under these circumstances, would have become barren ground—Abraham's would as much as Lot's.
It is the man that makes the place. Personality is a stronger force than environment; Abraham would have immortalised the Plain of Sodom, Lot would have left Mount Moriah in its native obscurity. Lot chose the rich plain for the reason that the ox chooses the rich pasture, and he has had the ox's reward; he is browsing there still.
And yet, I should be sorry to deny this man his due amount of credit, nay, his due amount of sympathy. Let us remember that for such a man it was a very arduous thing to be just,
_ and that therefore it was a very great victory to achieve that goal. For a generous nature it is easy to avoid falling short of justice; the [ 149 ]
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temptation is, to exceed justice. But for one by nature avaricious, it is a brave thing to be just.
Honesty, with such a man, would need to be more than a policy; it would require to be a passion. The man who is too covetous to be generous and who is yet too just to be fraudulent must possess the principle of honesty in an extraordinary degree of development. From this point of view I would give my sanction to the epithet by which Lot has descended to posterity. Let him take it—he is entitled to it.
A more sounding epithet would have been untrue. We could not describe him as 'loving
Lot,' 'tender Lot,' 'magnanimous Lot'; but 'just Lot' is a phrase which truly expresses his character. He has earned the right to it by reason of the very temptation which assailed him.
The truth is, this man occupies morally that very position which he holds socially; he is the man who lingers. Socially, he is neither among the barbarians nor abreast of the highest culture: he is stationary at a particular point. Morally, he is neither a very bad man nor a very good man; he is a correct man. He stands in the golden mean between baseness and generosity—the plain of justice.
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Behind him is the valley of humiliation, in front of him is the mount of self-forgetfulness; he belongs to neither. He stoops not to the low, he soars not to the high; he keeps the level plain. He is the middle man, the just man. He has paid his way, though he has paid no other's way. His life has been self-contained, but it has been also self-restraining.
If I were asked to place an inscription on the grave of Lot which would be congruous with the facts of his life, I would write the words, 'A man worthy of better things.' There are some things which are done so well that we are disappointed they are not done better.
Many a schoolboy gives us dissatisfaction in the very points where he is strong; we say, 'A lad of such parts should take a higher place.'
Even thus does Lot impress us. He dwells in Sodom, but he is far above Sodom. In the midst of an environment of iniquity, he never descends. His family descends; his innermost surroundings become unfavourable to purity; but Lot himself stands firm—he bows not to temptation.
A man who could thus resist going down might well be expected to go up. A man who could withstand temptation to descend into the pit should have been winged
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with aspiration to ascend into the heavens. We feel, in looking at him, as we feel in looking at some unfinished building. The foundation is there, the pillars are there, the various stories are there; but the roof is wanting. The man is far above the ground, but he is not pointing to the sky. He has surmounted the dust, but he has not reached the gold. He has fulfilled the law, but he has not arrived at love. He is so high that he ought to have been higher.
= , Hy i: i i 4 i re a :
O THOU whose nature and whose name is Love, let me not pause short of Thee/ Let me not linger on the march of my pilgrimage at any spot less beautiful than Love! Let me not be content to say, 'I have kept the law—I have not struck, I have not robbed, I have not slain!' Let me not be satisfied to think, 'I have been, in all my dealings, just; from what a height do I look down on Sodom!' Nay, my
Father, but let me rather say, 'From what a height dost Thou look down on me!' Instead of fixing my eyes on the valley which I have surmounted, let me lift up mine eyes to the hills which I have yet to climb! Teach me that all my safety comes from looking up—
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not down! Make me humble by the sight of Thy hills, O Lord! What time my heart is lifted up with the pride of its vanished yesterday, bring me to the foot of Thy Mount of Beatitudes! Let me see the distance between my soul and Jesus! Give me a glimpse of the Promised Land to cure me of the pride of present possession! Give me a taste of the grapes of Eshcol to disenchant me of the fruits of Sodom! Give me a strain of the songs of Zion to make me weary of my cherished music! Waft me a perfume of the Rose of Sharon to wean me from the flowers which my hands have gathered! Send me a breath of Thy mountain air to teach me the narrowness of what I call my freedom! Lend me one throb of Thy pulse of love to tell me the poverty of my reign of law! I shall cease to linger on the Plain of Sodom when my eyes have rested on the Heights of Calvary.
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