The Hebrews, settled in their land of hills and valleys, forgot the high hand and outstretched arm which brought them forth from the house of bondage in Egypt, whose unleavened bread and bitter herbs were a healthier sacrament than Canaan's milk and honey. How strange it seems! but look through any village or family, and you see in brief what the world's history has writ on its vast pages, blazoned in luxury and in war.
Man is so little advanced, as yet, in his higher culture, that he must be fed with the utmost caution. A hearty draught of prosperity turns our head; and so God feeds us as yet with milk, and not with strong manly success; else we should perish. One day the average life of man will be a hundred years, I doubt not, and
“Fever and ague, jaundice and catarrh,
The grim-looked Tyrant's heavy horse of ar,
And Apoplexies, those light troops of Death,
That use small ceremony with the breath,”
will be put to rout, and early death be as strange to men as nakedness and famine are to you and me. But we cannot bear it now. If the average life of man were all at once lengthened only twenty years in this present generation; if what it costs us ten hours' sore toil to accomplish could now all at once be achieved in a single hour, or “miraculously” given, it would be a misfortune to mankind; our heads would be giddy, and we should perish. “Neither yet now are ye able,” quoth Paul to his new converts; “I have fed you with milk, and not with meat;” and the great God does the same to His little children here below.
The savage in the tropics contents him with the spontaneous products of Nature. He is filled with the earth's fruits and satisfied with her beauty; he goes no further. Wherever Nature is an indulgent mother, she finds man a slothful and a lazy son.
The successful man, in general, cultivates only the easy virtues which come mainly of their own accord; nay, he often welcomes the easier vices which we are so swift to learn. Samson need not fear the Philistines; it is in Delilah’s lap his head is shorn of its crispy strength; her amorous fingers are more terrible to him than all the
