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by
S. Solis.
In
our observation of every-day life; how few do we find imbued with that
love of ancestry, which, causing them to cast their minds back to the time
when Israel was yet a nation, when her people were the chosen servants and
friends of the Most High, glory that they can claim kindred with that
ancient race, which, whilst mightier and greater nations (greater at least
in a worldly sense) lie buried in the gloom of the past, setting time and
decay at defiance, exists as a living miracle of the great deeds of the
Omnipotent, live in every land, in every country, a part of every people,
yet not of them; speaking every tongue, yet clinging to their own peculiar
language; rising and falling in the social scale of every nation, yet
preserving intact their own separate views and separate hopes; preserved
unmixed with stranger blood, until that time when the God of their fathers
shall gather Israel, scattered and dispersed as they now are, once more
into the sheaf of nationality, and plant them once more within the borders
of Palestine, within the lovely valleys of Judea, where Israel shall
forget their grief and travail, in the exceeding great peace which shall
then surround them, as with a wall of adamant.
Possessed
of an ardent imagination, and a deep and innate love of her religion and
people, Miss Aguilar has thrown the enthusiasm of her nature around those
“women of Israel,” whose characters she has attempted to portray. A
very woman herself, in feeling, she has endowed them with the feelings and
passions of a woman’s nature. Not content, however, in showing our women
as they were, she has pointed out what they are, and ought to be. Her aim
has been “to bring yet closer to the youthful and aspiring heart, the
poetry, the beauty, the eloquence, the appealing tenderness” of the word
of God, as expressed in the sacred pages of the Bible; and to rebut from
that source, the foul slander perpetrated against Israel’s God, “that
to Christianity alone, women owe their present station in the world, their
influence, their equality with man, their spiritual provisions in this
life, and their hopes of immortality in the next.” If this was the case,
truly, why is it, that “we see no proofs of the humanizing and elevating
influence of Christianity, either on man or woman, till the Reformation
opened the Bible,—the whole Bible,—to the nations at large?” No!
Mankind are generally too prone to take effects for causes; and knowing
that the moral civilization of other nations, than the Hebrew, followed in
the wake of Christianity, they have considered Christianity as the cause
of this moral advancement. We might well ask, why a code so vastly
superior in effect to the Laws of Moses, was not revealed when the Most
High thundered from Sinai, in the presence of witnessing millions? But no!
we ourselves need no arguments to convince us, that the moral civilization
of our nation needed no other revelation for its full development than
that, which, taking its rise from the summit of Sinai, and flowing through
a course of years, at last burst through the mountain barriers of Judea,
and, at the destruction of the Jewish kingdom, civilized the world.
Though
fully agreeing, in the main, with what Miss Aguilar has advanced in the
illustration of her subject, the necessity does not appear apparent to us,
of insisting so often, and so strongly, upon the perfect equality of woman
with man, as a moral and accountable being. From the first page of the
Bible to the last, we can see no other doctrine inculcated; and if such a
belief, indeed, exists, “that woman is a soulless being, truly,” as
Miss Aguilar says, “such is not a Jewish belief, but must have been
engrafted upon the Jewish mind from the theories existing in the views of
some of those countries that have afforded a home, for a time, to the
weary wanderers of our nation.” If, however, there are some so
inconsistent amongst the educated of our people, who still do themselves
this injustice, as to consider that those who gave them birth have no
claim to that immortality which they consider their own by right of birth,
let them but turn once more to Holy Writ, and if they do possess aught of
the spiritual, sure are we that they will, on the earnest perusal of its
pages, be eager to acknowledge that the spirit of woman is as immortal as
the source from which it sprung; and that it was indeed necessary to give
man such a help-meet, as from her own innate power should be capable of
infusing into his breast her own spirituality, and thus serve, as it were,
to be the connecting link between earth and heaven.
It
is said, that infants are in communion with angels, in their pure and holy
slumbers; and in the pure gushing feelings of the early springtide of
womanhood, see we naught of these heavenly influences? Truly, if they
possess the power to give a calm and refreshing peace to the mind, after
the day has been passed in the fierce pursuit of ambition or wealth; it
cannot be that this is the effect of mere outward beauty, but of the
loveliness of mind. And what is mind? is it corporeal, or incorporeal? If
corporeal, how know we than we have a soul? If incorporeal, then we must
first prove that women have no mind, before we dare advance that they have
no souls; for can we pretend to separate mind from soul? If so, what
prevents the beast of the field from having as large, as noble, a soul as
ourselves. It is no use, however, to pursue this argument farther; for the
proposition itself is its contradiction.
Then,
in, the language of Miss Aguilar:
“Free
to assert their right as the immortal children of the living God, let not
the women of Israel be backward in proving they, too, have a rock of
strength, a refuge of love; that they, too, have a station to uphold, and
a ‘mission’ to perform, not alone as daughters, wives, and. mothers,
but as witnesses of that faith which first raised, cherished, and defended
them;” and, “to prove that they have no need of Christianity, or the
examples of females in the gospel, to raise them up to an equality with
man.”
Commencing
then with Eve, and closing with the Jewish females of our own times, Miss
Aguilar describes our primal mother, as we may imagine her, “fresh from
the creating hand of love,” and full of “love towards God, Nature, and
Man, which none of the infirmities of our present state could cloud or
interrupt.” But, “when the bulwark of her faith was shivered,” when
the crime of disobedience was consummated, how beautifully has Miss
Aguilar justified the ways of the Most High.
“If
He permitted, ordained, why did He punish? Oh, had the voice of his
creature called upon him in that terrible hour; had but the faintest cry
ascended for help, for strength, for mercy; had but the struggling murmur
arisen, ‘Father, thy words are truth, let me but believe!’ strength,
help, faith, would have poured their reviving rays into her sinking soul,
and she had been saved—saved for immortality.” But, whilst Miss
Aguilar points out the holiness of love, she warns us not to divert it
from its true course; which, though perverted, in being made the influence
through which Adam sinned, still had the power of enabling our first
parents to endure the banishment from Eden. But though Miss Aguilar
denies, and holds in abhorrence, “the awful creed that condemns every
man’s soul for the sin of Adam,” “believing that they had not
existence from Adam, but are a direct emanation from God,” still she
thinks, “that the disobedience of our first parents so far altered our
nature as to give the body more powerful dominion than the soul;”
rendering it, therefore, necessary “to devote our whole hearts, to give
the spiritual dominion over our corporeal nature.” “Our own acts must
be our witness, or our condemnation,” and, therefore, an intercessor
would plead in vain.
Another
argument brought by those of an adverse creed, as to the necessity of a
new revelation subsequent to, and superior to, the one made from Sinai,
is, that the Bible treats nowhere the doctrine of the soul’s
immortality. Miss Aguilar’s views are so germain to the subject, that we
give them at length. In considering the death of the righteous, as a proof
of this doctrine, she says: “That the caviller, the sceptic, the
thoughtless, will deny this, because we can bring no written proof, we are
perfectly aware; but we write for the believer, for the Israelite, who not
only reads the words of his Bible, but explains them by the only unerring
test,—the attributes of God. The question is simply this: Do we believe
in a God? that He is as He proclaimed himself, ‘merciful and gracious,
long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for
thousands, forgiving iniquity and sin, yet clearing not the guilty,’
without repentance and amendment? Do we believe in Him,
as in every page of his holy word He is revealed, or do we not? if we do
not—if we deny the existence of a just and merciful, though in many
instances an inscrutable, God—then, indeed, we may deny our immortality;
but if we acknowledge there is a God, ay, and one whose justice and whose
love are infinite and perfect as himself, we must not only believe in our
own immortality, but trace its doctrine running through the holy
Scriptures, alike from the death of Abel to the last verses of Malachi,
pervading, vivifying, spiritualizing its every portion, given as our
mortal frame is pervaded, vivified, and spiritualized, by the invisible,
yet ever-breathing, soul. We do not doubt and question that we have a
soul, because we have nothing palpable and evident by which to prove it;
and even as the soul is the essence, the spirit of our being, so is
immortality the essence and the spirit of the Bible.” Considering pride
the stumbling-block of our faith, she would teach us to cultivate “the
sweet flower of humility;”—“the sweet flower on whose breath our
souls are enabled more continually to ascend to God, and whose petals,
seemingly so frail and tender, have yet more power to guard us from
temptation than an unsheathed sword.”
In
depicting the lives of Abraham and Sarah, Miss Aguilar seems to have
entered into the spirit of the Holy Writ; and, tracing the course of
Abraham from his first and “earnest desire after divine life,” follows
him in his various sojournings and trials. Strong in faith, in purity, we
find him ever ready to exhibit a ready confidence in God; brave and
magnanimous, we find him ever ready to extend a helping hand to man.
Sarah, possessing a character of the highest order, shows still that the
brightest virtues may be linked to human weaknesses. Woman, indeed, may be
at times more spiritual than man; with a greater power in the
concentration of thought on a particular object, she needs some excitement
to keep that object in view; but man, being more capable of generalizing
in his views, the creature of reason, rather than feeling, runs not the
same danger of having his purpose diverted by surrounding influences. Thus
we find no laugh in the soul of Abraham, because of the promise of the
Most High, in relation to the birth of Isaac; though apparently out of the
due course of nature. Yet, though doubting in her own heart at first the
fulfilment of the anticipated promise, but quickly recalled to a sense of
the power of the Omnipotent, we may imagine “that Sarah must have felt
self-reproached in the midst of her joy, that she had not waited, had not
trusted, had not believed, unto the end.” And yet one doubt cannot cast
a shadow over a character as true, as beautiful, as Sarah’s. Mother of
the promised race, and worthy of this honour in the sight of God, “Is it
nothing,” its the words of the authoress, “to be the lineal
descendants of one so favoured; nothing, to peruse the wonderful
manifestations of the Lord’s love for her; to feel that from Him direct,
was Sarah’s patent of nobility, and yet possess the privilege of being
her descendant? will the women of Israel feel this as nothing? will they
disdain their princely birth—their heavenly heritage? will they scorn to
look back on Sarah as their ancestress, and yet long for earthly
distinction—earthly rank? No! oh no! let us think of these things—of
those from whom we are descended, and our minds will become ennobled—our
hearts enlarged. We shall scorn the false shame which would descend to
petty meannesses to hide our faith, and so exalt ourselves in the sight of
a gentile world. Humbled, cast off, for a little moment, as we are, we are
still Israelites—still the chosen, the beloved, the aristocracy, of the
Lord.”
Such
a character, as Abraham’s, must have had a pervading influence upon the
members of his household, and even exhibited itself in his intercourse
with surrounding nations. In such a school of piety, as Abraham’s
household presented, Isaac must have early imbibed a love for the good and
the beautiful; and in his cherished companion, the wife of his bosom,
Rebecca, he found a help-meet to walk with him through the smooth or
thorny paths of life as the Most High
might deem most fitting.
“It
was eventide, that still solemn hour of holy musing, sought only by those
who have no thought from which to shrink, who can can call up sweet dreamy
visions of the past, and yet how inexpressibly soothing,” when Isaac
first beheld his bride, whose sweet beautiful spirit had power to dry up
the tears of sorrow; caused by the loss of a loved mother, and whose calm
and holy love filled his cup of happiness, until the eve of his life drew
nigh, and he was gathered to the bosom of “his Father and his God.”
In
painting the grief that Isaac felt at his mother’s loss, how truthfully
has the authoress expressed what we all must feel the force of.
“Though
it be in very truth the invisible soul that we love, yet we become so knit
with the mortal habitation of that soul, that we cannot feel it has
perished from our sight for ever, without an agony of heart, that time and
prayer, and constant communings with the invisible spirit alone, can in
any way assuage.”
But
the grief of Isaac was assuaged in the love of Rebecca; and her lamp of
faith receiving oil from the pure fount pointed out by the pious Abraham,
he found that its light flickered not. Oh, who would not acknowledge,
“that the very breath of our being, the light of our path, the support
of strength, is prayer—that prayer, that brings us daily, nay, hourly,
in the commune with a loving Father, whose tender sympathy is as endless
as his love.”
But
whilst Miss Aguilar acknowledges the certainty of the fulfilment of the
Lord’s promises, she repudiates the doctrine, that their accomplishment
needs the aid of finite measures, and, in allusion to the means resorted
to by Rebecca, to carry out the fulfilment of the Lord’s promise to her,
that the younger should inherit the promised blessing, shows, that
although the purposed means may be successful, yet the Most High will
surely punish the wrong done, that the right may follow.
And
thus was the mother parted from the son, for whose beloved sake she had
been tempted to turn aside from the straight line of probity and truth,
which, in such guilelessness and beauty, she had trodden so changelessly
before. And is it not ever thus? When we once turn from the one straight
path, can we say, Thus far shall we go and no farther? Can we set a
boundary to the rushing flood of pain and sorrow, which, when we have
removed the barrier of truth, obtains dominion, dashing our fairest dreams
to earth, and bringing in misery in the very garments of success? But, oh!
“not in the condemnation of our meek and gentle ancestress, shall we
reap the benefit of her example, and turn aside from her faults. If, even
in her, the weakness of human nature once triumphed over the immortal
spirit, what may save us from the same fault? will the purity of youth,
the piety of early womanhood, the truth and virtue of long years, will
these obtain such sway as always to be our safeguard and our strength?
alas, not these: it must be the grace of God alone, sought by constant
prayer and utter dependence upon Him—the constant watch over
ourselves—the knowledge of our own weakness.” Nor can “the idea,
that human means are necessary to forward any intention of the Most
High, be entertained a single moment without verging on impiety, when we
have the whole word of God to prove by precept that he is as omnipotent To
Do as To WILL.”
In
portraying the love borne by Jacob for the beautiful Rachel, which was
neither chilled by the frost of night, nor the drought of day, during
fourteen long years of labour, how beautifully has Miss Aguilar delineated
the pure feelings of the heart.
“God
gave not love to bind to earth, but to raise to heaven: not to make us
earthly idols, but, on the very love we bear each other, to lift up the
soul to Him—to lighten toil and soften grief, to heighten joy and bless
our earthly sojourn with a bright ray from that exhaustless fount of love,
which waits for us above.” “Stronger than pain and toil, an even
death, it is the very essence of our being,—the spiritual
essence,—which marks more powerfully than aught else our immortal
destiny; and, from a reflection of that destiny, lends a glow to earth.”
That it is “to last for ever, not unto death, but beyond it, and,
therefore, not to be given to one whose future was of earth, and who
sought in its possession but the gratification of a few fleeting years;
that it is to endure through sorrow and sickness, and trial and wo; not to
be the mere harbinger of gaiety and joy, to shine in a ball-room, and
glitter in a bridal robe, but to bear with occasional irritability, or
even with unkindness and apparent neglect;” “and to bear all this,”
“will aught but that love, which is spiritual, sustain us?”
Not
despising beauty, but considering it as a gift of God, who will call the
possessor to account if she fail to keep bright the invisible gem shrined
in so fair a temple, Miss Aguilar portrays in the beautiful character of
Leah, those beauties of the spirit, quite sufficient to compensate for the
want of outward charms. And did the youthful daughters of our race set
about with their whole soul to increase the loveliness of their minds,
they, too, might find, that the charms of loveliness of disposition, of
graces of mind, of purity of thought, were much more potent in securing in
indissoluble chains the love of the worthy of the other sex, who, if first
struck with a beautiful face, if they find it connected with a deformed
mind, will throw it carelessly aside, as they would some flower deficient
of perfume.
Alone,
and with nothing but his staff, did Jacob leave the house of his father,
the consciousness of wrong done his
brother, weighing down his spirit; but God looked upon him and pardoned,
and consoled him in his lonely journey, with the promise that through him,
too, mankind should be blessed; nor do we see one promise of the Lord fail
in the whole of his sojourn, who, after a sufficient trial of faith,
appeared to him again at Bethel, and changed his name from Jacob to
Israel, denoting, “that, as a prince, our father Jacob had power with
God and with man, and had prevailed. Is there, can there” (in the
authoress’s words) “be, one amongst the descendants of this prince of
God’s creating, ashamed of the name he bears? should it not be our
glory, our pride, of which no persecution, no injury, no wrong, can rob
us? does not its very sound teem with the wondrous mercies of the
past—with the truth, the unanswerable truth of revelation,” and the
sure warranty of the fulfilment of prophecies?
Closing
the first period with the delineation of the characters of Leah and
Rachel, the authoress depicts the cruel sufferings of the Jewish mothers
in Egypt, claiming, that for them, however despised and downtrodden in
ages succeeding the delivery of the law,—
“For
the women of Israel were those laws issued, which were to guard the
innocence, purity, honour, and well-doing of women in general throughout
the world; for, however other revelations may profess to be the first and
purest,—however the smile of scorn and unbelief may attend the mention
of the Jewish dispensation in conjunction with woman,—the truth remains
the same; that, as from that law every other sprung, so from that law does
woman, in every age, clime, rank, and race, receive her guardianship on
earth, and hope of heaven.”
(To
be continued.)
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