Daniel 7:17

THE HUMAN COMEDY

‘These great beasts, which are four … kings.’

Daniel 7:17

‘The age of the quadruped is to go out, the age of brain and heart is to come in,’ wrote Emerson. Is not that the pith of Daniel’s vision?

‘And thus the land of Camelford was waste,

Thick with wet woods and many a beast within,

And none, or few, to scare or chase the beast;

So that wild dog and wolf and boar and bear

Came night and day and rooted in the garden of the king,

’Till Arthur came and slew the beast.’

That was Tennyson in his profoundly allegorical poem the ‘Idylls of the King.’ But Daniel had anticipated him by more than two millenniums. In an age dark as an Egyptian night with trouble personal and national, he saw the history of the destiny of the world; he saw that at bottom all the tumult of time was the struggle between the Beast and the Man, animalism and humanity striving for possession of the world. He foresaw that Man was predestined to triumph over the Beast, and to cheer all fainting souls he sang this idyll of the king. After the fearful vision of the beasts, hurtful, untameable, terrible, came a beautiful vision of another world, and in a thick concourse of superhuman beings came at length one like unto a son of man, that was a real man. Not the half-animal man born from below, but man completely born from above—coming with the clouds of heaven, still a true man—neither beast nor angel. And to the man is given the dominion of the beast-ridden earth. The kingdom of the world in which the winged lion, the bear, the many-headed leopard, and the nameless terror with teeth of iron contend for mastery, is given by Him who sits on the throne of fire to—a man.

I. Man’s earliest struggle was with animal forces.—What an eminent stride from the day when man waged daily battle and set a nightly watch against the beasts of the earth, to the day when the hind could yoke the willing ox to the plough and harness the horse to the car; when the milkmaids with merry morning songs troop forth to the field unafraid to collect the white tribute from the full udders of the lowing herd; when the child could play with the purring cat, and the boy call to his dog as to a friend that never betrayed. To have thus domesticated, civilised, semi-humanised so many creatures was not the least of the achievements of man.

II. But man had not yet succeeded in taming himself, and no wild thing of the woods was half so wild, so insatiable, so cruel as man could be. In him the animal instincts were intensified by all the passion of an immortal nature, and the animal powers were multiplied a thousandfold by human intelligence. When Buffon, the naturalist, produced his great work on Natural History, revealing the marvellous variety of species in the animal world, the idea flashed on Balzac’s great mind that all history was a struggle between animalism and humanity. What were the misers, the voluptuaries, the voracious men of commerce, the selfish politicians, the heartless women of fashion, but specimens of animalised humanity—creatures in whom the powers of the human mind and soul are degraded to the service of the purely animal instincts of acquisitiveness, sensuality, and display, or in St. Paul’s fearful phrase ‘carnal minds’—souls run to flesh. Could we view life from that other world, see it in God’s light, we should need no further commentary on Daniel’s words. ‘Think for a moment of a man entering on a profession. He is perhaps endowed with splendid natural gifts, which he has raised to their highest power by education and made lustrous by wide culture. But if his sole aim be self-advancement, if he be motived only by goldbags or desire for fame, what is such an one seen from above but a winged lion? A magnificently endowed animal, whose forest is the city of London, and whose prey is men. Then of commerce. If a man put no limit to competition, if his effort to succeed becomes a passion for making money for its own sake—a passion which impels him to hew down others without ruth or pity,—was not such a man like the bear with the rib of some victim still in his mouth?’ Imperialism is a fine mouth-filling word, but what is it? The desire to realise the Greater Britain—the essential unity of English-speaking men—the passion to conserve and strengthen the virtues characteristic of the English nation,—to fulfil the mission laid up by the will of God to be everywhere true to her own best traditions as the home of liberty! Then God bless Imperialism! But Sir Edward Russell says that when he asked Mr. Rudyard Kipling whether a certain colonial personage had any moral ideals, the reply was, ‘Tut! Tut! it is enough that he is building up an empire.’ It is not enough. Imperialism regardless of moral consideration is seamanship regardless of navigation,—a folly and a crime. Daniel’s Beast with the iron teeth that devoured and broke in pieces and stamped the residue with his feet, and was slain. This Beast is one of the perils of the world to-day. ‘We do not want—we dread—an Imperialism arising out of the sea. We want the Imperialism that comes with the clouds of heaven. We must hold this blood sacred. There must be no weakness or hesitancy. This war must not be stopped, but ended. Victory must be a victory for all, not the triumph of a party, or even of a people, but of humanity—the coming again of Jesus Christ, whose watchword is “Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, goodwill towards men!” ’