21. Shamgar.
1894 142 The Philistines had a way of disarming their conquered foes and cutting off all their supplies of weapons which was peculiar and effective. In Saul's time, when they once got the upper hand, they did not allow the Israelites to have a blacksmith in all their country, lest they should have the means of making swords; the conquered had to go to the conqueror's smithies if they wanted an axe or a coulter ground. This was not at all a bad policy for a conqueror to adopt, and not more cruel than was customary in those times; but it was highly inconvenient to Shamgar, who wanted to deliver his people from their bondage. In his day there was not so much as a single spear or shield amongst forty thousand Israelites. Shamgar had only an ox-goad himself. With this, however, he rose, slew six hundred Philistine warriors, and emancipated the people of God: perhaps as remarkable a feat in its way as when the one-eyed Ziska and his thirty thousand farm-labourers rose up from that vast celebration of the Lord's supper on the hills near Prague, and, armed only with scythes and flails, defeated two hundred thousand of the bravest and best armed troops in Europe. This event forms a suitable pendant to the story of Ehud. Ehud had done great work with crippled faculties; Shamgar does great work with a poor instrument.
When Christian was in the Palace Beautiful, we are told, the three maidens took him into a mansion in which he saw, amongst other relics, Shamgar's ox-goad. Happily the Dreamer had too sound a mind to give the relics themselves more than a passing mention; and perhaps it is as well that nobody else ever saw them. For there is such an inveterate tendency to worship the mere instrument that the whole significance of the event is distorted; and, instead of our learning from it the wholesome stimulating lesson of how great things may be done with small means and giving God the glory, we assume that there is something to be venerated in the instrument itself and burn incense to it, as the Israelites did to the brazen serpent until Hezekiah wisely dashed it to pieces and derisively called it "Nehushtan" — a bit of brass. Thus we perversely attribute all the credit of the work to the ox-goad, instead of to the strong arm and stout heart behind it and to God overhead; as the Rabbis say that the rod of Moses was a magic wand brought by Adam out of Eden and inherited through Seth, etc., etc. Any puerile story will do so long as it takes the glory from God and gives it to the instrument.
Mighty works have been often accomplished by the faith and energy of those who have possessed only small and apparently inadequate or contemptible means. If we take this lesson to heart, we shall not sit down waiting for swords or sceptres before we commence to work; we shall hear the voice of God saying to us, What is that in thine hand? A stick? Moses broke the power of Egypt with such a one. What has not David or the woman of Thebez accomplished with a stone? or Gideon with candles and pitchers? or Samson (and perhaps many another) with the jawbone of an ass? I have no doubt that if men could get hold of the stick, stone, and so forth, they would preserve and adore them like the blood of St. Januarius or the shin-bone of some other defunct old saint; and we may therefore be grateful that they are not extant. I am sufficiently iconoclastic in such matters to be glad to see them destroyed, and "Nehushtan" pronounced by Hezekiah's contemptuous voice over every mere instrument that we are disposed to burn incense to. "This holy candle," said the monk, "has not been extinguished for five hundred years." "Then it is time it was" said the American tourist as he blew it out. Although it was not courteous to blow out the poor monk's treasured candle, and the action is not cited as an example, yet it requires a very abnormal condition of mind to be able to regret that the wretched rush-light, which gave so much occasion of labour and lying to grown people, was at last extinguished.
It is no particular credit to do great things with appropriate means; but it is creditable and glorious when great achievements are wrought by those who have only poor and unworthy instrumentalities to work with. It is just here that the true genius manifests itself. The bad workman lays the blame of failure on his tools. The able workman can produce the most exquisite results with almost any tools, though none knows the value of a fine tool so well as he does; none treats it so carefully, keeps it so long, fondles it so affectionately. He can make a cross-grained piece of wood into a beautiful ornament and turn every knot in it to some special advantage. When even Da Vinci could do nothing with that awkward piece of stone, Michael Angelo took it and sculptured such a David out of it as had never till then been seen.
Above all this is one of the noblest attributes of the Most High. He takes up "the devil's castaways," and, when His work is finished in them, they are taken to Paradise; or He uses men of like passions to ourselves, feeble and frail, to do work on the earth that holy angels and flaming seraphs might be proud to be used in. He creates a world by a word and regenerates it by "the foolishness of preaching." With a small brown seed He can make a forest; with a few coral polypi He raises a barrier of rocks a thousand miles long in the Pacific, or with the little encrinites paves the vast basin of the Atlantic. Yea, the ocean itself He constructs from drops of water, the mountains from grains of dust, the whole universe from microscopic atoms, spores, and cells.
And this is what I found written on Shamgar's ox-goad: a common bit of stick enough it was too, with nothing but a rough iron spike at the end of it.