THE 
 
 PROPHETS AND KINGS 
 
 OF 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT
 
 THE 
 
 PROPHETS AND KINGS 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT 
 
 { 
 
 ,|l cSmts .of -Sermons $achco in tht Chapd of Lincoln's Intt 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, M.A. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF CASUISTRY AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE 
 
 ICmtbott 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 1894 
 The Right of Translation in reserved
 
 First edition printed 1852 (dated 1853) ; Second, 1855 ; Third, 1871 ; 
 Fourth, 1879; Fifth, 1886; reprinted, 1891, 1894.
 
 TO 
 
 THOMAS ERSKINE, ESQ., 
 
 OF LINLATHEN. 
 
 MY DEAR MR. ERSKINE, 
 
 The pleasure of associating my name with 
 yours, and the kind interest which you expressed 
 in some of these Sermons when you heard them 
 preached, might not be a sufficient excuse for the 
 liberty which I take in dedicating them to you. But 
 I have a much stronger reason. I am under obliga- 
 tions to you which the subject of this volume especially 
 brings to my mind, and which other motives beside 
 personal gratitude urge me to acknowledge. 
 
 I owe it to you that I am able to honour and to 
 appreciate one part of the testimony which was borne 
 by those Scotchmen in the 17th century, whom we of 
 the English Church are apt to regard with great 
 dislike. I owe it to you that another part of their 
 doctrine, which is often confounded with that tes- 
 timony, and which, I fear, in the minds of a number 
 
 2000624
 
 vi DEDICATION. 
 
 of their descendants has survived it altogether, 
 appears to me much more perilous and terrible than 
 it does to many of those who are in the habit of 
 denouncing them. Their proclamation that God 
 Himself is the King, the Lawgiver, the Judge of 
 a Nation ; that His government over the Jews was 
 not a more actual government than that which He 
 exercised over Scotland; that His Will is the only 
 source and ground of right will and right acts in His 
 creatures ; this is a proclamation which, whatever 
 form it may have taken, against whatever persons or 
 institutions it may have been directed, whatever may 
 have been the immediate or apparent results of putting 
 it forward, I cannot but accept as true, beneficent, 
 divine. If the Episcopalian Churchmen and States- 
 men of England and Scotland had fully and heartily 
 recognised it, I do not believe that any power on 
 earth could have shaken their hierarchy. Because 
 they were not possessed with the truth of it, I thank 
 God that they were not permitted to uphold what I, 
 nevertheless, believe that He established and that He 
 raised again. 
 
 But those who spoke of God as a real King, and 
 who affirmed that a nation stood by virtue of its 
 covenant with Him, used phrases respecting His 
 sovereignty which, it seems to me, were destructive 
 of the very principle for which they were contending ; 
 which justified any evil acts they might find necessary
 
 DEDICATION. vii 
 
 for their purpose, which were pregnant with mischief 
 to after generations. All that there was of strength 
 and nobleness in these men arose out of the belief 
 that the God of the Jews and of them was a God of 
 righteousness and truth, and that whatever was un- 
 righteous and untrue must sooner or later shrink and 
 shrivel at His word. Alas ! how easily did the idea 
 of a Being who can decree what He pleases, who can 
 make right wrong and wrong right by choosing it, 
 who may outrage the conscience in man which He 
 has created to bear witness of what He is and of what 
 Man, His image, is intended to be, mingle itself with 
 a faith so contradictory of it ! How easily, in an age 
 of energy and action, could the bravest deeds, the 
 most passionate devotion to a cause, blend with cruel 
 judgments and fanatical exclusiveness, which hide the 
 good from one set of party-historians, and are glorified 
 by it in the eyes of another ! But how much more 
 easily, when the age of action and energy has passed 
 away, and an age of speculation has begun, does the 
 theory of a Will which arranges Punishment, Satis- 
 faction, Salvation, according to its pleasure, of a 
 Justice which means only the demand for Vengeance, 
 of a Mercy which means only the exemption of certain 
 persons from that demand, take the place of belief in 
 a God who so loves the world as to give His Son for 
 it ! How easily do those records, wherein Puritan 
 divinity is so rich, of souls struggling with the Spirit
 
 viii DEDICATION. 
 
 of -Evil and taking refuge from his suggestions, and 
 from their own weakness and despair, in a Love of 
 which they could not sound the depths and to which 
 no external acts or internal feelings of theirs could 
 the least entitle them, records full of truth and 
 living power, however sense and Spirit, physical 
 disease and torments of the conscience may some- 
 times be confounded in them, adjust themselves to 
 a system which attributes the acts and purposes of the 
 Tempter and Destroyer to the Father of Lights ! 
 
 I know well how much there is, and always has 
 been, in the roughest, hardest Calvinism, which fights 
 against these conclusions, and practically triumphs 
 over them. God forbid that I should hold any human 
 being tied to them by any logical necessity, that I 
 should not welcome his indignant repudiation of them, 
 that I should not thank him for calling me a maligner, 
 and for affirming that nothing like what I have set 
 down is the faith of him or of his fathers. But I do 
 know also, and you know, that thousands of men and 
 women, in your land and in ours, regard this as the 
 only consistent explanation of the dogmas which they 
 have been taught, of that which they suppose to be 
 the teaching of the Bible. They think that we are 
 practising a cheat upon ourselves, that we are using 
 some mystical artifices to evade plain texts and literal 
 history, if we profess to hold by the Scriptures and 
 yet not to adopt this view of the divine sovereignty.
 
 DEDICATION. ix 
 
 We may hide it from ourselves as we will, we may 
 cast the burden upon whom we will, but this is the 
 cause which is driving our sons to infidelity and our 
 daughters to Rome. The spectre from which they are 
 flying is a God whom they cannot trust and cannot 
 love. We may try to cure symptoms by producing 
 evidences of Christianity, or by exposing superstition. 
 But we shall find that we have not reached the root 
 of the disease, and that it will always be appearing in 
 new forms. Have we a Gospel for men, for all men ? 
 Is it a Gospel that God's will is a will to all Good, a 
 will to deliver them from all Evil? Is it a Gospel 
 that He has reconciled the world unto Himself ? Is 
 it this absolutely, or this with a multitude of reserva- 
 tions, explanations, contradictions ? Such questions 
 must be asked by those who are desirous of restoring 
 faith among the upper and middle classes, or of lifting 
 the lower out of the pit into which we have allowed 
 them to sink. If they cannot be answered, the gentler 
 and feminine spirits will try what help they can get 
 from the Pope; the speculative will become Pantheists; 
 the People will become Atheists. 
 
 It is more than twenty years since a book of yours 
 brought home to my mind the conviction that no 
 Gospel but this can be of any use to the world, and 
 that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is such a one. From 
 that time I ceased to wish for refined explanations of 
 the Catholic Creeds. They became to me the clearest
 
 x DEDICATION. 
 
 explanations I could find of man's relation to God, the 
 fullest declaration of that Name which I felt that all 
 creatures were desiring to know. I ceased, also, to 
 desire refined explanations of the Four Gospels and 
 the Epistles. The first, taken as they stand, declare, 
 it seems to me, the existence of a Kingdom of Heaven 
 which is near us all. The last shew how that King- 
 dom of Heaven established itself on this earth of 
 ours, Churches of Jews and Gentiles being called 
 out as witnesses of it, and the Jewish nation perishing 
 that it might be revealed in its fulness and unity as 
 the ground of modern Society. In proportion as I 
 grew strong in this conviction, I became more deeply 
 thankful for the testimony which Protestantism has 
 borne for the truth that the Universal Church stands 
 only on Christ, and that a perfect sacrifice has been 
 offered and accepted once for all. At the same time, 
 I have felt a strong sympathy with those who say 
 that Protestants do not recognise, as they ought, in 
 their thoughts and in their worship, the truth that all 
 prayer is grounded on that finished sacrifice, and that 
 it becomes an irreverent effort to change the divine 
 Will, not an earnest entreaty that it may be done on 
 earth as it is in Heaven, the expression of divided, 
 contradictory individual wishes, not the utterance of 
 a body the distinct members of which are possessed 
 with one Spirit, when it loses its connection with 
 Sacrifice, or when any other notion of Sacrifice is
 
 DEDICATION. xi 
 
 substituted for that of a Son yielding Himself to a 
 Father in whom He delights. 
 
 These thoughts have reference chiefly to the New 
 Testament. But the conviction has been fixing itself 
 deeply in my mind that the Old Testament, too, ought 
 to be read much more simply and according to the 
 letter than we are used to read it, that we have not 
 made its application to our individual cases more clear 
 by overlooking its obvious national characteristics ; 
 that if we had given heed to them we should have 
 found an interpretation of some of the greatest diffi- 
 culties in history and in the condition of the world 
 around us. This opinion is strangely opposed to that 
 which is common among the philosophical thinkers of 
 our day. It sets me in direct opposition to those 
 writers, in this country and America, who make it 
 their business to copy German models, though it does 
 not authorise me to refuse any help from German 
 learning when it comes within my reach, or to pro- 
 nounce sentence upon a nation with which I am most 
 imperfectly acquainted, or to generalise under one 
 name Theologians who, I suppose, exhibit as many 
 varieties of opinion, and are scattered through as 
 many schools as our own. 
 
 Many of my conclusions may differ widely from 
 those into which you have been led : I should be 
 grieved to make you responsible for them. But if I 
 have tried in these Sermons to shew that the story
 
 xii DEDICATION. 
 
 of the Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament is as 
 directly applicable to the modern world as any Cove- 
 nanter ever dreamed but that it is applicable, because 
 it is a continual witness for a God of Righteousness, 
 not only against idolatry but against that notion of 
 a mere Sovereign Baal or Bel which underlies all 
 idolatry, all tyranny, all immorality; I may claim 
 you as their spiritual progenitor. You will see that 
 they do bear a witness, though a feeble one, for a 
 truth upon the acknowledgment of which I believe 
 the well-being of your land, and of ours, and of the 
 whole Church, depends. You will pray that more 
 courageous and faithful champions of it may be raised 
 up. How many will desire that you may be preserved 
 to shew to them, by an evidence mightier than words, 
 that there is a Spirit of Love working in the hearts 
 of human beings, and that the lives of those who 
 submit to it are illuminated and transfigured by it. 
 
 Believe me, 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 Ever gratefully and affectionately yours, 
 F. D. MAURICE. 
 
 LONDON : Novemler llifc, 18&.
 
 ADVEETISEMENT. 
 
 A PREVIOUS volume of Lectures on the Old Testament 
 brought down the history to the time of Samuel. Though 
 I have commenced these Sermons at that point, I have not 
 taken any pains to preserve uniformity in the shape and 
 appearance of the volumes ; I have rather wished to indicate 
 that they are distinct in their subject and their treatment ; 
 to some extent even in their purpose. The former series 
 was founded upon our Sunday Lessons. I could not continue 
 to take my texts from them, for lectures addressed to a legal 
 audience are almost necessarily interrupted by the Long 
 Vacation. If there had not been this local reason for 
 altering my plan, I should still not have been disposed 
 to persevere in it. When our Lessons follow the order of 
 books in the Canon, they necessarily depart from chronology. 
 The preservation of it in this part of the history seemed to 
 me of great importance. During all the Sundays in Advent 
 and on those after the Epiphany, Isaiah is read ; when he 
 appears as one of a series of Prophets, he could not occupy 
 so large a space. For these reasons I have departed from the 
 arrangement which the Church has followed in selecting the 
 chapters; not, I hope, from the spirit which has directed 
 the selection. The compilers of the Lessons have been 
 much more careful to exhibit the Prophets as preachers of 
 righteousness than as mere predictors. I have felt that 
 this aspect of their lives has been greatly overlooked in our 
 day, and that there is none which we have more need to
 
 xiv ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 contemplate. The history of the Hebrew Monarchy, without 
 the light which it receives from Jewish prophecy, seems to 
 me as unintelligible and incoherent as it does to those who 
 reject it or who try to reconstruct it. Seen by that light, I 
 can find nothing more orderly or continuous, nothing more 
 consistent with itself or more helpful in interpreting the 
 modern world. 
 
 I have found that the Old Testament Prophets, taken in 
 their simple natural sense, in that sense in which they can 
 be understood by, and presented to a lay student, clear up 
 difficulties which torment us in the daily work of life ; 
 make the past intelligible, the present endurable, the future 
 real and hopeful ; cast a light upon books ; deliver us from 
 the tyranny of books ; bring the invisible world near to us ; 
 shew how the visible world may be subjected to its laws and 
 principles. He who knows and feels thus much, cannot be 
 silent merely because there is a vast amount of knowledge, 
 most needful for the elucidation of this, of which he possesses 
 nothing. Let those who have it produce it, and let them 
 point out all the blunders and confusions into which we 
 have fallen who want it. But of this I am sure, that the 
 portion of truth which God has enabled us to take in, is 
 one which neither learned men nor ignorant men can dis- 
 pense with ; and which it is a sin for us not to proclaim, 
 because, if there are only one or two who listen to it or care 
 for it, yet it may bear fruit in those one or two for the good 
 of this land and of the whole Church. 
 
 The history of the Jerwish kingdom begins with Saul and 
 ends with Zedekiah. The corresponding cycle of Jewish 
 prophecy begins with Samuel and ends with EzekieL Upon 
 the period which follows, one embracing various new topics, 
 requiring a different kind of treatment, I have not entered.
 
 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 THE dear and honoured friend to whom the First 
 Edition of this book was dedicated is gone to his rest. 
 If it had been a polemical treatise, I could not have 
 borne to associate his name with it at first ; I should 
 leave it now without the sanctity which his memory 
 gives to it. Since I regarded the Kings and Prophets 
 of Israel as the subjects of a divine education, as the 
 expounders of that education to their nation and to 
 all nations, I felt that I had some title to ask his 
 sympathy with it. For no one more delighted to 
 contemplate them in that aspect ; they were never to 
 him merely interesting figures of a bygone age ; they 
 were his personal friends, who helped him to bear 
 the burden of his own thoughts and his own time. 
 As his conversation had done much to give me this 
 living, human interest in the characters of Scripture, 
 a human interest not separate from their relation to 
 the divine Teacher, but the consequence of it, I felt 
 that the publication of such a book as this was a fit 
 opportunity for acknowledging my manifold obligations 
 to him. 
 
 Yet many who knew and loved him may consider 
 that there was some incongruity in presenting a 
 volume specially national to Mr. Erskine. He cared
 
 xvl PREFACE TO THE THIED EDITION. 
 
 little for politics. When he spoke of a divine Edu- 
 cation, he meant, unquestionably, the Education of 
 individuals the various processes by which they are 
 led out of darkness, and through darkness, into light. 
 It was this Education which he rejoiced to trace in 
 the lives of others and in his own. It was because he 
 felt in himself, and saw in others, how imperfectly the 
 Education had attained that end to which it was, 
 nevertheless, always pointing, that he resisted as im- 
 moral and atheistical all theories which limited it to 
 the threescore years and ten of our earthly pilgrimage. 
 Now, I had learnt partly from Coleridge's " States- 
 man's Manual" to consider the Prophets of Israel 
 especially as Politicians j as men who were pro- 
 foundly concerned in the well-being and continuity 
 of their nation ; who watched with intense anguish 
 the influences which were detaching its present from 
 its past, and both from the future; who believed that 
 it would be held together, through all generations, 
 amidst all its crimes and its follies, by Him who is, and 
 was, and is to come. The false gods, the idols of sense 
 and of fancy, the corrupt likenesses of men's selfish 
 fears and longings, which hindered Israelites from 
 trusting in the Unseen and Everlasting Lawgiver, and 
 Judge and Teacher, who alone made them a people, 
 inspired these seers with unspeakable horror ; on! y 
 in the conviction that the idols would be abolished, 
 that the Righteous King would prove Himself to be 
 supreme, could they find any comfort. This faith, it 
 seems to me, was essentially national. There was 
 implied in it the vision of a Society for all Nations ; 
 one in which each particular Nation should enjoy its 
 own proper life, and should fulfil its own purpose in
 
 PKEFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. ivii 
 
 the divine Economy. But it was not what learned 
 men in our day call Semitic ; it was Israelitic strictly 
 and simply. 
 
 That thoughts of this kind did not take much 
 hold of Mr. Erskine, I knew. It often struck me 
 that if he could have entered into them, he would 
 have had greater influence over his Presbyterian 
 countrymen; he would have understood better what 
 their old Covenant signified; he would have been 
 regarded less as a mere protestant against the exclu- 
 siveness of their Calvinism; his idea of God, as an 
 Educator, would have quickened many conceptions 
 of Him as a Ruler and a Judge which had become 
 petrified in their minds. I was much possessed by 
 this feeling when I first published this book. It has 
 become deepened in me while I have considered, in 
 reference to recent controversies about the Union of 
 Church and State, the theories of a distinguished 
 divine whom Mr. Erskine reverenced and loved for the 
 geniality of his character and the warmth of his heart, 
 whom Scotland regards as one that made her old 
 theology in some degree palatable, or at least tolerable, 
 to the philosophers and economists of this generation. 
 
 The defence of Establishments which Dr. Chalmers 
 put forth in his London Lectures between thirty and 
 forty years ago, must have received many a useful cor- 
 rection, even a severe commentary, from the zeal and 
 struggles of the writer's latter years. These may have 
 modified greatly the influence of it on his own country- 
 men. But for those to whom the Lectures were 
 addressed, for our parties in the South, his apology 
 had, and has still, many attractions. For (1) taking 
 the law of Supply and Demand as the proper rule for
 
 xviii PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 Government in dealing with other commodities, he 
 pleaded a special exemption for the commodity called 
 Religion. That being disagreeable to the tastes of 
 men, and yet necessary for their health, needed the 
 State bounty and encouragement which it was right 
 to withdraw from corn, and meat, and articles of 
 clothing, these being general objects of desire. Such 
 a proposition at once commended itself to the ordinary 
 Conservative who maintains that Religion is needful 
 for the preservation of decency and of property, and 
 to those of the evangelical school who build their 
 theology upon human depravity. However difficult 
 it might be for the last to reconcile the theory of 
 Dr. Chalmers with the general success of their preach- 
 ing and the special success of his own, it was too much 
 in harmony with the fundamental article of their creed 
 to be rudely tested by facts. (2) He was in agree- 
 ment with a majority of High Churchmen and many 
 Dissenters, in his estimate of the State as a body 
 which might, when it was under pious influences, do 
 service to Religion, but which had no sacredness or 
 divinity of its own. (3) His theory met the opinion 
 of a majority of what are called the liberal or broad 
 Churchmen, inasmuch as it only contended for the 
 State patronage of some form of Religion, the particular 
 form, subject to certain conditions, being indifferent. 
 
 So many hostile sentiments were enlisted in favour 
 of this method of presenting the question, that one 
 could not have wondered if it had been generally 
 accepted as the only true issue on which the partiea 
 were to join and the controversy to be decided, even 
 though it had been brought forward by a far less 
 eloquent, popular and devout thinker than Dr. Chalmers.
 
 PREFACE TO THE TH1B.D EDITION. xix 
 
 But this theory has undergone a severe shock. The 
 Protestant Establishment in Ireland was the true 
 exemplification of it. That was an instance per- 
 haps the only complete one in Europe of a religion 
 selected by the State, and set up under its protec- 
 tion. Many admirable reasons could be given why 
 the State, for its own protection, and for the educa- 
 tion of the Irish people, was bound to create this 
 Establishment and to maintain, what it had created. 
 But it could not. The disunion between Church and 
 State, which was the consequence of the experiment, 
 was too palpable too terrible; at whatever risks it 
 must be abandoned. We may contemplate those risks 
 with some trembling ; but they are inevitable. What 
 rests on the sand of a mortal policy must fall down. 
 
 The ' Policy ' which overthrew the Irish Establish- 
 ment may, Mr. Miall thinks, be applied to the Union 
 of Church and State in England. Of course, the 
 policy of ' Cabinets of Churchmen/ followed or not 
 followed by ' a party of Dissenters/ will be applied, in 
 all possible ways, to this Union. If it is not a real 
 one not one grounded in the order of God, in the 
 constitution of things it will come to naught ; no cal- 
 culations of Statesmen or Church-men will uphold it. 
 But those who have learnt from the Old Testament 
 to see in a nation the mightiest testimony for 
 the righteous God, and for His government over 
 the world ; those who have learnt from the New 
 Testament to look upon the Church as no artificial 
 fabric, but as the great witness for the Unity of 
 Man in the Son of Man as essentially Catholic, 
 and therefore as the sustainer of the life of each 
 nation ; those who believe that the Church cannot
 
 PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. 
 
 be separated from the Nation without becoming a 
 narrow and cruel sect, or a mere aggregation of 
 sects ; those who believe that the nation which tries 
 to stand by itself must renounce its humanity as well 
 as its divinity, must reduce itself into a mere trading 
 company; they will trust in God to shew that what 
 has been built with ' bricks for stone, with slime for 
 mortar/ by whatever name we call it religious or 
 secular must perish j that His word, however we 
 may please to describe it as merely of the earth, 
 must endure. If the Kingdom of Heaven is a merely 
 future kingdom, reserved in some distant star for some 
 happy individuals, rulers or people have a right to 
 declare that it is no concern of theirs. If it is an 
 Eternal Kingdom, by which all the acts of Monarchs, 
 Nobles, Clergymen, Shopkeepers, Beggars are governed 
 and judged, it will make its power felt though all High 
 Churchmen and Low Churchmen, Conformists and 
 Nonconformists, Conservatives and Liberals, agree to 
 break its bonds asunder and to cast away its oords 
 from them. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE : June, 1871.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 THB NEW PERIOD IN JEWISH HISTORY. ( 1 Samuel yiii. 4-7.) . 1 
 
 SERMON IL 
 THE LIFE OF SAUL. (1 Samuel xix. 24.) . . . .18 
 
 SERMON III. 
 DAVID THE SHEPHERD AND THE OUTLAW. (Pa. Ixxviii. 70, 71.) 37 
 
 SERMON IV. 
 DAVID THE KINO. (2 Samuel v. 12.) 56 
 
 SERMON V. 
 THE WISE KING. (1 Kings iii. 6-9.) . . . , .75 
 
 SERMON VI. 
 THE RENDING OF THE KINGDOM. (1 Kings xii. 21-25.) . . 90
 
 xxii CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 FAGB 
 
 THE CALF-WORSHIP DENOUNCED. (1 Kings xvi. 7.) . . . 108 
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 AHAB AND ELIJAH. (2 Kings i. 3.) ..... 126 
 
 SERMON IX. 
 ELISHA AND JEHXT. (2 Kings ix. 1-3.) 142 
 
 SERMON X. 
 THK SHEPHERD PROPHET. (Amos vii. 10-15.) ... 159 
 
 SERMON XL 
 THE VALLEY or DECISION. (Joel ii. 32.) ..... 180 
 
 SERMON XII. 
 THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE. (Hosea ii. 8.) 200 
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 THE VISION OF THE KINO. (Isaiah vi. !.)... 219 
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 ISAIAH AND AHAZ. (Isaiah vii. 10-14.) 236 
 
 SERMON XV. 
 THE LIGHT m DABKNESS. (Isaiah ix. 1-7.) . . 265
 
 CONTENTS. 
 SERMON XVI. 
 
 PAQH 
 
 THE PROUD CITY DOOMED. (Isaiah xiii. 1.) . . 273 
 
 SERMON XVII. 
 THE SUFFERING KING AND PEOPLE. (Isaiah xlii. 1-3.) . . 292 
 
 SERMON XVIII. 
 THE JEW CONQUERING THE NATIONS. (Isaiah Ixiii. 1(5.) . . 312 
 
 SERMON XTX. 
 THE VILLAGE GREATER THAN THE CITIES. (Micah v. 2.) . . 332 
 
 SERMON XX. 
 THE EVIL CITY SAVED AND DESTROYED. (Nahum i. 1.) . . 851 
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 MANASSEH AND JOSIAH ; ZEPHANIAH AND HABAKKUK. 
 
 (Habakkuk ii. 4.) ........ 370 
 
 SERMON XXII. 
 TEMPTATION THE SCHOOL or THE PROPHET. (Jeremiah i. 6-8.) . 388 
 
 SERMON XXIII. 
 THE POTTER'S WORK. (Jeremiah xviii. 1-6.) .... 406
 
 xxiv CONTENTS. 
 
 SERMON XXIV. 
 
 FAOB 
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. (Jeremiah xxxi. 31-34.) . . . 426 
 
 SERMON XXV. 
 THE HEAVENS OPENED TO THE EXILE. (EeeTciel i. 1.) . . 445 
 
 SERMON XXVI. 
 THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES. (Ezekiel xxxvii. 1-3.) % . 461 
 
 SERMON XXVII. 
 THE NEW TEMPLE. (Ezekiel xliii. 10, 11.) . .
 
 THE PKOPHETS AND KINGS 
 
 OP THE 
 
 OLD TESTAMENT. 
 
 SERMON I. 
 
 THE NEW PERIOD IN JEWISH HISTORY. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 22nd Sunday after Trinity. Nov. 1, 1851.) 
 
 Then all the Elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and 
 came to Samuel unto Ramah, and said unto him, " Behold thou 
 art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways ; now make us a king 
 to judge us like all the nations." But the thing displeased 
 Samuel, when they said, " Give us a king to judge us." And 
 Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Samuel, 
 " Hearken to the voice of the people in all they say unto thee : 
 for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected Me, that 
 I should not reign over them." 1 SAMDEL viii. 4-7. 
 
 THE titles of this and the next book in our canon are 
 either the first and second books of Samuel or the first 
 and second books of Kings. The propriety of the latter 
 name is obvious. We are entering upon the history 
 of the Hebrew kings ; we are told by what steps the 
 age of the judges passed into theirs. But how should 
 Samuel, whose death is recorded before the end of the 
 first of these books, who ceases to be the most con- 
 spicuous person in it after he has anointed Saul, have
 
 2 SAMUEL'S PLACE IN HISTORY. [SERM. 
 
 succeeded in stamping such an image of himself upon 
 the narrative ? He is not the composer of the record ; 
 there are no lengthened prophecies of his introduced 
 into it. We have a very clear picture of him certainly 
 in infancy, boyhood, manhood, and old age. But there 
 are many biographies equally distinct ; yet the subjects 
 of them have not possessed this dignity; they have 
 not given their names to any portion of the history. 
 
 I apprehend that this fact indicates a consciousness 
 among the Jews, that the age of the kings would be also 
 the age of the prophets. It could not, they felt, be con- 
 templated in one light without being contemplated in 
 the other. On all occasions the prophet would be beside 
 the king to reprove, direct, and encourage him. On all 
 occasions the prophet's office would be to show what 
 the office of the king was, how it might be neglected 
 and violated, how it might be faithfully executed, how 
 the full significance of it would at last be brought out 
 and actually embodied. The Book of Bangs therefore is 
 the Book of Samuel, not merely because the individual 
 man was the last of the judges, and poured the anoint- 
 ing oil upon the first two of the kings, but because he 
 represented in his own person a power and a position 
 which were quite different from theirs, and yet which 
 could not be rightly understood apart from theirs. 
 
 When we first meet with Samuel, he appears as the 
 reprover of an aged priest. Eli was not insensible to 
 the greatness of his vocation.- But his dignity was 
 an hereditary one, and the subordinate priests were 
 members of his family. His sons had become utterly 
 corrupt and abominable. He had failed to preserve a 
 seed which could feel, and make their countrymen feel, 
 that the service of the God of Israel was a reality and
 
 i.] THE HEREDITARY PRIESTHOOD. 3 
 
 not a fiction. Eli's faith was all his own; it brought 
 no one within its circle ; it created no atmosphere 
 about itself. In a deeper sense than the most literal 
 and obvious one the lamp was waxing dim in the ark 
 of the Lord. No one was keeping the flame of it alive. 
 The people felt as if it were all but quenched already. 
 The boy Samuel was raised up to tell them that it 
 would soon be more evidently extinct than it was then, 
 but that it would be found to be fed from a hidden 
 source, to be kept alive by another than Eli or his sons. 
 The preservation of the ark and the sacrifices, of the 
 most inward substance of the Jewish commonwealth, 
 would be seen to depend, not upon a succession in the 
 family of Aaron, but upon Him who had ordered the 
 succession, upon Him who was, and is, and is to come. 
 Thus Samuel, because he had been called to be a 
 prophet, and was proved to be one by signs, which all 
 men from Dan to Beersheba could recognise, was a 
 witness that an hereditary priesthood derives all its 
 worth from a divine presence which is not shut up in 
 it or limited by it ; and, that, without that presence it 
 means nothing and is nothing; nay, becomes worse 
 than nothing, a plague and cancer in the society, 
 poisoning its very heart, spreading disease and death 
 through it. His message was first to the priest him- 
 self; then to the nation concerning the priest. For 
 the priest was as yet the hereditary functionary in the 
 commonwealth. He was the only person who could 
 turn duties into mere routine; who could make his 
 authority and his reputation a plea for setting up the 
 worship of false gods instead of the worship of the 
 living and true God, vile orgies instead of the services 
 of the holy place wherein the Most High was dwelling, 
 
 B 2
 
 4 THE OFFICE OF THE JUDGE. [SEBM. 
 
 The judge had no power to do this kind of mischief. 
 He appeared when an emergency demandedhis presence. 
 He might do a number of irregular, turbulent, anarchical 
 acts ; he might pass from a deliverer and defender of 
 boundaries into a tyrant. But his power died with 
 him. There were several attempts to perpetuate it, as 
 for instance, in the family of Gideon. An illegitimate 
 child of that family tried to make himself a king ; but 
 the conscience of the better Israelites was against the 
 experiment. The disorders and jealousies of their tribes 
 were equally against it. It was as unnatural and im- 
 possible for them all to confess one permanent head, or 
 to allow him to transmit his powers to others, as it was 
 natural for them to receive and follow a great champion 
 when he proved that he could subdue their enemies and 
 govern them. These champions judged them, made 
 them understand that there was a law over them which 
 they must obey ; reclaimed them for a little while from 
 their wild and reckless habits, their slavish and brutal 
 idolatries. Then the settled order of the priesthood gave 
 them some feeling of unity as a nation ; reminded them 
 that an unseen God had called them to be His people. 
 Presently the old factions appeared again. Some Levite 
 went off with a particular family, became its priest, intro- 
 duced or ratified some domestic idolatry. There would 
 be new tribe wars, fresh attacks from their neighbours 
 round about them, more of feebleness and more of slavery. 
 The signal downfall of the nation which took place in 
 Samuel's day, when the ark, the symbol of thepeople's 
 unity, was captured by the Philistines, prepared the 
 way for a great change in all these respects. Samuel 
 became a judge in a different sense from his predecessors. 
 He was not a mere warrior or hero raised up to put
 
 i.J CIVIL GOVERNMENT. 6 
 
 down a particular foe. He was the restorer of the 
 whole land ; one who brought the different parts of it 
 into connexion with each other ; who made them feel 
 the blessings of a common organisation, the necessity 
 and the happiness of being subject to government, the 
 misery of a condition of things in which each man did 
 that which was right in his own eyes. It would 
 appear that the Jews had never, since they came into 
 the promised land, experienced so orderly and righteous 
 a civil government as during the time in which Samuel 
 ruled them. I say civil government, for such it evi- 
 dently was. Samuel was in the strictest sense a 
 Judge. Whatever other functions he had, this was one 
 by which he was chiefly and most distinctively recog- 
 nised. It is clear, from the story of his dedication by 
 Hannah, that he was a priest, and that circumstance 
 is of considerable importance in some of his relations 
 with Saul ; but the comparative sinking of that part 
 of his character, the incidental manner in which it is 
 brought out, make us aware how much more prominent 
 the other side of the commonwealth at this time was ; 
 how much the legal, judicial, governing element was 
 for the present overshadowing the purely sacrificial. 
 But if it should be supposed for a moment that Samuel 
 was a less devout man because his acts were more of a 
 civil than of a sacerdotal kind, every word in the 
 history will refute the notion. The ark of God had 
 never been so precious to any earlier Israelite as it was 
 to him who lived when it was captured and brought 
 back again. God as a living ruler and king, was pre- 
 sent to him in all his thoughts and acts. He existed 
 only to bring home His righteous rule to the minds 
 and hearts of his countrymen. We must understand
 
 6 THE CRAVING FOR A KING. [SERM. 
 
 how much this was the absorbing purpose of his mind, 
 if we would trace what passed in it when the Elders of 
 Israel came to him with the request "Make us a king." 
 Such a request I said just now could scarcely have 
 been made, or at least could not have been the 
 expression of the mind of any great body of the 
 people, in the previous age. But Samuel's reforma- 
 tion had awakened in them a sense of order to which 
 they had been strangers before. The words " Elders 
 of Israel" themselves show how much had been done 
 to revive the institutions of Moses, to call out the 
 family and tribe sympathies which were at the root 
 of those institutions ; and to make them ministers 
 of union, not, as they had been, of division. So 
 strongly had this family feeling been awakened, that 
 Samuel's sons, it seems from the next passage, had, 
 without any formal election or designation, performed 
 some of the functions of their father. A tendency 
 to hereditary succession was unfolding itself in the 
 mind of the people, and was connecting itself directly 
 with the civil as it had before been connected with 
 the ecclesiastical, forms of the commonwealth. But 
 Samuel's sons did not walk in his ways. They were 
 self-seekers ; they were suspected of taking bribes. 
 The effect of this distrust was just that which proceeds 
 in all ages from the same cause, dissatisfaction, a cry 
 for change, a feeling that the fault of the person who 
 administers implies some evil or defect in that which he 
 has to administer. But the change which these elders 
 craved for was not a greater independence of authority. 
 They had a sense of wanting authority. The degene- 
 racy of Samuel's sons did not, as we might have fancied, 
 make them suspicious of a ruler who should establish a
 
 T.] SAMUEL'S DISPLEASURE. 7 
 
 family. It only made them long for a different sort of 
 rule, for one which should be less irregular and fluctu- 
 ating. They were not like the nations round about - t 
 they seemed to be at a manifest disadvantage when they 
 fought with them ; they had no regular leader of their 
 armies, no one who could set them in array and go forth 
 at the head of them. It is evident from another pas- 
 sage, in which it is said that they desired a king 
 because Nahash, the king of Ammon, was coming out 
 against them, that this was their uppermost thought. 
 A king signified to them little more than a general. 
 There was something else in their minds than this; 
 something at least was implied in this which was deeper 
 than the rude craving for a man in a target of brass 
 and with a spear like a weaver's beam. The discipline 
 and the coherency of an army have a charm which the 
 inmost spirit recognises, and which could not exist if it 
 was without a directing head. 
 
 But the thing displeased Samuel and he cried unto 
 the Lord. Why did it displease him ? Men who think 
 themselves very clever have answered : " Of course, 
 because he was seeking to aggrandise his own family. 
 He had a cunning plan of advancing his sons which 
 this new proposition would defeat/' It is not neces- 
 sary to confute such a notion by proclaiming that the 
 characters in Scripture are different from other charac- 
 ters. It is quite enough to say that if such a character 
 as Samuel's were met with in any history whatever, 
 this would be a low, paltry, vulgar way of accounting 
 for his acts. He had all his life been possessed with 
 one great conviction, that the righteous God was King 
 of the land. In His name and in His strength, he had 
 been putting down wrong and asserting right. He
 
 8 SAMUEL'S PRAYER. [SERM. 
 
 had taken no man's ass and had handled no bribes, had 
 sought for truth in his inward parts, and had striven to 
 speak and act the truth outwardly. To suppose that 
 he had been plotting all his days for those miserable 
 objects which have made Popes execrable and have 
 overthrown the kingdoms of modern dynasts, is to con- 
 found all distinctions, to make the records of humanity 
 merely the records of the pettinesses and crimes which 
 have destroyed it. If Samuel was conscious of any such 
 desire in his heart, and it may doubtless have been 
 there, as any, even the vilest desire may be working in 
 him who abhors it most, he would indeed have cried 
 to the Lord to deliver him from such godlessness, and 
 his nation from the effects of it. He did cry to the 
 Lord because the thing displeased him, because he had 
 a sense that there was something very wrong in the 
 wish which his countrymen were cherishing ; perhaps, 
 and such a feeling was not wrong, though wrong 
 might be very near it, because he discovered in them 
 much ingratitude to himself ; because he thought his 
 government was better than any they would substitute 
 for it, because he did not believe, or tried not to 
 believe the ills which were imputed to his sons. All 
 these were good reasons for praying to the Lord ; for a 
 man does that with very little fervency if he is quite 
 clear about his own conclusion, if he sees his way and 
 is in no sort of embarrassment or perplexity. It is a 
 sense of dimness and confusion which drives us to the 
 source of light. We do not know what we ought to 
 think about this thing or that, and we want to be told 
 what we should think about it ; we want to have our 
 displeasure deepened if it is right and taken away if it 
 is wrong; or if, as most often happens, it is partly
 
 i.] 'HEARKEN TO THE PEOPLE.' 9 
 
 right and partly wrong, that the good should be 
 separated from the evil, the first reinforced with God's 
 own might, the other utterly cast out. In such a state 
 of mind, I apprehend, Samuel prayed unto the Lord, 
 or else into such a state of mind he came while he was 
 praying. And so his prayers led to an honest practical 
 result, a result to which the displeasure without the 
 prayer would certainly not have brought him. 
 
 " And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the 
 voice of the people in all that they say unto thee : for 
 they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected Me, 
 that I should not reign over them." Such an answer 
 sounds at first most strange, most perplexing ! ' Hear- 
 ken unto them -for they have rejected Me ! Yield to 
 them because they are doing a worse thing than you 
 supposed they were doing. Let them have their way, 
 seeing that they are not changing a m'ere form of 
 government but breaking loose from the principle upon 
 which their nation has stood from its foundation/ No 
 contradiction can seem greater. And yet no Jewish 
 statesman or prophet could do the work that was given 
 him to do, could be God's faithful witness, if he did 
 not enter into the very heart of this contradiction ; if 
 he did not mould his own conduct according to the 
 deep truth which was implied in it. His impulse was 
 to maintain the order of things which he found estab- 
 lished in his day. He believed that order was God's 
 order ; he dared not refer it to any lower source. He 
 administered that order in this faith : if it forsook him 
 he became careless and corrupt. Could God's order 
 then be changed ? Was He not by His very nature, 
 the Unchangeable ? Was it not the highest duty to 
 make the people feel that this was His character ?
 
 10 THE LOVE OF SYSTEM. [SERM. 
 
 Was it not thus that their own frivolity and passion for 
 change would be corrected ? When the impulse passes 
 into reasoning you cannot easily detect a flaw in it ; 
 and yet it was stronger still while it remained an 
 impulse and did not pass into reasoning. Nothing 
 but prayer to the unchangeable God could show 
 wherein both were false and might lead to falsehood. 
 The unchangeableness of God is not to be confounded 
 with the rigidness of a rule or a system. If it is so 
 confounded the purpose and nature of His government 
 are forgotten. He, the Perfect and Absolute Will, has 
 created beings with wills, beings made in His own 
 image. He educates them ; He desires that they 
 should know His will, that is to say Himself. They 
 are to learn what they themselves are; what they 
 would make of themselves ; what He would make of 
 them ; partly by an experience of the effects of their 
 own wilfulness, partly by the results which He brings 
 to pass in spite of that wilfulness, nay, by means of it. 
 This is the explanation of the paradox. ' Hearken 
 unto them, for they have not rejected thee but Me/ 
 If this was a personal question, if the wish of the 
 people was one which you might regard merely as an 
 offence to you, there would be a pretext for fighting 
 with them, and insisting upon their surrendering them- 
 selves to your judgment. But if you take a more 
 accurate measure of their wrong, if you feel it to be 
 an act of unbelief in My unseen government, and a 
 desire to substitute a visible for an invisible ruler, 
 you will not think you can deal with such perverseness 
 by any petty scheme of yours, by a mere adherence to 
 existing forms. The evil requires a far deeper and 
 more radical treatment; the people must be taught
 
 i.] THE CURE OF NATIONAL DISTEMPERS. 11 
 
 that they have an unseen ruler, and cannot live or act 
 without one. The preservation of you as a judge, the 
 preservation of the system of government by judges, 
 would be no such lesson. It would only be a question 
 between one kind of outward rule and another ; you 
 would be attaching the same kind of false and dan- 
 gerous importance to the ancient scheme which they 
 attach to the novel one. There is nothing strange in 
 this desire of theirs. ' According to all the works 
 which they have done since the day that I brought 
 them up out of Egypt even unto this day, wherewith 
 they have forsaken Me, and served other gods, so do 
 they also unto thee/ The same idolatrous tendency, 
 the same unbelief in an invisible government has been 
 in them throughout. With that tendency have I been 
 striving by a series of wonderful, orderly methods ; you 
 experience the bitterness of it now. Believe that this 
 is part of your privilege as My servant, to encounter 
 the same kind of opposition which I encounter from 
 the self-will of men; to understand what My heart 
 towards them is through your own. And therefore 
 tell them what manner of a king will reign over them. 
 Tell them that he will take their sons for his chariots and 
 to be his horsemen, and their daughters to be confec- 
 tioners and cooks ; and that their fields and their olive- 
 yards and their vineyards he will give to his servants. 
 Let them know what the general of armies whom they 
 crave for as a deliverer will do to bring them into bond- 
 age ; but do not resist a desire which has a deeper 
 meaning in it than you know, which will produce imme- 
 diate sorrows, but in which is hidden a divine purpose 
 for the good and not the destruction of your people/ 
 In a very remarkable sense then the vox populi was
 
 12 THE FALSE AND TRUE KING. [SERM. 
 
 the vox Dei even when the two voices seemed most 
 utterly out of harmony. The prophet was not merely 
 to notice the outward and obvious discord between 
 them ; he was to listen with purged ears till he found 
 where one became really the echo of the other. 
 
 The Jews were asking for heavy punishments which 
 they needed ; without which the evil that was in them 
 could not have been brought to light or cured. But 
 they were asking also for something besides punishment, 
 for that in which lay the seeds of the highest blessing. 
 The king to lead their armies, the new military ruler 
 who would make them like the nations round about 
 them, would bring upon them all the plagues of which 
 Samuel was commanded to warn them. He would do 
 worse things for them than make their daughters confec- 
 tioners, or than take their fields and oliveyards for his 
 servants. He would cultivate all their most idolatrous 
 tendencies, and would give them the freest scope while 
 he crushed and enslaved all that was better and nobler 
 in them. But beneath this dark counterfeit image was 
 hidden the image of a true king reigning in righteous- 
 ness, the asserter of truth, order, unity in the land, the 
 helper of the poor, who would not judge after the sight 
 of his eye, nor reprove after the hearing of his ears, 
 but would smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, 
 and with the breath of his lips would slay the wicked. 
 
 Such true kings, kings after His own heart, God 
 would in due time bring forth. Such kings instead 
 of intercepting the rays of His light, instead of putting 
 themselves in place of Him would continually remind 
 their subjects of His presence ; would impart to them 
 a sense of divine government which they had never pos- 
 sessed before ; would make them understand that a true
 
 I.] THE PROPHET'S SORROW. 13 
 
 divine government must also be a true human govern- 
 ment ; that man is made in the image of God ; that the 
 heavenly offices are represented in the earthly. And 
 though such kings might leave sons more utterly unlike 
 them than Samuel's sons were to him self, yet this degene- 
 racy would not prove that the desire for a family succes- 
 sion was a false one, that it did not answer to a deep 
 want in the heart of man which God designed to satisfy. 
 The belief in a race reigningby covenant with God, would 
 give to the people a sense of the continuity of their 
 nation, of the sacred and intimate relation between one 
 age of it and another, of that relation being interwoven 
 with and inseparable from the family relation, which 
 would be an abundant compensation for the depravities 
 and misdoings of particular sovereigns nay, which 
 would convert those depravities and misdoings into 
 arguments and evidences of God's abiding and eternal 
 dominion. 
 
 Samuel could see little of these good things, which 
 lay hidden in the womb of time, to be brought forth 
 in their appointed season. He could only walk in the 
 dark by faith not sight, slowly coming to understand 
 so much of the divine precept as enabled him to obey 
 it. His after life is full of melancholy yet consolatory 
 instruction. He goes into obscurity as a good man 
 should, when he feels that his main work is done. He 
 comes forth whenever there is need for him ; showing 
 that the power which he once possessed is as real as 
 ever, though it has another and safer dwelling than 
 with the temporary and earthly steward of it. His 
 last years are years of sorrow. The king whom he has 
 anointed has too faithfully fulfilled all his fears and 
 prognostics. Yet there lies in the dim distance the
 
 14 THE SEED OF THE PROPHET. [SERM. 
 
 hope of one, then a fugitive and an outlaw, who might 
 become a true shepherd of the people, the author of a 
 progeny which should rule and bless the nations. 
 
 But as I intimated at the beginning of this sermon, 
 the meaning of his life is not exhausted in himself. 
 He too is to be the beginner of a race, though not of 
 one which is to be propagated like that of the kings. 
 It was a race which would include like the other a 
 number of evil and degenerate children, who would 
 turn their gifts to worse uses, who would more directly 
 blaspheme the source of their gifts, than the civil rulers 
 were able to do. There is no charm in any ordinance 
 whatever, in the succession of son to father, or of pupil 
 to teacher, to prevent such results as these. If there 
 were, we should fall down and worship institutions 
 and arrangements, instead of worshipping God. He 
 pours contempt upon the best devices upon those 
 which bear most the stamp of "Hisown wisdom, when 
 they exalt themselves against Him. The wise father 
 has not to shed more bitter tears over the foolish son 
 than the godly self-sacrificing teacher has over the 
 disciple who turns his truest words into falsehoods, his 
 most faithful acts into excuses for sin. But under the 
 guidance of a living God, the seed of the prophets 
 became the blessed counteracter of the evil, the inter- 
 preter of the good which was to come from the seed of 
 the kings. As the first of them trampled upon the 
 hereditary charm of the priesthood that he might 
 assert the glory of Him who had appointed the priests, 
 so his successors were to break through the hereditary 
 charm and tradition of royalty, that they might declare 
 that covenant which was the foundation of royalty ; 
 the Giver of the covenant from whom royalty derived
 
 i.] THE LESSON FOR ALL TIMES. 15 
 
 its primary sanction, His continual claim upon the 
 obedience of His subjects. This work was never to 
 become extinct, till it had obtained its perfect fulfil- 
 ment ; no, not to become extinct then, for the revela- 
 tion of a perfect Prophet, a perfect Priest, a perfect 
 King, would be but the commencement of a new and 
 universal society, grounded upon the fact of His 
 appearance, as all previous society had been upon 
 the belief of His reality and the hope of His mani- 
 festation. 
 
 How prophets and kings accomplished their respec- 
 tive missions, how each explained the mission of the 
 other, how much was learned by their errors and 
 imperfections because there was a higher ruler and 
 teacher than either, I may, if God permit, consider 
 in future sermons. We may find that the great ultimate 
 objects which the divine ministers were to keep in 
 sight do not in the least prevent them from suggesting 
 to us innumerable hints, and discovering the deepest 
 principles, for our guidance in the commonest tran- 
 sactions of our lives. The more earnestly we desire 
 to understand God's ways to us, and how we may 
 walk in His ways, the more light will these records 
 afford us. 
 
 One glimpse of such light, I think, you may have 
 obtained from the subject which has occupied us this 
 afternoon. You may have seen how possible it is in 
 our dealings with our fellow- creatures to fight too 
 obstinately with their wilfulness, because we do not 
 thoroughly appreciate the evil of it. We fancy that 
 we can resist it by strengthening certain mud banks 
 which had a real worth when they were formed, but 
 which were intended for a purpose that has been
 
 16 SELF WILL AND GOD'S WILL. [SERM. 
 
 fulfilled. If we saw how mighty the flood was, what 
 it was likely to sweep away, we should feel that we 
 needed some diviner and more permanent defence. 
 That we may bring forth deep and eternal principles 
 into fuller manifestation, we should not scruple to 
 concede that for which we have a strong personal 
 affection ; we should acknowledge that the sins of 
 rulers must lead to changes we cannot contemplate 
 without fear ; we should even adopt names and titles 
 of which we have a reasonable dread. Our best 
 maxims, our dearest heirlooms are worthless and dead 
 if they do not bear witness of the Living God. He 
 may sanctify and consecrate that which seems most 
 opposed to them. This lesson I think is one of 
 frequent and various application in our individual and 
 national experience. There is another still more pre- 
 cious, that we should never despair when a people 
 appears to be most bent on mischief, not even when all 
 powers, civil and spiritual, are conspiring with it. 
 Samuel had more than once or twice in his life, an 
 excuse for thinking that all these influences were lead- 
 ing to the ruin of his land. Yet deliverance came 
 through the very acts which these evils made necessary. 
 And this was one of a series of instances in which 
 self-will was found to serve the purposes of a high and 
 gracious Will. The last of that series explained the 
 meaning of all that went before. " Of a truth," said 
 the little band of disciples who were gathered in the 
 upper room of Jerusalem " Of a truth, against thy 
 holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both 
 Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the 
 people of Israel, were gathered together, for to do 
 whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined
 
 i.] SELF WILL AND GOD'S WILL. 17 
 
 before to be done." Oh, that while we lay to heart 
 this consolation we may also join in the prayer which 
 followed it : " And now, Lord, behold their threat- 
 enings : and grant unto thy servants, that with all 
 boldness they may speak thy word, by stretching forth 
 thine hand to heal ; and that signs and wonders may 
 be done by the name of thy holy child Jesus."
 
 SERMON II. 
 
 THE LIFE OF SAUL. 
 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 23rd Sunday after Trinity. Nov. 23, 1851.) 
 Wherefore they say, " Is Sanl among the Prophets ? " 1 SAMUEL xix. 24. 
 
 THIS question, which became proverbial, is referred 
 in the Book of Samuel to two different incidents 
 in the life of Saul. He is said to have met a troop of 
 prophets before he was chosen king, when he was known 
 only as the son of Kish the Benjamite, and to have been 
 suddenly seized with their spirit. He is said in the 
 latter and degenerate period of his reign, when he was 
 persecuting David, to have gone down to Ramah in 
 search of his son-in-law, ' f and the Spirit of God was 
 upon him also, and he went on, and prophesied until he 
 came to Naioth in Ramah." It is the fashion of our 
 times to suppose that these must be two versions of the 
 same f actpreserved by different chroniclers, and brought 
 together by some careless compiler. I venture to think 
 that that solution of the difficulty is not a necessary 
 one, not even the most probable one. I believe that 
 there occur in most of our lives events, often separated 
 by many years, which look as if one was the repetition 
 of the other. I fancy that those who reflect, may
 
 SERM. u.] HOW EVENTS EEPEAT THEMSELVES. 19 
 
 discover in such, recurring incidents very striking, 
 often very sad, memorials of what they have been and 
 of what they are ; very awful witnesses of their own 
 identity, amidst all the changes that have befallen them, 
 and the more terrible changes that have taken place 
 within them. As it sometimes assists a man's medita- 
 tions to walk amongst the same trees under the shade 
 of which he walked, or to watch the sea from the same 
 point from which he watched it, twenty or thirty years 
 before ; so these startling revivals of past experiences, 
 these relapses into states of feeling that have been un- 
 known for a long season, must be more powerful reve- 
 lations to him respecting the unity of the past and 
 present in his inward history. And if so, a faithful 
 biographer will be careful to record such pairs of events. 
 He will find them especially useful in making the life of 
 his hero intelligible. They will give his reader, though 
 he may not know why, a sense that he is meeting 
 with an actual man, not merely with a man in a book. 
 We shall understand better how this observation ap- 
 plies to Saul's history, if we trace it as it is delivered in 
 the Bible. There is a way of presenting what is called 
 the rationale of the Bible narratives, stripping them of 
 their mystical and theological adjuncts, which I do not 
 profess to follow. If I did, I should have to tell you 
 that Saul was chosen by the people of Israel, because he 
 was the tallest and strongest man among them ; that 
 while the novelty of royalty lasted, he retained his 
 popularity ; that he lost it partly through the influence 
 of the prophet Samuel, who feared that he was breaking 
 loose from his influence and taking a course of his own, 
 and who therefore represented him as having violated 
 some of the duties which belonged to a theocratic 
 
 c 2
 
 20 ATTEMPTS TO MODERNISE THE BIBLE. [SERM. 
 
 sovereign ; that a young and brilliant rival put forward 
 by this venerated teacher supplanted him in the affec- 
 tion of his people and even of his own family ; that 
 jealousy at the admiration which was excited by this 
 adventurer, and fear that he would actually obtain the 
 kingdom, overthrew his reason ; that he fell into wild, 
 arbitrary, and desperate courses, provoked a war with 
 the Philistines, and died in battle. It seems to some that 
 the records of our book become vastly more real when 
 they are put into this modern dress and made to look 
 as if they had been taken out of a journal of the day. 
 And I do not deny that such paraphrases may be an 
 escape from t"he dryness and formality with which Scrip- 
 ture narratives are sometimes offered to us, as if they 
 referred to beings of a different nature from our own ; 
 as if, because they speak of God, they have nothing to 
 do with man. But I venture to doubt whether the 
 phraseology of newspapers is after all the most real, the 
 most human, the most historical ; whether the conven- 
 tional formulas which describe so readily and so satis- 
 factorily to our minds the causes that produce popular 
 or royal follies or perversities, do convey any distinct or 
 living impressions to us ; whether we must not render 
 the modern dialect back into the ancient one from which 
 we have translated it, before we can hope honestly to 
 understand it, or to bring what passes among ourselves 
 into comparison or correspondence with the history 
 that is delivered in it. 
 
 For instance, it may be very true and very needful 
 to remember that the height of Saul's stature and the 
 comeliness of his person, had much to do with his 
 being made the first king of Israel. But if instead of 
 saying that the people elected him for this reason, we
 
 ii.] THE CHOICE OF RULERS. 21 
 
 follow the Scripture narrative strictly, and say that he 
 being a member of an insignificant family in the smallest 
 tribe of Israel, and therefore being most unlikely to be 
 selected by the people, and having no dream of any 
 such honour for himself, was marked out by God as 
 the person on whom He would bestow it, I believe 
 we shall obtain a light, not upon this fact only, but 
 upon a multitude that have occurred in the history of 
 the world, which stand in great need of explanation, 
 and which are certainly not explained by the common- 
 places of ordinary narrators, even if they call them- 
 selves philosophical. In a number of cases (the annals 
 of every nation, and of almost every age, supply some) 
 an inconceivably trifling incident, as trifling as that 
 of Saul going out in search of his father's asses, has 
 brought forth the man whom a people feel to be, not 
 selected by them, but given to them; whom they adopt 
 and embrace, they know not why ; and who, whether 
 or not he is able to guide and govern them, proves to 
 be a faithful representative of their own state of mind, 
 the very type and embodiment of that character and 
 those habits of mind which they are themselves ex- 
 hibiting. This is the fact. It has nothing to do with 
 theories about who are or ought to be the choosers 
 of a ruler, with the maxims which guide or should 
 guide their choice of him. He is there ; he comes 
 to them. Whether you like it or not, you must refer, 
 you do refer, his appearance to some invisible agency. 
 You may call that agency Chance, if you like. If you 
 know no other name, that is of course the one which 
 you will resort to. If you are content with it, there 
 is no more to be said. But mankind has not been 
 content with it. Men have said, there must be an
 
 22 CHANCE AND GOD. [SERM. 
 
 order in these events apparently so fortuitous. They 
 have insisted upon knowing something about that order 
 and who directs it. If now in this nineteenth century, 
 this century of science, you choose to say, there is no 
 order in all this, your language at all events sounds as 
 if you were retrograding not progressing, as if you 
 were falling back upon the crudest notions of barbarism. 
 But if not, you may listen to the way in which the 
 Scripture accounts for one of these instances, and in 
 that one for all, whensoever and wheresoever they take 
 place. He, it says, who governed the Israelites, who 
 was their real king, had taught His judge and prophet 
 that he was not to resist the craving of the people, 
 though it was a self-willed, idolatrous, mischievous 
 craving, to have a ruler of their armies who should 
 make them like the nations round about ; that he was 
 to yield to them and let them have their way. And 
 now, it is said, God appointed the king who would 
 answer to the desires of this people, who was the kind 
 of man that they had conceived of, cast in their own 
 mould, distinguished from them chiefly by mere out- 
 ward superiority, the very person who would cause 
 them to experience that which it was absolutely neces- 
 sary for them to experience. Scripture says that Samuel 
 the prophet was taught to perceive that this was the 
 man whom God had chosen for them ; that he anointed 
 him ; and that he became their king accordingly. 
 
 We are not told any remarkable points in the cha- 
 racter or early discipline of the man who was appointed 
 to this office ; there were probably none to tell. But 
 as I have often had occasion to notice in the earlier 
 Scripture narratives, a man not distinguished from his 
 fellows by any peculiar gifts, merely a specimen of the
 
 II.] SAUL SEEKING THE ASSES. 23 
 
 ordinary, the most ordinary, human material, may 
 nevertheless be brought most livingly before us ; we 
 may be compelled to feel that he is an individual man, 
 one of ourselves, and simply as such to care for him. 
 
 We must read the story of Saul's journey in search 
 of the asses ; of his servant's advice to him about the 
 prophet ' the honourable man, the man of God/ whose 
 words would surely come to pass, and who might tell 
 them the way they should go ; of the maidens coming 
 down the hill to draw water, who told him how the 
 people were gone up to the high place to a sacrifice, 
 and how the seer would presently come to bless it ; of 
 the first meeting of the Benjamite with the holy man, 
 and of the wonder with which he heard that a portion 
 of the sacrifice was set apart for him, and that the 
 desire of Israel was upon him and upon his father's 
 house we must read this story oftentimes in order to 
 understand how a few lines may bring a whole picture 
 before us, and make us acquainted with what is pass- 
 ing in a region into which a mere picture cannot lead 
 us. The historian does not talk about the subjects of 
 his narrative, but shows them to us. All is, in the 
 strictest sense of the word, dramatical. The men are 
 made known to us in their doings, and we feel that 
 there is a clear light falling upon them from above by 
 which we are enabled to see them. 
 
 Then comes in that passage in the story of Saul to 
 which I alluded before. It is thus foretold to him by 
 Samuel. " When thou art departed from me to-day, 
 then thou shalt find two men by Rachel's sepulchre in 
 the border of Benjamin at Zelzah : then shalt thou go 
 on forward from thence, and thou shalt come to the 
 plain of Tabor, and there shall meet thee three men
 
 24 MOMENTS OF INSPIRATION. [SERM. 
 
 going up to God to Bethel, one carrying three kids, and 
 another carrying three loaves of bread, and another 
 carrying a bottle of wine. And they will salute thee, 
 and give thee two loaves of bread ; which thou shalt 
 receive at their hands. After that thou shalt come to 
 the hill of God, where is the garrison of the Philistines. 
 And it shall come to pass, when thou art come thither 
 to the city, that thou shalt meet a company of prophets 
 coming down from the high place, with a psaltery, and 
 a tabret and a pipe, and a harp, before them ; and they 
 shall prophesy. And the Spirit of the Lord will come 
 upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt 
 be turned into another man." 1 Sam. x. 2-6. 
 
 There are moments, you may all have noticed them, 
 in the mind of the dullest, most prosaic man, when un- 
 known springs seem to be opened in him ; when 
 either some new and powerful affection, or quite as 
 often the sense of a vocation, fills him with thoughts 
 and causes him to utter words which are quite alien 
 from his ordinary habits, and yet which you are sure 
 he cannot have been taught by any other person, 
 they have in them such a pledge and savour of origin- 
 ality. You say involuntarily, "he seemed for the 
 moment quite inspired, he became another man." Are 
 you not also half inclined to say, " Now, for the first 
 time, the man has come forth. Hitherto a cold barren 
 nature, or a formal education, has choked up the life that 
 was in him ; now it is bursting through artificial dams, 
 through mud barriers. Now we can see what is in him." 
 Soon perhaps he sinks back into what he was before. 
 There are no more traces of that splendour than of a 
 sunset after the shades of night have closed in ; but it 
 has been ; it has brought something to light which you
 
 H.] THE PEEPAEATION OP A KING. 25 
 
 could never have dreamed of but for that momentary 
 appearance ; you feel as if you had a right to think of 
 the man, to measure his capacity, by that which spoke 
 forth in him at that instant more than by all the rest 
 of his existence. 
 
 Now it is a fact of this kind which this record dis- 
 closes to us. Only it is a fact not separated from the 
 law and principle of it, but explaining that law and 
 principle to us. " God gave him another heart : the 
 Spirit of God came upon him " these are the words 
 which tell us what that prophetic impulse denoted. 
 Then Saul became conscious of thoughts and desires 
 altogether new and wonderful. The same earth and 
 skies were about him, but he himself was different. 
 He looked out upon all things with different eyes. And 
 this was because the Spirit of God had apprehended 
 him. He could not doubt that God was speaking to 
 him, down in that region which the vulture's eye had 
 not seen : a transmuting, life-giving power had pene- 
 trated there ; it had claimed his obedience, and he had 
 yielded to it. He could not but connect this power 
 with the office to which he had been so suddenly called. 
 How could he be a king, if he were still the same 
 feeble paltry creature that he had been ? Did he not 
 need some mighty influence to fit him for his work ? 
 And was it strange that He who chose him for that work 
 should enable him to fulfil it ? However unwonted then 
 might be the thoughts which stirred in him and the 
 words which he poured forth, they could not have come 
 from some irregular tumultuous excitement ; they must 
 have proceeded from the very spirit of calmness and 
 order. Saul was among the prophets precisely because 
 he confessed the presence of such a spirit of calmness
 
 26 THE CARELESSNESS OF SAUL. [SERM. 
 
 and order. For this was the faith of the prophets, this 
 was the design of their appointment, to be witnesses by 
 what they said, and what they did, and what they were, 
 that men, whether they be kings or subjects, are not to 
 be the sport of outward accidents and chance impulses, 
 but to act habitually as the servants and scholars of a 
 divine master : who can show them the path in which 
 they are to go, can give them continual inward illumi- 
 nation, can raise them to a point from which they may 
 overlook the world around, and interpret the course of it. 
 
 This was the preparation and discipline of a king, in 
 all essentials the discipline and preparation which every 
 king requires and must undergo who is to rule a people 
 righteously and wisely ; not following the bent of his 
 own inclinations, not swayed by some bias from with- 
 out, but being under the dominion of an invisible and 
 righteous Will, obeying that he may exercise dominion 
 over his fellow-men. What the Scripture teaches us in 
 the next part of the story, is that Saul did not continue 
 the subject of this government, and therefore that he 
 became by degrees feeble, reckless, and tyrannical. The 
 steps of the facilis descensus are carefully noted. 
 
 Saul is no monster who has won power by false 
 means and then plunges at once into a reckless abuse 
 of it, no apostate who casts off the belief in God, and 
 sets up some Ammonite or Phoenician idol. He merely 
 forgets the Lord and teacher who had imparted to him 
 that new life and inspiration ; he merely fails to re- 
 member that he is under a law and that he has a 
 vocation. Samuel, according to modern expositors of 
 the story, was angry, because he felt that he was losing 
 his own influence over the mind of the king. No, he 
 was angry because the king was so much the slave of
 
 ii.] STEPS TO TYRANNY AND SUPERSTITION. 27 
 
 his influence, or of any influence that was exerted over 
 him for the moment ; because he was losing the sense 
 of responsibility to One higher than a prophet, to 
 One who had appointed him to rule not in his own 
 right, but as the minister and executor of the divine 
 righteousness. It was a light transgression, you will 
 say, that Saul made haste to perform a sacrifice without 
 waiting for the person who was appointed by the law 
 to perform it. Perhaps you may think it was a sign 
 of the king's devotion ; how could he neglect a religious 
 duty for the sake of a formality ? But, in that indiffer- 
 ence to law lay the seeds of arbitrary government, the 
 pretensions of an autocrat. In that eagerness to do a 
 religious service, lay the seeds of the superstition which 
 God by His covenant and statutes was undermining ; 
 since all superstition lies in the neglect of the truth 
 which Samuel proclaimed, that obedience is better than 
 the fat of rams, that sacrifices are not to buy God's 
 good will, but are acts of submission to it. It may 
 seem to some as if Samuel was enjoining a very rigorous 
 course, when he complained of Saul for sparing Agag 
 the king of the Amalekites, and the best of the flocks 
 and the herds. But a king who let his people rush 
 upon the prey when they were sent to punish an un- 
 righteous nation, the crimes of which had reached a 
 full measure, was forgetting the very functions of a 
 Jewish sovereign, and was turning conquest into that 
 which it was not to be, a gratification of covetousness, 
 a means of aggrandisement. The king who heeded the 
 voice of his army in such a matter, showed that he was 
 not their leader but their tool and slave. The king who 
 pretended to keep the booty for the purpose of offering 
 sacrifice to the Lord his God, was evidently beginning
 
 28 STEPS TO MADNESS. [SERM. 
 
 to play the hypocrite ; to make the service of God an 
 excuse for acts of selfishness, and so to introduce all 
 that is vilest in king-craft as well as priest-craft. 
 Samuel the prophet was not trying to keep alive the 
 habits which these names express, that he might main- 
 tain the dignity of his own office. That office enjoined 
 him to bear the most emphatical protest against them. 
 He was bound to tell Saul, that if he forgot that he was 
 a servant and fancied himself absolute, his true con- 
 dition would be shown him, for that the kingdom would 
 be rent from him and given to another. 
 
 The next passages of the story belong properly to 
 the history of David ; I reserve them, therefore, for next 
 Sunday. But the progress of Saul's fear and jealousy 
 of the young man concerning whom the virgins of Israel 
 sang, " Saul hath slain his thousands, and David has 
 slain his ten thousands," is a part of the present subject. 
 There are many ways, no doubt, of describing how such 
 a passion as this enters into the soul and takes a direction 
 towards a person who had once been loved, is baffled 
 for a while, sometimes gives way to fits of returning 
 affection, then absorbs the man completely, till it 
 becomes an ungoverned phrensy prompting the most 
 extravagant and ferocious acts. But I think that one 
 who is considering the subject in earnest, trying to 
 turn it to account for himself and his fellow-men, will 
 do well to pause before he abandons the language in 
 which the Bible speaks of this awful mental process, 
 and takes up with any other. It tells us that " the 
 Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil 
 spirit from the Lord troubled him." This was before 
 David had awakened his fears, while lie was still a shep- 
 herd boy, sent for to soothe him with his harp. The words
 
 ii.] MUSIC. 29 
 
 therefore describe an earlier state of mind, one which 
 the story we have considered already will make suffi- 
 ciently clear to us. That calm Spirit of trust and hope 
 which had once come upon Saul, had been resisted and 
 grieved ; he had forgotten that such a Spirit had been 
 given him to be his guide and counsellor, his wisdom to 
 understand God's commands, his strength to obey them. 
 And now there had come an evil spirit from the Lord, 
 an accusing conscience warning him of what he had 
 been, throwing its dark shadow upon the present, 
 making the future look dim and gloomy. All ghastly 
 apparitions haunt a mind in this condition. It sees 
 nothing as it is. It sees innumerable things which 
 are not. Much physical disease probably attends the 
 moral derangement. The palpable and monstrous dis- 
 tortions which arise out of it, are such as friends 
 naturally seek to cure by outward applications and 
 diversions. The servants of Saul, who could not probe 
 the seat of their master's disorder, suggested the wisest 
 of all methods for removing its external symptoms. 
 The music was more than a mere palliative. It brought 
 back for the time the sense of a true order, a secret, in- 
 ward harmony, an assurance that it is near every man 
 and that he may enter into it. A wonderful message, 
 no doubt, to a king or a common man, better than a 
 great multitude of words, a continual prophecy that 
 there is a Deliverer who can take the vulture from the 
 heart and unbind the sufferer from the rock ; but not (as 
 many, I suppose, most bitterly know) the deliverer itself. 
 And therefore, at the next turn of the story, the evil 
 spirit has become an evil spirit indeed. It is still called 
 an evil spirit "from the Lord." For that which tor- 
 ments us, and does not suffer us to sink into the ease
 
 30 THE EVIL SPIRIT. [SERM. 
 
 and security we long for, has surely a commission from 
 God for our good, though it come with a thousand dark 
 suggestions which cannot be from Him, which are per- 
 petual incitements to rebellion against Him. But now 
 this spirit which was preying upon the man himself, 
 has found another object ; it has become a gnawing 
 suspicion and hatred against an innocent man, a feeling 
 that he has some deep plot against the life of his king 
 and father, and that all Saul's children are plotting with 
 him. Surely this feeling of suspicion more explains to 
 us than anything else, the nature of the retribution 
 which a man brings upon himself by tampering with 
 evil thoughts and imaginations, by trifling with the 
 loving power which is so close to him, and so ready to 
 nourish him with wholesome and gracious food. Every 
 one of us perhaps has had converse enough with this 
 demon, has dallied enough with his dark hints, to know 
 how true the Scripture portrait must be, even though, 
 by God's great mercy, we may have been saved from 
 catching the entire likeness of it. Awful as is the 
 misery which the indulgence of this sin causes to 
 others, yet the punishment which it inflicts upon the 
 heart that is the seat of it, the madness which it pro- 
 duces there, is something more terrible still. We are 
 surely warranted in hoping that in a multitude of cases 
 it is a healing discipline ; that the utter humiliation 
 which it produces works out blessings though they may 
 never appear ; though the soul may seem to sink and 
 go out in utter bewilderment and desolation. 
 
 I have not tried to ascertain the point at which the 
 moral guilt of Saul ends, and his madness begins. The 
 Bible does not hint at a settlement of that question. It 
 belongs in this case, as in all cases, to Him who said
 
 ii.] GLIMPSES OP A DIVINE PRESENCE. 31 
 
 " Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what 
 judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged : and with what 
 measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." 
 It is enough for us to know, and to tremble as we 
 know, that the loss of all capacity for discerning be- 
 tween right and wrong, a hopeless inversion of rule 
 and order, a loss of all the kingly faculties which enable 
 us to exercise an influence over others or ourselves, 
 may be the rightful and natural result of indulging 
 any one hateful passion, of forgetting the special work 
 which God has committed to us, of acting as if we were 
 our own masters, and could do without Him. On the 
 other hand, it is for the relief and comfort of our minds 
 to believe, as we are taught to believe by all lawgivers 
 and moralists, that there are conditions of mind to 
 which we must not and dare not impute moral delin- 
 quency ; a still greater and deeper comfort to know, 
 that in these conditions, as well as in those where there 
 is most of wilful wrong, God may still be carrying on 
 His own great and wonderful work of " bringing souls 
 out of darkness and the shadow of death, of breaking 
 their bonds asunder/' 
 
 There are glimpses of light in the later life of Saul, 
 which we refer at once to this divine source, which it 
 would be sinful to refer to any other. The love and 
 loyalty of David in sparing his life, were not unre- 
 warded. They struck out sparks of love in him ; they 
 made it evident that there was something deeper and 
 healthier beneath all his strangest distortions of mind. 
 And that sacred inspiration, of which our text speaks, 
 which recalled the almost forgotten question, " Is Saul 
 among the prophets ? " though it came mixed with a 
 kind of wild insanity, though it was no longer the
 
 32 SAUL ON MOUNT GILBOA. [SERM. 
 
 prophetical utterance of a calm, heaven-possessed soul, 
 though it was like the sound of the wind through a 
 broken and fallen building, yet proclaimed that 
 God's Spirit, which bloweth where it listeth, had not 
 left this building to be a mere possession for the birds 
 of night. 
 
 Even in the last act which is recorded of Saul on 
 the night before his death, his resorting to the witches 
 whom he had himself forbidden, there is a strange 
 and mad confusion between a real desire to know the 
 mind of God, and a feeling that to him it could only be 
 declared through some evil agent. He has a longing 
 to see the friend of his youth, the true counsellor from 
 whom he had severed himself, and when the deceiver 
 produces some lying semblance of the departed prophet, 
 his imagination quickly invests it with reality. He 
 feels that the presence of the reprover and friend is 
 there. " And he fell straightway all along on the 
 earth, and was sore afraid, because of the words of 
 Samuel : and there was no strength in him." 
 
 A strange preparation for the fight on the coming 
 day, when "the men of Israel fled from before the 
 Philistines, and fell down slain in Mount Gilboa. And 
 the Philistines followed hard upon Saul and upon his 
 sons ; and the Philistines slew Jonathan, and Abinadab, 
 and Melchishua, Saul's sons. And the battle went 
 sore against Saul, and the archers hit him ; and he was 
 sore wounded of the archers. Then said Saul unto his 
 armour-bearer, Draw thy sword and thrust me through 
 therewith; lest these uncircumcised come and thrust 
 me through, and abuse me. But his armour-bearer 
 would not; for he was sore afraid. Therefore Saul 
 took a sword, and fell upon it. And when his armour-
 
 ii.] JUDGMENT OF THE FALLEN. 33 
 
 bearer saw that Saul was dead, he fell likewise upon 
 his sword, and died with him. So Saul died, and his 
 three, sons, and his armour-bearer, and all his men, that 
 same day together. And when the men of Israel that 
 were on the other side of the valley, and they that were 
 on the other side Jordan, saw that the men of Israel 
 fled, and that Saul and his sons were dead, they for- 
 sook the cities, and fled ; and the Philistines came and 
 dwelt in them. And the Philistines put Saul's armour 
 in the house of Ashtaroth, and they fastened his body 
 to the wall of Bethshan." 2 Sam. xxxi. This was 
 the end of Saul and of his kingdom. 
 
 He who was to be the restorer of this kingdom, 
 sang of Saul and Jonathan on the day when he heard 
 of their fall. " They were lovely and pleasant in their 
 lives, and in their death they were not divided." Was 
 this an idle flattery by one who knew it to be false, of 
 a man whom flattery could please no longer ? I believe 
 it was nothing of the kind. David spoke what he felt 
 at that moment, and he would not have wished to recall 
 the words afterwards. He had known a loveliness and 
 pleasantness in the life of Saul, which all its after dis- 
 cords could not make him forget. He had known a 
 real man under the name. A false man had borne it 
 too. The one was dead; the other was still alive in 
 his memory and heart. Other questions, agitating, 
 perplexing, almost maddening, he could leave to Him 
 who only could resolve them. There were symbols of 
 reconciliation in the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. 
 The father and son who had been often so unnaturally 
 separated, were united at last. David was privileged 
 to think of them together, to let the tenderness of the 
 one efface the hard treatment of the other ; to feel that 
 
 P
 
 34 JUDGMENT OP OURSELVES. [SERM. 
 
 God had meant them to be one in heart and act, 
 though the evil and dark spirit to which Saul had 
 yielded himself tore them asunder. 
 
 Brethren, I believe it is not dangerous but safe, not 
 a homage to falsehood but to truth, in our judgment of 
 those who are departed, to follow David's example. 
 We may dwell upon bright and hallowed moments of 
 lives that have been darkened by many shadows, 
 polluted by many sins ; those moments may be wel- 
 comed as revelations to us of that which God intended 
 His creatures to be ; we may feel that there has been a 
 loveliness in them which God gave them, and which 
 their own evil could not take away. We may think of 
 this loveliness as if it expressed the inner purpose of 
 their existence ; the rest may be for us as though it 
 were not. As nature, with her old mosses and her new 
 spring foliage, hides the ruins which man has made, 
 and gives to the fallen tower and broken cloister a 
 beauty scarcely less than that which belonged to them 
 in their prime, so human love may be at work too, 
 ' softening and concealing, and busy with her hand in 
 healing' the rents which have been made in God's 
 nobler temple, the habitation of His own Spirit. If it 
 were lawful in the old time to cover with love and hope 
 a multitude of transgressions, it cannot be less lawful 
 now that the earth is overshadowed with a mercy that 
 blotteth out iniquity and transgression and sin ; when 
 the blood of sprinkling has a mightier voice than that 
 which cries for vengeance ; when the atoning sacrifice 
 reveals heights and lengths and depths and breadths 
 of love in which we must rejoice to be lost. 
 
 But oh ! brethren, if this be a lesson which it is 
 lawful to take up and apply to our friends and brethren,
 
 ii.] WHAT WE ALL MAY BE. 35 
 
 it should come in another form, with another force, to 
 ourselves. There has been some moment, some one 
 fleeting moment, in the life of every man, even the 
 most thoughtless, when he has had dreams of better 
 things ; when he has heard the voices of the prophets 
 coming with their harp and their tabret down the hill, 
 when he has joined their company and has caught their 
 strains. There may have been a time when it has been 
 said of him, " What ! is he too among the prophets ? 
 Has he found that life is real, and that it is not to go 
 out in miserable efforts for self-advancement or in more 
 miserable self-indulgence, that it is to be consecrated 
 to the service of God and man ? " That hour, that 
 moment was the hour, the moment of thy life, friend 
 and brother. To that, God would raise and assimilate 
 the whole of it. Oh ! do not let the sluggish, turbid 
 current of your ordinary days seem to you that which 
 truly represents to you what you are, what you are 
 able to be. No, the time when you made the holiest 
 resolutions, when you struggled most with the powers 
 of evil, when you said it should not be your master, 
 when Love conquered you and freed you from other 
 chains that you might wear her chains, that, that was 
 the true index to the Divine purpose concerning you ; 
 that tells you what the Spirit of God is every hour 
 working in you that you may be. You may not be 
 able to revive the feeling which you had then, but he 
 who gave you the feeling, He is with you, is striving 
 with you, that you may will and do of His good plea- 
 sure. Only do not strive with Him that He may leave 
 you to yourself and to the power of evil. 
 
 But if you should have engaged in that mad 
 struggle, and been to your own ruin a conqueror in it, if 
 
 D 2
 
 36 WHAT WE ALL MAY BE. [SERM. 11. 
 
 you should have succeeded in quenching that voice of 
 Love which you once heard speaking in your heart, 
 and now you can hear nothing but hoarse and dissonant 
 voices of evil omen, oh ! yet be sure that the Spirit 
 of God does not desert the work of His own hands, 
 that He is still hovering about the habitation in which 
 He desires to dwell. And if, when you meet with old 
 friends from whom you have been long estranged, 
 there should come back something of the youthful 
 impulse, some of those heart-yearnings and songs of 
 hope which you poured forth then, though mixed with 
 turbulence and confusion, and hardly to be distinguished 
 from the ravings of madness, yet the question may be 
 asked again, "Is he too among the prophets?" and 
 God will answer that question as it was not answered 
 before, if you desire not the power of the prophets, 
 but their obedience, not that you may speak inspired 
 words, but that you may have the humble and contrite 
 heart which he does not despise.
 
 SERMON III. 
 
 DAVID THE SHEPHERD AND THE OUTLAW. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 2nd Sunday in Advent. Dec. 7, 1851.) 
 
 He chose David also His servant, and took him from the sheep-folds ; 
 from following the ewes great with young. He brought him to 
 feed Jacob His people, and Israel His inheritance. PSALM Ixxviii. 
 70, 71. 
 
 OBJECTORS to the history of the Old Testament have 
 dwelt much upon the title, " the man after God's own 
 heart," which is given so continually to David. " Is he 
 not," they have said, " directly charged with adultery 
 and murder, murder of a very base kind and for the 
 basest purpose? Are there not passages in his life 
 recorded without condemnation which are indefensible 
 upon any moral principles which we acknowledge ? Do 
 not some of his worst acts belong to his later years, 
 when one would have expected to see his passions sub- 
 dued, his higher qualities matured and perfected ? Is 
 this the man whom a righteous God would declare to 
 be the object of His especial complacency ? What must 
 we think of the book which teaches us to believe that 
 he was thus regarded ? What impressions must it 
 leave upon us of the divine character, what possible 
 help can it afford us in forming our own ? " 
 
 Divines have very often met these questions with an
 
 88 OFFICIAL VIRTUE. [SERM. 
 
 answer of this kind. " The epithet which you complain 
 of," they have said, " belongs to David not personally 
 but officially. He was called out by God to restore 
 the kingdom which Saul had destroyed, to subdue the 
 Philistines and the surrounding nations, to raise up a 
 family of kings of the tribe of Judah. These purposes 
 he accomplished. He did the work which he was 
 appointed to do. He fulfilled God's counsel. So far 
 he was a man after God's own heart. His moral delin- 
 quencies are recorded, that we may know where the 
 divine approbation stops short." 
 
 I believe that this explanation never satisfied the 
 minds of those who availed themselves of is. I am 
 sure that it never satisfied the mind of any simple or 
 devout reader. The notion of official virtue belongs to 
 a very low code of ethics indeed. In a very artificial 
 state of society we sometimes separate the workmen 
 from the work ; we speak of that as done faithfully and 
 honestly, while he is unfaithful and dishonest. The 
 possibility of such a separation undoubtedly exists; 
 but we all know that it is one of the greatest and most 
 frightful anomalies that it should exist ; we all long for 
 the time when it shall exist no longer. Statesmen 
 possessing no high-flown morality, trained in the school 
 of party politics, have rejected the vulgar distinction 
 between the bad man and the bad king, as inconsistent 
 with experience. Lying, the great sin of the individual, 
 has been proved to be the fatal sin of the monarch, that 
 which makes all aptitude for business, all clearness of 
 perception, all skill in devising theories, even higher 
 qualities than these, practically inefficient, or positively 
 mischievous. How then can a believer in the Bible 
 transfer to it a habit of thinking which we are trying
 
 in.] THE SEARCHER OF HEARTS. 39 
 
 to banish from common life ? How can he imagine that 
 the book which he holds to be essentially true, should 
 sanction and consecrate one of our most pernicious 
 falsehoods ? 
 
 A very little reflection upon the words themselves, 
 still more a slight study of the history of David, should 
 surely have prevented any man from resorting to this 
 kind of apology. " God," we hear again and again in 
 Scripture, " trieth the reins." That general principle is 
 applied expressly to the case of David. The Lord said 
 to Samuel, when he was about to anoint the eldest son 
 of Jesse, " Man looketh on the outward appearance ; but 
 the Lord looketh on the heart." What can be so direct 
 a contradiction of this statement, as the notion that 
 David was after God's own heart, because he did certain 
 outward acts which were in conformity with the divine 
 mind and pleasure ? And surely if there is a man in the 
 sacred history or in any history whom it is impossible 
 to think of merely as an official actor, that man is the 
 shepherd-boy who became king of Israel. There is no 
 one who has so marked a personality, no one with whose 
 inward life and struggles we are so well acquainted. 
 Whatever he is, we feel that his whole mind and will 
 are thrown into the words which he speaks and the 
 deeds which he does. And in no life are the king and 
 the man so entirely and inseparably blended. In his 
 highest raptures, in the utterances of his greatest 
 anguish, we are reminded continually that he is to 
 become a king, or that he is one. On the other hand, 
 his sins are not treated as what we call in our artificial 
 nomenclature, private sins ; they are the sins of a king, 
 affecting multitudes besides himself. As such they are 
 denounced, as such they are punished.
 
 40 THE EDUCATION OP A KING. [SERM, 
 
 I think it must have been the obviousness of 
 this fact in the scriptural records, which misled the 
 commentators into this dangerous method of justi- 
 fying them. They saw that David was spoken of 
 as intended by God for a king, while he was a 
 shepherd-boy. They perceived that all his various 
 and romantic adventures were preparing him for a 
 throne; they were struck with the consciousness, 
 in his own mind, of a destiny and a work which 
 were to be accomplished. They could not but be 
 aware, that everything which was greatest, best, 
 purest, in him, had reference to a divine mission which 
 he was to execute for his country. They could not be 
 mistaken that he was educated for a special office. 
 Unhappily they forgot to ask themselves what the 
 education for such an office implied, what we are actually 
 told about it in the Bible. Had they followed the 
 guidance of the history for which they were trying to 
 make ingenious excuses, they might have found how 
 truly the education of the divine king was the education 
 of a man ; they might have come to understand what 
 it was in the old days to be a man after God's own 
 heart, what it is in our days ; they might have attained 
 through that knowledge to a far deeper sense of the 
 nature and cause of David's sins, to a more earnest re- 
 pentance for their own. Some of these blessings may, I 
 hope, come to us, my brethren, while we seek to under- 
 stand the nature of David's discipline. I shall confine 
 myself this afternoon to the years which he passed before 
 the death of Saul, the period which is indicated by the 
 words of the text. The time of his actual government, 
 described in the following sentence, " So he fed them 
 according to the integrity of his heart, and guided
 
 in.] THE THOUGHTS OF A SH EPHEKD-BOY. 41 
 
 them by the skilfulness of his hands/' I reserve for 
 another occasion. 
 
 When I speak of David as having the consciousness 
 of a divine calling or mission in every period of his life, I 
 do not mean that he was haunted in the sheepf olds with 
 dreams of some great honour to come upon him here- 
 after. Those to whom such dreams come, are commonly 
 impatient of the mean position in which they find them- 
 selves. What I apprehend he felt was, that he hada call to 
 the work in which he was then engaged. He must have 
 believed that the God of his fathers, He and no other, 
 had appointed him to take care of the few sheep in the 
 wilderness which Jesse had trusted him with. A strange 
 thought, that the tasks which fell to him because he was 
 the youngest son of the house, could be tasks in which 
 the Most High God who filled Heaven and earth, inter- 
 ested Himself. But it was the thought which made 
 David's life tolerable to him, the only one which could 
 have enabled him to work without becoming the slave 
 of his work. The shepherd's life brought him into wide, 
 open plains, to hill-sides that were lonely by day as well 
 as night. How awful to feel himself there, him the poor 
 shepherd, an atom amidst the infinity of nature ! But an 
 atom which breathed, which thought, which, in the depth 
 of its nothingness, felt that it was higher and more 
 wonderful than the universe which was able, and some- 
 times seemed ready to crush it. Shepherd-boy, what ai't 
 thou ? Child of the covenant, what art thou ? Fearful 
 questions, to which the hills and the skies could give no 
 answer. But the boy pursued his task. He led the sheep 
 to their pastures, he took themtothe streams, he followed 
 them into thickets and ravines where they had lost them- 
 selves. These poor silly creatures were worthy of
 
 42 HOW HE BECOMES A POET. [SERM. 
 
 David's diligence. And then the answer came : " The 
 Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want. He maketh me 
 to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside 
 the still waters. He leadeth me in the paths of righteous- 
 ness. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the 
 shadow of death, I will fear no evil ; for Thou art with 
 me. Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me." What a 
 revelation to the soul of a youth ! A Guide near him, 
 with him, at every moment, as actual a guide as he 
 was to the sheep ; a guide who must watch over a 
 multitude of separate souls, as he watched over each 
 separate sheep, who must care to bind them together 
 in one, as he cared to bring the sheep into the same 
 fold! 
 
 Let us not suppose for an instant that David, as he 
 practised these duties and meditated upon them, gained 
 some fine metaphors respecting the relations of faithful 
 men to their Creator, which afterwards served to make 
 him the poet of Israel. These thoughts and the shepherd 
 life did bring forth that divine poetry, just because they 
 were so intensely real, and because it was so intensely 
 real. They sprung out of intense anxieties respecting 
 himself. What had such anxieties to do with meta- 
 phors ? His thoughts associated themselves with the 
 humblest toils. What had they to do with metaphors ? 
 His meditations were upon the I AM, upon Him before 
 whom Moses hid his face, Who spoke in thunders upon 
 Sinai. How dared he make Him a subject for meta- 
 phors ? When God taught David to think of Him as 
 a shepherd, He took away that cold cloud-drapery with 
 which we are wont to invest Him; He brought him 
 into contact with His actual presence and government. 
 And do not fancy that, because this apprehension was
 
 in.] THOUGHTS THE SEEDS OF ACTIONS. 43 
 
 direct and personal, it was narrow and local. Then, when 
 he could think of God as One nigh and not far off; then, 
 when he could believe that he cared for him and cared 
 for each of his brethren ; then he could look up into the 
 open sky with wonder, but without trembling, and say, 
 "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, 
 the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what 
 is man that Thou art mindful of him ? and the son of 
 man that Thou visitest him ? For Thou hast made him 
 a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with 
 glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion 
 over the works of Thy hands ; all sheep and oxen, yea, 
 and the beasts of the field. Oh Lord our Lord, how 
 excellent is Thy name in all the earth ! " Then first all 
 Nature could sympathise with him, could call forth 
 instead of crushing the energies of his own heart. For 
 the heavens, as they shone clear and bright before him 
 after a long night-watching, declared the glory of the 
 God who was his shepherd ; the firmament showed His 
 handywork. Day unto day, and night unto night, 
 uttered speech and showed knowledge. The sun came 
 out of his bridal chamber, he went forth as a giant 
 rejoicing to run his race, carrying a message to all 
 nations concerning One whose law converted the soul 
 of man, whose statutes made wise the simple. 
 
 This was a hidden education, the education of a young 
 man's heart. But it was cultivating the seeds which 
 were to bring forth fruits in manly acts. Here we are 
 told in David's words of some of the earliest of those 
 fruits. " Thy servant kept his father's sheep, and there 
 came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock; 
 and I went out after him, and smote him, and delivered 
 it out of his mouth ; and when he arose against me, I
 
 44 THE ANOINTING. [SERM. 
 
 caught him by the beard, and slew him." David was 
 learning the secret of invisible strength, what it is, and 
 where and how it works. So there grew in him a scorn 
 of that which lies in bulk and looks terrible to the eye. 
 If the bear and the lion came out against one of his 
 flock, it was his business to encounter them. And see- 
 ing that he was a man, made in God's image, made a 
 little lower than the angels, the child of God's covenant, 
 he could use the dominion that God had given to his 
 race. The strength was not his. In that first battle, 
 as in every one he was to fight hereafter, the Lord of 
 Hosts was with him, the God of Jacob was his helper. 
 
 The story tells us that there came to the house of 
 Jesse, an old man whom all knew to be a prophet ; 
 that he came upon a strange errand which he scarcely 
 understood himself, to anoint one of the sons of that 
 family ; that the eldest passed before him, and that the 
 prophet was struck with his look and stature, and would 
 have poured the oil on his head ; that he was told that 
 the Lord did not look on the outward appearance but 
 tried the heart ; that the other sons all passed by ; 
 that one was missing (he being the youngest, and with 
 the sheep) ; that when this youth, ruddy and fair to 
 look upon, came in, Samuel was bidden to rise and 
 anoint him. 
 
 Here was the sign that all the inward discipline and 
 preparation of David had an object, another object than 
 merely to make him a faithful keeper of sheep, or even 
 a wise and righteous man. But a divine sign is not a 
 mere ceremony. It would be deceitful and insincere if 
 there were not a present blessing denoted by it, the com- 
 munication of an actual power to fit the man for tasks to 
 which he has not hitherto been appointed. From that
 
 in.] MOMENTS OF EEPLECTION AND FORESIGHT. 45 
 
 day forward, we are told, the Spirit of God came upon 
 David. There was a power within him stirring him to 
 thoughts and acts which connected him directly with 
 Israelites, with human beings. Yet with this new 
 calling, with the consciousness of this new power, he 
 still returned to his old work. It was his till some clear 
 summons drew him from it. It had not lost its sacred- 
 ness, it could still impart wisdom to one who sought 
 wisdom. There is a time in men's lives, before they 
 enter upon some great work to which they have been 
 consecrated, a time when they are permitted to look 
 back upon the years which they have already past, to 
 see them no longer as fragments, but as linked together, 
 as having a divine purpose running through them which 
 makes even their incoherences and discords intelligible. 
 In such a time of retrospection, when the future is seen 
 mirrored in the past, David may have found his harp 
 much more than the mere solace of lonely hours, the 
 mere response to his inward sorrows and thanksgivings. 
 He may have begun to know that he was speaking for 
 other men as well as for himself ; that there were close 
 and intimate fibres uniting men utterly unlike and 
 separated by tracts of time and space ; that there is 
 some mysterious source of these sympathies, some living 
 Centre who holds together the different portions of each 
 man's life, and in whom there is a general human life, 
 of which all may partake. The Spirit of God which 
 had taken possession of David, may have been teaching 
 him these lessons and inspiring the song which was the 
 utterance of them, before he was prepared to come forth 
 as the actual deliverer. And that Spirit will assuredly 
 have been preparing him for his after conflicts, by 
 making him feel that he had, even then, enemies most
 
 46 DAVID AND GOLIATH. [SERM. 
 
 fierce to struggle with, subjects most turbulent to sub- 
 due. The invisible God does not make known to man 
 that He is his Shepherd, without making known to him 
 also, that there are invisible powers more fearful than 
 bears and lions, which would tear His flock asunder, 
 which would bring each separate sheep into the valley 
 of the shadow of death. It may be true that the 
 Psalms of David which speak most of enemies, belong 
 to a later period than this, when he was wrestling 
 with flesh and blood ; but those psalms would not have 
 been what they are, they would not have expressed 
 the fears and confidence of suffering people in all 
 times, if the writer of them had not been trained to 
 perceive what are the real and universal foes of God's 
 creatures, before he had to engage with those who were 
 tormenting him and his people. 
 
 The passage of the Book of Samuel, which describes 
 the battle of David with Goliath, is called by some of 
 the wise men in our day a fragment from the heroic 
 legends of the Hebrew people. I suppose this phrase- 
 ology conveys some new and striking impression to the 
 minds of those wh,o use it, or it could not have become 
 so popular as it is, here and elsewhere. I confess the 
 old childish notion of a battle between a man with shields 
 and buckler and greaves of brass, and a youth with a 
 ruddy countenance who went forth with his sling and 
 stone in the name of the Lord God of Israel, gives me 
 a sense of reality, which I miss altogether in the modern 
 substitute for it. Why the story should be looked upon 
 as an interpolated fragment I cannot conceive. It is 
 entirely in the spirit of all that goes before and of all 
 that follows. David no doubt became a hero in the eyes 
 of the men and the virgins of Israel. But nothing is
 
 in.] THE HEBREW HEROISM. 47 
 
 said by the historian to make us think him a hero. He 
 comes down with food and a message from his father to 
 his brothers ; he hears from them only scornful words 
 about the sheep he has left in the wilderness; Saul smiles 
 at his boldness in thinking he can meet the Philistine ; 
 Goliath laughs at him, and curses him by his gods. 
 Everything is said to make us feel the feebleness of the 
 Israelitish champion ; everything to remind us that the 
 nation of Israel was the witness for the nothingness of 
 man in himself, for the might of man when he knows 
 that he is nothing, and puts his trust in the living God. 
 We may write the Bible again ; but as long as it remains 
 what it is, this must be the sense of it. And this is the 
 sense which human beings want now as in the times of 
 old. We want to be reminded, as much in the age of 
 all mechanical inventions and triumphs, as in the age of 
 greatest barbarism, that the shield and the helmet, 
 and the greaves of brass, do not constitute strength ; 
 that the sling and the stone in the hand of one who 
 believes in invisible power, are ever the symbols and 
 pledges of victory. If to disbelieve this is to cast off 
 Hebrew old clothes, it is also to put on the most vulgar 
 worn-out garments of tyranny and superstition ; it is 
 to fall down and worship brute force, to declare that 
 to be the Lord. How soon we may come through our 
 refinements, our civilisation, our mock hero-worship, to 
 that last and most shameful prostration of the human 
 spirit, God only knows. But He does know. And 
 because He lives and is true, He will, make it manifest 
 in His own due time, that the law of His universe is 
 not changed, and that by that law all true strength 
 must be made perfect in weakness. 
 
 David, however, did become a hero in the sight of the
 
 48 THE CAPTAIN OF FREEBOOTERS. [SEEM. 
 
 people ; they celebrated in their songs and dances the 
 shepherd who had become the son of the king, and who 
 slew his ten thousands, while Saul slew his thousands. 
 A fearful crisis surely for him who had been learning 
 by such slow silent discipline, and now by such a signal 
 triumph, whence all glory conies ! A dizzy height for a 
 man to stand upon, who had also received the mysterious 
 anointing, and who might well dream that a kingdom 
 was within his reach ! He must have, learned then, that 
 there were stronger and nearer enemies than Goliath, 
 who might turn his boast into confusion, his life into a 
 lie. He must have struggled hard with those enemies ; 
 for we are told that he behaved himself prudently, that 
 he was glad to soothe Saul when he was tormented by 
 his evil spirit, that he fled from him instead of provoking 
 his wrath. But if he had been under no better conduct 
 than his own, his prudence, and the higher wisdom 
 which was the source of it, would both have forsaken 
 him; he would have snatched at a power which he 
 could only turn to the ruin of those over whom he 
 exercised it. He was under a Teacher who did not 
 leave him to himself, who was leading him, through 
 the terrible discipline of flattery, as He had through 
 the quieter and safer experiences of his youth, to 
 understand what a king is and what his dangers are j 
 and who had yet higher lessons for him, to be learnt in 
 another way. 
 
 David as an outlaw, is to many a far less pleasant 
 subject of contemplation, than the same David as a 
 shepherd or as the champion of Israel. Most people 
 feel the beauty of the story of Jonathan's love for him, 
 which binds these two portions of his history together. 
 They can understand that the man who called forth
 
 in.] THE BIBLE TO BE READ HONESTLY. 49 
 
 such affections, must have had deeper qualities in him 
 than those which command the admiration of a multi- 
 tude ; if this admiration was not itself paid to those 
 qualities, to the frank, warm, trustful heart which 
 spoke out in its deeds, rather than to the deeds merely 
 in themselves. But the captain to whom everyone 
 resorted that was in distress, and everyone who was 
 discontented, the freebooter who made a foray one 
 day upon the Philistines, and another went down to 
 punish Nabal for not giving food to support his fol- 
 lowers, affronts all our notions of what is decorous, and 
 makes us think that we are reading the exploits of a 
 border chief, rather than a passage of a divine record. 
 We certainly should not shrink from describing David 
 in the terms in which the Bible itself describes him, nor 
 try to make out a case for him or it, by distorting a 
 single fact, even by giving it a different colour from 
 that which it would have if we found it elsewhere. If 
 we meet with the tale as simply told in a profane author, 
 we should admit that many of the acts attributed to 
 David, however strange and out of place they would be 
 in an ordinary legal condition of society, were perfectly 
 just and honourable when all formal bonds were broken ; 
 some of them (e.g. his conduct to Achish) we should say 
 were natural, but not justifiable, in his circumstances or 
 any other circumstances. We cannot vary our language 
 because the standard of the book we are reading is more 
 divine. The difference is, that while the Bible sets before 
 as broadly and without comment just the temptations 
 which a man in such a position would be likely to fall 
 into, and leaves it to our conscience, enlightened by its 
 own teaching, to say when he did or did not fall into 
 them, it takes still more pains to make us understand 
 

 
 50 THE CAVE OF ADULLAM. [SERM. 
 
 what the man himself was, the purpose of his being, the 
 light by which he was guided. David, in the cave of 
 Adullain, amidst his wild reckless comrades, is essentially 
 the same man as David in the sheepfolds,or David fight- 
 ing the Philistine. He had not chosen his own circum- 
 stances, he had been thrown into them. He did not 
 rebel against Saul. He did not deny his authority, or 
 plot against his life even when he had cast him off. He 
 had no home, and he was compelled to seek one where 
 he could. I do not know where a better home could 
 have been provided for him than among these men in 
 distress, in debt, in discontent. If it behoved a ruler 
 to know the heart of his subjects, their sorrows, their 
 wrongs, their crimes ; to know them and to sympathise 
 with them ; this was surely as precious a part of hie 
 schooling as the solitude of his boyhood, or as any 
 intercourse he had with easy men who had never faced 
 the misery of the world, and had never had any motive 
 to quarrel with its laws. He was now among the lowest 
 of those whom he would afterwards have to govern, not 
 hearing at a distance of their doings and sufferings, 
 but partaking in them livingly ; realising the influences 
 which were disposing them to evil. And here he was 
 acquiring more real reverence for law and order, more 
 understanding of their nature than those can ever arrive 
 at who have never known the need of them from the want 
 of them. He was bringing his wild followers under a 
 loving discipline and government which they had never 
 experienced ; he was teaching them to confess a law 
 which no tyrant had created, no anarchy could set 
 aside. He instructed them by his example to bow before 
 female grace and gentleness, to reverence the person 
 of an enemy, to treat a king as the Lord's anointed.
 
 i".] EIGHT MUST BECOME MIGHT. 51 
 
 " Come, ye children/' he says in a Psalm which a reason- 
 able Jewish tradition connects with this part of his life: 
 " Come, ye children, and I will teach you the fear of the 
 Lord. What man is he that lusteth to live, and would 
 fain see good days ? Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy 
 lips that they speak no guile. Eschew evil and do good, 
 seek peace and ensue it. The eyes of the Lord are over 
 the righteous : His ears are open to their cry." This is 
 no dull sermon of a man discoursing to wretched people 
 against sins to which he has no mind. It is the honest, 
 hearty, sympathetic voice of a captain speaking to a 
 band, each one of whom he knows, telling him of a 
 right way which they may follow together, and of a 
 wrong way into which he is as much in danger of 
 straying as ourselves. He speaks to them of a God 
 who thinks of them, who is watching over them, who 
 does not despise their poverty, who will avenge their 
 wrongs ; but who desires above all that they should be 
 right, who is willing and able to make them right. 
 
 And this was the lesson which David was at the same 
 time taking home to his own inmost heart. Through 
 oppression, confusion, lawlessness, he was learning the 
 eternal and essential righteousness of God. He had 
 been taught to despise the brute force of the lion and 
 the bear and the Philistine before ; he was now taught 
 to despise all power whatsoever, lodged in men circum- 
 cised or uncircumcised, which was maintaining itself 
 against Bight. He was set in the throne who judged 
 right. "Hear the right; attend unto my cry \" he could 
 say with confidence that the prayer would at last be 
 answered. He was sure that though the kings of the 
 earth might gather together, and say, 'let us break these 
 bands of right asunder, and cast away these cords 
 
 E 2
 
 52 THE NEW CRISIS. [SERM. 
 
 from us/ He that sitteth in the heavens would laugh, 
 the Lord would have them in derision. He had set his 
 righteous king upon the holy hill of Zion, and all the 
 nations must do him homage. 
 
 The time came when David's faith in the existence 
 of a righteous kingdom, which had its ground in the 
 unseen world, and which might exhibit itself really though 
 not perfectly in this, was to be brought to the severest 
 of all trials. Saul died on the mountains of Gilboa : the 
 Philistines possessed themselves of the cities of Israel. 
 The new mode of government for which the people 
 craved so earnestly had been tried, they had become 
 like the countries round about, these countries were 
 now their masters. They had gained such a king as they 
 had imagined, a leader of their hosts. They had lost 
 law, discipline, and fellowship : now their hosts had 
 perished. Could there come Order out of this chaos ? 
 Whence was it to come ? From a band of freebooters '( 
 That was to be seen. If the chief of this band thought 
 of setting up a dominion for himself, of making his fol- 
 lowers possessors of the lands from which they had been 
 driven out, of putting down his private enemies, of 
 rising by the arms of soldiers and the choice of a faction 
 to be a tyrant, his life would be merely a vulgar tale 
 such as age after age, civilised and barbarous, has to 
 record ; a tale that would be merely dull and flat from 
 its frequent repetition, from the utter absence of any- 
 thing but the lowest purposes and the pettiest plotting 
 in the actor, if we could lose the sad reflection that 
 millions of human beings are interested in events which 
 the onlooker may be disposed to regard with indifference 
 or contempt, and the consolatory recollection that by 
 the crimes of foolish, feeble men, God is bringing forth
 
 in.] THE MAN AFTER GOD'S OWN HEART. 53 
 
 His wisdom and righteousness into clear light. But if 
 David took this disordered miserable country of his 
 fathers into his hands, not as a prize which he had 
 won, but as a heavy and awful trust that was com- 
 mitted to him, a trust for which he had been prepared 
 in the sheepfolds, which he could only administer while 
 he remembered that the Lord was his Shepherd, and 
 that He was the Shepherd of every Israelite and of 
 every man on the earth, then, however hopeless 
 seemed the materials with which he had to work, and 
 which he had to mould, he might believe confidently 
 that he should be in his own day the restorer of Israel, 
 and the witness and prophet of the complete restoration 
 of it and of mankind. 
 
 This, brethren, was the man after God's own heart, 
 the man who thoroughly believed in God, as a living 
 and Righteous Being; who in all changes of fortune 
 clung to that conviction ; who could act upon it, live 
 upon it ; who could give himself up to God to use him 
 as he pleased ; who could be little or great, popular or 
 contemptible, just as God saw fit that he should be; 
 who could walk on in darkness secure of nothing but 
 this, that truth must prevail at last, and that he was 
 sent into the world to live and die that it might pre- 
 vail ; who was certain that the triumph of the God of 
 Heaven would be for the blessing of the most miserable 
 outcasts upon earth. Have we asked ourselves how the 
 Scripture can dare to represent a man with David's 
 many failings, with that eager, passionate temper 
 which evidently belonged to him, with all the manifold 
 temptations which accompany a vehement, sympathetic 
 character, with the great sins which we shall be told of 
 hereafter, as one who could share the counsels and do
 
 54 REPENTANCE FOR HEARTLESSNESS. [SERM. 
 
 the will of a Holy Being ? Oh ! rather let us ask our- 
 selves, whether, with a plausible exterior, a respectable 
 behaviour, an unimpeachable decorum in the sight of 
 men, we can ever win this smile, hear this approving 
 sentence. The words, " Well done, good and faithful 
 servant," are not spoken by the Judge of all now, will 
 not be spoken in the last day, to him who has found in 
 his pilgrimage through this world, no enemies to fight 
 with, no wrongs to be redressed, no right to be main- 
 tained. How many of us feel, in looking back upon 
 acts which the world has not condemned, which friends 
 have perhaps applauded, " we had no serious purpose 
 there; we merely did what it was seemly and con- 
 venient to do, we were not yielding to God's righteous 
 will ; we were not inspired by His love." How many 
 of us feel that our bitterest repentances are to be for 
 this, that all things have gone so smoothly with us, 
 because we did not care to make the world better or to 
 be better ourselves. How many of us feel that those 
 who have committed grave, outward transgressions, 
 into which we have not fallen because the motives to 
 them were not present with us or because God's grace 
 kept us hedged round by influences which resisted them, 
 may nevertheless have had hearts which answered 
 more to God's heart, which entered far more into the 
 grief and the joy of His Spirit, than ours ever did. 
 And that such lamentations for the past may not be 
 fruitless, let us ask for the time to come, that we may 
 not be of the class which Christ describes by the 
 mouth of His Apostle, as neither hot nor cold; that 
 He will fill us with a burning zeal in His service ; that 
 He will make us indifferent where or among whom our 
 lot is cast, among princes or among outlaws, whether
 
 in.] REPENTANCE FOB HEARTLESSNESS. 85 
 
 we are respected or scorned ; so long as we may but 
 testify to all that He who took upon Him the form 
 of a servant, He who was despised and rejected of 
 men, the true Man after God's own heart, the Son of 
 David and the Son of God, is the present and eternal 
 Shepherd, to whom the weary and wandering may turn 
 for help and guidance now, since he has passed through 
 the valley of the shadow of death for them; from 
 whom they may expect fuller deliverance hereafter, 
 seeing that He must reign till He has put all enemies 
 under His feet.
 
 SERMON IV. 
 
 DAVID THE KING. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 3rd Sunday in Advent. Dec. 14, 1851.) 
 
 " And David perceived that the Lord had established him king over 
 Israel, and that He had exalted His Kingdom for His people 
 Israel's sake." 2 SAMUEL v. 12. 
 
 THIS language, some may think, would have been 
 suitable and pious, if an extraordinary, evidently 
 miraculous, event had raised David to the throne of 
 Israel. Such an event might have enabled him to per- 
 ceive that he was divinely elected to reign ; he might 
 have continued to reign with the same comfortable 
 assurance. But he appears to have risen quite as slowly, 
 under the same course of accidents, as other leaders 
 of troops in tolerably quiet conditions of society, to say 
 nothing of those which are utterly anarchical. He be- 
 longed to an honourable tribe, he had performed great 
 exploits, he had strong popular sympathy with him, in- 
 creased by the unfair treatment he had undergone from 
 Saul. He had the command of a body of compact, 
 devoted, even desperate followers. Saul and Jonathan 
 were dead. Battles and assassinations, perpetrated by 
 men hoping to gain rewards from him, or under the 
 influence of private enmity, removed his rival out of
 
 SEBM. iv.] HOW GOD ESTABLISHES A KING. 57 
 
 his way. What man who has not taken some very out- 
 rageous method of establishing his power, might not say 
 that the Lord had bestowed his dominion upon him, if 
 that phrase became the lips of the shepherd-sovereign ? 
 This is a question which I am not able to answer. I 
 do not know what king might not safely adopt these 
 words and ought not to adopt them. The danger, I 
 fancy, lies in the disbelief of them, or in the idle use of 
 them when no definite meaning is attached to them. 
 So far from admitting that David would have had more 
 right or would have been more likely to think and speak 
 as he did, if some angel suddenly appearing had placed 
 the crown upon his head, I apprehend that the strength 
 and liveliness of his conviction arose from the number 
 of conspiring accidents, often seemingly cross accidents, 
 which had led him into so new and dangerous a position. 
 It was the successiveness, the continuity, of the steps 
 in his history, which assured him that God's hand had 
 been directing the whole of it. One startling event 
 would have made no such impression upon him. That 
 he might have referred to chance, or to the rare irregular 
 interference of an omnipotent Being. Only such a 
 Being as the Lord God of Abraham, only one who had 
 guided each patriarch and the whole nation from age 
 to age through strange unknown ways, could have 
 woven the web of his destinies, could have controlled 
 his proceedings and the proceedings of indifferent, of 
 unrighteous, men. Had David, instead of maintain- 
 ing the ground which circumstances pointed out to him 
 as his, seized violently that which was not his, he 
 would not have perceived that the Lord had made him 
 king of Israel ; he would have felt that he had made 
 himself so, and would have acted upon that persuasion.
 
 58 THE DIVINE KING EULES FOE HIS PEOPLE. [SEEM. 
 
 For the two clauses of the sentence are intimately 
 and inseparably connected. David perceived that God 
 had established his kingdom, and he knew that He had 
 exalted it for His people Israel's sake. A government 
 which a man wins for himself he uses for himself. 
 That which he inwardly and practically acknowledges 
 as conferred upon him by a righteous being, cannot be 
 intended for himself. And thus it is, that the early 
 and mysterious teaching of David while he was in the 
 sheepfolds, bore so mightily upon his life after he 
 became a king. The deepest, lesson which he had learnt, 
 was that he himself was under government ; that in his 
 heart and will was the inmost circle of that authority 
 which the winds and the sea, the moon and the stars 
 obeyed. We have seen how the sense of this invisible 
 kingdom was awakened in him ; how it was quickened 
 by all joyful and bitter experiences, by the cars of 
 sheep and the society of outlaws. To understand that 
 the empire over wills and hearts is the highest which 
 man can exercise, because it is the highest which 
 God exercises ; to understand that his empire cannot 
 be one of rough compulsion, because the divinest power 
 is not of this kind; to understand the necessity for 
 stern, quick, inevitable punishment, arises from the 
 unwillingness of men to abide under a yoke of grace and 
 gentleness ; to understand that the law looks terrible 
 and overwhelming to the wrong-doer, just because he 
 has shaken off his relation to the Person from whom 
 law issues, in whom dwells all humanity and sympathy, 
 all forgiveness and reclaiming mercy, this was the 
 highest privilege of a Jewish king, that upon which 
 the rightful exercise of all his functions depended. 
 
 Two memorable passages in the history of David,
 
 IV .] THE CAPITAL. 59 
 
 the establishment of his capital, and the removal of the 
 ark to the hill above it, illustrate the principles upon 
 which his kingdom stood ; and show wherein it differed 
 from the great Asiatic empires which were contem- 
 porary with it, and which had existed nearly in the 
 same form, perhaps, centuries before the birth of Abra- 
 ham. The first sign of the unity of these monarchies 
 was the building of some great city Babylon, or Calah, 
 or Nineveh. The inhabitants of such cities felt that 
 they were a people because they were compassed with 
 walls. Within those walls there speedily were built 
 temples to some of the powers of nature, which they 
 feared. Very soon as we now have such good means 
 of knowing the arts of sculpture came forth, doing 
 honour to animal forms, which, for their strength or 
 their swiftness, were believed to be divine. With a 
 great hunter as a ruler, with one of these cities as the 
 centre of their strength, with divinities thus conceived 
 and visibly represented as their protectors, these Asiatic 
 worlds continually enlarged their limits, absorbed new 
 tribes into themselves, acquired the titles of conquest 
 and glory for one or another of their temporary masters. 
 The commonwealth of Israel began in open plains and 
 pastures. A single man, who had not afoot of earth for 
 his possession, was its founder. A family of colonists, 
 still dwelling on a land which was not theirs, suc- 
 ceeded to him. These became a race of Egyptian 
 captives. They acquired laws, festivals, a polity, first 
 in a wilderness. They struggled hard for generations 
 with the corrupted people of the land into which they 
 came. Only after centuries of conflicts, discomfitures, 
 humiliations, they acquired a king, and a city which 
 he could make the centre of their tribes. But these
 
 60 THE TWO KINDS OF CIVILIZATION. [SERM. 
 
 had been centuries of moral and political progress, of 
 the deepest experiences for individuals, and for the 
 whole nation, respecting the grounds of their social 
 existence, and the relation in which they stood to the 
 visible and the invisible world. All this time they had 
 been learning to worship a Being who was not to be 
 made in the likeness of things in the heaven above or 
 in the earth beneath ; to apprehend him as a present, 
 unseen Lawgiver, Judge, Deliverer, in whom they might 
 put their trust. They learned that a nation built upon 
 fear and distrust must be evil while it lasts, and must 
 at length come to ruin. Here are the two kinds of 
 civilisation; the civic life, the life of cities, is in one 
 the beginning, is in the other the result, of a long 
 process. But in the first you have a despotism, which 
 becomes more expansive and more oppressive from day 
 to day : expansive everywhere except in the spirits of 
 those it rules ; they are more contracted from year to 
 year: oppressive of everything but crime and disorder; 
 they possess growing activity and freedom. In the other 
 case you have a struggle, sometimes a weary struggle; 
 but it is the struggle of spirits, it is a struggle for life. 
 And God himself is helping that struggle ; is working 
 with and for the spirits whom He has formed; is bring- 
 ing them out of darkness into an ever clearer and 
 broader light, out of confusion into a real, at last even 
 to something like a visible and outward, unity. 
 
 But this unity does not stand in the walls of the 
 capital city, even though that city be the holy city and 
 the city of peace. When David had made this con- 
 quest from the Jebusites, and had set up his throne in 
 it, he was impatient till he had brought the Ark of God 
 there, and placed it, with songs, and shoutings, and
 
 iv.] THE ARK. 61 
 
 dancings, on the holy hili. That Ark had been the 
 witness to the people that they were one people, be- 
 cause they had the one God dwelling in the midst of 
 them ; while they are shifting their tents continually 
 in the wilderness, perishing from heat and drought, 
 sighing for the slavery, if they might but have the 
 flesh-pots, of Egypt. It was to be the witness of the 
 same truth to those who were dwelling in settled habi- 
 tations, who were under a native government ; whose 
 hunger and thirst were not quenched by manna from 
 heaven, or by water from a rock, but by the produce 
 of ordinary fields and fountains. It spoke to them, as it 
 had to the others, of a permanent Being, of a righteous 
 Being, always above His creatures, always desiring 
 fellowship with them a fellowship which they could 
 only realise when they were seeking to be like Him. 
 " Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ; or who 
 shall rise up into His holy place ? " so spake David 
 as he brought the Ark to its resting-place " Even he 
 that hath clean hands and a pure heart : who hath not 
 lifted up his mind unto vanity, nor sworn to deceive 
 his neighbour." 
 
 The moral being of the nation then, as of each indi- 
 vidual of it, stood in the confession of a person absolutely 
 good, the ground of all goodness in His creatures, acces- 
 sible to them while they sought Him with fear and 
 reverence, as the King, Protector, Friend, of each and 
 of all. There could be no lesson to a king so deep and 
 solemn as this, respecting the- nature, condition, and 
 bulwarks of his own authority ; no warning so fearful 
 against forgetting that the bond which united him to 
 his subjects, was also the bond which united him to 
 God. He ruled so long as his throne was based upon
 
 62 DAVID'S POLYGAMY. [SERH. 
 
 righteousness; the moment he sought for any other 
 foundation, he would become weak and contemptible. 
 All David's discipline had been designed to settle him 
 in this truth. He was the man after God's own heart, 
 because he so graciously received that discipline and 
 imbibed that truth. The signal sin of his life con- 
 firmed it still more mightily for himself and for all 
 ages to come. 
 
 I have shown in what respect David was not an 
 ordinary Oriental Monarch, but the very opposite of one. 
 The history tells us as plainly, that there were points 
 in which he resembled the sovereigns of the East of 
 that day, and the Caliphs and Sultans of later times. 
 He had his wives and his concubines. No divine edict 
 told him that such indulgence was unlawful. For, 
 thanks be to God, though He makes use of edicts and 
 statutes, it is not by these mainly that he rules the 
 universe. The Bible, as we have seen, is, from first to 
 last, the history of a practical education God leading 
 men by slow degrees to enter into His mind and pur- 
 poses, and to mould their own into conformity with 
 His. If we want exemplifications of all the miseries 
 and curses which spring from the mixture of families 
 and the degradation of women in a court and country 
 where polygamy exists, David's history supplies them. 
 No maxims of morality can be half so effectual as a 
 faithful record of terrible facts like these. But the 
 thorough correction of this monstrous evil, the full 
 assertion of the principle which is opposed to it, could 
 not, so far as we may judge, be brought out in that stage 
 of the history of society. In later times of the Jewish 
 commonwealth, when the royal power had ceased, 
 when the people had been more instructed in theopposi-
 
 iv.] DAVID'S ADULTERY AND MURDER. 63 
 
 tion between their own polity and that of the Asiatic 
 despotisms, there was a very evident awakening of the 
 conscience upon this subject, a growing anticipation of 
 the principle which Christendom has adopted and cano- 
 nized. The like feeling however resisted by evil passions 
 and a corrupt mythology, it pleased God to awaken 
 in some of the Pagan nations of the West, in Greece, 
 in Rome, among the Teutonic tribes. The instinctive 
 recognition of the true law of marriage was a prepara- 
 tion, the most wonderful, perhaps, of all, for the 
 revelation of the one Lord and Husband of Humanity. 
 Certainly wherever polygamy exists there is the most 
 fatal resistance to that revelation ; certainly also, 
 wherever the fact of Christ's incarnation is acknow- 
 ledged, there is a horror of polygamy which can be 
 explained by no arguments, which resists all subtleties 
 of logic, all pretended authority from the example of 
 patriarchs, which prohibits by a fixed law what was 
 esteemed innocent and regal among those who lived 
 before the Kingdom of Heaven was proclaimed, even 
 though they might be the prophets of it. 
 
 These facts must be borne in mind, if we would 
 understand what constituted that guilt of David which 
 the Prophet Nathan brought home to him by the story 
 of the ewe-lamb. For a king to take the wife of a poor 
 man ; how light a fault may this have appeared to one 
 with the power and privileges which David possessed ! 
 Supposing there was a fixed law against adultery, did 
 this law apply to the ruler of the land ; was he not in 
 some sense above law ? Such are the arguments and 
 sophistries which would occur to one who was wrest- 
 ling with his conscience, either to give him leave to 
 commit a wrong, or not to torment him for it when it
 
 64 THE ACCUSING SPIRIT. [SERJI. 
 
 was done. And then if the husband of this woman 
 stood in the way of the full gratification of his purpose, 
 or of the concealment of it, was there anything strange 
 that he, who was exposing thousands of his subjects to 
 the chances of battle and death, should expose this one ? 
 Why was his life more precious than that of any other 
 Israelite ? Was it precious simply because it was con- 
 venient to his master that he should lose it ? And so 
 the deeds were done. Bathsheba was taken ; Joab, by 
 David's order, put Uriah in an exposed place where he 
 was sure to be slain. And David, no doubt, performed 
 all his official tasks as before, went daily to the services 
 of the Tabernacle, was probably most severe in enforcing 
 punishments upon all wrong-doers. That characteristic 
 feature of a transgressor, his rapid and bitter condem- 
 nation of other transgressors, is strikingly preserved 
 in the Scripture portrait. " And David's anger was 
 greatly kindled against the rich man who had stolen 
 the poor man's lamb. And he said, 'The man who 
 hath done this thing shall surely die.' '' This energy 
 of virtue, this mighty effort to get credit with oneself 
 for a lively sense of right and hatred of injustice, 
 who does not recognise it ? Who should not tremble 
 while he thinks, The evil spirit who prompts to this 
 consummate deceit and hypocrisy, is near to me ; I am 
 tempted continually to fly from the light which would 
 show me the foul spots in my own soul, by projecting 
 them outside of me, and pronouncing sentence upon 
 them in another man. But how satisfactory to think 
 that while all this was at work in David's heart, it was 
 not left to the ease and comfort which, no doubt, it 
 was seeking for, and striving by all artifices to secure. 
 What availed it that he could so plausibly justify the
 
 iv.] THE INTERPRETER OF ITS VOICE. 65 
 
 acts he had done, and give them gentle names, and 
 could prove that they were not adultery and murder in 
 him, though they might be in anyone else ? "WTat 
 availed it that he could look back to holy prayers and 
 songs in the night, and evident tokens that God was 
 with him ? What availed it to argue that he must be 
 the same man now that he had ever been ? There was 
 a voice near him saying, ' Thou hast done it and thou 
 canst not change it. God is no respecter of persons. It 
 signifies nothing to Him that thou art called king, or 
 saint, or psalmist. Thy heart is not at one with Him, 
 and thou knowest it. Thou art living in a lie, and 
 thou knowest it. Thou art a miserable heartless man 
 at this time, and thou knowest it. And to have been 
 called the man after God's own heart, is nothing at all 
 to thee. It only adds a sting and bitterness to thy 
 present self-condemnation, such as another could not 
 feel/ He understood this voice afterwards. Then the 
 effect of it was mere anarchy and restlessness of mind, 
 a condition in which a man hates his fellows and 
 wishes to disbelieve in God, and dares not. " While I 
 held my tongue," he says, " my bones consumed away 
 through my daily complaining. For thy hand is heavy 
 upon me. My moisture is like the drought in summer." 
 No language ever described so vividly the sense of a 
 weight at the heart, a weight that cannot be lifted ; 
 and it was the weight of God's own presence, of that 
 presence which he had once spoken of as the fulness of 
 joy. With this oppression, like that of the air before a 
 thunderstorm, came the drying up of all the moisture 
 and freshness of life, the parching heat of fever. Did 
 the Prophet Nathan bring all this to his consciousness? 
 No, surely. The Prophet Nathan came at the appointed
 
 66 THE FIFTY-FIRST PSALM. [SERM. 
 
 moment, to tell him in clear words, by a living instance, 
 that which he had been hearing in muttered accents 
 within his heart for months before. He came to tell 
 him that the God of righteousness and mercy, who 
 cared for Uriah, the poor man with the single ewe-lamb, 
 was calling him, the king, to account, for an act of 
 unrighteousness and unmercifulness. Nathan brought 
 him to face steadily the light at which he had been 
 winking, and to own that the light was good, that it 
 was the darkness only which was horrible and hateful ; 
 so that he might turn to the light, and crave that it 
 should once more penetrate into the depths of his being 
 and take possession of him. 
 
 And this was his confession and prayer. He makes 
 out no case for himself; he pleads no extenuating 
 circumstances. I myself have sinned, and done this 
 evil in thy sight. My joy is in the thought, that Thou 
 wilt be clear when Thou art judged. If I did not 
 believe that Thou art altogether just and righteous and 
 true, I could have no hope. Because Thou art this, I 
 believe that Thou canst and wilt make me a clean 
 heart, and renew a right spirit within me. It is not 
 the misery which Thou wilt lay upon me for my sin 
 that I dread ; the misery is to be false, and to continue 
 in a falsehood. But Thou desirest truth in the inward 
 parts ; and Thou canst make me to understand wisdom 
 secretly. I fancied, till Thou didst find me out, that I 
 could make peace with Thee by offering sacrifices. 
 But Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it 
 Thee. Thou Thyself must give the sacrifice that we 
 may offer it. This one of a broken and contrite heart 
 which Thou has given to me, I offer to Thee, and Thou 
 wilt not despise it. When Thou hast restored the king
 
 IT.] THE ANSWER TO PRAYER. 67 
 
 to his right state, and built up again the walk of the 
 city which Thou hast promised to bless, then indeed we 
 may come and offer bullocks upon Thy altar, the 
 expressions of united submission of king and people to 
 Thee, their just and forgiving King and Lord. 
 
 What was the answer to this prayer ? First the 
 death of Bathsheba's child ; next the discovery of 
 hateful crimes in his household ; finally the revolt of 
 the beloved Absalom. These, answers to a prayer for 
 forgiveness ? Yes, if forgiveness means what David 
 took it to mean, having truth in the inward parts ; 
 knowing wisdom secretly. He had had falsehood in 
 his inward parts ; he had cherished the delusion that 
 he was free to do what he liked ; that laws and rules 
 were not for him ; that he might use a subject at his 
 pleasure. The taking the sins home to himself instead 
 of imputing them to circumstances or to God, had 
 brought him into fellowship with Truth once more. 
 He had known folly secretly ; he had dallied with silly 
 childish excuses; he had lost all freedom and manli- 
 ness of spirit. Now he had desired to be Wisdom's 
 pupil again. He had begun, with more prostration of 
 heart than ever before, to learn her lessons. And she 
 would assuredly not leave him till she had written 
 them upon his mind. To have his people's hearts 
 stolen from him, to have his child for his enemy, to be 
 deserted by his counsellors and his wives, to lose his 
 kingdom, to be mocked and cursed; this was rough 
 discipline surely. But he had desired it ; he had said 
 deliberately, " Make me a clean heart, and renew a 
 right spirit within me." And that blessing, if it was 
 granted him in part at once, if he rose up from that 
 very prayer a freed man with a free spirit, yet was to
 
 G8 ADVERSITY HAS NO POWER OP ITS OWN. [SERM. 
 
 be realised through his whole life, and to be secured by 
 methods which he certainly would not have devised or 
 chosen for himself. 
 
 But, as in all his past history, the discipline was not for 
 him more than for his people, not for his people more 
 than for all ages to come. The kingly lesson and the 
 human lesson are nowhere more intimately united than 
 here. That which enabled David, crushed and broken, 
 to be more than ever the man after God's own heart, to 
 see more than ever into the depths of wisdom and love 
 in that heart, was also that which fitted him to be a 
 ruler, by understanding the only condition on which 
 it is possible for a man to exercise real dominion over 
 others, viz., when he gives up himself, that they may 
 know God, and not him, to be their sovereign. 
 
 Those who administered the affairs of the English 
 church in the early years of the reign of Charles II., 
 chose the passage of the Book of Samuel which de- 
 scribes David's return to his kingdom, for the service 
 on the 29th of May. There was a solemn warning in 
 their selection. History has turned it into bitter irony. 
 The use of this lesson forbids us to forget the certain 
 and terrible truth, that years of hard adversity and 
 suffering do not of themselves fit a man to reign ; that 
 they may be worse than wasted upon him, that he may 
 come out of them more reckless and heartless, more 
 ignorant of any government exercised over himself, 
 less conscious of any responsibility for the government 
 which he exercises over others, than he went into 
 them. For our own individual benefit, as well as for 
 the sake of nations, we should lay this doctrine, hard 
 though it be, to heart. Adversity is in itself as little 
 gracious as prosperity. Moral death may be the fruit
 
 IT.] USES OF IT TO DAVID. 69 
 
 of one as much as of the other. It was otherwise with 
 David, not because adversity had any especial influ- 
 ence over him which it has not over us, but because he 
 accepted it as God's punishment and medicine, 
 because he believed that God would do the good for 
 him which adversity could not do. 
 
 One of the best proofs, it seems to me, that his school- 
 ing was effectual, is this, that all his family griefs, his 
 experience of his own evil, the desertion of his sub- 
 jects, did not lead him to fancy that he should be 
 following a course acceptable to God, if he retired to the 
 deserts, or ceased to be a shepherd of Israel, instead 
 of doing the work which was appointed for him. It 
 shows how healthy and true his repentance and faith 
 were that he again set himself to organise the people 
 and to fight their battles, to feed them and rule them with 
 all his power; when a religious prudence or self-interest 
 might have whispered, " Do thy best to make amends 
 by services to God for the ills thou hast done ; save 
 thyself, whatever becomes of thy people Israel." These 
 ungodly suggestions, the like of which came as angels 
 of light to so many Christian monarchs in the Middle 
 Ages and sent them to do penance for their evils and to 
 seek a crown of glory in monasteries, may have pre- 
 sented themselves to the man after God's own heart. If 
 they did, he proved his title to the name by rejecting 
 them. He showed that he could trust God to put him 
 in the position that was best for him ; that he knew 
 God did not send him into the world to provide either 
 for his body or his soul, but to glorify His name and to 
 bless His creatures. He was most devoted to God 
 when he was most devoted to His work. He prayed 
 fervently because he lived fervently. He found out
 
 70 THE PERVEKSION OF GOD'S INTIMATIONS. [SERJ*. 
 
 the necessity of seeking God continually, of meditating 
 upon His law, of blessing His name, because he learnt 
 how weak he was and how little he could be a king 
 over men when the image of the divine kingdom was 
 not present to him. 
 
 This is the impression which is left upon our minds 
 by the general context of his history after his restora- 
 tion. There are passages of that history, such as his 
 giving up the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites, which I 
 do not understand. I can perceive in the story a 
 recognition of the continuance of a nation's life, of it& 
 obligations, and its sins, from age to age. All national 
 morality, nay the meaning and possibility of history, 
 depends upon this truth, the sense of which is, I fear, 
 very weak in our day. But I cannot in the least tell 
 why the death of Saul's children should have been the 
 needful expiation of the nation's crimes. I do not 
 indeed see any pretext for the supposition, of course a 
 very ready and obvious one, that it was an act of policy 
 on David's part to rid of himself of a dangerous family; 
 there would be a blackness in the putting forward of a 
 religious motive for such a crime, which all our know- 
 ledge of his previous life forbids us to attribute to him. 
 On the other hand I conceive that we are not bound 
 to assume that the proceeding was in all particulars a 
 just one, because we are told that a divine intimation 
 was the cause of it. The Scripture is most careful 
 that we should feel the reality of these intimations, 
 that we should refer them to their true source, and yet 
 that we should understand how possible it is for a man 
 to pervert them and found wrong inferences upon 
 them, if his own mind is not in a thoroughly pure and 
 healthy condition.
 
 l.] NUMBERING THE PEOPLE. 71 
 
 An instance which illustrates and proves that prin- 
 ciple occurs shortly after this one. God is said to tempt 
 David to number the people. The thought that it was 
 a blessing and a cause of thankfulness to be the head of 
 a growing and thriving people, this was divine. The 
 thought that it was well for a ruler to be acquainted 
 with the condition and resources of his people, this 
 was divine. With the confidence that it was, must 
 have come an assurance from the very existence of the 
 Book of Numbers, that it was a right thing in itself, 
 a part of the divine ordinance, that each tribe and its 
 families, and the persons who composed them, should 
 be registered. But the determination, just then, to 
 send forth officers for the sake of ascertaining the armed 
 force of the land, this was the thought of a self-exalted 
 man, aspiring to be a military chief and conqueror ; a 
 thought which was at work also in His people, and 
 which threatened to make their organisation and his 
 victories steps to their ruin. And this tendency in 
 king and people was checked by a sweeping pestilence, 
 which brought them back to the feeling that their 
 power did not lie in the number of men capable of 
 bearing arms ; that if this were their reliance they 
 would soon be swallowed up by empires immeasurably 
 greater than themselves, the habits and false notions 
 of which they were adopting. I do not know anything 
 so instructive to us, if we use them as we ought, as 
 these passages in the Bible, which teach us that all 
 good thoughts, counsels, just works, come from the Spirit 
 of God ; and at the same time that we are in the most 
 imminent peril at every moment of turning the divine 
 suggestions into sin, by allowing our selfish and impure 
 conceits and rash generalisations to mix with them.
 
 72 NO DEATH-BED SCENES IN SCRIPTURE. [SERM. 
 
 We have seen that the life of David is the life neither 
 of a mere official, fulfilling a purpose in which he has 
 no interest, nor of a hero without fear and without 
 reproach ; but of a man inspired by a divine purpose, 
 under the guidance of a divine teacher, liable to all 
 ordinary errors, as likely as any of us to fall into great 
 sins. The interest we feel in him is strong and personal. 
 It is not won from us by a single exaggeration of his 
 merits by the least attempt to surround him with 
 some unnatural halo of glory. We should have wished, 
 perhaps, to see his sun setting with peculiar splendour; 
 to be told of some great acts, or hear some noble words, 
 which' would assure us that he died a saint. The Bible 
 does not in the least satisfy this expectation. It repre- 
 sents him in the bodily feebleness, in something like 
 the dotage, of old age. The last sentences which are 
 reported of him concern the after-administration of his 
 son's kingdom, and the punishment of some of his mis- 
 chievous subjects. Of all his words they are perhaps 
 those which we the least care to remember. We must 
 turn elsewhere than to the books of the Old or of the 
 New Testament for death-bed scenes. One beautiful 
 record of the first deacon of the Church, who prayed 
 for his countrymen, " Lord, lay not this sin to their 
 charge," is all that we have of martyrology in the Bible. 
 Its warriors fight the good fight. We know that in 
 some battle or other they finish their course. Where, 
 or how, under what circumstances of humiliation or 
 triumph, we are not told. If it pleased God that their 
 lamp should shine out brightly at the last, that was 
 well, for He was glorified in their strength. If it 
 pleased him that the light should sink and go out in its 
 socket, that was well too ; for He was glorified in their
 
 iv.] THE SEVENTY-SECOND PSALM. 73 
 
 weakness. Not by momentary flashes does God bid us 
 judge of our fellow-creatures; for He who reads the 
 heart and sees the meaning and purpose of it, judges 
 not of them by these. And never be it forgotten that 
 at the death which has redeemed all other deaths and 
 made them blessed, there was darkness over all the 
 land until the ninth hour, and that a cry came out 
 of the darkness, "My God, my God, why hast thou 
 forsaken me ? " 
 
 If you would judge of David, of what he was, and 
 what he looked for, let this psalm be your guide. "Give 
 the king thy judgments, oh God ! and thy righteous- 
 ness unto the king's son. He shall judge thy people 
 with righteousness, and thy poor with judgment. He 
 shall save the children of the needy, and shall break 
 in pieces the oppressor. He shall redeem their soul 
 from deceit and violence : and precious shall their blood 
 be in his sight. There shall be an handful of corn in 
 the earth upon the top of the mountains; the fruit 
 thereof shall shake like Lebanon : and they of the city 
 shall flourish like grass of the earth. His name shall 
 endure for ever : His name shall be continued as long 
 as the sun : and men shall be blessed in Him. All 
 nations shall call Him blessed. Blessed be the Lord 
 God, the God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous 
 things. And blessed be His glorious name for ever : 
 and let the whole earth be filled with His glory. The 
 prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended/' 
 
 And with that aspiration and hope, brethren, may 
 our prayers be ended. May it be the business of our 
 lives to testify, that there is a righteous kingdom esta- 
 blished upon the earth, and that God has set it up ; 
 and that His Son, who has made Himself one with all
 
 74 THE PASSING AWAY OF OPPEESSOES. [SEBM. IT. 
 
 poor and suffering men is at the head of it ; and that 
 it shall prevail over all oppression and violence ; and 
 that all nations shall be blessed by it. Let us grapple 
 this faith to our inmost souls now, when men think 
 and openly proclaim, that law and order are based not 
 on the will and mind of a gracious God who cares for 
 His creatures, but are to be the tools and servants of a 
 grasping Mammon; now, when we have proof s openly 
 before our eyes, how that low, grovelling, godless con- 
 viction leads at last to the trampling down of all law > 
 to the setting up of the most hateful lawless tyranny. 
 Let us not merely detest such outrages upon God's- 
 order but scorn them as essentially weak, as predestined 
 to destruction, however for a time He may permit them 
 for the chastisement of the sins and idolatries of other 
 nations, nay even if He should see fit to use them for 
 the chastisement of our own. " Rest in the Lord, and 
 wait patiently for Him : fret not thyself because of him 
 who prospereth in his way, because of the man who- 
 bringeth wicked devices to pass. Cease from anger, 
 and forsake wrath : fret not thyself in any wise to do 
 evil. For evil-doers shall be cut off : but those that 
 wait upon the Lord, they shall inherit the earth. For 
 yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be : yea, 
 thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall 
 not be. But the meek shall inherit the earth ; and 
 delight themselves in the abundance of peace."
 
 SERMON V. 
 
 THE WISE KING. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 4,th Sunday in Advent. Dec. 21, 1851.) 
 
 Aud Solomon said, ' Thou hast shewed unto thy servant David my 
 father great mercy, according as he walked before Thee in truth, 
 and in righteousness, and in uprightness of heart with Thee ; and 
 Thou hast kept for him this great kindness, that Thou hast given 
 him a son to sit on his throne, as it is this day. And now, O 
 Lord my God, Thou hast made Thy servant king instead of 
 David my father : and I am but a little child : I know not how 
 to go out or come in. And Thy servant is in the midst of Thy 
 people, which Thou hast chosen, a great people that cannot be 
 numbered nor counted for multitude. Give therefore Thy servant 
 an understanding heart to j udge Thy people, that I may discern 
 between good and bad : for who is able to judge this Thy so 
 great a people ? ' 1 KINGS iii. 6 U. 
 
 THE seventy-second Psalin, part of which I read to 
 you last Sunday, because it contains, if not the last 
 words, yet the habitual wishes, the inmost heart of 
 David, speaks of a son in whose days there should be 
 abundance of peace, to whom should be given of the 
 gold of Arabia, whose name should remain among the 
 posterities. That these words were fulfilled in the 
 peaceful and glorious reign of Solomon, most readers 
 believe. That there are other words in that Psalm 
 which speak of blessings far beyond any which came
 
 76 DESIRE OF FOUNDING A FAMILY. [SERM. 
 
 upon Israel or upon the earth then, or perhaps have 
 come upon it since, they also believe. How are we to 
 connect the different passages together; which may 
 we assign to the immediate successor, which point to 
 some distant, unrealised future ? 
 
 Though this inquiry concerns the sense and inter- 
 pretation of all the Psalms, nay, the very nature of 
 Prophecy itself, I propose to speak of it only as it bears 
 upon the subject which comes under our notice this 
 afternoon. There can be no doubt, I conceive, that the 
 dream of transmitting his kingdom to a child of his 
 own had often visited the mind of David. We should 
 naturally conclude that he fixed upon the favourite 
 Absalom as his successor. His rebellion was a sad 
 mockery of that expectation. But it was not only a 
 mockery. It was the severest part of that discipline, 
 so regular and consistent, which taught David that the 
 kingdom was not his, that another than he ruled it, 
 that it was established in his hands not for his own 
 sake, but for the sake of God's people Israel. It was as 
 much a falsehood in the king to think of giving it away 
 according to some choice or fancy of his own, as it was 
 a falsehood in the people to desire a king who should 
 merely lead their armies and make them like the other 
 nations. Bat just as the self-willed and sensual longing 
 which caused Samuel so much sorrow was the perver- 
 sion of a divine instinct which in due time was to be 
 satisfied, so did it prove in this case also. The desire 
 to advance a beloved child had much of selfishness in 
 it ; the passion for founding a family though it was of 
 nobler kind, clung too closely to the mere individual 
 who cherished it. But the paternal impulse and the 
 power of looking onwards into another age when the
 
 v.] THE CHILD OF BATHSHEBA. 77 
 
 father and perhaps also the child should have left the 
 earth, these do not belong to the earth or to David ^ 
 they belong to humanity ; their root is in God. To keep 
 them alive had been a main part of all the wonderful 
 education of Abraham and of his descendants. The 
 mystery of fatherhood and of birth had been that which 
 the old patriarch had learnt while he dwelt in the open 
 plain of Canaan, apart from the corrupted cities. The 
 desire for offspring which seemed to be accomplished in 
 Ishmael, the long waiting for Isaac, the sight at last of 
 the child of laughter and joy, these had been the main- 
 springs of his life ; upon these all his knowledge of 
 other higher truths, of death, of sacrifice, depended. 
 The continuousness of the history, the links of here- 
 ditary sympathy by which the parts of it are bound 
 together, we all feel,, whether we are able to explain 
 the fact to ourselves or not, are one secret of our 
 interest in it, are internal tokens and pledges of its 
 divinity. 
 
 It was a son of Bathsheba who was to teach David, 
 in circumstances grievously unfavourable, one would 
 have thought, to such learning, this truth which had 
 been imparted, by a like experimental method, to the 
 first fathers of his race. Birth became associated with 
 death, and with his own sin as the cause of death. 
 Shame, repentance, the desire to do justice to one whom 
 he had bitterly wronged, bound him to his wife with 
 more real affection than he had, perhaps, ever felt for 
 any other. The child who was born after the one for 
 whom he had prayed and fasted was taken must have 
 had a mysterious worth in his eyes; he must have looked 
 upon it as especially given to him ; he could not claim 
 any right over it ; it was God's. This child he was
 
 78 DAVID'S VISION OF A SON. [SERM. 
 
 taught to connect with the permanence of the kingdom. 
 The thoughts which were awakened in him, as he 
 recollected all that had been and might have been in 
 his days, and of all that should be in his son's days, were, 
 not through some wild exaggeration, not through 
 some artificial arrangement, but by an eternal necessary 
 law, wider, deeper, higher than any, even the most bril- 
 liant series of outward events, could accomplish. Such 
 events he was sure there would be ; a heap of corn on 
 the earth higher than the hills ; the kings of Tharsis 
 and the Isles would bring presents; the kings of Arabia 
 and Saba would offer gifts. He trusted also that the 
 blood of the poor would be dear in Solomon's sight. 
 But the hope which these last words expressed, rested 
 upon the assurance that there was an inward sympathy 
 and communion between the king and the poorest of his 
 subjects, an actual relation between them which had 
 been realised and understood in some measure by David 
 and his people ; which might be realised more perfectly 
 in the son who was to follow him; which must be realised 
 perfectly some day. The power of the prophet, his 
 security that his thoughts and anticipations would prove 
 true, did not depend upon his knowledge of times and 
 seasons ; but upon the intimation which he had of the 
 mind and purpose of the Most High ; upon his con- 
 fidence that he and not the evil spirit would prevail: 
 and that the triumph of the Creator must be the triumph 
 of his creatures. This blessed conviction had enabled 
 David to struggle with hosts of enemies, with his own 
 sin and despair, it came forth now in strong close 
 alliance with his family life, as it had always been in 
 alliance with the life of his nation. A son of David 
 must be the deliverer of the poor and needy, a son of
 
 T.] SOLOMON'S PRAYER. 79 
 
 David must have dominion from the flood unto the 
 world's end. 
 
 In what sense then, I shall be asked, did David 
 expect that his son's kingdom would be a divine and 
 spiritual one ? in what sense an earthly and magni- 
 ficent one ? I answer ; he looked for no earthly mag- 
 nificence which was not the manifestation of an inward 
 and spiritual dominion ; he feared no earthly magnifi- 
 cence which was a manifestation of it. Solomon's own 
 history will be the best solution of the riddle if it is 
 one. The words which I have taken for my text are 
 the proper and natural introduction to it. 
 
 It is very needful in the case of Solomon, as in that 
 of David, to protest against an arbitrary separation of 
 the man from the king, of the devout student of God's 
 ways from the ruler and judge. The prayer which I 
 have just read to you shews how untenable and impos- 
 sible this classification is. He beseeches God for an 
 understanding heart. All his moral and spiritual desires 
 are gathered up in that petition. But it is understand- 
 ing to judge, because " I am in the midst of thy 
 people which thou hast chosen, a great people that 
 cannot be numbered or counted for multitude." He 
 asks precisely what he feels to be necessary for his 
 work ; he wants nothing more. Let us consider what 
 he felt that this work demanded. 
 
 " He must discern between good and bad." This he 
 perceived to be the characteristic function of a ruler. 
 He must know right from wrong ; must learn in com- 
 plicated cases to see into the truth ; to see it through 
 the falsehoods with which it might be mixed up ; to 
 see it in spite of any falsehoods that might be invented 
 to blacken it. Was this asking for a skilful habit, such
 
 80 THE UNDERSTANDING HEART. [SERM. 
 
 as worldly men acquire or fancy they acquire by long- 
 experience, of finding out the man who will cheat them ; 
 a habit which leads them at last to assume every man 
 a cheat until he has convinced them that he is honest ? 
 I apprehend it must have been one of Solomon's most 
 earnest desires that he might be saved from this 
 temptation, however sad and repeated might be his 
 discoveries of the tricks and impostures which men 
 practise upon themselves and upon each other. To 
 discern good first, that he might judge of evil by that ; 
 to be sure that whenever evil is found, there must be a 
 good side-by-side with it, struggling against it; to have 
 intense inward sympathy with the right, that he might 
 hate and resolutely put down the wrong ; this was the 
 gift which in his conscious ignorance, with the feeble- 
 ness of a little child, he desired Him who possessed it 
 to bestow. For why did he pray, if he did not think 
 that he was in the presence and under the government 
 of a righteous Judge who could and would teach him 
 of His own ways ; who could impart to him a discern- 
 ment of His own character, and so of everything that 
 contradicted it ? This perception, a perception which 
 by its nature must be internal, must belong to his very 
 self, was the essence of that understanding heart which 
 he believed was more precious than wealth and length 
 of days. It was a perception which implied a continual 
 looking up, the beholding an object immeasurably 
 above him who contemplated it, and yet an object 
 exactly answering to all his capacities and organs ; a 
 Being who had given him these capacities and organs 
 that they might converse with Him and reflect His 
 likeness. It was a perception which could never become 
 the separate individual possession of him who attained
 
 v.] KNOWLEDGE OF GOD AND OF SELF. 81 
 
 it. At the root of it, were faith, trust, affection, which 
 lift a man out of himself, which make him cleave to 
 that which he cannot comprehend or reduce to his own 
 measures and proportions; and which make every 
 exercise of his discernment, a means of expanding it. 
 
 I speak of this understanding heart as beginning 
 with the confession, and apprehension of God. I have 
 been quite unable to separate that statement from the 
 other that it implies self-knowledge. That knowledge, 
 says the wise heathen, descends from Heaven. Some 
 of us seem to fancy that it rises out of hell. We think 
 a man knows himself, when he discovers all the grovel- 
 ling tendencies which there are in himself and reconciles 
 himself to them. Assuredly it is through the keen 
 sense of evil within them, that most men are educated 
 to wisdom. But that is because the sense of evil con- 
 tains implicitly the pledge of a deliverer from it, 
 because the discovery of a flesh which is not subject to 
 the law of God neither can be, is never made except by 
 a spirit which delights in that law and asks for help to 
 fulfil it. The understanding heart of Solomon led him 
 to revere as well as to suspect himself; to revere that in 
 himself which was God's image, to suspect that which 
 was seeking to make images of its own ; to revere that 
 which united him to his fellow-men, to suspect and 
 dread that which divided him from them. 
 
 And this understanding heart therefore was a truly 
 kingly heart, seeing that it had a rich and free fellow- 
 ship with all kinds and classes of people, a sense of 
 that which was common to them all ; a power of enter- 
 ing into that which was peculiar to their crafts, localities, 
 temperaments ; a facility of distinguishing the person 
 who was fittest for any particular service ; in one word
 
 82 WISDOM SUPERNATURAL. [SEEM. 
 
 a judgment which was not determined by anything 
 external, which had its laws and principles in a world 
 that the eye sees not. 
 
 We are told that this same wisdom made Solomon a 
 student of all natural things, from the hyssop upon the 
 wall to the cedar of Lebanon. And if it was what I 
 have supposed, you will ?,/low at once that such a 
 wisdom is precisely what the man of science aims at 
 cultivating. He is fearful of being imposed upon by 
 the idols of sense, by the conclusions and anticipations 
 of his own mind. He is always seeking for that which 
 is. He seeks, believing that he may find. That faith 
 rests upon the conviction that he is not investigating 
 a world which he created for himself, nor a world 
 which is lawless and ungoverned, but one of which the 
 meanings and harmonies lie deep ; to be reached only 
 by him who feels that he is a little child and bewails 
 his ignorance, and desires clearer light that he may 
 wonder more. 
 
 But was not Solomon's wisdom supernatural ? Are 
 we justified in using language to describe it which con- 
 nects it with that of the ordinary king and student ? 
 I use the Bible language. Throughout the Book of 
 Proverbs you will find Solomon speaking of that which 
 belongs not to himself, but to every ruler of a land, to- 
 every searcher of God's secrets. He assumes all wisdom 
 to be supernatural ; to be supernatural not because it 
 comes in sudden gusts, in some oracular afflatus, but 
 in proportion as it is toilsome, self-distrusting, open to- 
 correction, ready to receive hints and illumination from 
 any source. No subject is too mean for it to be exer- 
 cised upon; the moment a man treats aught as unworthy 
 of him, the eye within him is growing dim, he has
 
 v.] THE VISIBLE THE SERVANT OF THE UNSEEN. 83 
 
 become a scorner, and is in the way to become an 
 atheist. Solomon has, however, a scale of worth; no 
 other than God's scale. To exercise judgment upon 
 human beings must be a nobler and more difficult task, 
 than to examine the cedars of Lebanon or the hyssop 
 on the wall, because man is made in God's image. 
 
 We have now a partial fulfilment of the desires of 
 David for his son. It is clear that Solomon's notion of 
 a king is not one derived from any outside appearances, 
 any mere signs of splendour, such as we naturally 
 associate with an eastern sovereign. It is clear that 
 the king is hot, according to him, a man removed from 
 contact with his subjects, regarding himself as a being 
 of a different nature from them. He is not one who 
 attains power, or keeps it, by force or by fraud. He is 
 not one who thinks he can make laws according to his 
 pleasure. A kingdom firmer and more everlasting than 
 the hills, a kingdom which must last always, he finds 
 established. What its principles are he is to learn 
 gradually ; trying to exhibit them as he becomes aware 
 of them ; acquiring more insight into them from the 
 effort to carry them out. Every transgression of order 
 on his part, is not more an act of tyranny than of 
 rebellion : a violation of his duty to his subjects, because 
 it is a defiance of his Master. 
 
 But the daily contemplation of theselaws of heavenly 
 government does not excuse him from dealing with the 
 things of earth. If he shrinks from handling them, 
 if he does not think that they are given to men to 
 mould and subdue, he renounces his belief in the divine 
 rule; he does not really feel that it is supreme and 
 claims all created powers as its ministers. Upon this 
 principle Solomon acted. The wood and stone of the 
 
 G 2
 
 84 THE WORTH OF THE OUTWARD TEMPLE. [SERM. 
 
 earth are God's gifts to man. They are not merely 
 dead things. They are capable of being shaped into 
 form, of being quickened with thought, of expressing 
 that sense of order and unity which is in the heart of 
 man ; of confessing and proclaiming the source of it. 
 The king believes that he is called to build a temple. 
 The ark had been brought to the holy hill. It was 
 there as an abiding witness of an invisible presence ; 
 as an assurance to the city and to the whole land that 
 in God was the secret of their strength, the ground of 
 their national fellowship. But why should that which 
 was there as a sign and pledge of permanence be 
 more capable of being moved, be less solid than the 
 habitations of perishing men ? If a city was to grow 
 up, if the kingdom of Israel was coming forth before 
 the eyes of men, it ought to proclaim in some august 
 and enduring form what its existence meant; it should 
 not attract glory to itself, but should show to whom it 
 referred its glory. I express in dry formal phrases that 
 which was evidently working in David's mind when 
 he sat before the Lord and grieved that he was dwelling 
 in cedar while the house of the Lord was in curtains ; 
 and that which Solomon uttered, when he prayed that 
 He who filled Heaven and earth, would yet dwell in 
 the house that he had builded. It was an overpower- 
 ing sense of the inward invisible majesty, which came 
 forth in the pillars and towers of the outward temple. 
 And we must contradict Scripture if we deny that this 
 was a very great onward step in the education of the 
 Jewish nation. The temple became a school for the 
 prophets. As they meditated in it and upon it, they 
 were led into profounder intuitions of the divine pre- 
 sence and government ; into a clear recognition of God
 
 v.] DANGERS OF THE OUTWARD TEMPLE. <55 
 
 as the Lord of the whole earth; into a greater assurance 
 of the triumphs which the unseen righteousness would 
 achieve over all sensual idols, and over all divided evil 
 powers, than had ever been vouchsafed to earlier patri- 
 archs and legislators. And where there was this pro- 
 gress in inward discovery and knowledge, we may be 
 sure that the whole national economy, amidst all real 
 and apparent discouragements, was unfolding itself. 
 
 The temple Solomon looked upon as the consecration 
 of the city itself, and of all earthly treasures to the 
 God of Abraham. He could therefore build his own 
 palace for thirteen years ; could fetch cedar trees and 
 fir trees from Tyre, could receive camels from Arabia 
 with spices and precious stones, could send his ships to 
 Eziongeber, could multiply chariots and horses, could 
 look without fear upon the abundance of silver and 
 gold. This splendour was assuredly a sign to that 
 time, and a sign to all times afterwards, of the divine 
 purpose which was announced in the original creation 
 of man ; that it can never become abortive, and that 
 no blasphemous notions of the evil of natural things 
 should be allowed for a moment to set it at naught. 
 The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof. This 
 was a lesson which was never to be forgotten, or to be 
 separated from the other, that he only can dwell in the 
 tabernacle or rest upon the holy hill whose hands are 
 pure, who has not lifted up his hand to deceive his 
 neighbour, or given his money upon usury. 
 
 But it is impossible not to perceive that such a time 
 as this of Solomon, though a really great one, is a 
 critical one for any nation. The idea of building a 
 house which the Lord would fill with his glory, was a 
 recognition of God as eternally ruling over that people
 
 86 DEGRADATION OF A KINGLY SOUL. [SERM. 
 
 and over all people. Yet there lay close to it a ten- 
 dency to make the invisible visible ; to represent the 
 holy presence as belonging to the building, instead of 
 the building as being hallowed and glorified by the 
 presence. There was no necessity that this evil should 
 grow out of that good ; in a very important sense one 
 is the testimony against the other ; still all experience, 
 and none more decisively than the experience of the 
 Israelites, prepares us to expect such a result. And 
 here I believe is the precious moral of Solomon's 
 history, that which makes it a perfectly harmonious 
 history in spite of the incongruities in his own life. 
 There was the seed of idolatry in him as there is in 
 every man. That early prayer for an understanding 
 heart was the prayer against it; the prayer for an 
 inward eye to look through the semblances of things to 
 their reality ; for a continual revelation of that which 
 passeth show. The prayer was answered, as fully as 
 any prayer ever was. The divine judgment, the dis- 
 crimination of good and bad, came to Solomon ; it 
 was not limited in any direction ; it could be exercised 
 on persons as on things; it was shown to be the faculty 
 which a king requires, because it is that which a man 
 requires, since by it God perceives the thoughts and 
 intents of the heart. But there comes a moment when 
 the king or the man ceases to desire that the light 
 should enter into him, should separate the good from 
 the bad in him. There comes a time when his faculty 
 begins to be regarded as a craft, when he half suspects 
 that the light by which he sees is his own. Then 
 appears the tempter. He may come in the form of an 
 Egyptian princess, or any other ; but he will in some 
 way appeal to the senses ; he will point the road to
 
 v.] WISDOM IMPERISHABLE. 87 
 
 idolatry. The secret desire of the heart, mightily re- 
 sisted once, will be allowed to prevail ; it will convert 
 all that once checked it to its nourishment. The gold 
 and the silver, not of the palace only but of the 
 temple, not the glory only of the kingdom, but of the 
 sanctuary, will strengthen and deepen the falsehood 
 of the inner man. The glorious power of judging, 
 which enabled one who knew not how to go out or 
 come in, to look into the hardest cases and to resolve 
 them, itself receives the yoke and bows to the image; 
 its keenness and subtilty only inventing arguments 
 and apologies for the shame. And the sympathising 
 king who sent his people away with gladness of heart, 
 sure that God was the king, and that they had a human 
 king, who felt towards them as He felt, would gradu- 
 ally become a tyrant ; laying on his subjects Egyptian 
 burdens, compelling them to do the work of beasts ; 
 proving that he valued the stones, the iron, and the 
 brass, which formed the materials of God's house, above 
 the living beings who were to draw nigh to offer their 
 supplications in it. So the wise king may prepare his 
 subjects for rebellion, and his kingdom for division. 
 
 A lesson surely full of instruction and wisdom for 
 all kings and for all men ; for those who think and for 
 those who act ; for those who study the secrets of the 
 human heart, and for those who investigate the mean- 
 ing of nature; for those who despise the arts and wealth 
 of the world, and for those who worship them ; for 
 those who hold strength and glory to be the devil's, 
 and for those who covet them and hunt after them as 
 if they were divine ; for nations upon which God has 
 bestowed mechanical knowledge and the blessed results 
 of it; for nations which look upon human beings as
 
 88 HOW WE MAY SEEK IT. [SEEM. 
 
 only the machines and the producers of a certain 
 amount of physical 'enjoyments. But though so full 
 of instruction it would be utterly melancholy and 
 oppressive, seeing that it speaks of retrogression 
 instead of progress, of folly coming forth from wisdom, 
 death from life, if there were no sequel to the story. 
 But the Wisdom which Solomon prayed for and pur- 
 sued with so true and earnest a heart was not a Wisdom 
 which could die with him, or which his forgetfulness 
 of it could kill. "The Lord possessed me," says the 
 writer of the book of Proverbs, " in the beginning of 
 His way, before His works of old. I was set up for 
 everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth 
 was." " In the beginning was the Word," says Saint 
 John, "and the Word was with God, and the Word 
 was God. All things were made by Him ; and with- 
 out Him was not anything made that was made. In 
 Him was life j and the life was the light of men." 
 "And this Word," so we shall read on Christmas- day, 
 " was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld 
 His glory as of the only-begotten of the Father full of 
 grace and truth." This is the King "who shall be 
 found as long as the sun and the moon endureth, whom 
 all nations shall call blessed." This is that Son " who 
 shall judge the people with righteousness and the poor 
 with judgment." This is He in whom the prayers of 
 David are ended. 
 
 Brethren, every one of us may ask that Divine 
 Word who is near to us and with us, for an under- 
 standing heart. Every one of us who feels that a 
 great work is laid upon him and that he is in the 
 midst of a people which God hath chosen, and some of 
 whom, at least, he must teach and judge, and that he
 
 >.] THE EEWABD. 89 
 
 is but a little child, may crave for a spirit to discern 
 the good and bad in himself and in all others. And if 
 we feel, as most of us perhaps do, that what we need 
 above all things else, is that sense of responsibility, 
 that consciousness of a calling, that feeling of feeble- 
 ness which were the source of Solomon's prayer, let us 
 ask for these gifts first. He who took upon Himself 
 the form of a servant and became a little child, has 
 said, Come unto me and take my yoke upon you, for I 
 am meek and lowly of heart. He promises us His 
 own meekness in place of our pride. He who was 
 straitened till his work was accomplished will teach us 
 to understand the object and the blessedness of ours. 
 He whose delight was to do the will of His Father 
 who sent Him, will make us enter into the delight of 
 showing forth God's love to His children. And so we 
 shall understand more and more clearly that we are 
 called to be kings and priests in that city which He 
 hath set up, and in which He reigns, a city in which 
 there is no one visible Temple; for the Lord God 
 Almighty and the Lamb are the Temple of it ; a city 
 into which the kings of the earth shall at last bring 
 their glory and honour.
 
 SERMON VI. 
 
 THE RENDING OP THE KINGDOM. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 2nd Sunday after Epiphany. Jan, 18, 1852.) 
 
 When Rehoboam was come to Jerusalem, he assembled all the House 
 of Judah with the Tribe of Benjamin, an hundred and fourscore 
 thousand chosen men, which were warriors, to fight against the 
 House of Israel, to bring the kingdom again to Rehoboam the son 
 of Solomon. But the word of God came unto Shemaiah the man 
 of God, saying, 'Speak unto Rehoboam the son of Solomon, king 
 of Jndah, and unto all the House of Judah and Benjamin, and to 
 the remnant of the people, saying thns saith the Lord, Ye shall 
 not go up, nor fight against your brethren the children of Israel ; 
 return every man to his house; for this thing is from me.' 
 1 KINGS zii. 21-25. 
 
 THE thing which the prophet declared to be from the 
 Lord was the separation of the tribes of Israel, the 
 revolt of Jeroboam from the house of David, the esta- 
 blishment of a new kingdom. Yet these events, to all 
 appearance, contradicted the very purpose for which 
 the chosen people existed, and confuse their history. 
 Their early records had reminded them that they were 
 the descendants of one man. The institutions of Moses 
 had carefully preserved the feeling that they were 
 kinsmen, while he had given them the new bond of a 
 common law, and a common tabernacle. To these 
 Joshua added a common country. The portions of land 
 assigned to the different tribes kept them distinct; but
 
 SERM. vi.] SEPARATION THE GREAT CALAMITY. 91 
 
 the one tribe, whose cities were scattered over the 
 whole country, which had no separate property, which 
 waited upon the tabernacle and offered the sacrifices 
 for the nation and for its individual members, testified 
 that the greatness and security of each tribe stood in 
 its fellowship with the rest and in its relation to the 
 whole society. This community of interests had been 
 imperfectly realised during the time of the judges. 
 One of the great blessings of David's government was, 
 that he asserted it and established new tokens of it. 
 After the revolt of Absalom, the other tribes showed 
 ^in evident jealousy of the one to which the king 
 belonged, and that one exhibited something of the 
 pride of a favoured class. But these differences were 
 softened, if not obliterated, after the restoration of the 
 king. The wisdom of Solomon proved itself, we may 
 believe, in nothing more than in his successful efforts 
 to unite his people by making them feel that they had 
 .an equitable and impartial ruler over them. Surely 
 one would have thought, a priori, that the breaking 
 up of such a state of things was not from the Lord. 
 
 And this conclusion appears to be strengthened by 
 all subsequent experience of the effects of this revolt. 
 Jeroboam, the author of it, is represented throughout 
 Scripture as the man who made Israel to sin. The his- 
 tory of the ten tribes is a record of continually deepen- 
 ing degeneracy. From this time, too, all the brilliancy 
 passes away from the house of David. His grand 
 .anticipations of what should come to pass in after-times, 
 if they had a partial accomplishment in the days of his 
 son, seemed to be belied by the history of his son's sons. 
 Prophets mourn over a land devoured by strangers, 
 " whose princes were rebellious and companions of
 
 92 REFERRED TO A DECREE OP GOD? [SEEM. 
 
 thieves, loving gifts and following after rewards, who 
 judged not the fatherless, neither did the cause of the 
 widow come before them." The noblest specimens of the 
 royal race were men, the main business of whose reigns 
 was to remove the corruptions of their predecessors. 
 The last and most zealous of all was unable, by his 
 reforms, to avert the downfall and captivity of his 
 people. All these evils are evidently connected in the 
 minds of the prophets with the schism of the tribes. 
 They look upon their division as containing the 
 principle, and illustrating the effects of all divisions 
 which should happen in all nations in times to come. 
 Their belief that unity would some day be restored to 
 their land, is identified with the hope of peace and 
 righteousness for the whole earth. 
 
 We must not suppose that the sentence which affirms 
 that this great calamity was from the Lord is an iso- 
 lated one or that it can be explained into some general 
 notion that all men's doings, good or evil, may be 
 attributed to an omnipotent ruler. We shall find pre- 
 sently how little that general notion accords with the 
 language or teaching of Scripture. And the follow- 
 ing vivid passage, which occurs in a previous chapter 
 of this book, will prove how consistent the words of 
 the text are with the general tone of the narrative. 
 "And Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, an Ephrathite of 
 Zereda, Solomon's servant, even he lifted up his hand 
 against the king. And this was the cause why he 
 lifted up his hand against the king ; Solomon built 
 Millo, and repaired the breaches of the city of David 
 his father. And the man Jeroboam was a mighty man 
 of valour. And Solomon seeing the young man that 
 he was industrious, he made him ruler over all the
 
 TL] JEROBOAM AND AHIJAH. 93 
 
 charge of the house of Joseph. And it came to pass 
 at that time, when Jeroboam went out of Jerusalem, 
 that the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite found him in the 
 way. And he had clad himself in a new garment. 
 And Ahijah caught the new garment that was on him, 
 and rent it in twelve pieces. And he said to Jeroboam, 
 Take thee ten pieces. For thus saith the Lord the God 
 of Israel, Behold I will rend the kingdom out of the 
 hand of Solomon, and will give ten tribes to thee. But 
 he shall have one tribe, for my servant David's sake 
 and for Jerusalem's sake, the city which I have chosen 
 out of all the tribes of Israel. Because that they have 
 forsaken me, and have worshipped Ashtoreth the goddess 
 of the Sidonians, Chemosh the god of the Moabites, and 
 Milcom the god of the children of Ammon, and have 
 not walked in my ways to do that which is right in 
 mine eyes, and to keep my statutes and judgments, 
 as did David his father. Howbeit I will not take the 
 whole kingdom out of his hand : but I will make him 
 prince all the days of his life, for David my servant's 
 sake, whom I chose, because he kept my command- 
 ments and my statutes. But I will take the kingdom 
 out of his son's hand, and will give it unto thee, even 
 ten tribes. And unto his son will I give one tribe, 
 that David my servant may have a light before me 
 always in Jerusalem, the city which I have chosen to 
 put my name there. And I will take thee, and thou 
 shalt reign according to all that thy soul desireth, and 
 shalt be king over Israel. And it shall be if thou wilt 
 hearken unto all that I command thee, and wilt walk 
 in my ways and do what is right in my sight, to keep 
 my statutes and my commandments, as David my 
 servant did ; that I will be with thee, and build thee a
 
 94 NECESSITY FOR SEPARATION. [SERM. 
 
 sure house, as I built for David, and will give Israel 
 unto thee. And I will for this afflict the seed of 
 David, but not for ever." 1 Kings xi. 
 
 In this passage we are distinctly told that a prophet 
 stirred up those thoughts in the mind of Jeroboam, 
 which led him to rise against Solomon. This prophet 
 is not represented as a deceiver, who spoke words out 
 of his own heart. He is a true witness for the Lord 
 God of Israel. He announces an eternal, unchangeable 
 law. It had been declared that idolatry must produce 
 degradation and division in the land. The succession 
 of day and night might as easily be changed as this 
 great moral relation. Solomon had introduced the 
 worship of visible things. The mind of the king and 
 of the nation was penetrated by the spirit which pro- 
 duced that worship. They might still keep up the 
 appearance of government and of obedience; the 
 kingdom might seem to be one kingdom still. But the 
 very ground upon which government stood had been 
 taken away, the allegiance of the king to a righteous 
 and invisible King. The very ground of the unity of 
 the nation had been taken away, its acknowledgment 
 of a one Lord. What would follow if the semblance- 
 remained when the reality was gone ? This would 
 follow. A perpetual growth of internal corruption, of 
 internal division ; falsehood spreading in the vitals of 
 the people, with nothing to remind them that it wa 
 falsehood, with nothing to prove that their kingdom 
 had another foundation than that which they were 
 trying to rest it upon. Such a state of things is incon- 
 ceivable if we suppose that human beings are as much 
 under a divine order as natural things are. That 
 order must vindicate itself, must show what it is : the
 
 vi.] JEROBOAM THE AVENGER OF SUFFERERS. 95- 
 
 punishment of the transgression must be the way of 
 proclaiming the principle which has been transgressed. 
 But moral laws, though they are as powerful de- 
 fenders of themselves as natural laws, do not defend 
 themselves in the same way. Human beings, voluntary 
 creatures, are the instruments of carrying out the one, 
 as the hidden powers in sea, or earth, or fire, are of 
 fulfilling the other. A personal God dealing with men, 
 will employ men as the agents and executors of His 
 purpose. The man least likely to be so employed, may 
 receive the commission; but in general we look for 
 some circumstances which shall manifestly prepare and 
 denote a specific person for the task. Jeroboam has 
 risen by his industry in the service of Solomon. He 
 appoints the charges or burdens for the House of 
 Joseph ; that is, as we may infer from the previous 
 passage, he either superintends the laborious public 
 works, in which Solomon was employing and exhausting 
 the energies of his subjects, or levies the necessary 
 taxes for carrying them on. He is thus acquainted 
 with the discontents of the people; apparently he 
 sympathises with them. It is not said or even hinted 
 that he felt the horror which Ahijah felt of Solomon's 
 superstition. The king might have worshipped Che- 
 mosh and Milcom, without exciting any indignation 
 in the son of Nebat. He appears as the spokesman 
 and representative of those who were oppressed by 
 Solomon's exactions for building Millo and repairing 
 the breaches in the city of David. The tyranny grew 
 out of the idolatry. Though Jeroboam might not per- 
 ceive the root, he could perceive the evil fruit, which 
 deserved to be hated for its own sake ; he was therefore 
 qualified to execute Ahijah's prophecy, not merely as
 
 96 THE SUPERNATUEAL AND NATURAL. [SERM. 
 
 a dull instrument, but as one who had, to a certain 
 extent, a righteous purpose. A promise is given him, 
 not of immediate, but of ultimate, success. He will 
 not shake Solomon's throne, but in his son's days the 
 kingdom will be rent as the new garment had been ; 
 ten pieces of it would be given to Jeroboam. 'And 
 they would not merely belong to them for a time. If 
 he walked in God's ways, he would establish a sure 
 house like that of David itself ; his children's children 
 would reign after him. At the same time, it is clearly 
 declared to him, that the divine purpose has not been 
 altered by the sin of the Jewish king. The tribe of 
 Judah, the house of David, the city of Jerusalem, had 
 a sacredness attached to them which would not be lost. 
 The tribe had been chosen, the kingdom had been 
 established, the temple had been built in the capital, 
 as assurances for the past, the present, and the future, 
 which nothing could set aside. That which seemed to 
 destroy the harmony, even the existence, of the nation, 
 would, in fact, bring out the secret of its harmony, the 
 ground of its existence, more fully than they had ever 
 been brought out yet. 
 
 This part of the narrative will seem to you, no 
 doubt, mysterious and supernatural. Such assuredly it 
 is. And it explains to us, I think, how supernatural 
 and mysterious every event or series of events must be 
 which concerns the life of nations and the sins of rulers 
 and subjects. But we soon find ourselves in the region 
 of ordinary human life. " And Jeroboam and all the 
 congregation of Israel came, and spake unto B-ehoboam, 
 saying, ' Thy father made our yoke grievous. Now. 
 therefore, make thou the grievous service of thy father, 
 and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and
 
 vi.] THE OLD AND YOUNG MEN. 97 
 
 we will serve thee/ And lie said unto them, ' Depart 
 yet for three days, then come again to me.' And the 
 people departed. And king Rehoboam consulted with 
 the old men, that stood before Solomon his father while 
 he yet lived, and said, ' How do ye advise that I may 
 answer this people? ' And they spake unto him, saying, 
 ' If thou wilt be a servant unto this people this day, 
 and wilt serve them, and answer them, and speak good 
 words to them, then they will be thy servants for ever/ 
 But he forsook the counsel of the old men which they 
 had given him, and consulted with the young men that 
 were grown up with him and which stood before him. 
 And he said unto them, ' What counsel give ye that we 
 may answer this people, who have spoken to me, saying, 
 Make the yoke which thy father has put upon us 
 lighter ? ' And the young men that were grown up 
 with him spake unto him saying, ' Thus shalt thou 
 speak unto this people, My little finger shall be thicker 
 than my father's loins. And now whereas my father 
 did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your 
 yoke. My father hath chastised you with whips, but 
 I will chastise you with scorpions/ " 1 Kings xii. 
 
 How rapidly the interval of 3000 years, how all 
 the difference between a small Syrian province of the 
 old world, and a nation of Europe in the nineteenth 
 century, seems to disappear, as we read this story ! 
 Have we not, in one sphere or other, among the pa- 
 triarchs of a village, or the statesmen of a kingdom, 
 met and conversed with some of these grave old men, 
 who did not, perhaps, set before themselves the highest 
 standard of moral excellence, who did not at once pro- 
 nounce upon the right or wrong of an action; but 
 whom long experience had taught the might which lies 
 
 H
 
 98 THE RESULT. [SEBM. 
 
 in gentle words, and the real desire there is in human 
 beings to obey, if there be but sense and somewhat of 
 sympathy, in those we rule ? Have we not also, and 
 alas ! far more frequently, encountered those young men 
 flushed with insolence and wine, who talked loudly of 
 putting down the pretensions of inferiors, and of main- 
 taining their own position and dignity, who had never 
 yet learnt in what superiority or dignity consists, who 
 had never begun to reverence their fellow-men because 
 they did not reverence themselves ; who thought they 
 could meet the demands of suffering and wronged men, 
 by boasting words and a frantic determination to main- 
 tain privileges which they ought never to have possessed, 
 because they were not privileges based upon any real 
 relations, upon any law human or divine, but merely 
 upon accident and assumption, which must perish as 
 rapidly as they have grown up? And yet these, as the 
 story teaches, and as all subsequent history has proved, 
 are the favourite and triumphant advisers of those whom 
 their own vanity and folly have already doomed, and 
 who want parasites to put into words the doctrine which 
 they have already received into their cold empty hearts. 
 " My father chastised you with rods ; I will chastise you 
 with scorpions " this in all ages has been the childish 
 bluster of men who have made themselves blind to the 
 future by refusing to use their eyes in judging of that 
 which is before them ; who fancy that the power will 
 be their own for ever at the very moment when the 
 handwriting on the wall is declaring that it has been 
 taken 'from them and given to another. 
 
 "Wherefore," the historian goes on, "the king heark- 
 ened not unto the people : for the cause was from the 
 Lord, that He might perform His saying which the
 
 vi.] HOW POLLY AND SIN WITNESS FOR GOD. 99 
 
 Lord spake by Ahijah the Shilonite unto Jeroboam the 
 son of Nebat. So when all Israel saw that the king 
 hearkened not unto them, the people answered the 
 king saying, What portion have we in David ? neither 
 have we inheritance in the son of Jesse : to your tents, 
 
 Israel: now see to thine own house, David. So Israel 
 departed unto their tents. Then king Rehoboam sent 
 Adoram, who was over the tribute; and all Israel 
 stoned him with stones that he died. Therefore king 
 Rehoboam made speed to get him up to his chariot, to 
 flee to Jerusalem. And it come to pass, when all 
 Israel heard that Jeroboam was come again, that they 
 sent and called unto him the congregation and made 
 him king over all Israel : there was none that followed 
 the House of David but the tribe of Judah only." 
 
 1 Kings xii. 
 
 Here again we are on the mysterious and divine 
 ground ; yet there is no sudden or violent transition 
 from that common homely earth upon which we were 
 standing a moment ago. The prophecy of Ahijah the 
 Shilonite is not brought to pass by any strange combi- 
 nation of events. The folly of Rehoboam and his gay 
 counsellors, their utter incapacity for estimating their 
 own weakness or the force of indignation and conviction 
 in the minds of other men, these are the ways by 
 which the divine counsels are brought forth into act; 
 these are the messengers of God's wrath, as much ae 
 the whirlwind or the volcano. Not as if He were the 
 author of those acts which have their source in the evil 
 will. They are by their very definition and nature, re- 
 sistances to His Will, rebellions against it. But as they 
 work out their own sentence and condemnation, they 
 become the reluctant servants of Him with whom they 
 
 H 2
 
 100 JEROBOAM'S POLICY. [SEEM. 
 
 are fighting j they are not only foils to His righteous- 
 ness, they actually help, as Scripture expresses it, to 
 turn righteousness into judgment, to make the truth 
 which they are denying, manifest for their own age and 
 for all ages to come. Deep and unfathomable mystery, 
 worthy to be meditated on by those who are fighting 
 with evil upon earth, and by those who have won the 
 victory ; the key to all the puzzles of history, the 
 comfort and consolation amid the overwhelming evils 
 which we see around us and feel within us ; the deliver- 
 ance at once from the debasing Pantheism which teaches 
 that sin is only another form of righteousness, wrong 
 only an aspect of right, and from the Manichaeism 
 which would lead us to think that evil may at last 
 triumph, or hold a divided empire with God. The 
 wrath of man has praised Him and will always praise 
 Him. Sin and Death and Hell must do Him con- 
 tinual homage now, and will be led as His victims and 
 grace His triumph, when His glory is fully revealed. 
 But neither now or then will they ever blend with His 
 works, or be shown to have their origin in Him, or be 
 known as anything but the contradictions of His 
 nature. 
 
 Jeroboam then was established on the throne of 
 Israel. As our text tells us, the heir of the house of 
 David tried to crush the revolt and to recover the 
 tribes ; but tried in vain. The thing was from the 
 Lord. Rehoboam could no more put down the rebel- 
 lious servant of Solomon, than Saul could put down 
 David. The decree which had said that the ten tribes 
 should remain distinct, was as divine a decree as that 
 which established an everlasting covenant with the 
 man after God's own heart.
 
 vi.] THE TWO KINDS OF GOVERNMENT. 101 
 
 And yet this is the sequel of the story. " Jeroboam 
 said in his heart, ' Now shall the kingdom return to the 
 house of David. If this people go up to do sacrifice in 
 the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the 
 heart of this people turn again unto their lord, even 
 unto Eehoboam king of Judah, and they shall kill me, 
 and go again unto Rehoboam king of Judah/ Where- 
 upon the king took counsel, and made two calves of 
 gold, and said unto them, ' It is too much for you to go 
 up to Jerusalem : behold thy gods, Israel, which 
 brought thee up out of the land of Egypt/ And he set 
 the one in Bethel, and the other put he in Dan. And 
 this thing became a sin : for the people went to worship 
 before the one, even unto Dan. And he made an house 
 of high places, and made priests of the lowest of the 
 people, which were not of the sons of Levi. And 
 Jeroboam ordained a feast in the eighth month, like 
 unto the feast that is in Judah, and he offered upon 
 the altar/' 1 Kings xii. 
 
 I have been careful to recapitulate the previous part 
 of the history ; because it is sometimes forgotten in this 
 last passage of it. I do not mean that an undue import- 
 ance has been attached to that passage ; its importance 
 can hardly be overrated. But the charge which is 
 brought against Jeroboam is scarcely intelligible, if we 
 forget that his kingdom stood, like that which was in 
 Jerusalem, upon the promise and covenant of God. He 
 had a right to believe that the God of Abraham and of 
 Isaac, of David and of Solomon, would be with him, and 
 would establish for him a sure house. He had a right to 
 live and act upon this conviction. His sin was that he 
 did not act upon it. He did not trust the living God. 
 He thought not that his kingdom stood upon a divine
 
 102 BENEFITS OF THE SEPARATION. [SEKM. 
 
 foundation, but that it was to be upheld by certain 
 divine props and sanctions. The two doctrines seem 
 closely akin ; many regard them as identical ; in truth 
 there is a whole heaven between them. The king who 
 believes that his kingdom has a divine foundation 
 confesses his own subjection and responsibility to an 
 actual living Ruler. The king who desires to surround 
 himself with divine sanctions, would fain make himself 
 supreme, knows that he cannot, and therefore seeks 
 help from the fears men have of an invisible power, in 
 which they have ceased to believe. He wants a God as 
 the support of his authority ; what God he cares very 
 little. The question is soon settled. It is on the 
 senses and on the terrors of his subjects that he works. 
 Something visible and tangible serves best for that 
 purpose ; visible and tangible, and yet invested with 
 an awe and a mystery which are borrowed from that 
 which is invisible and intangible. This would be 
 enough to explain the calves in Bethel and Dan. But 
 the Bible history, which always does justice to the men 
 whom it condemns most, supplies us with another link 
 in the chain of Jeroboam's thoughts, and shows us 
 how very natural, and, according to the apprehensions 
 of politic men, how very sagacious, those thoughts 
 were. Jerusalem was not merely the capital of Reho- 
 boam, it was the seat of God's Temple. If they had 
 the bond of a common worship, they might desire the 
 bond of a common kingdom. To prevent the second 
 wish, you must extinguish the first. They shall not 
 have a common worship; they shall have a local 
 separate worship ; and therefore they must have local 
 separate gods. " These calves in Bethel and Dan, 
 Israel, are thy gods. I Jeroboam decree them to be so/'
 
 vi.] MODERN ANALOGIES. 103 
 
 As this passage receives great light from those which 
 precede it, so also it throws back a light upon them. We 
 see now more clearly than ever, why the separation of 
 the kingdoms was a thing from the Lord. It asserted 
 the real dignity of Jerusalem as the place in which it 
 had pleased God to put His Name, not merely or chiefly 
 as the place in which David or Solomon chanced to 
 reign. It asserted the real unity of the nation to be not 
 in a King, but in the King ; it showed that the only 
 basis of any political fellowship among the tribes, lay 
 in that Name which was revealed to the first father of 
 them. The revolt of Jeroboam would have done this, 
 if he had continued faithful ; his unfaithfulness, as we 
 shall see more clearly hereafter, discovered the same 
 principle through another and a sterner discipline. The 
 miseries to which it led, justified all the groans of the 
 prophets ; the light which broke forth through those 
 miseries, showing the cause of them and the deliverance 
 from them, justified all their hopes. 
 
 All Christians have felt, as I said the Jewish pro- 
 phets felt, that the principle of separations and schisms 
 in different lands and ages, must be contained in this 
 schism of the tribes. Romanist writers have of course 
 been busy with their applications. What can be more 
 natural than to consider Rome the parallel of Jerusalem, 
 to identify the Elector of Saxony or Henry VIII. with 
 Jeroboam, and to make the prohibition of intercourse 
 with the Papal see and the establishment of a national 
 worship the same sin as the setting up of calves in Dan, 
 that the people might be withdrawn from the general 
 fellowship of Christendom ? However arbitrary such 
 analogies may seem to us, they have a force on many 
 minds, a force derived from a strong persuasion that in
 
 104 GREEK AND LATIN CHURCHES, POPES. [SEEM. 
 
 some way or other there must be a relation between 
 different periods, and that the Bible is intended to dis- 
 cover that relation. I shall not hope to convince any 
 person that this is not a legitimate mode of treating the 
 subject whom I cannot also convince that when our Lord 
 said to the woman of Samaria, " Believe me, the hour 
 cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet 
 in Jerusalem, worship the Father/' He announced a law 
 of His Universal Church which excludes one visible 
 centre of it as much as another, and that to imagine 
 such a centre is in fact to restore that merely national 
 economy into which Romanists accuse us of relapsing. 
 
 And I could not venture to protest against this use 
 of the portion of Scripture history we have been con- 
 sidering, unless I were ready to accept it, subject to 
 that change which our Lord Himself has proclaimed to 
 us, as a real interpretation of modern facts, both when 
 it seems to make in our favour and when it condemns 
 us. The great schism of the Latin and Greek Churches 
 strikes the student of ecclesiastical records as a most 
 startling contradiction in the history of a body which 
 was to include all nations and races. Yet it was surely 
 from the Lord. Idolatrous habits and feelings had been 
 spreading in both divisions of the Church. The sense of 
 union in an invisible Head, though not lost, was fearfully 
 weakened. A seeming union must have been preserved 
 by the loss of all witness for real union ; the division 
 remains a standing witness against the possibility of a 
 visible head ever holding the Catholic body together. 
 
 The schism of rival popes in the Western Church 
 during the fifteenth century was as great a scandal to 
 Christendom as can be conceived. Yet it was surely 
 from the Lord. It led men to perceive that there was
 
 vi.] REFORMED CHURCHES, STATES AND SECTS. 105 
 
 corruption in the head and in the members of the eccle- 
 siastical polity ; it led to those disputes respecting the 
 relative powers of popes and councils, which showed 
 that neither could heal the wounds of the Church or 
 preserve its unity. It led to that movement in the six- 
 teenth century, which we all I trust believe to have 
 been from the Lord, and which was really a declaration 
 of faith in a living God, against a system of idolatry 
 that was rapidly passing into a system of organised un- 
 belief. In each of these cases there were chances of 
 reconciliation, such as were offered to Rehoboam when 
 the people besought him to lessen their burdens. In each 
 case there were grave counsellors advising reconciliation 
 and noisy fanatics preaching uncompromising resistance. 
 In each case the infatuation of princes and rulers, eccle- 
 siastical and civil, was carrying out a divine and eternal 
 principle even when they were defying it. They could 
 not restore unity by declamations, by concessions, or by 
 persecution. Facts spoke louder than the Prophet spoke 
 to Rehoboam, "It cannot be. The thing is from the Lord." 
 In the last period to which I have alluded there were, 
 in England as much as in any country, those who looked 
 upon the new and reformed state of things merely as a 
 means of establishing their own power; who regarded the 
 Church as an instrument of keeping up that power; who 
 valued a worship in their own language, not because it 
 brought their countrymen nearer to God, but because it 
 was a badge of separation from foreigners; who pro- 
 tested against the idolatry of papal nations, and were 
 really making royalty, or the privileges of the upper 
 classes, or money, as much objects of their idolatry, as 
 the calves in Dan or Bethel were to the ten tribes. And 
 therefore we must not shrink from the acknowledgment,
 
 106 COMMON SINS NEED COMMON CONFESSION. [SEBM. 
 
 that the different sects which rose up in this land, seem- 
 ingly to rend the body of*Christ more completely asunder 
 than it had been rent already, were from the Lord. 
 There were idolatries in the ruling body which made 
 such divisions inevitable. The first impulses of those 
 who began them were like those of Jeroboam, pure and 
 honourable. They became spokesmen of hearts which 
 were suffering under a burden ; they encountered Reho- 
 boams in the State and proud men in the Church, who 
 said, " Let us change rods into scorpions;" compromises 
 failed, persecutions failed ; the thing was from the Lord. 
 And the lesson was repeated again in those separating 
 bodies. Politic men rose up, who sought to make the 
 division permanent and hopeless. The separate priest, 
 and altar, and sacrifice must be introduced, that there 
 might be no recollection of the bond which united them 
 to those from whom they were severed. Hence the one 
 sacrifice for mankind became lost in the notion of some 
 special salvation for themselves. New forms of intel- 
 lectual, if not sensual, idolatry appeared ; the victims 
 of them groaned under the narrowness and bondage, 
 which they had been taught to call liberty. Are not 
 many of them even now ready to turn for refuge from 
 their sectarian faith and freedom, sometimes to the 
 vaguest forms of unbelief, sometimes to the most per- 
 fect and universal despotism over conscience and will ? 
 Oh, brethren ! how intolerable would be these facts 
 and recollections which show every party in Church 
 and State to have been the cause of shameful scandals, 
 which forbid us to cast stones at others because we 
 are in the same sin, if we might not recur again and 
 again to the words which I have quoted so often. But 
 if the thing is of the Lord, there must be an end of
 
 vi.] HOPES OF A BETTER DAY. 107 
 
 all those strifes by which He has ordained that our 
 idolatries against Him and cruelties to our brethren 
 should punish themselves. There must be a day when 
 all things in heaven and earth, which consist only by 
 Christ, shall be gathered manifestly together in Him ; 
 when it shall be known and confessed that there is one 
 king, one priest, one sacrifice ; that we have been at 
 war with each other, because we have not done homage 
 to that one king, drawn nigh to God through that one 
 priest, omitted to present that one perfect sacrifice. 
 And those who are willing before God's altar to own 
 that their self-seeking and self-will have been rending 
 asunder their families, the nation, the Church, the world, 
 may hope that God's Spirit will work in them hence- 
 forth to do all such acts as shall not retard, but hasten 
 forward the blessed consummation for which they look. 
 They may ask to be taught the mystery of daily self- 
 sacrifice, how to give up their own tastes, opinions, 
 wishes. They may ask that they may never be tempted 
 to give up one atom of God's truth, or to dally for one 
 moment with the falsehoods of themselves or of their 
 brethren ; because truth is the one ground of universal 
 peace and fellowship, because falsehood and division are 
 ever increasing and reproducing each other.
 
 SERMON VII. 
 
 THE CALF WORSHIP DENOUNCED. 
 (Lincoln's Inn. Conversion of St. Paul. Jan. 25, 1852.) 
 
 Also by the hand of the prophet Jehu the son of Hanani came the 
 word of the Lord against Baasha, and against his house, even 
 for all the evil that he did in the sight of the Lord, in provoking 
 him to anger with the work of his hands, in being like the house 
 of Jeroboam ; and because he killed him. 1 KINGS xvi. 7. 
 
 BAASHA occupies no very remarkable place among the 
 kings of Israel, nor Jehu the son of Hanani among 
 the prophets. But the narrative in the text is a com- 
 pendious statement of the relations in which the kings 
 and prophets of the ten tribes stood to each other, after 
 the division of the kingdom. I wish to consider this 
 subject upon the present occasion, taking it up from the 
 time of which I spoke in my last sermon, and continuing 
 it to the reigns which received a new character from the 
 prophecies of Elijah and Elisha. 
 
 A man of God, who, we are told, came out of Judah 
 by the word of the Lord unto Bethel, marks the transition 
 point between the older history and the new. The chapter 
 which contains the tragedy of his life a,nd death, has been 
 selected for one of our Sunday lessons, with much fear- 
 lessness, I think, as well as wisdom. For there is none 
 which a timid, distrustful reader of the Bible would bo
 
 SEEM, vii.] THE OLD PEOPHET IN BETHEL. 109 
 
 more ready to pas. over, and few which throw more real 
 light upon its moral and method. This man of God 
 came to Bethel while Jeroboam was standing by the altar 
 to burn incense. " And he cried against the altar in the 
 word of the Lord, and said, ' Behold a child shall be born 
 unto the house of David, Josiah by name ; and upon thee 
 shall he offer the priests of the high places that burn 
 incense upon thee, and men's bones shall be burnt upon 
 thee.' And he gave a sign the same day saying, ' This 
 is the sign which the Lord hath spoken, Behold the altar 
 shall be rent, and the ashes that are upon it shall be 
 poured out.' And it came to pass when king Jeroboam 
 heard the saying of the man of God, that he put forth 
 his hand from the altar, saying, ' Lay hold on him.' And 
 his hand which he put forth against him dried up, so 
 that he could not pull it in again to him. The altar 
 also was rent, and the ashes poured out from the altar, 
 according to the sign which the man of God had given 
 by the word of the Lord. And the king answered and 
 said unto the man of God, ' Intreat now the face of the 
 Lord thy God, and pray for me, that my hand may be 
 restored me again.' And the man of God besought 
 the Lord, and the king's hand was restored him again, 
 and became as it was before." 1 Kings xiii. 1-7. 
 
 I would at once dismiss the question whether the name 
 Josiah which occurs in this place, was actually pronounced 
 by the prophet, or was introduced afterwards when the 
 books were put together, as marking the person who ac- 
 complished the threat. That point seems to me of very 
 little consequence indeed. I do not think the substance 
 of the prophecy would derive the least weight from the 
 presence of the name, or lose the least from the omission 
 of it. The cases of such definite foretelling are rare in
 
 110 JEROBOAM SUPPOSED TO BE A REFORMER. [SBKM. 
 
 the Scriptures. I only recollect two ; this and the use 
 of the name of Cyrus in Isaiah, of which I may have to 
 speak hereafter. It is extremely rash and dangerous to 
 deduce the nature or characteristics of prophecy from 
 doubtful and excepted cases. We may be sure that when 
 we are tempted to do so, we shall overlook the points 
 on which the Scripture most desires to fix our attention. 
 The great business of the prophet is evidently to de- 
 nounce the altar and the sacrifices in Bethel. It has been 
 set up as a rival altar to that in the Temple of Jerusalem ; 
 it is the beginning of a new system of sacrifices ; new 
 priests will be required to perform them. " Of course," 
 the rationalist teacher exclaims, " these were the offences 
 of Jeroboam. He was an intruder upon the special privi- 
 leges of the Jerusalem hierarchy ; he had courage to 
 introduce priests taken from the lowest of the people ; 
 he broke through the formalities of the Levitical law. 
 Such a man in our days would be called a reformer, or 
 asserterof national and individual independence. There- 
 fore he is denounced by the ecclesiastics who have com- 
 piled the Jewish records." Yes, if the establishment of 
 visible, sensual worship be a great step in the progress 
 of the human intellect, if the introduction of a set of 
 priests continually at work to make that worship more 
 visible, more sensual, more gross, be a mode of fulfilling 
 the aspirations of those who desire moral and spiritual 
 liberty, if the breaking through the fetters of a law 
 which restrained all sacerdotal inventions whatsoever, 
 and bore witness continually that sacrifices were not 
 offered to appease a tyrant, but to remove an obstacle 
 between a righteous Lord and His unrighteous subjects, 
 if the consequent establishment of a devil-worship, 
 be that which wise men of the nineteenth century after
 
 vii.] CHARACTER OP HIS REFORMATION. ill 
 
 Christ call reformation, Jeroboam deserves all their 
 patronage, and the man of God who came out of Judah 
 to pronounce a curse upon his altar, all their wrath. And 
 this is precisely the question, not for this passage of the 
 history only, but for every subsequent passage of it. The 
 revolting kings of Israel, in whom modern enlighten- 
 ment discovers the champions of human progress, were 
 introducing the most unlimited sacerdotal tyranny; were 
 making that sacerdotal tyranny an instrument of regal 
 tyranny. The priests of the high places, the prophets 
 of the grove, were building their own power upon the 
 degradation of the multitudes whom they drew after 
 them; were using that power to confirm every un- 
 righteous decree, to remove every real moral restraint 
 from the kings. The prophets, who we are told would 
 never have been praised except in a book compiled by the 
 supporters of a certain set of caste interests, were bear- 
 ing a protest at the hazard of their lives, for a righteous 
 order which no caprices of human superstition or human 
 will could set aside ; for a spiritual authority which not 
 only did not demand the slavery of the conscience but 
 was incompatible with it, for an actual relation between 
 the Most High and His creatures, which not only did 
 not involve their regarding Him as an object of terror 
 or distrust, but proved such habits of mind to. contain 
 the very essence of sin. 
 
 Men like the one we are now considering, are said 
 to speak the word of the Lord, or sometimes in the word 
 of the Lord. Their function assumes that the thoughts 
 of man's heart and the utterances of it, are of all 
 things the most sacred ; that a presence is there which 
 men are seeking in dark groves, on high places, in sun, 
 or sea, or air ; that this Presence is not a phantom, not
 
 112 THE PROPHET'S ASSURANCE. [SKHM. 
 
 a creation of their own, but He who is, He who formed 
 them ; that the best and wisest man is he who confesses 
 this Presence with awe and wonder; who believes 
 that he is standing before a living Being to whom all 
 within him is naked and open, who desires that that 
 Being should direct him, act upon him, use him for His 
 own purposes ; who knows that those purposes are right 
 purposes, who is sure that they cannot concern him 
 more than they concern his fellows. To a man thus 
 taught and trained (and the law, the statutes, the his- 
 tory of his land were all parts of his training, all spoke 
 to him of a real Being whom no man had seen or could 
 see ; but who had held converse with Abraham, who had 
 made a covenant with him and with his seed after him ; 
 who had sent Moses to deliver the people, who had been 
 with the people in all their wanderings and their sins), 
 to such a man I say, the sight of idolatry was some- 
 thing absolutely appalling. He had no measure of its 
 enormity. Only he was sure that a people worshipping 
 calves, seeking God in high places, were flying from a 
 friend and a deliverer, to enemies and destroyers, from 
 the living and the true, to death and falsehood. He 
 knew that it was so. He was certain that he was not 
 uttering himself or his own fancies, when he said that it 
 was so. God was speaking through his lips ; God was pro- 
 nouncing sentence upon that which defied Him. What 
 signified who might stand before the altar, who might be 
 burning incense upon it ? He no more could or dare 
 tremble at the worshipper than at the thing worshipped. 
 Both were creatures of the eternal God. The one was 
 setting himself up, the other was set up in contempt of 
 Him ; each alike must come down. The truth must stand 
 fast and fulfil itself. He had only to proclaim the truth-
 
 vii.] THE ARM WITHERED. 113 
 
 But liow shall the idolater know it and be convinced 
 of it ? The arm we are told which was stretched out to 
 perform the sacrifice, and then to seize the prophet, 
 was dried up so that he could not pull it again to him. 
 "Here," you say, " is a miracle ; such a one as we expect 
 in all records of this kind." Precisely I think such a 
 one as you might expect in a record of this kind, and as 
 you would not expect and not meet with, in record of 
 another kind written by the supporters of a body which 
 was interested in superstition, and trying by all means to 
 sustain the reputation of it. The man of God testifies to 
 Jeroboam that the juices and springs of life are renewed 
 from an invisible source, that it is another than the dead 
 thing which he is worshipping who can dry them up or 
 give them their natural flow. A protest exactly in accord- 
 ance with that which Moses bore against the gods of 
 Pharaoh, that is to say a protest on behalf of regularity 
 and law, and for a God of regularity and law, with whom 
 are the issues of daily life and death, against the seeker of 
 charms in natural things, against the worshipper of ca- 
 pricious deities. The other part of the sign is precisely of 
 the same kind. The altar is rent and the ashes are poured 
 out from the altar, as a sure and everlasting testimony 
 that law and order shall not be violated with impunity by 
 any ruler, under any religious pretext; that his religious 
 acts are more hateful in the sight of God than all his 
 other acts, and must hasten the vengeance upon those. 
 
 The story of the prophet is continued in these words, 
 "And the king said unto the Man of God, ' Come home 
 with me, and refresh thyself, and I will give thee a re- 
 ward. 3 And the Man of God said unto the king, ' If thou 
 wilt give me half thine house, I will not go in with thee, 
 neither will T eat bread nor drink water in this place.
 
 114 THE TWO TEMPTATIONS. [SERM. 
 
 For so it was charged me by the word of the Lord, 
 saying, Eat no bread and drink no water, nor turn 
 again by the same way that thou earnest/ So he went 
 another way, and returned not by the way that he 
 came unto Bethel." The invisible Teacher, who had 
 bid him go forth on his journey and carry the message 
 to the king, had made him understand as clearly, that 
 when he had done his errand, he was to go back into 
 Judah. He had no doubt that this was what he ought 
 to do. It was part of his commission. The other part 
 of it would not be faithfully discharged if this was 
 forgotten. These words and acts of the Prophet 
 were connected with his own life, they belonged to his 
 very self. His conscience as well as his powers of 
 thought and reflection, were not crushed or stifled by 
 the divine communication, but were awakened by it 
 into activity. And the conscience so awakened, was 
 proof against any solicitations of the king. The Man 
 of God said in quite a different spirit from that in which 
 Balaam spoke to Balak, that if he gave him half his 
 house, he would not stay in that evil place. 
 
 But another temptation came, against which he was 
 not equally proof. An old prophet found him sitting 
 under an oak, and said unto him, " Art thou the man 
 of God that earnest from Judah ? " And he said, " I 
 am." Then he said unto him, " Come home with me, 
 and eat bread." And he said, " I may not return with 
 thee, for it was said to me by the word of the Lord, 
 ' Thou shalt eat no bread nor drink water there, nor 
 turn again to go by the way thou earnest/ ' He said 
 unto him, " I am a prophet also as thou art. And an 
 angel spake to me by the word of the Lord, saying, 
 ' Bring him back with thee to thy house that he may
 
 vii.] PROPHETS CAN BE DECEIVED AND DECEIVE. 115 
 
 eat bread and drink water.' But he lied unto him. 
 So he went back with him to his house/' * 
 
 I do not know any passage more useful than this, 
 for disabusing us of a prejudice, which the mere word 
 prophet is liable to create in our minds. " If the man 
 was inspired/' we say to ourselves, " inspired by God, 
 we must be sure he would do the right thing, and say 
 the right thing. It would destroy all our security if 
 we thought otherwise." No, brethren ; it would 
 destroy no security at all which the Bible designs to 
 give us. On the contrary, we shall lose a great security, 
 we shall fall into a great danger, if we do not strictly 
 adhere to the teaching of the Bible on this subject, 
 but set up certain canons of our own. The first 
 obvious lesson which this passage teaches us is, that a 
 prophet, a true prophet, a prophet of God, might be 
 grossly deceived. The second is, that he must be 
 deceived if he yielded to any pretences of inspiration 
 on the part of any man, though that man were called 
 a prophet, and were a prophet, when what he said 
 went against a sure witness and conviction as to his 
 own duty. The third is, that a prophet, not habitually 
 a deceiver, might on a certain occasion wilfully deceive, 
 in the plain language of Holy Writ, might lie. All 
 these statements we accept on the authority of Scrip- 
 ture. And if we accept them, we may derive the very 
 greatest profit from them. We are often apt to suppose 
 that a prophet or inspired man, is one who is raised 
 above laws and government, who can lay down laws 
 for himself, whose internal power is itself the rule for 
 others and for his own conduct. The Scripture teaches 
 us quite a different lesson. The characteristic quality 
 of the prophet when he is true, is obedience. He is 
 
 i 2
 
 116 NATURE AND MEASURE OF PUNISHMENT. [SERU. 
 
 nothing in himself. He is merely a servant. In the 
 acknowledgment of his service, of the power which 
 is upon him, his strength consists. But it is no mere 
 impulse to which he yields himself. He is liable to 
 all the same chance and foolish impulses as other 
 people. He is particularly liable to confound these 
 impulses with God's teaching and commands. He 
 is therefore to be more suspicious of himself, more 
 watchful against this confusion, than other men. If he 
 once forgets the invisible Ruler and Lawgiver, no one 
 will commit such flagrant errors, such falsehood, such 
 blasphemy. We shall see as we proceed, with what 
 fidelity and consistency the Scripture brings home 
 these truths to our minds ; with what strange openness, 
 in the written prophecies, the processes in the mind 
 of the seer are laid bare before us ; what a witness 
 there is of sincerity in the discoveries which he makes 
 to us of all his inward inclinations to be insincere and 
 treacherous. 
 
 In the remainder of the narrative we hear how the 
 prophet who had deceived his brother, himself de- 
 nounced his disobedience, and told him the conse- 
 quence of it ; how a lion met him by the way and slew 
 him, but left his body untorn ; how the old prophet of 
 Bethel bade his sons lay his bones beside the bones of 
 the man who had cursed the altar of Jeroboam. A stern 
 punishment, it will be said, for such a crime. An actual 
 punishment certainly, one which asserted the fact, 
 that a prophet will not be more, but less, excused for 
 his transgressions, than another man. What was the 
 magnitude of the punishment, we are no judges. A 
 man who has been witness of a great national sin and 
 has foretold a great national calamity, who has found
 
 VIL] A LIAR PUNISHES HIMSELF. 11? 
 
 out the falsehood of a friend and a prophet and who 
 is conscious of having done wrong himself, may not 
 think the sentence a very hard one which calls him 
 out of a confused world ; or more hard because it comes 
 in a form which assures him that there is an eternal 
 order which will vindicate itself in spite of his errors 
 and those of all other men. A man of God who had 
 learnt to trust God, could trust him when he was slay- 
 ing him, and see that there was a deep and awful 
 righteousness and wisdom in the way in which the 
 creatures of God going forth to seek their meat from 
 Him, may, without the least departure from the ordi- 
 nary law of their kind, be made the instruments of 
 punishing man's transgressions. The prophet who 
 betrayed him and then had the heavy punishment of 
 being forced to proclaim the wrong which he had him- 
 self instigated, is surely the greater object of com- 
 passion ; especially if, as the narrative half leads us to 
 suspect, his conscience was blunted, and he was able to 
 understand Jeroboam's sin without any keen sense of 
 his own. A man with a clear apprehension of the evil 
 doings of rulers, and admiration for those who protest 
 against them, with a prophetical power of uttering the 
 truth, yet with no love of truth or resolute abhorrence 
 of falsehood, is a very painful but a very instructive 
 spectacle. Every one must be conscious of something 
 akin to such a state of mind, some possibility of it, at 
 all events, in himself. He should think of that with 
 trembling, and with the prayer, " See if there be any 
 wicked way in me. Lead me in the way everlasting." 
 There is something very pathetic in the homage to a 
 truer and better man, which is expressed in the words, 
 " Lay my bones beside his bones." The lion slew him
 
 118 JEROBOAM'S PRIESTS AND HIS CHILD. [SERM. 
 
 for returning with me to eat bread and drink water ; 
 yet I should have been glad to die his death ; for I 
 feel that he was right within, and therefore that there 
 is a sacredness in his carcase which I would wish mine 
 to share. 
 
 Apparently the witness which the Man of God bore, 
 and the death which he died, were in vain. The next 
 sentence tells us that " Jeroboam returned not from his 
 evil way, but made again of the lowest of the people 
 priests of the high places. Whosoever would, he con- 
 secrated him, and he became a priest of the high places." 
 The destruction of an altar and the withering of a hand 
 which was cured again, were lessons soon forgotten. A 
 law once broken, there must be continual new trans- 
 gressions to justify the first. A superstition once 
 established will go on increasing and multiplying itself. 
 At last the sense of being under any authority will 
 vanish almost wholly from the mind of the rebellious 
 ruler. He will say, using the words in precisely the 
 opposite sense to that in which they are used in the 
 parable, " May I not do what I will with mine own ? " 
 As the necessary retribution for such a state of mind, 
 he will become more and more a slave. The priests 
 whom he has made will insist on ever higher prizes for 
 their ignominious work. To soothe the fears which 
 haunt him after the fear of a righteous Being has been 
 cast aside, he will ask those whom he has put in the 
 place of his conscience, what acts he must do that he 
 may seem a religious man to them, possibly at last to 
 himself. 
 
 But there are events which may put a man in mind 
 of realities after he has been living for a long while in 
 a fiction. " At that time," we are told, " Abijah, the
 
 vii.] THE HOUSE SENTENCED. 119 
 
 son of Jeroboam, fell sick. And Jeroboam said to his 
 wife, Arise, I pray thee, and disguise thyself, and get 
 thee to Shiloh. Behold, there is Ahijah the prophet, 
 which told me that I should be king. And take with 
 thee ten loaves, and cracknels, and a cruse of honey, 
 and go to him. He shall tell thee what will become of 
 the child." 1 Kings xiv. 
 
 The sight of the sick boy whom he cared for, brought 
 back perhaps the thought of himself when he had still 
 youthful freshness and hope ; when he felt the wrongs 
 which Solomon was inflicting upon the land, and 
 dreamed that he might be its deliverer. And with 
 these thoughts would come the recollection of the man 
 who had told him how, if he walked in right ways, 
 God would make him a sure house. A sad and pro- 
 fitable reflection if he had paused to dwell upon it. 
 But the lying habit of mind, which he had contracted 
 by converse with the priests of the high places, only 
 urged him to consider how he could bribe Ahijah to 
 tell him something about the child, which he would 
 like to hear. 
 
 The other person in the story is scarcely less changed 
 since we last met with him. " And Jeroboam's wife 
 went to Shiloh, to the house of Ahijah. But Ahijah 
 could not see ; for his eyes were set by reason of his age. 
 And the Lord said unto Ahijah, ' Behold the wife of 
 Jeroboam cometh to ask a thing of thee for her son ; for 
 he is sick. And thus shalt thou say unto her : (for it 
 shall be when she cometh in, she shall feign herself 
 to be another woman,) Go, tell Jeroboam, thus saith 
 the Lord God of Israel, Forasmuch as I exalted thee 
 from among the people, and made thee prince over my 
 people Israel, and rent the kingdom away from the
 
 120 THE PEOPLE SUFFER WITH THE KING. [SERM. 
 
 house of David, and gave it to thee ; and yet thou hast 
 not been as rny servant David, who kept my command- 
 ments ; but hast gone and made thee other gods, and 
 molten images, to provoke me to anger, and hast cast me 
 behind thy back; therefore the Lord shall raise him up 
 a king over Israel who shall cut off the house of Jero- 
 boam that day. But what ? Even now. And he shall 
 give Israel up because of the sins of Jeroboam, who 
 sinned and made Israel to sin/" This was the main 
 burden of the message. There was another part of it, 
 more afflicting to the wife of Jeroboam, more soothing 
 to the reader, which told her that " the son of whom 
 she inquired, should come to the grave, because in him 
 was found some good thing towards the Lord God of 
 Israel." 
 
 This fragment of Ahijah/s history, compared with 
 that which we heard last Sunday, marks out with 
 much clearness the office of a prophet in Israel. Living 
 under the brilliant government of Solomon, where 
 all had the outward face of prosperity and continuance, 
 living under the tyranny of Jeroboam, where all was 
 new and revolutionary, he had still to say, ' There is 
 an eternal order which cannot be violated. Whoso- 
 ever defies it, will bring ruin upon himself and upon 
 his house. God is ; a power which sets him at naught 
 and substitutes changeable things in His place, cannot 
 abide. It may be appointed to punish an evil which 
 has been working secretly ; it will last its hour ; but it 
 is doomed. The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it/ 
 
 The prophets could speak this word knowing it to 
 be true. And they could speak another which was 
 more terrible. They could say, Israel must suffer for 
 Jeroboam's sin. Not by an arbitrary decree, which
 
 vii.] THE SUCCESSION TO CRIMES. 121 
 
 punishes one for the crimes of another ; but because 
 the heart of the people has gone along with the ruler ; 
 because a ruler embodies in himself and presents in 
 open act the temper and spirit of those whom he rules ; 
 because if they would be saved from the consequences 
 of his evil doings, they must turn to the everlasting 
 King. This is a universal principle which comes out 
 with fresh power in each stage of Jewish history. 
 
 Nadab, the son of Jeroboam, reigned for two years 
 over Israel. Then Baasha, of the tribe of Issachar, 
 conspired against him and slew him. There is nothing 
 in the records of conspiracies like this, which separates 
 the Bible history from ordinary history. We have, on 
 a very small scale, in the annals of a few petty tribes, 
 just what we have expanded to its highest power in 
 the history of the Roman or of the Byzantine Empires. 
 Nor is the result different. The new house is like the 
 old. The rebel and murderer becomes the tyrant. It 
 will be said, 'There is grandeur about crimes and 
 miseries which affect a world; but what interest can 
 we feel in the story of men so diminutive in influence, 
 so insignificant in character, as Jeroboam or Baasha ? ' 
 I answer, The Scripture wishes us to feel none, except 
 so far as by a small experiment we may discover a 
 truth for all ages and nations. Such a truth is con- 
 tained in my text. 
 
 " Then the word of the Lord came to Jehu the son 
 of Hanani, against Baasha, saying, 'Forasmuch as I 
 exalted thee out of the dust, and made thee prince 
 over my people Israel ; and thou hast walked in the 
 way of Jeroboam, and hast made my people Israel to 
 sin, to provoke me to anger with their sins ; behold, 
 I will take away the posterity of Baasha, and the
 
 122 THE SECOND HOUSE DESTROYED. [SEBM. 
 
 posterity of his house ; and will make thy house like 
 the house of Jeroboam the son of Nebat. Him that 
 dieth of Baasha in the city shall the dogs eat ; and 
 him that dieth of his in the fields shall the fowls of 
 the air eat/ " 
 
 The general law is repeated with the same stern 
 simplicity, to one man as to another. " Whether you 
 came in by right means or by foul ; whether you are 
 a legitimate heir or a conspirator, God has made you a 
 prince. Your crime is your own. Your power is His. 
 Trying to be something in yourself, you pronounce 
 your own sentence. When you think to make gods, 
 God unmakes you/' The principle is again affirmed, 
 that a regular succession, a sure house, is a blessing 
 to a land ; that a man who desires to found such a 
 one, desires a good gift ; but that it is a gift ; that as 
 a witness of God's permanence and presence it is good; 
 that succession apart from him is a mere transmission 
 of curses. The particular phrase, "provoke me to 
 anger," is used here as it is used everywhere else in 
 the Bible. God is contemplated as jealous over His 
 people, feeling like a husband or a father to a rebellious 
 wife or child. It is presented with all boldness to 
 men who had the lowest, most grovelling conceptions 
 of the divine nature, not to flatter them but to coun- 
 teract them ; to destroy the fiction that God is indifferent 
 to His creatures or hates them, which is the foundation 
 of all idolatry ; to prepare the way for the full revela- 
 tion of that truth which interprets His jealousy, and 
 is the ground of all right faith in man, " God is Love." 
 
 I may have many opportunities hereafter of pointing 
 out the difference between the rude monotonous utter- 
 ances of these first prophets to the ten tribes, and the
 
 vn.J ST. PAUL AND THE OLD PEOPHETS. 123 
 
 various many-sided teachings of those who were at 
 once the poets, preachers, and statesmen of the two. 
 But another still more striking contrast is suggested 
 to us on this day. When one thinks of St. Paul now 
 speaking to the savages of Lycaonia, now holding 
 converse with the Stoics and Epicureans of Athens, 
 adapting himself perfectly to the feelings of the one 
 respecting a sender of rain and fruitful seasons, entering 
 into the heart of the pantheism and hero-worship of 
 the other; one moment a Hebrew of the Hebrews, versed 
 in all rabbinical and cabalistical lore, then writing to 
 the Ephesians in the dialect of commerce ; to-day pene- 
 trating the different party tendencies at Corinth, to- 
 morrow addressing himself to the sense of law and 
 righteousness which had been cultivated through many 
 generations and was not yet extinct in the mind of the 
 Romans, one may be disposed to think very meanly 
 of the Man of God who came to Bethel, or of Ahijah, 
 or of Jehu the son of Hanani. Still more when one 
 thinks that all the intellectual gifts of St. Paul were 
 united with and subordinate to that beautiful play of 
 the affections, which made him burn with every one 
 who was angry, and wish himself accursed from Christ 
 for the sake of his kinsmen after the flesh, and feel all 
 the slights of the Corinthians, and never bow the knee 
 to the Father of the whole family in Heaven and earth 
 without thinking of his converts and of their sins or 
 sorrows, one may half despise the narrow circle of 
 sympathies in which these men of the old time revolved, 
 with the perversities, inconsistencies, sometimes in- 
 sincerities, into which they fell. No such feelings, we 
 may be sure, ever dwelt in the mind of St. Paul himself. 
 These heroes of his nation were to him dear and vener-
 
 124 HIS MESSAGE LIKE THEIRS. [SEEM. 
 
 able names, the recollection of which cheered him in 
 lonely hours and went with him to the tribunals of 
 kings and governors. In all essentials he will have 
 felt that their hopes were one, the end, the source of 
 them the same. While he was denouncing the exclu- 
 siveness of his people, " enemies to God and contrary to 
 all men," he was in fact denouncing an idolatry, a 
 separate worship, which though maintained in the 
 Temple at Jerusalem, was more at variance with the 
 mind of the God of Abraham than the worship of the 
 calves of Bethel, than the sacrifices offered by the 
 priests of the high places. When he went before Nero, 
 and no man stood with him, he was in fact crying out, 
 not to a single altar, but to all those at which Rome 
 and the world were offering incense, " You shall be 
 rent in pieces, your ashes shall be strewed upon the 
 earth, and the hands, pontifical or imperial, which 
 serve before them shall be withered." When he was 
 preaching the everlasting Gospel, the Gospel of Christ's 
 full redemption of mankind, to all kindreds and nations 
 and tribes, he was saying to that age and to all ages, 
 tc Fear the true God, the God and father of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, the God of love, and give glory to Him. 
 For all who give glory to any but Him, to any earthly, 
 brutal, sensual power, shall share its certain downfall 
 and perdition." 
 
 And we too, brethren, we need not the glorious com- 
 pany of the Apostles only, but the goodly fellowship of 
 the Prophets, to strengthen us in the faith of God's 
 elect, to inspire us for the work which we have to do. 
 We need to believe that they, different parts of the 
 same family in Heaven and earth, are watching us 
 in our race and strife here below. We need to hear
 
 TIL] BOTH ARE OUR HELPERS. 125 
 
 the voices of old Prophets testifying in broad and simple 
 language, that every petty tyranny and superstition of 
 the earth which lifts itself up against God and against 
 man, shall be put down ; as well as to hear the full cry 
 of the Saints beneath the altar, who have triumphed 
 by the blood of the Lamb and the word of His testi- 
 mony, " How long, O Lord, faithful and true, wilt thou 
 not judge and deliver the earth ! " We need it be- 
 cause we ought to be prepared to resist unto blood 
 striving against sin, the sin which defied the Law, 
 the sin which rejected the Gospel, the sin which is 
 rebelling against both now, in ourselves and in the 
 world.
 
 SERMON VIII. 
 
 AHAB AND ELIJAH. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 4th Sunday after Epiphany. Feb. 1, 1852.) 
 
 'But the angel of the Lord said to Elijah the Tishbite, Arise, go up to 
 meet the messengers of the king of Samaria, and say unto them, 
 " Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go up to 
 inquire of Baal-zebub, the god of Ekron ? " 2 KINGS i. 3. 
 
 THE worship of the calves which Jeroboam set up in 
 Bethel and in Dan, is carefully distinguished in 
 Scripture from the worship of Baal, which was intro- 
 duced by Ahab into Samaria. Jeroboam wished to 
 separate the ten tribes from those which followed the 
 house of David, by giving them sacrifices and priests 
 of their own. From the words which he is said to 
 have used, "These are thy gods, Israel, which brought 
 thee up out of the land of Egypt," it is probable that 
 Tie affected to restore the idolatry which Aaron had 
 sanctioned in the wilderness. He or his priests would 
 suggest the thought to the people, or their own hearts 
 would suggest it to them, that what the high-priest 
 approved could not be very wrong ; that Moses had no 
 right to break the calf in pieces ; that the people in 
 Jerusalem who followed the law of Moses were really 
 departing from a good old example; that they were 
 returning to a national service. The step from this
 
 SERM. viii.] HOW FOREIGN WORSHIP BEGINS. 127 
 
 ultra local worship to a foreign Phoenician worship 
 seems a very long one. Yet it was natural and easy. 
 We cannot tell exactly what the calf signified to the 
 Egyptian, still less what it signified to the Hebrew 
 slave in the desert, or to the revolted tribes. It may 
 have been merely adopted as a traditional symbol, no 
 special force being attached to it. But a people trained 
 in the law of Moses must have associated some re- 
 collection of an unseen Being even with the most 
 worthless image. How strong such associations may 
 be in any mind, how long they may continue, we have 
 happily no means of determining. We only know 
 that the conscience of the idolater becomes at once 
 stupefied and sensitive ; more and more incapable of 
 appreciating moral distinctions ; more and more alive 
 to terrors. The thought of a righteous Being is 
 appalling; from an object of trust He passes into an 
 object of horror. How to appease Him is the question. 
 The old forms may not be the right. Other nations 
 which seem happier and more prosperous, have other 
 gods and sacrifices. It might be well to try them. 
 The most powerful neighbour must be most worthy of 
 imitation. 
 
 A king like Ahab meets the demands of a people 
 in this state. The Scripture, which speaks of the 
 cities which he built, and his ivory house, and his 
 might, and the wars which he warred, leaves the 
 impression upon our minds that he was intellectually 
 superior to his predecessors, of a higher ambition, less 
 narrow in his notions. He had not the dread which 
 Jeroboam felt of intercourse with Jerusalem, he culti- 
 vated the friendship of Jehoshaphat. At the same 
 time he took to wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal,
 
 128 JEZEBEL AND BAAL. [SERM. 
 
 king of the Sidonians. And with her he naturalised a 
 worship, certainly very much more august and im- 
 posing than that which had been practised by the 
 kings that were before him. There may, or may not, 
 have been animal forms connected with the service 
 of this God of Ekron. The name would seem only to 
 impart a comprehensive notion of lordship, a notion 
 which might express itself in a number of different 
 symbols, which certainly would not be limited to the 
 one of the calf, or be likely to adopt that as its favourite. 
 Baal would become Baalim ; the general lord and ruler 
 would soon be multiplied and divided into a number 
 of lords and rulers; but there would be attached to 
 them all a much grander feeling of dominion than 
 could ever have entered into the mind of one who was 
 bowing to the likeness of a calf which eateth hay. 
 
 Ahab would therefore seem to himself, as well as to 
 a great many of his people, an improver and expander 
 of the popular faith. Foreign priests, with much more 
 knowledge probably than those lowest of the people 
 whom Jeroboam had consecrated, would come into the 
 land. A number of the native priests would be quite 
 ready to adopt the worship which the king and queen 
 favoured. Though they might have some new rites to 
 learn, though they might not like the strangers, or might 
 be despised by them, yet they would not be conscious 
 of any great change in themselves or their devotions. 
 In their dark groves, on their hill-altars, they had been 
 seeking to propitiate some unknown fearful divinity. 
 For that divinity they had now found a name. The 
 Egyptian idol might suggest thoughts sometimes of 
 the dark power, sometimes of Him who had made a 
 covenant with their fathers; the Phoanician taught
 
 viii.] POWEE IDENTIFIED WITH EVIL. 129 
 
 them to understand the distinction, to feel and know 
 that they were invoking another than the Lord God 
 whose presence Solomon had prayed might fill his 
 temple. 
 
 You see then why Ahab is said to have provoked 
 the Lord God of Israel more than all that were before 
 him. The Baal worship was essentially the worship 
 of mere power. I do not say that abstractedly or 
 originally it was the worship of an evil power. But 
 it was the worship of power as distinguished from 
 righteousness. It was the worship therefore of that 
 which man sees without him in nature, not that of 
 which he feels within, speaking to himself. It may 
 not have been wholly disjoined from the acknowledg- 
 ment of an order and succession in nature. It is hard, 
 almost impossible, for man to conceive of power apart 
 from some order and government. But these ideas 
 become exceedingly weak when they are derived from 
 nature to man, not through man to nature. When we 
 think that the things themselves exercise the power, 
 and do not receive it from One in whom dwells eternal 
 justice and rectitude, forms which denote the most 
 violent and inexplicable outbursts of fury, the fire and 
 the tempest, are speedily thought to represent the 
 nature of the Baal or Baalim, of the lord or lords of the 
 universe. At all events these are what man must 
 address himself to. Some joyous feasts may be cele- 
 brated, with wild and reckless licence, to the gentler 
 and human er powers which manifest themselves in 
 the propitious breeze, the quiet evening, the sun that 
 ripens the autumn fruits. But the most serious ser- 
 vices, the sacrifices which those very enjoyments have 
 made necessary, the libations of blood, must be pre- 
 
 x
 
 130 THE MORALITY OF AHAB. [SEEM. 
 
 sented to some malevolent nature, which would destroy 
 unless it were soothed. Thus the worship of power 
 becomes literally the worship of evil. By a regular 
 and awful process Baal or Baal-zebub became in the 
 minds of his devout servants, what his name imported 
 to Jews of later time the Prince of the Devils. 
 
 Ahab and his people may only by slow degrees have 
 learnt to see their god in this portentous aspect. But 
 the first conception of him, as naked power, is sufficient 
 to explain all the acts which are imputed to the king, 
 as well as the slavery and cowardice of his subjects. 
 The story of Naboth's vineyard sets forth in one 
 instance the history of the reign. The king desires 
 some land which belongs to another man ; he is ready 
 to pay for it. But Nabqth will not sell the inheritance 
 of his fathers. Ahab is wroth and will not eat bread. 
 Jezebel wonders at his weakness. "Dost thou now 
 govern Israel ? " she says, " Arise and be merry. I 
 will give thee the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite." 
 The elders of his city are told in sealed letters to pro- 
 claim a fast, to set up Naboth on high among the people 
 and to say, " Thou didst blaspheme God and the king." 
 The command is faithfully executed. Naboth is stoned 
 till he dies. Ahab enters and takes possession. Here, 
 as elsewhere, the man has still a troublesome conscience 
 checking an evil will. "I dare not waits upon I 
 would." The female adviser cuts the knot. She sees 
 what his heart is, and if he has power, what would 
 hinder him from carrying his purpose into act ? She 
 is perfectly sure that the nobles of the city will not 
 refuse obedience to a request of their master, if it only 
 involves perjury and murder. The king and queen 
 avail themselves of a religious act, as the most obvious
 
 TIIL] ELIJAH THE TISHBITB, 131 
 
 and easy means of accomplishing and hallowing their 
 design. And it was the most fitting means of accom- 
 plishing such a design. It showed how deeds of this 
 kind are generated and made possible. The worshipper 
 has made a god in whom he sees nothing but cruelty 
 and self-will. There is an eternal law which binds / 
 him to exhibit the image of that God in himself. 
 
 Ahab and Jezebel and these elders of Jezreel, who 
 are no unfair representatives of the tribes generally, 
 enable us to understand the character and work of 
 Elijah. He is as different from the men of whom I 
 spoke last Sunday, as Baal worship is different from the 
 earlier worship against which they bore witness. One 
 difference is indicated in my text and may be traced 
 through the history. Elijah speaks with repeated and 
 continual emphasis of the Lord God of Israel as opposed 
 to the God of Ekron. The foreign Phoenician worship 
 is denounced, in that character. I draw your attention 
 to this circumstance, because it has given rise to an 
 objection like that of which I spoke a week ago. 
 " Everything," it is said, " in these Jewish records is 
 exclusive and national. The least intrusion of new 
 ideas, even if they are more elevated and less animal 
 than those which preceded them, and which in part 
 they displace, must be carefully watched and vehe- 
 mently resisted. What is attempted in a great sphere, 
 and yet unsuccessfully, by the ministers of the Celestial 
 Empire, was attempted on a very small scale in 
 Palestine; the Prophets were the protectors of the- 
 old traditions of their little commonwealth from any 
 external refinements." 
 
 In what sense this charge is true; in what sense 
 Elijah was a witness for a national God; how far he 
 
 K 2
 
 132 ELIJAH COMMANDING THE BAIN. [SEKM. 
 
 was therefore a witness for a local exclusive God, or 
 for a dead tradition of the past, the records concerning 
 him must determine. 
 
 The first of these records is contained in the 17th 
 chapter of the 1st Book of Kings. " Elijah the Tish- 
 bite said unto Ahab, As the Lord God of Israel liveth, 
 before whom I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain 
 these years, but according to my word." A strange 
 speech certainly to be reported of a man of whom as 
 yet we have heard nothing. What had been passing 
 in his mind up to that day, what he had to do with 
 Ahab, how he came to think that dew or rain would 
 obey his commands, we are not told. We are to judge 
 of these things as we can. Our only help for judging 
 of them, lies in the words themselves. And there is 
 the secret ; "As the Lord God of Israel liveth before 
 whom I stand." Here we have the key to the educa- 
 tion and faith of Elijah, as well as to his relation with 
 the king of Israel. " I have learnt that there is a 
 Lord God of Israel and that He lives, and that I am in 
 His presence. I am sure that He is my Guide and 
 Teacher and Judge ; I am sure that He is the Guide 
 and Teacher and Judge of this land and of its king. 
 And this, Ahab, is just what thou dost not believe, just 
 what thou by thine acts art denying. Thou believest 
 in a lord or in many lords, far off from thee, exercising 
 no government over thy actions, enforcing no duties 
 upon thee towards thy subjects; a lord seated some- 
 where in the clouds, or on the summit of some hill ; a 
 cloud-compeller, a giver of dew or rain when your 
 offerings please him, or when of mere sovereignty he 
 chooses to do it. And I tell you that it is not this lord 
 or these lords who send rain and dew ; but that it is
 
 viii.] HIS MESSAGE TO THE SIDONIAN WOMAN. 133 
 
 the God of you and of your fathers, the God who has 
 ordained the course of seasons, who has appointed 
 summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, who has ap- 
 pointed you to till the land upon which His rain descends 
 and His sun shines ; who claims first of all your trust 
 and your obedience, since though you stand as I stand 
 before Him, it is not your eyes that will tell you of 
 Him ; you must believe in Him if you would know Him. 
 And as a sign and witness that it is even so, I declare 
 to you, that the rain and the dew shall not come except 
 at the word of me, a poor, insignificant, unknown man, 
 by whom it pleases God to declare what He is, and 
 what the being whom he has formed in His image is 
 meant to be/' Herein consists the force of this auda- 
 cious sentence. It at once proclaims that relation 
 between the unseen God and the spirit of man, which 
 Jezebel's priests by their services, and Ahab by his 
 tyrannical acts, were alike setting at naught. 
 
 The Lord God of Israel, then, is declared by Elijah 
 to be in His very nature the present God, the " God 
 with them " just as much as he had been with Jacob 
 when he wrestled with the Angel, and He put on him 
 his new name. Let us see what the next passage of 
 Elijah's story tells us about the limitation or exclusive- 
 ness of this belief. It is the passage upon which our Lord 
 commented when He was standing in the Synagogue 
 of Nazareth. " I tell you of a truth/' He said, " many 
 widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the 
 heaven was shut up three years and six months, when 
 great famine was throughout all the land. But unto 
 none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city 
 of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow." So that 
 the person from whom Elijah was to receive sustenance,
 
 134 ELIJAH ON CAKMEL. [SKI; a. 
 
 and whom, as a return for that favour, he was to 
 teach trust in the Lord God of Israel, that her barrel 
 of meal should not waste, neither her cruse of oil fail, 
 was a woman of that very country from which Jezebel 
 had come the very country from which the Baal 
 worship had been imported. The Lord God of the 
 nation, then, was one in whom the weak and poor 
 of all nations might confide one from whom they 
 might ask their daily bread, and on whom they might 
 cast their heaviest cares. It is this same woman to 
 whose son, as we are told in the next paragraph, Elijah 
 restored life. He who testified that man did not live 
 from hour to hour by bread alone, but by every word 
 that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, testified also, 
 and as in the former case to a stranger from the com- 
 monwealth of Israel, that God can give back that life 
 which He has taken away. The poor woman of Sidon 
 learnt the amazing lesson, that the power which she 
 had looked upon as emphatically the destroyer, is 
 warring with death, and can win a victory over it, not 
 for some great and holy person, but for her whose sins 
 had been brought to her remembrance by the presence 
 of the prophet and the death of her child. 
 
 Elijah on Mount Carmel, surrounded by all Israel, 
 while the prophets of the groves, and those that ate at 
 JezebeFs table, were offering their bullocks, or crying 
 " Baal, hear us ! " and leaping upon the altars, and 
 cutting themselves with knives, is a picture with 
 which we are all familiar. If you try to recall the 
 impression which it has made upon you, I think you 
 will feel that it has not proceeded mainly from the 
 sudden appearance of the fire which came forth to con- 
 sume Elijah's sacrifice, but from the contrast between
 
 vin.] HIS ORDER; HIS PRAYER. 135 
 
 the fever and restlessness of the priests, and the calm- 
 ness and minute regularity of all the proceedings of 
 the prophet. " He took twelve stones, according to 
 the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto 
 whom the word of the Lord came, saying, ' Israel shall 
 be thy name/ And with the stones he built an altar 
 in the name of the Lord. And he made a trench about 
 the altar as great as would contain two measures of 
 seed. And he put the wood in order, and cut the bul- 
 lock in pieces, and laid him on the wood, and said, 
 * Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on the burnt 
 sacrifice, and on the wood/ And he said, ' Do it the 
 second time/ And they did it the second time. And 
 he said, ' Do it the third time/ And they did it the 
 third time. And the water ran round about the altar ; 
 and he filled the trench also with water. And it came 
 to pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacri- 
 fice, that Elijah the prophet came near, and said, ' Lord 
 God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Israel, let it be 
 known this day that Thou art God in Israel, and that I 
 am Thy servant, and that I have done all these things 
 at Thy word. Hear me, Lord, hear me, that this 
 people may know that Thou art the Lord God, and 
 that Thou hast turned their hearts back again/ " 
 
 To testify by the form of the altar that the people 
 were even then a portion of the twelve tribes, that 
 they were united in God's sight, though visibly sepa- 
 rated by the sins of men, was one great part of Elijah's 
 work. But "it was not a less important part of his 
 duty to remind the people, that God had appointed the 
 method and time of the sacrifice ; that prayer to Him 
 was not a violent effort to bring about some mighty 
 result desired by the worshipper, but was an act of
 
 136 DESTRUCTION OF THE PEIESTS. [SSRX. 
 
 quiet obedience of self-surrender ; all its earnestness 
 being derived from a belief in the willingness of God 
 to make His creature that which without Him he 
 cannot be. " Lord God, turn the heart of this people 
 back again ! They are in an unnatural, disorderly con- 
 dition; they are trying to be independent of Thee. 
 And they have so fixed and rooted themselves in that 
 which is false, that they cannot break loose from it. 
 The evil power to which they have done homage, holds 
 them fast bound in his fetters. Good has become evil 
 to them; evil has become good. Ruler of the heart 
 and reins, who desirest good, and nothing but good for 
 them, make them reasonable beings restore them to 
 the state of men ! " To this prayer the fire was an 
 answer. It came down as a witness that God Himself 
 is the author as well as the acceptor of every sacrifice, 
 that all fire must be false which He has not kindled. 
 
 And then we are told that Elijah performed another 
 sacrifice. The people who exclaimed, " The Lord He 
 is God," of course regarded the priests, who had not 
 been able to make their god hear, with a rage corre- 
 sponding to their previous reverence. And so it is said 
 Elijah was able to slay four hundred and fifty of them, 
 Ahab consenting to their death, or fearing to prevent 
 it. A fearful vengeance surely ! Does the thought 
 occur to you, ' ( If this book be, as is alleged, not a mere 
 history of that which is strange and exceptional, but a 
 revelation of permanent laws and principles, may not 
 this act be pleaded in justification of any, even the 
 most outrageous punishment of worshippers, false, or 
 thought to be false, that has ever taken place in any 
 age of the Christian Church ? " I answer, I conceive 
 this story is a revelation of permanent principles, just
 
 VIIL] ELIJAH UNDER THE JUNIPER TREE. 137 
 
 as I believe Elijah's declaration that there should be 
 no rain nor dew, or his commanding the widow's erase 
 not to fail, is the revelation of a permanent principle. 
 The one shows forth God's indignation against those 
 who corrupt and demoralise a nation by trading in 
 religious arts and fears, just as the others show God's 
 continual government over the outward universe, and 
 His protecting care over every person who dwells in it. 
 The method in which the revelation of these truths 
 was made belongs to a peculiar period of the world's 
 history. In a general way it may be said to belong to 
 the whole Jewish dispensation, including in that the 
 period down to the destruction of Jerusalem. In 
 another sense it belonged to the special circumstances 
 of the time in which Elijah was living. We do not 
 need to have prophets executing these purposes of the 
 divine government, which famines, pestilences, revo- 
 lutions execute without them, or those which are 
 accomplished through the intervention of the ordinary 
 ministers of health and nourishment. But if no pro- 
 phet had ever been commissioned to do one kind of 
 work as well as the other, we should not have known 
 to whom we might refer them. An infinite darkness 
 would have rested both upon human and natural pro- 
 ceedings, which except through our own fault and 
 unwillingness to profit by God's illumination, does not 
 rest upon them now. 
 
 Then we are told, Jezebel swore by her gods that 
 she would make Elijah like one of those prophets whom 
 he had slain. " And he went a day's journey into the 
 wilderness and sat under a juniper tree : and said, 
 ' Lord, take now my life ; for I am not better than my 
 fathers.' " They had passed away from the earth ; why
 
 138 USE OF THE DISCIPLINE. [SERM 
 
 was he to stny upon it in strife with all- with whom he 
 had to do, with a commission to destroy, but not it 
 seemed having one friend who cared for him or could 
 feel with him ? Then food was provided for him ; he 
 found there was One who knew his wants and could 
 satisfy them. He went in the strength of that meat 
 towards Horeb, where God had once been heard speak- 
 ing out of the midst of the fire those commandments 
 which His people were breaking. " And he came into a 
 cave and lodged there. And the word of the Lord came 
 unto him and said unto him, ' What doest thou here, 
 Elijah ? ' And he said unto Him, ' I have been very 
 jealous for the Lord God of Hosts : for the children of 
 Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine 
 altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword. And I, 
 even I only, am left ; and they seek my life to take it 
 away.' " And He said, " Go forth, and stand upon the 
 mount before the Lord. And, behold, the Lord passed 
 by. And a great and strong wind rent the mountains, 
 and brake in pieces the rocks before the Lord. But 
 the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an 
 earthquake j but the Lord was not in the earthquake. 
 And after the earthquake a fire ; but the Lord was not 
 in the fire. And after the fire a still small voice. And 
 it came to pass that when Elijah heard it he went and 
 wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood 
 in the entering in of the cave." 1 Kings xix. 9-13. 
 
 There are those who think that Elijah exceeded hi3 
 commission when he destroyed the Priests of Baal ; that 
 this was one of the self-willed acts, which the Scripture 
 records, sometimes with no commentary but that which 
 subsequent events supply, of its noblest heroes. I have 
 not adopted that view of the subject. I have not seen
 
 vin.] ELIJAH'S FELLOWS AND SUCCESSORS. 139 
 
 any occasion to depart from the ordinary one. But 
 though I do not read in this story of Elijah's deep 
 despondency the condemnation of his last act, I do see 
 in it the natural effects of any great exercise of des- 
 tructive power, perhaps of power at all, upon the 
 mind of him to whom it has been entrusted. The 
 sense of exhaustion, the cry, " I am not better than my 
 fathers/' though I have done such wonders, the hope- 
 lessness of the future becoming all the more deep from 
 the apparently useless triumph that had been won 
 already, surely every prophet must have these bitter 
 experiences if he is not to sink into a Baal-worshipper, 
 and after all to regard the God of Truth and Righteous- 
 ness merely as a God of Might. Elijah, though he 
 wrought so many miracles, was comparatively still a 
 novice when he sat down under the juniper tree. 
 When he left the cave he was an initiated man. He 
 had thought that the earthquake, the fire, the wind 
 that rent the mountains, must be the great witnesses of 
 the Lord. But He was not in them. Not they ; but 
 the still small voice had that awe in it which forced 
 the prophet to cover his face with his mantle. What 
 a blessed and a beautiful conclusion of all the past his- 
 tory ! What an interpretation of its meaning ! The 
 glaring outward signs which the priests of Jezebel 
 sought for, were feeble ; the living power which spoke 
 to the heart within, this only demanded and compelled 
 reverence. He who coulgLapiirl bread to- the woma-n"oT\ 
 Zarephath was indeed the God who answered by fire. 
 
 And now the prophet was prepared for two lessons 
 of deep humiliation, and therefore of unspeakable com- 
 fort. He had supposed he was alone in his witness 
 for God. It was a thought of anguish, and yet it was
 
 140 THE WHIRLWIND. [SEEM. 
 
 a thought of pride. He felt the misery of solitude, 
 yet there was self-exaltation in it. " I alone am left ; 
 and they seek my life." No ! there are seven thousand 
 who have not bowed the knee to Baal. Is it so, in- 
 deed ? What, Elijah the great prophet, after all does 
 not know more than a multitude beside ! He is not 
 more faithful than they are ! God has called them as 
 well as him. Who can tell whether Elijah could have 
 borne that discovery a few hours before ? The still 
 small voice had made it the most blessed of all dis- 
 coveries. That voice had taught him not to care 
 whether he was better than his fathers, or better than 
 his brethren ; to desire only that God might be glorified 
 in his strength and in his nothingness. 
 
 This lesson referred to the present. The other con- 
 cerned the future. Elisha the son of Shaphat, and 
 Jehu the son of Nimshi, were to finish the work which 
 he had left undone. He was wanted no longer ; God 
 had other men, one of them his servant, the other a 
 wild captain of the host, who could bear a witness 
 which he had not been able to bear. Was not this a 
 message of humiliation ? But was there not in it such 
 comfort as no other could have brought ? His task was 
 over ; he might leave the world in which he had fought 
 so hard a fight, certain that he and the world were both 
 in God's hands, whithersoever he might go, in whatever 
 manner he might be taken. 
 
 Once convinced of that, it signified not whether he 
 died the most lingering death or was carried in a 
 whirlwind into heaven. There are those who dwell 
 on the story of his departure, as if it were worthy of 
 more wonder and were more divine than all the events 
 of his life. I cannot think so. I do not pretend to
 
 Tin.] THE TRANSFIGURATION. 141 
 
 understand that story. I do not desire to explain it 
 away. I receive it in all the vagueness with which 
 the Scripture has left it surrounded, as one of the 
 testimonies which it pleased God to bear to the old 
 world of a truth which we receive, since Christ has 
 risen and ascended on high, as belonging not to some 
 special saint, but to all beings who bear the flesh 
 which He took. And when you are disposed to dwell 
 upon that which is peculiar in the history of Elijah, 
 that which is not vouchsafed to us in this age, turn to 
 these words : " And it came to pass about an eight 
 days after these sayings, Jesus took Peter and John and 
 James, and went up into a mountain to pray. And as 
 He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered, 
 and His raiment was white and glistering. And, be- 
 hold there talked with Him two men, which were 
 Moses and Elias : who appeared in glory, and spake of 
 His decease which He should accomplish at Jerusalem." 
 There is then something more glorious than translation 
 So Elijah told the disciples ; so he tells us. The death 
 of a malefactor, the death of the cross ; this in the eyes 
 of saints and angels is far more glorious. This breaks 
 down all distinctions, this exhibits the eternal Son of 
 God uniting Himself with the weakness and the death 
 of every creature. This makes it a shame to wish that 
 there were any other way into the full and open presence 
 of God, than the one which He has consecrated. And 
 in this Cross, we see Righteousness and Wisdom and 
 Love, triumphing over all forms of human and natural 
 power ; claiming them as the servants, claiming us as the 
 children, of Him of whom Moses and Elijah and every 
 prophet in the whole world bore witness while they were 
 on earth, and bear witness now in their glory.
 
 SERMON IX. 
 
 BLISHA AND JEHU. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, Septuagesima Sunday. Feb. 8, 1852.) 
 
 And Elisha the prophet called one of the children of the prophets, 
 and said unto him, " Gird np thy loins, and take this box of oil 1 
 in thine hand, and go to Ramoth-gilead. And when thou comest 
 thither, look out there Jehu, the son of Jehoshaphat, the son of 
 Nimshi, and go in, and make him arise up from among his 
 brethren, and carry him to an inner chamber. Then take the 
 box of oil, and pour it on his head, and say, ' Thus saith the Lord, 
 I have anointed thee king over Israel.' Then open the door, and 
 flee, and tarry not." 2 KINGS ix. 1-3. 
 
 I NEED scarcely tell you that the phrase " children of 
 the prophets " in this passage, indicates men who were 
 taught by a prophet or prophets, and who might hope 
 in due time to fulfil the office themselves, if they were 
 not already called to it. The notion of a class of men 
 under this kind of education, is very puzzling I appre- 
 hend to some modern readers. " Was not the prophet/' 
 they ask, " emphatically the inspired man ? Were not 
 his words false if they did not proceed directly from 
 the mouth of the Lord ? How could he be trained or 
 disciplined to utter such words ? " The subject is a 
 very important one. The portion of the history at 
 which we are now arrived, forces it upon our notice. 
 Elijah was in a remarkable sense the solitary man.
 
 SERM. ix.] THE SCHOOLS OF THE PROPHETS. 143 
 
 " I alone," lie said, " am the prophet of the Lord ; 
 while the prophets of Baal are four hundred and 
 fifty. I alone am left ; and they seek my life." On 
 the contrary, his successor Elisha is nearly always 
 surrounded by companions, disciples, or servants. 
 Every passage of his history makes us understand 
 how great the influence of the previous teacher had 
 been ; how true it was that there were numbers who 
 had not bowed the knee to Baal during his stay upon 
 earth ; how soon, according to what seems the general 
 law in such cases, they discovered themselves after he 
 had left it. In the particular instance of which the 
 text speaks, a young man out of the schools goes by 
 the direct command of Elisha to execute an errand 
 which involved nothing less than the overthrow of a 
 dynasty and a revolution of two kingdoms. 
 
 If the main work of the prophet was to declare, 
 that such and such an event would, or would not, come 
 to pass, or if he was a mere ^Eolian harp from which 
 a chance breeze drew forth certain wild and irregular, 
 however beautiful, notes, the idea of preparation 
 involves an absurdity, or something worse than an 
 absurdity. On that supposition it must mean, if it 
 means anything, an initiation of the scholar into certain 
 tricks by which his predecessors had been wont to im- 
 pose upon the vulgar, or the communication to him of 
 certain facts and principles known to them, by which 
 he might acquire a reputation for sudden insight and 
 discovery. No doubt such an education as this was 
 not unknown in the old world, as it is not unknown 
 in the modern. It is the ordinary discipline of adepts 
 and conjurors, of those who practise upon men's fears 
 or upon their curiosity ; of those who appeal to their
 
 144 THE CHARACTER OF THEIR INSPIRATION. [SEEM. 
 
 consciences by religious deceptions, or to their sense of 
 mysterious powers in the natural world by philosophical 
 deceptions. 
 
 But the Jewish prophet, as we have found him in 
 the Scripture records which we have gone through, 
 was not primarily or characteristically a foreteller. 
 The essence of his office did not lie in what he an- 
 nounced respecting the future, though he might speak 
 of it very decisively and authoritatively. Nor did he 
 eek to draw any special wonder to himself as an 
 improviser, though he might be called upon to speak 
 out at once on great emergencies that which had been 
 put into his heart. But the sole power which the 
 prophet possessed of declaring that which should be, 
 arose from his knowledge of that which had been and 
 which was. He meditated in the law of the Lord, 
 and in that law did he exercise himself day and night. 
 In this exercise he learnt what was in conformity 
 with the law, what was contrary to it. In this 
 exercise he learnt to believe in a divine Teacher and to 
 commune with Him j to believe in Him as a permanent 
 and continual Teacher, as the guide of his own heart ; 
 to believe that all other men's hearts were right so 
 long as they were under the same guidance, and wrong 
 when they were breaking loose from it. The fruits of 
 revolt his inward monitor enabled him to foresee and 
 to predict. The prediction might take a general form 
 and point to a distant issue, or a number of issues ; it 
 might speak of that which was definite and immediate. 
 There would be the same proof in both cases that 
 the word came from a hidden source and from a moral 
 being; a proof addressed to the conscience of the 
 hearer, seeing that the prediction would always come
 
 ix.] THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF PASSING EVENTS. 145 
 
 forth with some warning respecting his actual conduct, 
 some denunciation of an idolatrous or unrighteous act. 
 Everything then that was sudden in these utterances, 
 bore witness to previous trains of thoughts and habits 
 of reflection. So far from wishing to deny the exis- 
 tence of these, as if they interfered with the genuine- 
 ness of his inspiration, the prophet would be grieved if 
 his hearer did not give him credit for them. If his 
 utterances seem to be fortuitous, they could not bear 
 the witness which he desired they should bear of a 
 permanent ruler; they could not remind the listener 
 of the deep fountain from which they had proceeded, or 
 encourage him to ask in wonder and awe, whether 
 that fountain was not also in himself. 
 
 The knowledge of passing events, too, would be 
 sought for, not declined, by the true prophet. He had 
 no need to bandage his eyes that the spectator might 
 be sure he derived his insight from some other source 
 than actual observation. He might observe, he was 
 bound to observe, whatever came before him in any 
 way, from any quarter. All facts we*e to him signs of 
 a divine purpose, solemn indications of truth which 
 they could not themselves make known, but which 
 nevertheless lay in the heart of them, and which God 
 could discover to the patient and faithful seeker. 
 
 Nor can I suppose that the knowledge which the 
 wise king is said to have possessed of trees and plants, 
 from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop upon the wall, 
 so far as the means of obtaining it lay within their 
 reach, would have been scorned or scouted by these 
 men of God. They might not have had much of it ; 
 probably much less than the soothsayers and magicians 
 of Egypt or Assyria; less perhaps of traditional in-
 
 146 THE PROPHET ONE OF THE PEOPLE. [SERM. 
 
 formation on such matters than the Phoenician priests 
 of Jezebel's court. But what they had they would 
 make use of ; looking rather to the secret powers of 
 things than to their outward mechanism ; referring 
 the former in all cases to the government of a personal 
 being ; believing that in many, perhaps in most, cases 
 they were subject to man as His vicegerent. 
 
 Supposing the habitual belief and work of the prophet 
 to have been of this kind, it does not seem very strange 
 that he should have been an educator of others, or that 
 one main object of his education should have been to 
 fit them for the exercise of functions like his own. It 
 would have been the most glaring contradiction to all 
 his professions if he had regarded the prophetical 
 power as something bestowed for his honour, a gift to. 
 separate him from the rest of the people. In a prophet 
 of Baal such an opinion would have been most 
 natural; in a prophet of the Lord God of Israel it 
 would have been most detestable. God had given His 
 law to the whole nation. All were under it ; therefore 
 all might study it and delight themselves in it. It 
 was a law which imported a government over the inner 
 man, over the conscience and heart and will. The 
 conscience and heart and will of every man might be 
 awakened to know the nature of this government, to 
 receive light from the source of light. And since 
 light is given that it may be communicated, since it 
 shines into a mind that it may shine forth from that 
 mind, there was no reason why any one of the Lord's 
 people should not be a prophet. It could not indeed 
 be taken for granted that everyone would be so. He 
 who worketh all things according to the counsel of His 
 own will, might determine otherwise ; He might have
 
 .] THE TEACHER OF ALL ORDERS. 147 
 
 other work for His servant to do different from that 
 of denouncing the sins of king or priest or people, or 
 of revealing God's judgments and the blessings that 
 would come out of them. But the training of the 
 prophet would not be less suitable for those other 
 works. It would teach the king the ground of his 
 authority, his relations to those whom he governed, his 
 responsibility for the government of them. It would 
 teach the elders of the city that they were not to obey 
 the commands of an evil woman, when she told them 
 to charge an innocent man with blaspheming God 
 and the king, that she might get possession of his 
 inheritance. It would teach the priests that they 
 were not to pollute the sacrifices of God, or offer them 
 to devils and not to Him. It would teach the owners 
 of the land, that the land was held by them, of Him 
 who had committed it to them in trust for the good of 
 His whole people. It would teach the seller the sin of 
 having the false measure and the bag of deceitful 
 weights. It would teach the master the sin of op- 
 pressing the hireling in his wages. It would teach all 
 that they were the members of one commonwealth, 
 over which a higher than Ahab or Jehoram was ruling, 
 and who could and would set aside their rule to assert 
 His own. 
 
 The sons of the prophets then were a continual witness 
 to the Israelites against certain errors into which they 
 were apt to fall respecting the prophetical office. The 
 man of God might have been looked upon as a mere 
 separate being, cut off by the awfulness of his character 
 and dignity from the rest of his countrymen ; an object 
 of distant admiration or dread, not an example of 
 what they ought to be. These men, taken from among 
 
 t 2
 
 148 ELISHA'S MIRACLES. [SERM. 
 
 themselves, and associated with him, declared that he 
 was only withdrawn from their communion, that he 
 might the better claim privileges for them which they 
 were in hazard of losing ; that he was only chosen out 
 by the Lord God of Israel, that he might the more 
 clearly understand, and help them to understand, their 
 national calling. If he did any strange acts or put 
 forth any marvellous powers, the people would see that 
 they were exercised not in his own name, but in the 
 name of the Lord God ; not for his sake, but for theirs ; 
 since some very humble person, scarcely distinguished 
 by a name, known only as one of an order, could per- 
 form some of the most important and perilous tasks 
 which were committed to his master. If the sons of 
 the prophets were entrusted with messages like that 
 which one of them bore to Jehu, a proof would be 
 given that the prophet was merely declaring and carry- 
 ing out a purpose which must be accomplished ; he did 
 not go himself to plot against an existing order, or to 
 earn the favour of some particular chieftain. 
 
 The repeated allusions to these sons of the prophets 
 in the story of Elisha, are specially worthy of note 
 because there are more passages in that story which 
 favour the notion that the man of God is a worker of 
 prodigies and portents, than in all the rest of the Bible. 
 I do not mean that there is any great number of those 
 stories. Open at hazard the life of almost any con- 
 spicuous saint in the Middle Ages, and you will find 
 five miracles attributed to him for one that is given to 
 Elisha. Of those that are given to him, the greater 
 part are of the same character with those which we 
 have considered hitherto. He teaches the Syrian leper 
 that there is a God in Israel who can deliver from
 
 ix.J THE CURSING OF THE CHILDREN. 149 
 
 plagues and restore health, as well as the more precious 
 and humbling lesson, that a prophet does not work by 
 enchantments ; that a man cannot purchase the mercy 
 and favour of God by great acts and sacrifices ; that a 
 simple word, simply obeyed, carries with it a power 
 which does not lie in Abana and Pharpar, the rivers 
 of Damascus, no, nor in Jordan, the river of Palestine. 
 Elisha testifies that man does not live by bread alone* 
 but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
 of God, when he sets before a hundred men twenty 
 loaves of bread. He signifies that there are instru- 
 ments, and those natural instruments, which by the 
 power of God may remove the effects of poison, and 
 heal the springs of waters. Finally, he raises the son 
 of the Shunammite woman to life ; the story of this 
 raising being no mere repetition of that which is 
 ascribed to his master, but one full of distinct and 
 living incidents, suggesting far more to the heart, 
 respecting the love of God and the way in which He 
 uses His creatures as the ministers of His love, than it 
 suggests to the understanding, respecting the peculiar 
 gifts of Elisha. This, I say, is the general character of 
 these records ; and the more strong one's apprehension 
 is of the degradation of the Israelitish people at that 
 time, of their low sensual idolatry, of their reverence 
 for evil powers, the more one feels how acts of this 
 kind must have been needed to counteract their ma- 
 terialism, to undermine their religion of fraud and 
 hatred, to establish, as no words or arguments could, 
 the proof of an actual and a gracious ruler. 
 
 But there are some deeds attributed to Elisha I 
 allude especially to the cursing of the children at 
 Bethel of which I have never heard any explanation
 
 150 RIGHT WAY OF TBEATING DIFFICULTIES. [SEEM. 
 
 that seemed to me satisfactory. It is easy to dispose 
 of such, narratives by saying that they accord with the 
 character of the Old Testament though not of the New; 
 but as I have not availed myself of that plea in other 
 cases I cannot in this. The old dispensation, I believe, 
 reveals the same God as the new ; less perfectly, no 
 doubt, oftentimes through clouds which the risen sun 
 has scattered, but a God exhibiting righteousness, 
 mercy, truth ; demanding them of His creatures ; cul- 
 tivating them in all who submit themselves to Him 
 and acknowledge Him as their Lord. Nor can I merely 
 resolve the difficulty, by telling you that if you accept 
 the Bible as the word of God, you must take each pas- 
 sage of it as part of the whole, without asking any 
 questions. The Bible itself forces us to ask a multitude 
 of questions. Because I receive it as a revelation of 
 God, I am bound to ask what it reveals concerning 
 God. Because I receive it as a whole book, as a con- 
 tinuous revelation, I am bound to ask how one part of 
 it accords with and interprets another. We must not 
 fear to make this demand. It is distrusting the Bible, 
 distrusting God, to have such a fear. And when we 
 have not found the answer in any special instance, we 
 should say so frankly. It cannot shake our faith to 
 feel such ignorance and to confess it. If there were a 
 hundred passages which I was unable to interpret, but 
 which puzzled me as to their moral significance, I should 
 believe in the God whom the rest revealed to me, and 
 ask Him to instruct me what I should think of them. 
 And this, I believe, in good time He would do, if I did 
 not lose my hold upon that which I had, or attempt, 
 by hasty efforts of my own, to grasp that which I had 
 not. A man who takes this course is, I believe, in an
 
 ix.] FALSE WAY OF IMITATING PROPHETS. 151 
 
 infinitely safer moral condition, and shows far more 
 reverence for the Bible, than one who takes the whole 
 book nominally upon trust or upon evidence, and does 
 not care what the contents of it are, does not strive to 
 bring them into connection with himself, does not 
 desire to understand from them what God is. 
 
 This story, however, is not one of a number which I 
 find it hard to reconcile with the general teaching of 
 the book. I do not know that there is another in which 
 I perceive the same difficulty. And for that very reason, 
 instead of passing it over, or offering some solution of 
 it, or, on the other hand, pronouncing it an interpola- 
 tion, when I have no proof to offer that it is one, I 
 think it is a plain duty to profess that I do not under- 
 stand it, though better persons may. And I do so the 
 more readily, because there are some who, it seems to 
 me, interpret this passage with great readiness and de- 
 cision, but utterly fail of explaining the rest of Elisha's 
 life, or the life of any other man of God whom the 
 Bible speaks of. The right of a prophet in the old 
 time to curse grown men or children, the right of 
 preachers and priests in this day to imitate him, they 
 perfectly apprehend. It is only when the prophet 
 comes forth as a healer, a restorer, a life-giver, that he 
 seems to be fulfilling a function uncongenial to their 
 taste, and which should be limited to his own time. 
 When he appears to be asserting the dignity of his own 
 person, or at all events of his own office, by a maledic- 
 tion, their spirits are in harmony with his ; they can 
 recognise his stern justice. When he bears witness 
 against idolatry and wrong-doing in the kings or 
 priests, his glory seems to depart ; those who chose 
 him for their model before, prefer then to copy the
 
 152 THE PUNISHMENT OF AHAB'S HOUSE. [SEEM. 
 
 men whom he threatened with the divine retribu- 
 tion. 
 
 That retribution is the main subject of the Scripture 
 narrative. Elijah had told Ahab that the blood of 
 Naboth would be required of his house. His humilia- 
 tion delayed the sentence. His enemy who had found 
 him out, seems thenceforth to have left him alone. 
 Perhaps the great prophet passed the remainder of his 
 own days in peace. But there were other prophets 
 to torment Ahab, and a still greater number, freshly 
 brought perhaps by Jezebel from her own land, to 
 deceive him. The lying spirit in their mouths drove 
 him to Ramoth Gilead, and Israel was left, as Micah 
 had foretold, without a shepherd. His son Joram finds 
 Elisha almost as terrible as his master had been to Ahab. 
 Yet their relations were different. Joram is less of a 
 Baal worshipper than his father. He consults Elisha ; 
 is asked by him why he does not go to the prophets of 
 his father and mother ; still is promised deliverance and 
 victory in a war which he has undertaken with the 
 Moabites, and is saved, not once or twice, by the pro- 
 phet's knowledge from the Syrians. These enemies of 
 Israel look upon the prophet with especial dread. Once 
 he is surrounded by them ; but his servant is permitted 
 to see invisible hosts which are on his side. These 
 visions, Elisha' s acts of power, his words of wisdom, 
 the ruin which threatened the land from the Syrians, 
 its unexpected rescue, are all signs that the God who 
 had made a covenant with their fathers, was with the 
 king and the people then. Trust was then as always 
 what the prophets demanded of them. They could not 
 trust too boldly or unreservedly. To trust would have 
 been to repent of the calf -worship, to rise out of the
 
 ix.J JEHU THE SON OF NIMSHI. 153 
 
 brutal habits which it had engendered, to begin a new 
 life as men. But the custom of idolatry had destroyed 
 trust in their hearts. They could only worship and 
 tremble. The sin of the father descended upon the 
 son with the weakness and cowardice, which were the 
 fruits of it, increased tenfold. At the appointed day 
 and hour the vengeance came, by just such an instru- 
 ment as would seem likeliest to carry it out. 
 
 Jehu the son of Nimshi had been declared to Elijah 
 as the joint successor with Elisha in the work that he 
 had left unperformed. No two men in Israel could have 
 been more unlike. One cried to have a double portion 
 of his master's spirit ; the other was known only as the 
 man who drove furiously. Yet Jehu had the kind of 
 faith which might be expected in a soldier, somewhat 
 reckless, but with his sense of right not quenched by 
 religious falsehood. He had heard the burden which 
 Elijah had pronounced on Ahab, as he sat with him in 
 his chariot, when they entered the plot of ground that 
 had been Naboth's. He felt that there was an ever- 
 lasting truth in the sentence, and that it must come to 
 pass. Who should execute it he did not know then. 
 When the anointing oil of Elisha's messenger had been 
 poured on his head, and his comrades had cried, " Jehu 
 is king," all the savage impulses of the soldier became 
 quickened and elevated by the feeling that he was com- 
 missioned to punish evil-doers and assert justice. Es- 
 teeming himself a scourge of God, and rejoicing in the 
 office, he gives full play to all his bloody instincts. He 
 murders two kings, commands Jezebel to be thrown 
 out of a window, treads her under foot, then eats and 
 drinks. He looks with delight at the heads of the 
 seventy royal children who were slain at his bidding by
 
 154 THE GOOD SIDE OF HIS CHARACTER. [SKRM. 
 
 the elders of Jezreel ; lie puts forty-two men to death 
 whom he meets coming into Samaria; he leaves not 
 one living of the house of Ahab. Finally he lays a plot 
 for the worshippers of Baal, calls them to hold a feast 
 to their god, and commands that none shall leave the 
 house in which he has shut them up alive. 
 
 It causes great scandal to many amiable and worthy 
 people that the Scripture does not stop to comment 
 on these atrocities of Jehu, but appears to commend 
 his zeal and to rejoice that what he began he accom- 
 plished. I believe, brethren, that a true portrait can 
 never be a mischievous one, and that this is essentially 
 true. Nothing is said to gloss over the ferocity of 
 Jehu ; it is exhibited broadly, nakedly ; you do not 
 want wordsto__tfill_3tQa -- th.at you must hate it; your 
 impulse, fpiKit is a right^me^iisto dajso. But there 
 may be in the most ruffi anty~^ndr^brutal characters, 
 not merely strength, not merely a clear distinct pur- 
 pose and a steadiness in following it out, qualities 
 worthy of all admiration, wheresoever and in whomso- 
 ever they are found, but along with these an intense 
 hatred of hypocrisy, a determination to put it down, 
 not for selfish ends, but because it is hateful ; which 
 determination is good and inspired by God. The 
 Scripture teaches us to confess this, and by so doing, 
 clears, not confuses, all our ethical conceptions and 
 judgments. We do meet with these characters in the 
 world, characters with something devilish lying close 
 beside something which is really divine. And though 
 the devilish is the obtrusive, and may become the 
 pervading, part of the man's soul, you cannot help 
 feeling that the other is in the very depth of it, and 
 marks out what he is meant to be and can be -
 
 ix.] THE VICTORY OF THE EVIL SIDE. 155 
 
 Honour it; confess that it is not of earthly origin; 
 that it does not spring from any dark root in the 
 selfish nature. Say boldly, " That honesty, that zeal 
 is from above; it has the sign of a celestial parentage; 
 just so far as th#t governs him he will be a servant of 
 his kind ; after-times will bless him." But it is also 
 true that the grovellnig elements of his character, if 
 they are not destroyed by this nobler fire, will only 
 glare the more fiercely for the light which it sheds 
 upon them, and that soon, when the fire begins to 
 burn low, you will see, instead of that glare, nothing 
 but dull smouldering ashes. 
 
 " Jehu/' says the Scripture, " took no heed to walk 
 in the law of the Lord." It is in the quiet time that a 
 man is tested. Then we find out not only what he can' 
 do, but what he is, whether his zeal for righteousness i 
 means that he wilfobey it ; whether his hatred for what | 
 is false implies an adherence to the true. The test in 
 this case failed. Jehu had destroyed Baal- worship, for 
 that was foreign. He clave to the calf -worship, for that 
 was the tradition of his fathers. And therefore the 
 people went on in the downward course. They had 
 swept away the house of Ahab. But the disease of 
 that house had hold of their- vitals. They sought after 
 evil powers ; they could not trust God. 
 
 Elisha the son of Shaphat and Jehu the son of Nimshi 
 did then carry out together the words of the prophet. 
 For those words depended upon no mortal agency ; they 
 were the expressions of an eternal law which in some 
 way or other would fulfil itself. This is the great lesson 
 which the Bible teaches in every page. The righteous 
 Will moves on steadily and irresistibly towards its own 
 end ; the unrighteous will struggles with it ; seems to
 
 156 ZEAL HUMAN AND EAETHLT. [SERM. 
 
 prevail; is broken in pieces. Bat seeing that it is Will 
 and not a blind necessity which rules in the armies of 
 heaven and among the inhabitants of earth, it is all- 
 important whether those who execute its decrees work 
 in cheerful submission to it, or in blindness, with base 
 and private designs. This was the great question for 
 the ministers of God's purpose, whether they were pro- 
 phets or soldiers, to consider then ; it is the great ques- 
 tion for us now. We may be sure that at the last, by our 
 evil doings and the fruits of them, if not by our zeal 
 for that which is sincerely good, we shall help to demon- 
 strate the existence of a divine order in the world, and 
 shall foretell its victory. But it is for us to say in which 
 way we shall perform the divine commission. If we 
 come to no decision, the gravitation of our nature to the 
 earth decides for us. We become sensualists and ido- 
 laters on a greater or smaller scale. We execute our 
 trust as Ahab and Joram executed theirs ; whatever is 
 the traditional conception of our time we fall into and 
 embrace ; when that is worn out we go in search of 
 some external novelty. But between the mere selfish 
 idolater and the faithful man, there is, we have seen, 
 an intermediate type of character which many a devo- 
 tee, many a one whom God would make a champion of 
 His own, too easily admires and adopts. Zeal is so 
 precious a gift, is so much wanted for the service of 
 mankind, it is so rare, that the evil spirit is certain to 
 assault those who possess it, and will not leave them 
 till he has worked hard to make a precious trust from 
 God into his own instrument. And seeing that there 
 are a multitude of kindly compromising men in the 
 world, whorepresent all energetic indignation against 
 wrong as unnecessary, disturbing, unphilosophical,
 
 IX.] THE HIGHER ZEAL OP THE PROPHET. 157 
 
 unchristian, those who believe that no form of false- 
 hood is to be tolerated, but to be abhorred, who are 
 convinced that good men exist to protest against evil, 
 who remember that He who was meek and lowly, 
 made a scourge of small cords to drive the money- 
 getters out of His Father's house, and that he de- 
 nounced Scribes and Pharisees, as hypocrites, men, I 
 say, with these strong persuasions and lively recollec- 
 tions, are stirred up by the indifference which others 
 exhibit and boast of, to a kind of savageness and fury. 
 They must make their voices heard in the streets, they 
 must if they can, hasten on the purposes of God, and 
 themselves execute part of His wrath ! Alas ! what are 
 they striving for ? ' It is the driving of Jehu for he 
 driveth furiously' this is the best memorial that will re- 
 main of him who has let his zeal become his master when 
 it was meant to be his servant, and who has counted it a 
 pleasure instead of a hard necessity to destroy. " my 
 father, the chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof," 
 these were the words which a king of Israel of Jehu's 
 house spoke to Elisha as he lay sick and dying. He 
 felt that a power was passing out of the world which 
 was greater^ than his, and than that of all the kings who 
 had been before him, because it was power, which, 
 doubtless amidst innumerable confusions and errors, a 
 thousand self-willed efforts and self-confidences, had 
 in the main been consecrated to the God of truth and 
 meekness, had been used in conformity with His mind, 
 and therefore had spread health and peace around it. 
 Was it better to kill the seventy sons of Ahab ; or to 
 bring up sons of the prophets ? To be the executor of 
 God's vengeance on the land, or to show that He was 
 the healer of its sicknesses ? To make it clear that
 
 158 THE HIGHER ZEAL OP THE PEOPHET. [SEEM. ix. 
 
 Death is the certain wages of sin, or to affirm by 
 acts and words that there is One who raiseth the 
 dead ? Which mission was the nobler in the old time ? 
 Which must be nobler for those who believe that 
 God gave His only begotten Son not to condemn 
 the world but that the world through Him might 
 be saved ?
 
 SERMON X. 
 
 THE SHEPHERD PROPHET. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, Sexagesima Sunday. Feb. 15, 1S52.) 
 
 Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to Jeroboam, king of Israel, 
 saying, " Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the 
 house of Israel. The land is noi, able to bear all his words. For 
 thus Amos saith, ' Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel 
 shall surely be led away captive out of their own land.' " Also 
 Amaziah said unto Amos, " Oh thou seer, go, flee away into the 
 land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there. But pro- 
 phesy not again any more in Bethel : for it is the king's court 
 and it is the king's chapel." Then answered Amos, and said to 
 Amaziah, " I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son. But 
 I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycamore fruit. And the 
 Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, 
 1 Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.' " AMOS vii. 10-15. 
 
 THE Jeroboam spoken of in this passage was the 
 fourth king of the house of Jehu. From the time 
 of Jehu, we hear of the Syrians under Hazael, as 
 the great oppressors of the Samaritan kingdom. " In 
 those days " (that is before the death of Jehu) it is 
 said, " the Lord began to cut Israel short : and Hazael 
 smote them in all the coasts of Israel." 2 Kings x. 82. 
 So of his son Jehoahaz, it is recorded, " he followed the 
 sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which made Israel 
 to sin. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against 
 Israel, and He delivered them into the hand of Hazael,
 
 160 THE SUCCESSORS OP JEHU. [SKEM 
 
 king of Syria, and into the hand of Ben-hadad, the 
 son of Hazael, all their days. And Jehoahaz besought 
 the Lord, and the Lord hearkened unto him : for He 
 saw the oppression of Israel, because the king of Syria 
 oppressed them. And the Lord gave Israel a saviour, 
 so that they went out from under the hand of the 
 Syrians. And the children of Israel dwelt in their 
 tents as beforetime." ch. xiii. The country had then 
 been reduced to a state of extreme weakness. " The 
 king of Syria," it is said, " had left of the people to 
 Jehoahaz but fifty horsemen and ten chariots and ten 
 thousand footmen; for he had destroyed them, and had 
 made them like the dust by threshing." From that 
 time began a revival in the outward prosperity, though 
 not in the internal condition, of the people. " Jehoash 
 did evil in the sight of the Lord;" but he took out of 
 the hand of Ben-hadad the cities which Hazael had 
 taken out of the hand of his father. " Three times did 
 Joash beat him, and recovered the cities of Israel." 
 His son Jeroboam was still more successful. He 
 is said to have restored the coasts of Israel from the 
 entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain. His reign 
 of forty-one years must have been one of rare, and to 
 the Israelites most unlooked-for felicity, which would 
 be felt in proportion to their previous depression and 
 ignominy. Yet of him also it is said, that " he de- 
 parted not from the sins of the son of Nebat, who 
 made Israel to sin." 
 
 The victories of Jeroboam are said in the 2 Kings 
 xiv. 25, to have "fulfilled the word of the Lord God of 
 Israel, which He spoke by the word of His servant 
 Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, which was of 
 Gath-hepher." Why, or when, or to whom, this pro-
 
 .] JONAH AND AMOS. 1G1 
 
 phecy was delivered, we have no means of knowing. 
 Nothing further is said of Jonah in the history. The 
 book in the canon of the Old Testament which bears 
 his name does not touch upon the condition of the 
 kings or people of Israel. Though it records a 
 passage in the life of Jonah, it does not purport to be 
 written by him. I reserve it for a later part of this 
 course, when the people to whom it refers will have 
 become closely identified with our subject. 
 
 Very different is the case with the prophet Amos. 
 Though he is not mentioned in the book of Kings, his 
 own express language connects him with the period of 
 which we are speaking, as well as with the previous 
 and subsequent history of the ten tribes. He did not, 
 however, belong to them. He was a herdsman of 
 Tekoa, a plain country situated in the south of Judaea. 
 The words of Amaziah, Jeroboam's priest, intimate 
 that he was an intruder, one who might prophesy and 
 eat bread in Judaea if he pleased, but who had no 
 business in Bethel near the king's house and the king's 
 chapel. The answer of Amos gives us a glimpse into 
 his own life, and throws much light on the character 
 of his book. " I was not a prophet," he says, " or the 
 son of a prophet; " that is to say, 'I was no recognised 
 member of the order, was attached to no school.' " I 
 was an herdman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit." 
 Oneof that class to which Abraham and Moses and David 
 had belonged ; but not rich in fields and herds, in men- 
 servants or maid-servants like the first ; nor learned in 
 the wisdom of the Egyptians like the second j nor with 
 any, the most distant intimation that he might one day 
 be the shepherd of a people, like the third. He was a 
 labouring man, familiar, as all his words indicate, with
 
 162 THE HERDSMAN. [SERW. 
 
 the forms and appearances of nature, with the com- 
 mon operations of husbandry, with the special tasks 
 of the keeper of flocks, with the wrongs and suf- 
 ferings of the poor. Being such a one, he says, 
 "the Lord took me as I followed the flock. And 
 the Lord said unto me, ' Go, prophesy unto my 
 people Israel/" An overpowering influence drove 
 him from the quiet plains of Judaea into the other 
 kingdom, not upon any errand that had to do with 
 his own herds, not into the country districts where 
 he might have found men of congenial occupa- 
 tion, but straight to the place where the first 
 king had set up the calf for the people to wor- 
 ship, and where the present king had chosen his 
 summer dwelling. 
 
 Amos therefore exhibits a different aspect of the 
 prophetical office from that which we considered last 
 Sunday. I said then that there was nothing at all 
 inconsistent with the inspiration of the prophet in his 
 becoming the member of a guild or college, or in his 
 being the subject of an education. The present 
 instance shows us with equal clearness, that a man 
 might be conscious of a most distinct calling to a 
 distinct work, who had not this formal preparation for 
 it. Not that he, any more than Elisha or those who 
 called Elisha master, was without a training or disci- 
 pline ; not that he, any more than they, corresponded 
 to that notion of an impromptu speaker, which we 
 sometimes attach to the name of prophet. A poet 
 of our own has taught us what wisdom an ordi- 
 nary English shepherd may acquire from the daily 
 sights which he sees and the daily tasks which he 
 performs :
 
 *..] HIS EDUCATION. 163 
 
 " Fields where with cheerful Spirits he had breathed 
 The common air ; the hills which he so oft 
 Had climbed with vigorous steps ; which had impressed 
 So many incidents upon his mind 
 Of hardship, skill, or courage, joy or fear, 
 Which like a book preserved the memory 
 Of the dumb animals whom he had saved, 
 Had fed, or sheltered, linking to such acts 
 So grateful in themselves, the certainty 
 Of honourable gain ; these fields, these hills, 
 Which were his living being even more 
 Than his own blood, what could they less, had laid 
 Strong hold on his affections, were to him 
 A pleasurable feeling of blind love, 
 The pleasure which there is in life itself." 
 
 A homely description certainly, without the slightest 
 exaggeration ; rather below than above what one 
 might fairly affirm of any manly dweller on our soil, 
 whose mind was not debased by crime, or specially 
 elevated by devotion. But now, if one added to this 
 in the case of a Jewish shepherd, the belief that he 
 was actually the heir of a covenant made with his 
 fathers and himself ; the conviction that every thought 
 of his heart, which was not dark or evil, must have 
 come from the Giver of all good and perfect gifts ; the 
 assurance that every sound in nature was in some 
 way the utterance of His voice, and announced some- 
 thing of His will ; the confidence, stronger than that 
 the sun would rise on the morrow, that His will must 
 be accomplished; connect these, the ordinary teach- 
 ings of the law to every Israelite, with the shepherd- 
 life of Amos, and you will feel that he may have been 
 in a school of the prophets, though he did not know 
 it himself, and thought he was intended chiefly to be 
 a gatherer of sycamore fruit. Remember also that 
 
 M 2
 
 164 NEWS FROM THE CITIES. [SEEM. 
 
 none of the most vulgar temptations of the English 
 shepherd were wanting to him; that if he had a 
 power drawing him up, there was the same mighty 
 tendency downwards which there is in any peasant or 
 noble of any age. Remember that the conflict between 
 these opposing powers in any man, is great in propor- 
 tion to his desire that the better may triumph : and 
 you will not fancy that because he was away from 
 cities, he was not learning much of what passes in the 
 hearts of those who dwell in them, much of which 
 those hearts are generally unconscious. The school 
 may not have been an easy one ; there may have been 
 severe chastisement in it as well as much learning ; no 
 little intercourse with men, even though if was carried 
 on for the most part in solitude. If we suppose 
 reports to have reached this lonely shepherd of acts 
 which were done in the city of David, the city where 
 the holy temple stood, or if we suppose him to have 
 travelled thither to some Passover or Pentecost, and 
 to have seen with his eyes what kind of worship was 
 going on in that temple, what kind of interest the 
 people took in the daily sacrifices or the solemn yearly 
 feasts, how far they were better in their daily conduct, 
 in their dealings with each other, either for the common 
 or the more rare service, we may believe that he 
 would have an abundance of materials for his musing 
 as he sat watching his sheep in the evening twilight 
 or in the early dawn. And if then, when he was 
 lamenting how the House of David had forgotten the 
 God of their father, he heard of the fierce war which 
 one of that house had commenced against the tribes 
 of Israel and of his discomfiture, we can imagine how 
 he would brood over the divisions of a land, every
 
 x.] THE PROPHET'S CALL TO SPEAK. 165 
 
 portion of which was included in the promise, all the 
 citizens of which were descended from those whom 
 God had brought with eagle's wings out of Egypt, that 
 they might be a people for Himself. One people, one 
 God ; the thoughts would be inseparable in the shep- 
 herd's mind. But have they one God? The calves 
 of Bethel and Dan would rise up in awful vision 
 before him ; that great parent sin which had suggested 
 itself to the mind of the first Jeroboam for the purpose 
 of keeping the nation asunder, which had gone on 
 corrupting and dividing his own people ever since. 
 The prophet may have heard of the success which had 
 blessed the arms of the reigning king ; surely, he will 
 have said, they must see God's hand in that. Who 
 could tell but Jeroboam and his people might repent 
 even then; that their prosperity might do for them 
 what adversity had not been able to do? A call to 
 them might resound in Judaea also; each kingdom 
 might turn again to its true King, and avert the doom 
 which otherwise could not be far off. 
 
 To suppose such thoughts as these stirring in the 
 shepherd's mind, is not (I must urge this observation 
 upon you again and again), to suppose that he was 
 obeying certain impulses and reflections of his own, 
 when he set forth on his journey to Samaria. Such 
 thoughts he knew and felt had come not from himself, 
 but from God. He may have resisted the conclusion 
 long : indolence, diffidence, the sense of his ignorance, 
 his delight in the quiet life of the shepherd, the dread 
 of cities, must all have worked mightily in him, and 
 persuaded him to think that the voice proceeded from 
 some other than the Lord of his heart, and that he 
 might safely neglect it. Then, a sense of this rebellion
 
 166 THE SINS OF THE NATIONS. [SEBM, 
 
 of his flesh against the conviction of his mind, would be 
 new and strong evidence that he was meant to go ; it 
 would be a test of the power of the Spirit which was 
 forcing him on, in spite of such obstacles, which was 
 fighting with his selfish inclination, and stirring him to- 
 the last work which he would have chosen for himself. 
 There is something very wonderful, and at the same 
 time most natural, in the expansion of mind which a 
 man brought up as Amos was, acquires when he has 
 been raised out of himself, and has been made to under- 
 stand the glory and the guilt of his country. At first 
 when you open his prophecy, you might fancy that you 
 had got beyond the confines of Israel and Israelitish 
 feeling altogether; for he speaks of Damascus, of Gaza, 
 of Tyrus, of Edom, of Ammon, of Moab; and then 
 comes to the two kingdoms of the chosen people, as if 
 they were included in this circle of nations, and were 
 subject to the same laws with them. When you look 
 further into " the words which he saw " (and they are 
 words which one sees, they must have risen up before 
 him like actual visions to the eye), when one looks 
 more into these words, this first impression does not 
 disappear. He declares that for two, or three, or four 
 transgressions, God will visit each of these lands. And 
 the transgressions are all of the same quality; they are 
 outrages upon a law of brotherhood which is assumed 
 to subsist between nations. Damascus has threshed 
 Gilead with threshing instruments of iron ; Tyre and 
 Gaza have delivered up the whole captivity to Edom, 
 that is to say, have sold to Edomites the captives whom 
 they took in war, not remembering the brotherly cove- 
 nant ; Edom has pursued his brother with the sword, 
 and cast off ah 1 pity, and kept his wrath for ever;,
 
 x.J IMPARTIALITY OF THE PROPHET. 167 
 
 Ammon has ripped up the women with child of Gilead 
 that they might enlarge their border; Moab has burnt 
 the bones of the king of Edom in the lime. Let it 
 always be observed that, in the last case at all events, 
 the crime has no reference whatever to the countrymen 
 of Amos. It has been committed against the bitterest 
 enemy which Israel has. Nevertheless, it is a hateful 
 and horrible act, which is denounced upon the same 
 ground on which the persevering hatred of the children 
 of Esau against the children of Jacob from generation 
 to generation is also denounced. And when we come 
 to the three and the four transgressions which are im- 
 puted to Judah and Israel, we discover no patriotic 
 tolerance, no wish to prove that the people of the cove- 
 nant though evil, are less evil, or will be less punished 
 than their neighbours. " Judah has despised the law 
 of God, and has not kept His commandments, and their 
 lies have caused them to err, after the which their 
 fathers walked." The charges against the other king- 
 dom are more directly and obviously of the same cha- 
 racter with those which we heard of before ; only they 
 are proclaimed with greater indignation. " They sell 
 the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes ; 
 they turn aside the way of the meek." Other gross 
 moral abominations are attributed to them; but he 
 does not yet speak of the special sin of idolatry. A 
 fact I conceive very notable, and which may go far to 
 confute the notion, that the indignation of the prophets 
 against the kings of Israel arose from some passionate 
 adherence to an old patriarchal tradition. Inhumani- 
 ties and brutalities are what Amos charges upon the 
 ten tribes. Unquestionably he believed that these 
 were the effects of their denial of a righteous Being ;
 
 168 APPEAL TO HISTORY. [SKRM. 
 
 but he does not declare that the root will be destroyed, 
 till he has shewn that the fruits are accursed, such as 
 the conscience of those who kneeled to the calves, and 
 patronised the worship of them, must have condemned. 
 Amos is sure that the like causes must produce the 
 like effects. " The height of the Amorite was like the 
 height of the cedars, and he was strong like the oaks. 
 Yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots 
 from beneath. Also I brought you up from the land 
 of Egypt, and led you for forty years through the 
 Wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite/' The 
 history of the past had been testifying that men who 
 did not like to retain God in their knowledge, who 
 chose to be evil and to do evil, would be cast out, let 
 them be as strong and rooted as they might. Had that 
 law been changed ? True, God had chosen the sons of 
 Jacob from all the families of the earth that they might 
 know His Name; He had given them prophets to tell 
 them of His Name, Nazarites, to testify that they were 
 separated to the invisible God. But if they said to the 
 prophets, " prophesy not," if they destroyed the separa- 
 tion of the Nazarites, what would follow ? They would 
 fall as the Amorite fell. " Then the flight shall perish 
 from the swift : neither shall he stand that handleth the 
 bow j neither he that is swift of foot, nor he that rideth 
 the horse, shall deliver himself." (Amos ii. 9 16.) 
 
 What particular oppressor was destined to punish 
 Israel, Amos does not intimate. But he has a clear 
 apprehension that some great power will be appointed 
 to do this work. It is not Syria; that has had its day, 
 and Jeroboam has triumphed over it ; its own punish- 
 ment is at hand. It is some empire which will swallow 
 up one and another of these little nations. We shaD
 
 x.] ISRAEL PUNISHED BECAUSE CHOSEN. 169 
 
 hear its name in due time. It will form the subject of 
 a whole body of prophecy. As yet we only see it at 
 a distance, a dark indefinite shadow : to the ordinary 
 observer, a cloud no bigger than a hand. Amos has no 
 greater knowledge of the Assyrian monarchy than his 
 contemporaries ; he has heard of it perhaps, but only 
 heard of it. His anticipations of what is coming rest 
 upon other grounds than any calculations of its might 
 or of the probability that it will aim at conquests. 
 
 " You only, saith the Lord, have I known of all the 
 families of the earth : therefore I will punish you for 
 all your iniquities." The covenant that I have made 
 with you is a covenant to do this, ' for two cannot walk 
 together except they be agreed/ If you separate from 
 Me, I must seek by punishments to bring you back. 
 And are there not signs that I purpose to do this ? 
 When you hear a lion roaring in the forest, you are 
 sure that he has taken prey. When a trumpet is blown 
 in the city, the people are affrighted. And must not 
 you conclude, when you see any calamity in a land, 
 that God is uttering His voice there ? His prophets 
 come to declare what that voice signifies. He makes 
 them understand what He is doing and why He is 
 doing it, that they may tell you. Let all the nations 
 then know, let Ashdod and the palaces of Egypt know, 
 that there are tumults and oppressions in the midst of 
 Samaria. These oppressions and tumults invite the 
 surrounding people to assemble; a guilty and an 
 oppressive land is ready for the spoiler. There is 
 violence and robbery in your palaces, .therefore you 
 know not to do right. You have reverenced power 
 more than right, therefore a greater- power than your 
 own will come upon you, an adversary round about
 
 170 INEFFECTUAL PUNISHMENTS. [SKRM, 
 
 the land will bring down thy strength. And in that 
 day, the altars of Bethel where you worship your God 
 of brute power, shall fall to the ground. And with 
 that altar " I will smite the winter-house with the 
 summer-house : and the houses of ivory shall perish, 
 and the great houses shall have an end, saith the Lord." 
 Then in broad, shepherd language, he addresses the 
 women of the land as the kiue of Bashan, in the moun- 
 tain of Samaria, who for the sake of their own luxuries 
 excite their husbands to crush the poor and oppress the 
 needy. And he tells them that the Lord God hath 
 sworn by His holiness that He will draw them and 
 their posterity with hooks; a comparison which, 
 whether those who heard it understood it or not, was 
 very intelligible to the next generation, who felt the 
 sharp hook of the Assyrian in their jaws, dragging; 
 them to a land which was not theirs. (Amos iii.) 
 
 In the next discourse to the Israelites (or if you 
 please, in the next division of his poem, for though 
 these words must have come from the prophet's lips, 
 they may afterwards have been put together in a dif- 
 ferent form, when he had delivered his message and 
 returned to his own land), Amos invites the people to 
 go up to Bethel and transgress, to bring their sacrifices 
 every morning and their tithes every three years, " for 
 this liketh you, ye children of Israel." That is to 
 say, he exhorts them, as Elijah had exhorted the priests 
 of Baal, to try what they can do with their petitions 
 and their offerings ; whether they can win rain from 
 heaven or avert any calamities from their land. " All 
 this time, saith the Lord, I have given you want of 
 bread in your cities, yet ye have not returned to Me. 
 I have withholden the rain from you, yet ye have not
 
 x.] THE SIGNS OF RUIN IN PEOSPEEITY. 171 
 
 returned to Me. I have smitten you with blasting and 
 mildew, yet ye have not returned to Me. I have sent 
 among you the pestilence, and your young men I have 
 slain with the sword, yet ye have not returned to Me/' 
 While you have been engaged in all these religious 
 services to win what you could not win from a reluc- 
 tant idol, I have been reminding you of my invisible 
 presence, of my power ; I have been calling you through 
 suffering to remember One who is near you and who 
 cares for you. " Therefore I will do this unto thee, 
 O Israel. Therefore prepare to meet thy God. For lo, 
 lie that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, 
 and declares unto man what is his thought, that maketh 
 the morning darkness, who treadeth upon the high 
 places of the earth, the Lord the God of Hosts is His 
 name." (iv.) A mighty utterance surely of this name 
 to burst from a poor shepherd's lips. But it came 
 from the innermost depth of that shepherd's heart. 
 He knew that he was speaking of One who was true and 
 in whom was no lie ; he knew that he was testifying 
 against lies ; he knew that the whole universe and the 
 consciences of those who heard him, however they 
 might turn away from him or persecute him, were on 
 his side, and were acknowledging his sentence to have 
 issued from the mouth of the Lord Himself. 
 
 The thought in this passage is continued into the 
 next. In the midst of all the seeming good fortune 
 of the house of Jeroboam, Amos declares that " the 
 virgin of Israel is faUen : that she is forsaken in her 
 land : that there is none to raise her up." It seemed an 
 absurd contradiction of appearances to say so. One can 
 conceive how ridiculous such words must have sounded 
 in the ears of the priests of the king's court and chapel.
 
 172 THE DAY OF THE LOED. [SEEM. 
 
 But here was the warrant for the prediction. " They 
 hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him 
 that speaketh uprightly. Forasmuch therefore as your 
 treading is on the poor, and ye take from him burdens 
 of wheat : ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye 
 shall not dwell in them ; ye have planted pleasant vine- 
 yards, but ye shall not drink wine of them. For I 
 know your manifold transgressions and your mighty 
 sins. They afflict the just; they take a bribe; and 
 they turn away the poor in the gate from their right. 
 Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time ; 
 for it is an evil time." An evil time, though it had all 
 the semblance of being a time of wonderful improve- 
 ment, of unparalleled security; an evil time, because men 
 could not bear to hear the truth, and be told what was 
 wrong in them ; because a man was less precious in 
 their eyes than that which he could produce or could 
 sell for ; because worth was measured by an altogether 
 capricious and false standard. Such a time was in- 
 wardly hollow, and its hollow ness would be made mani- 
 fest. There would come a day of the Lord ; some great 
 startling event which would show the thing as it was, 
 which would remove the paint that had disguised the 
 wrinkled withered countenance. There were some it 
 seems in Samaria who anticipated such a day of the 
 Lord. They were very diligent in their fast days and 
 solemn assemblies ; possibly they had kept themselves 
 from the outward idolatry of the court ; they had pre- 
 served some of the traditions of their fathers and a 
 punctilious outward morality. Such men would con- 
 gratulate themselves that a judgment-day was at hand, 
 which would separate between them and their less 
 godly countrymen; which would reward them for all
 
 x.] THE SELF-RIGHTEOUS. 173 
 
 their painful services, while the careless evil-doers 
 endured their deserved punishment. This loveless 
 self-righteousness, Amos evidently regards as one of 
 the worst features of the time. " Woe unto you," he 
 says, " that desire the day of the Lord ! To what end 
 is it for you ? The day of the Lord is darkness and 
 not light. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness 
 and not light ? even very dark, and no brightness in it ? 
 I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell 
 in your solemn assemblies. Though you offer me burnt 
 offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them. 
 Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat 
 beasts. Take then away from me the noise of thy songs ; 
 for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let 
 judgment run down like waters, and righteousness as 
 a mighty stream." Thus the prophet spoke to those 
 who, instead of claiming God's covenant with Israel, 
 and warning their countrymen how they forgot it, 
 stood on their own faith or their own good deeds, and 
 tried to make out a case for themselves. If they would 
 not take up their place as Israelites, they must at least 
 share the punishment of Israelites. For in truth, were 
 they better men than those they despised ? Were they 
 more worshippers of God, because they merely clung to 
 the forms of their forefathers ? Alas ! No. Their fore- 
 fathers in the wilderness had not really believed in the 
 God who delivered them, had not trusted in the God 
 of righteousness. While kneeling at His altar, while 
 using His holy Name, they were really bearing the 
 tabernacle of Moloch and Chiun, the star of their god 
 whom they made to themselves. And their descendants 
 and professed imitators were doing the same. " There- 
 fore must they go into captivity beyond Damascus,
 
 174 THE COMING WOE. [>ERM. 
 
 saith the Lord, whose name is the God of Hosts." 
 <v. 1427). 
 
 Amos had hinted very often at this captivity. He 
 has now openly pronounced the word; still without 
 alluding distinctly to the nation that should carry them 
 away. But so sure is he of the fact, that he turns at 
 once to those " that are at ease in Zion, who put far 
 away the evil day, who lie upon beds of ivory, who 
 stretch themselves upon their couches, who eat the 
 lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst 
 of the stall, who chant to the sound of the viol, and 
 invent to themselves instruments of music, like David ; 
 who drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with 
 the chief ointments." He turns to these, and exhorts 
 them to think of the changes that had happened within 
 their own recollection, almost under their own eyes, in 
 lands as prosperous as theirs, whose border a little while 
 before had been larger than theirs. And then, having 
 shown them that there was nothing strange or un- 
 reasonable in his warnings, he goes into particulars, 
 as all great poets and true prophets do ; not merely 
 denouncing captivity in vague phrases, but bringing 
 the circumstances and incidents of it vividly before 
 them. The city is delivered up and all that is therein, 
 to an invading host ; pestilence follows in the train 
 of war. If there happen to remain ten men in one 
 house who have escaped the one calamity, they will 
 die by the other. One shall come to seek for the bones 
 of a kinsman to burn them ; " he shall ask him that is 
 a,t the side of the house, Is there any yet with thee ? 
 And he shall answer, No." And the man bids him hold 
 his peace, lest in some wild exclamation he should utter 
 .the name of the Lord, and so bring some fresh terror
 
 x.J THE PEOPHET SENT HOME. 175 
 
 upon them. As powerful a picture certainly of the 
 results of devil-worship, as was ever presented in lan- 
 guage ; yet not more fearful than true. Men may come 
 to think of the Name of the Lord God as a mere name 
 of horror, which they dare not pronounce lest He should 
 destroy them. And yet unless all the laws of nature 
 could be altered, unless horses could run upon the rocks, 
 or you could plough on them with oxen, such judg- 
 ments could not be averted from an evil and impenitent 
 nation. Those who have turned judgment into gall, 
 and the fruits of righteousness into hemlock, which 
 rejoice in a thing of nought, and say, 'Have we not 
 taken unto us horns by our own strength/ will find a 
 nation stronger than themselves to punish them. " The 
 Lord, the God of Hosts, saith, I will raise up such a 
 one against you, House of Israel." (vi.) 
 
 Three images are then presented to the prophet's 
 mind two of them at least, to his eyes. The grass- 
 hoppers in the autumn seem about to destroy the whole 
 grass of the land ; a loss the more terrible, because the 
 king has claimed the first crop for himself. Next he 
 sees the summer heat burning up the meadows. He 
 prays that each of these judgments may be averted; and 
 the prayer is granted. But though these preparatory 
 punishments, arising through the selfishness of the 
 rulers, or the neglect of husbandry among the people, 
 do not come, or are mitigated, Amos sees another vision 
 which signifies to him that the high places of Isaac shall 
 be desolate and the sanctuaries of Israel laid waste, and 
 that God would rise against the house of Jeroboam 
 with a sword. (vii.) 
 
 These were some of the words which the priest of 
 Bethel said that the land was not able to bear. One
 
 176 THE FAMINE OP THE WOED. [SERM. 
 
 of the ablest of modern commentators supposes that 
 Amos yielded immediately to the order that he should 
 return into Judah, leaving behind him the fearful 
 sentence upon Amaziah which is contained in the last 
 verse of the seventh chapter, and that upon Israel 
 contained in the first three verses of the eighth 
 chapter; this being suggested by the vision of the 
 basket of summer fruits. Then being once more in his 
 own country, he meditates on the last fearful calamity 
 which can overtake a people given up to gain ; "a 
 people who swallow up the needy, and make the poor 
 of the people to fail ; who long for the feast to be over 
 that they may sell corn, and the Sabbath that they 
 may set forth wheat ; making the ephah small, and the 
 shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit; 
 that they may buy the poor for silver, yea, and sell the 
 refuse of the wheat/' For such a people he predicts 
 a more fearful famine than one of bread ; a famine of 
 the word of the Lord. To hear of a God of mercy and 
 righteousness was an intolerable thing in the days of 
 their plenty. The thought of such a Being troubled 
 them in their self-indulgence and indifference to others. 
 They would fain silence the prophets who said to 
 them, " He lives, and reigns. He is your Judge. If 
 you will trust Him you will find Him your Deliverer." 
 In death and dreariness, in exile from the land of their 
 fathers, crushed by oppressors, hearing only of gods 
 more cruel than those who make them, how will they 
 hunger and thirst for any tidings of one who cares for 
 the weary and heavy-laden ; one who would have 
 manservant and maid, the cattle and the stranger 
 within the gates to rest as well as the prince ; of one 
 who had fixed the year of Jubilee, that the debtor
 
 x.j VISIONS OP RESTORATION. 177 
 
 might be released and the captive go free. Oh ! what 
 longing in a land of bondage to hear of such a Being ; 
 to believe that ah 1 that had been told of Him in 
 former days was not a dream ; to have a right to tell 
 their children that it was true for them. And oh ! to 
 think of the sentence going forth, It cannot be ; " they 
 have chosen their idols ; they have sworn by the sin of 
 Samaria and said, Thy god, oh Dan, liveth ; they shall 
 fall and not rise up again." (viii.) 
 
 The spirit of the prophet seems to have reached the 
 lowest point of depression. For we find that there 
 may be depths in captivity below the captivity itself ; 
 a moral abyss more fearful to look into than all its 
 physical evil. He does not pass by one or the other ; 
 he faces them all. There seems no escape for the 
 doomed people in earth or sea, in heaven or hell ; the 
 eternal law has gone forth against them ; it cannot be 
 repealed. For is not the law His " who buildeth His 
 stories in the Heaven and has founded His troop in the 
 earth ; He that calleth for the waters of the sea, and 
 poureth them out upon the face of the earth. The 
 Lord is His Name." 
 
 Yes ! The Lord is His Name, and therefore Truth 
 and Good must be maintained, Falsehood and Evil 
 must fall. Because it is so there is still a lower depth 
 beneath that which seemed to be unfathomable. " Lo," 
 thus the shepherd of Tekoa winds up his prophecy, "Lo, 
 I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel 
 among all nations like as corn is sifted in a sieve. 
 Yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. All 
 the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which 
 say ' the evil shall not overtake nor prevent us/ In 
 that day will I raise up the Tabernacle of David that 
 
 I
 
 178 GROUNDS OF THE PEOPHET'S FEAB. [SEEM. 
 
 is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and I -will 
 raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old ; 
 that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all 
 the heathen, which are called by My name, saith the 
 Lord that doeth this. Behold, the days come, saith the 
 Lord, that the ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and 
 the treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the 
 mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall 
 melt. And I will bring again the captivity of my people 
 Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and in- 
 habit them : and they shall plant vineyards, and drink 
 the wine thereof ; they shall also make gardens and eat 
 the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon the land, 
 and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land 
 which I have given them, saith the Lord." (ix.) 
 
 Does it seem to you that a hope so confident as 
 this, a hope of life arising out of death, light out of 
 darkness, is inconsistent with that vision of utter ruin 
 which rose up a moment ago before us ? Brethren, 
 we shall not know the heart of the Jewish prophet, 
 we shall not know our own, till we learn to see not 
 only how these things are compatible, but why they 
 are inseparable. Amos would not have left his sheep- 
 folds to denounce the idolatries of Israel if he had not 
 felt that men, that his own countrymen, were maintain- 
 ing a fearful fight against a Will which had a right to 
 govern them, and which could alone govern them for 
 their good. He could not have been sustained in the 
 witness which he bore if an ever-brightening revelation 
 of the Perfect Goodness, of that goodness, active, 
 energetic, converting all powers and influences to its 
 own righteous and gracious purposes, had not accom- 
 panied revelations that became every moment more
 
 x.] GROUNDS OF HIS CONFIDENCE. 179 
 
 awful of the selfishness and disorder to which men 
 were yielding themselves. From the observation of this 
 strife, as history and experience present it to the mind 
 of a man, earnestly loving his fellow-creatures, there 
 come forth only the most fearful and despairing 
 auguries. It is precisely because he has not only 
 experience and history to guide him, but the certainty 
 of an Eternal God, present in all the convulsions of 
 society, never ceasing to act upon the individual heart 
 when it is most wrapped in the folds of its pride and 
 selfishness ; it is precisely because he finds this to be 
 true whatever else is false, that he must hope. And 
 oftentimes when his hope for himself is well-nigh gone, 
 it is renewed as he thinks of what God has done for 
 his race, and is doing for it. This is no solitary 
 experience of a single herdsman or prophet. Through 
 the whole Epistle to the Romans St. Paul had been 
 tracing out the sin of his countrymen ; their rejection 
 of the perfect Deliverer for themselves, their refusal of 
 Him to the Heathens ; their desire to wrap themselves 
 in a righteousness which would prove itself to be the 
 very contrary of God's righteousness. He had seen 
 and declared that the fruit of these sins would be the 
 utter excision of his kinsmen after the flesh from God's 
 covenant. And yet he winds up all he has been 
 saying in these words : " For God hath concluded all 
 in unbelief, that He might have mercy upon all. Oh 
 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and know- 
 ledge of God! how unsearchable are His judgments, and 
 His ways past finding out ! For who hath known the 
 mind of the Lord ? or who hath been His counsellor ? 
 For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all 
 things. To whom be glory for ever. Amen." 
 
 N 2
 
 SEEMON XI. 
 
 THE VALLEY OF DECISION. 
 (TA* coin'* Inn, Quinquageiima Sunday. Feb. 22, 1852.) 
 
 " In Mount Zion and in Jerusalem shall be deliverance, as the Lord 
 hath said, and in the remnant whom the Lord shall call." 
 JOEL ii. 32. 
 
 JOEL is probably an earlier prophet than Amos : I 
 spoke of the latter first, because his message related 
 to the revolted kingdom of Israel and threw great 
 light upon the history of it. Joel is strictly a prophet 
 of Judah. He does not merely belong to the south 
 as Amos did ; his words touch less upon the peculiar 
 sins of the northern tribes than those of any other 
 of the prophets previous to the Assyrian captivity. 
 His book therefore recalls us to Mount Zion and to 
 J erusalem. 
 
 The broad and obvious distinction between the 
 history of the two tribes and that of the ten, is that 
 the hereditary succession which was so continually 
 violated in the one, is rigidly preserved in the other. 
 Abrjam succeeds Rehoboam ; Asa Abijam, Jehoshaphat 
 Asa. Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat, becomes con- 
 nected with the house of Ahab. His son, Ahaziah, is 
 destroyed with the rest of that house by Jehu. A 
 usurpation by the queen-mother for six years follows ;
 
 SKRM. xi.] ORDERLY CONDITION OF THE TWO TRIBES. 181 
 
 the child Joash, the son of Ahaziah, is preserved and 
 becomes king. Amaziah, Uzziah, Jotham, and Ahaz 
 succeed each other in strict order, though Joash and 
 Amaziah both died by conspiracy, and Ahaziah became 
 a leper. 
 
 If the regularity of royal succession is a point of 
 difference, the regularity of the priestly succession and 
 of the divine services is quite as remarkable a one. 
 The feasts might be sometimes intermitted ; the rights 
 of the year of jubilee violated. But the temple which 
 Solomon had dedicated was continually in sight of the 
 people. The daily sacrifices went on there ; it was 
 the perpetual resort of seers who desired to know the 
 innermost meaning of the covenant ; to acquaint them- 
 selves with Him who had promised to fill the house 
 with His presence. 
 
 An inference might be drawn from this outward 
 regularity as to the inward state of the people which 
 would lead us astray. We are told that in the days of 
 Rehoboam " Judah did evil in the sight of the Lord 
 above all that their fathers had done. For they built 
 them high places and images, and groves, on every 
 high hill, and under every green tree. And they did 
 according to all the abominations of the nations which 
 the Lord cast out before the children of Israel." Punish- 
 ment followed directly upon their sins. " Shishak, 
 the king of Egypt, to whom Jeroboam had fled, came 
 up against Jerusalem : and took away the treasures 
 of the house of the Lord, and the treasures of the 
 king's house; he even took away all." Still "Abijam 
 walked in the sins of his father which he had done 
 before him." Asa is a reformer ; he removes all 
 the idols which his father had made, put his mother
 
 182 SUCCESSION OF THEIR KINGS. [SERM. 
 
 away from being queen, because she had made an idol 
 in a grove; burns the idol by the brook Kidron. 
 Daring these reigns the ten tribes are in continual war 
 with the two : in Asa's time we even hear of a strange 
 league between Judah and Syria to oppose Baasha, 
 king of Israel, who had built Ramah that he might not 
 suffer any to go out or come in to the king of Judah. 
 All this is changed in the time of Jehoshaphat. He 
 makes peace with Ahab and goes down with him 
 against the Syrians to Ramoth-Gilead. Jehoshaphat 
 seems to have made Solomon his model. We are told 
 that he built ships at Tarshish to go to Ophir for gold. 
 He might hope to restore union to the tribes if he 
 could not bring them again under his yoke. In spite 
 of his connection with the idolatrous house, we are 
 taught that he did that which was right in the sight of 
 the Lord. In the book of Chronicles he is stated " to 
 have set judges in the land, throughout all the fenced 
 cities, city by city, and to have said to them, ' Take 
 heed what ye do : for ye judge not for man, but for the 
 Lord, and He is with you in the judgment/ " In the 
 same record is a description of a great battle of his with 
 the children of Moab and the children of Ammon and 
 of others beside, and how they were smitten before a 
 small host which trusted in the Lord. But the inter- 
 marriages with the house of Ahab led to two igno- 
 minious and idolatrous reigns, to the destruction of 
 Jehoshaphat's grandson, and the tyranny of Athaliah. 
 She first seems to have established the Baal-worship in 
 Jerusalem. It was Jehoiada the priest who delivered 
 the land from that worship and from her, and who 
 restored and educated Joash. 
 
 Some writers assign the prophecy of Joel to the
 
 Jti.] JOEL A PRIEST. 133 
 
 time of Joash. There is no sufficient evidence for 
 that date except this ; that he must be considerably 
 earlier than Hosea, or Isaiah, who belong to the times 
 of Uzziah, Jotham, and Ahaz, and that passages in his 
 prophecy show him to have been subsequent to Jeho- 
 shaphat. He is one of those prophets who appears 
 to have been also a priest. In the history of Israel 
 the prophet stands often in marked distinction from 
 the priests. He is the witness for the true God ; for 
 the divine order ; the priests as well as the kings are 
 the patrons or authors of disorder. In Judah, as we 
 have seen, the case is different. There were plentiful 
 elements of division and confusion, but there was a 
 standing witness against them. Kings and priests 
 were open to the same temptations here as in the other 
 part of the land. But it was probable that some would 
 always appear to restore the old discipline when it had 
 been broken through. At the same time it is quite 
 evident that a strong necessity was beginning to arise 
 in the land for witnesses against religious formality, 
 as well as against the irregularity which is so frequently 
 the reaction against it. It was the special vocation of 
 the prophet to declare the meaning of his country's 
 order, and thereby to prevent his brethren from mis- 
 taking it for routine. There was no reason why a 
 priest should not vindicate his own hereditary work 
 by fulfilling this function. After an unusual breach 
 in the royal line and disturbance of the divine rites, 
 it would seem likely that the two offices would be 
 united. In later times they may have been quite as 
 often separated, though Jeremiah and Ezekiel were 
 priests of the temple at the time of its destruction. 
 This book of Joel is then a type of the early Jewish
 
 184 THE PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS. [SERM. 
 
 prophetical discourse, and may explain to us what 
 distant events in the history of the land would expand 
 it, and bring fresh discoveries within the sphere of 
 the inspired man's vision. Joel speaks of a terrible 
 northern army which is coming against Judah. It is 
 an army of locusts, as really formidable as any human 
 hosts could be. For, says the prophet, "A fire de- 
 voureth before them; and behind them a flame burneth. 
 The land is as the garden of Eden before them, and 
 behind them a desolate wilderness ; yea, and nothing 
 shall escape them. The appearance of them is as the 
 appearance of horses : and as horsemen so shall they 
 run. Like the noise of chariots on the tops of moun- 
 tains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire 
 that devoureth the stubble, as a strong people set in 
 battle array. Before their face the people shall be 
 much pained. All faces shall gather blackness. They 
 shall run like mighty men ; they shall climb the wall 
 like men of war; and they shall march every one on his 
 ways, and they shall not break their ranks. Neither 
 shall one thrust another. They shall walk every one 
 in his path : and when they fall upon the sword, they 
 shall not be wounded. They shall run to and fro in 
 the city; they shall run upon the wall, they shall 
 climb up upon the houses; they shall enter in at the 
 windows like a thief. The earth shall quake before 
 them : the heavens shall tremble : the sun and the 
 moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their 
 shining." (i. ii.) 
 
 I have quoted this passage, though it is probably 
 familiar to you all, and is connected with one which we 
 shall be reading next Wednesday, because it may assist 
 in removing some misapprehensions, more prevalent
 
 XL] THE PROPHETICAL DICTION. 185 
 
 perhaps in the last century than in our own, but not 
 yet extinct, respecting what is called the metaphorical 
 language of the Old Testament writers. The eminent 
 Bishop who wrote Prelections on Hebrew Poetry, and 
 made a new translation of Isaiah, has done such good 
 service to his own times and subsequent times by these 
 works, that it would be most ungrateful to complain that 
 his learning and taste did not always save him from the 
 artificial phrases and habits of thought, which charac- 
 terise the poetry and criticism of his contemporaries. 
 He and others have fostered the notion that the 
 Jewish prophet adopted a diction, which was certainly 
 very beautiful, elevated, and suitable to an Oriental 
 composition, but far removed from that style which 
 conveys to a western mind an impression of fact and 
 reality. It is esteemed the highest praise of the 
 prophets, that they were carried by divine inspiration 
 or by the genius of their country far out of the path in 
 which our minds naturally travel, and that they were 
 able (so these commentators often express themselves) 
 to invest great religious truths with the richest orna- 
 ments of the fancy. 
 
 Now, when one considers what stern reprovers these 
 prophets were, how they were overwhelmed \\ith a 
 sense of the evils which they actually saw, how con- 
 tinually they proclaimed it to be their task to strip off 
 outsides and take away varnish that they might show 
 the thing as it really was, it is difficult to understand 
 how they can ever have practised arts of this kind, or 
 that they would not have denounced as false prophets 
 any who did. Whatever use Joel intended to make of 
 this plague of locusts, it was surely a most tremendous 
 fact for husbandmen and vine-dressers, for every man
 
 186 THE LOCUSTS A DAY OF THE LORD. [SERM. 
 
 and woman and child in the land. Was it a time to 
 be playing tricks with words, to be putting together 
 choice sentences which after-times might admire and 
 comment upon? Would after-times have troubled 
 themselves the least with a man who had occupied 
 himself with such a task ? Would his own have been 
 the least the better for it ? Or if you fall back upon 
 inspiration, is it in this way that a divine teacher leads 
 a man to meditate upon the woes of his country ? Is 
 it thus he is lifted out of himself to trace the ways of 
 the Most High ? 1 apprehend that Joel's language is 
 the language of poetry, only because that was the most 
 strictly veracious language he could have employed ; 
 that which actually represented the fact better than 
 any other ; being the utterance of the inmost heart of 
 a man who had felt and understood the fact better than 
 any other, and who was endued with the power of 
 making those who had witnessed it feel that he had 
 understood it, since for the first time it came home in 
 its power to themselves. I trust and believe that these 
 remarks will sound to you commonplace, that you will 
 have anticipated them all. The benefit that we have 
 derived from clearer apprehensions of the nature of 
 art generally has, I am inclined to hope, reacted very 
 usefully upon our study of the Scriptures; and has 
 removed at least one impediment to our reading them 
 simply as a child or a peasant reads them. Still I 
 could not wholly suppress observations which apply, I 
 believe, quite as strictly to all the more complicated 
 prophecies we may consider hereafter, as they do to 
 the description of locusts in the book of Joel. (ii.) 
 
 This army the prophet looks upon as God's army. 
 He hears the Lord's voice going before it. It is a day
 
 xi.] THE EXHORTATION. 187 
 
 of the Lord; who can abide it? Those who saw the 
 regular succession of prayers and sacrifices, would 
 naturally contract a faith in a regular succession of 
 rain and crops. Both feelings were desirable, until the 
 sense of mere sequence in outward phenomena dulled 
 the mind as to the invisible cause, the inward order 
 which they betokened. When that effect had been 
 produced, and who knows not how soon it is produced, 
 the chain of custom and association must be broken 
 through, or it will bind the spirit in an Atheism the 
 more fatal, because unsuspected. Joel hears in the 
 army of locusts a distinct, loud call to repentance. 
 " Therefore now," saith the Lord, " turn ye to Me with 
 all your heart, and with fasting and with weeping and 
 with mourning. And rend your heart and not your 
 garments, and turn to the Lord your God : for He is 
 gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kind- 
 ness, and repenteth Him of the evil." What special 
 evils were they to turn from ? If the solemn assembly 
 which he asked for were called, if the fast were pro- 
 claimed, what would the people have to confess ? Joel 
 does not tell them. There is no enumeration of crimes 
 like those which Amos charged upon different nations 
 and different classes in his own nation. But a call to 
 turn to God may be very practical when the voice of 
 the teacher points to no specific offences, nay, when the 
 conscience itself is awake to none. A dull mechanical 
 temper of mind, obedience to mere custom, impulses 
 communicated from without, not from a spirit within, 
 a will recognising no higher law than the opinion of 
 men, this is that turning away from God, that implicit 
 denial of His presence, which makes it a most needful 
 thing that the call should go forth from some human
 
 188 THE TEMPLE SEEVICES. [SERM. 
 
 lips, and be echoed by unwonted natural calamities, 
 and be received as coming straight from the mouth of 
 the Lord, " Repent and be converted/' The service of 
 a righteous Being demands a righteousness correspond- 
 ing to His ; He who is a Spirit, requires that we should 
 worship Him in spirit and in truth. When we do not 
 feel the force of the first claim, our religion becomes 
 something wholly separated from morality ; we are not 
 just in our hearts or just in our doings, for we are not 
 setting any standard of justice before us. When the 
 second claim is not allowed, our minds must by degrees 
 become grovelling and sensual ; for we confess no power 
 acting upon them, or in them, to raise them out of their 
 natural sloth, to overcome their gravitation downward. 
 The capacity for manly effort becomes feebler and 
 feebler. A lion is always in the path to every duty. 
 It is not the inner life, the kingdom of Heaven only, 
 which is forgotten and disbelieved in ; the spade and the 
 plough lie idle ; it is supposed that thorns and thistles 
 are meant to possess the ground, and that man is not 
 meant to remove them. How suitable a chastisement 
 for individuals or nations in this condition is blight and 
 mildew, the palmer- worm and the locust ? The mes- 
 sengers of death are indeed messengers of resurrection. 
 They say that all things must wither and die if man him- 
 self will not arise and live. In the torpor and palsy of 
 all his powers and energies which he has brought upon 
 himself, and which his circumstances are increasing, 
 they force him to ask what power there is which can 
 make him arise and live. (ii. 12 18.) 
 
 The prophet therefore does not forget that he is a 
 priest of the temple. Because its services may have 
 become unreal, he does not tell his countrymen to lay
 
 ii.] THE BLESSINGS OF REPENTANCE. 189 
 
 them aside. This pestilence is sent that they may be- 
 come real. He would therefore have the priest weep 
 between the porch and the altar ; he would have a fast 
 and a solemn assembly ; he would have the bridegroom 
 go forth out of his chamber and the bride out of her 
 closet. God is inviting them to turn to Him, and He 
 will surely enable them to turn to Him. They have 
 not believed too much that He was present in His own 
 temple, at His own altar ; they have forgotten that He 
 was there. They have paid their offerings to Him 
 without remembering that He was in the midst of 
 them. Let them now come in the faith that He is 
 there, and see whether He will not bless them. 
 
 Joel's prophecy, like all the other prophecies, does 
 not form one continuous discourse, but is broken into 
 a number of discourses. It appears that his exhorta- 
 tion was heard, the assembly called, the fast decreed. 
 The mind of the people was really aroused. There 
 was an actual repentance. Then the prophet speaks 
 again : " Fear not, land ; be glad and rejoice ; for the 
 Lord will do great things. Be not afraid, ye beasts of 
 the field : for the pastures of the wilderness do spring, 
 for the tree beareth her fruit, for the fig-tree and the 
 vine do yield their strength. Be glad then, ye children 
 of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God : for He hath 
 given you the former rain moderately, and He will cause 
 to come down for you the rain, the former rain and 
 the latter rain in the first month. And the floors 
 shall be full of wheat, and the fats shall overflow 
 with wine and oil. And I will restore to you the 
 years that the locusts have eaten, the canker-worm, 
 and the caterpillar, and the palmer-worm, my great 
 army which I sent among you. And ye shall eat in
 
 190 THE GIFT OF THE SPIRIT. [SERM. 
 
 plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the 
 Lord your God, who hath dealt wondrously with you r 
 and my people shall never be ashamed." (ii. 21 28.) 
 
 These will seem to many, very earthly and carnal 
 blessings to follow upon repentance, blessings such as 
 indicate an unspiritual dispensation. But I apprehend 
 that people who speak thus, are in great hazard of 
 becoming exceedingly unspiritual themselves. The corn 
 and wine and oil are something to them, whether they 
 acknowledge it or not. The question is whether they 
 shall look at these things simply in themselves, and 
 pay them honour for their own sakes, while they affect 
 to despise them, or whether they shall look upon them 
 as gifts and signs of One whom they cannot see, but 
 who is present with them. And there is this question 
 which follows from the former. Do we think of the corn 
 and wine and oil only in connection with ourselves, or 
 in connection with the land on which we are dwelling ? 
 Most assuredly if we take the first course, we must 
 be very earthly and sensual, because we must be 
 utterly selfish. Joel took the other, and thereby found 
 in those things which men covet and pursue to the 
 exclusion of their brethren, therefore to the destruc- 
 tion of themselves, witnesses of his relation to all who 
 dwelt on the soil, tokens of God's care for them and 
 for it; assurances at the same time that he was 
 educating them by the enjoyment of these things or 
 by the want of them, to seek after Himself. 
 
 I prefer to place the defence of the prophet on this 
 ground. I might easily defend him upon another; for 
 these words, so well known from the use that is made 
 of them in the New Testament, occur immediately 
 after those which I have quoted. " And it shall coine
 
 XL] ST. PETER'S APPLICATION. 191 
 
 to pass afterward, that I will pour out My Spirit upon 
 all flesh. And your sons and your daughters shall 
 prophesy ; your old men shall dream dreams, your 
 young men shall see visions. And also upon the 
 servants and upon the handmaids in those days, will I 
 pour out nay Spirit." This promise is connected, as it 
 is in St. Peter's quotation of it, with a great and terrible 
 day of the Lord. What the day was which the prophet 
 looked forward to, we must try to ascertain from his 
 own words. The coming of the locusts he had regarded 
 as such a day ; but that was past. That had been a 
 revelation of the unseen presence ; it had roused the 
 nation to recollect God, it had done the work it was 
 meant to do. The other day which he looked for is 
 denoted in quite different language. " Behold, in 
 those days, it is said, that in that time, when I shall 
 bring again the captivity of Judah and of Jerusalem, 
 I will also gather all nations, and will bring them down 
 into the valley of Jehoshaphat, and will plead with 
 them there for my people and for my heritage Israel, 
 whom they have scattered among the nations, and 
 parted my land." From these words it is very com- 
 monly concluded that the prophet is looking forward 
 to a period subsequent, not only to the captivity of the- 
 ten tribes, but of the two, not to their captivity only, 
 but their restoration. And since no great decisive 
 battle can be found in that period, it is supposed that 
 the fulfilment of the words must be sought for in the 
 Christian age. First it is argued that it would be 
 wrong not to make St. Peter, an inspired apostle, the 
 interpreter of the words which he adopted, by demand- 
 ing any earlier accomplishment of them. A moment 
 after, that power of interpretation is denied to the
 
 192 ISRAELITES SOLD TO GRECIANS. [SERM. 
 
 Apostle. For it is said that the day of the Lord which 
 he expected, and for which he thought that the out- 
 pouring of the Spirit was a preparation, did not actually 
 occur in his age, and has not occurred yet. I believe, 
 brethren, that by adhering resolutely to the most 
 obvious interpretation of the words we shall best 
 understand what right St. Peter had to apply them to 
 his own time, what justification there is for those who 
 say they must have a mystical or spiritual interpreta- 
 tion, what excuse for connecting them with our own 
 period, or with periods yet to come. (ii. 28 32.) 
 
 If you look at the third chapter of Joel, you will 
 perceive to what captivity or captivities it is that the 
 prophet is alluding. He complains that "Tyre and 
 Sidon and the inhabitants of Palestine have taken 
 away my silver and gold, and have carried into their 
 temples my goodly pleasant things. The children also 
 of Judah and the children of Jerusalem have ye sold 
 unto the Grecians, that ye might remove them far from 
 their border." The slightest attention to the history 
 will show us that invasions of Judea by the surround- 
 ing nations were most frequent; that the cities and 
 the temple were often rifled, that numbers of captives 
 were carried away ; these would be taken to Tyre and 
 Sidon; they would be sold there for slaves. So com- 
 mercial a people as the Phoenicians would of course 
 very frequently sell them beyond the seas, to the 
 countries with which they were trafficking. We have 
 so used ourselves to the word captivity as applicable to 
 one or two great deportations, that we very little appre- 
 ciate the seriousness of these repeated invasions and 
 the continual misery which they caused. That which 
 Joel anticipates, is the punishment of all these robbers
 
 xi.J THE TRIAL DAY CAME. 193 
 
 of men and invaders of boundaries ; some very sweeping 
 and tremendous punishment which would resemble in 
 its results the great battle which Jehoshaphat fought 
 with the Moabites and Ammonites, or which (since the 
 word Jehoshaphat bears that signification), would be a 
 great judgment of God upon the nations. What nation 
 should execute this punishment the prophet does not 
 declare. Only he is sure that it will be a great day of 
 decision, very fearful to all who are engaged in it. 
 He is sure that the righteous sentence of God upon 
 those who have been committing unrighteous and un- 
 brotherly acts, will be seen in it. He is sure that the 
 thieves will be forced to disgorge some of their un- 
 lawful prey. He is sure lastly that Jerusalem and 
 Mount Zion will be brought through the conflict, 
 " Judah shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from 
 generation to generation." (iii.) 
 
 If we compare the exceeding vividness of Joel's 
 descriptions when he is treating of the actual miseries 
 of his land, whether they come from a flight of locusts 
 or from human marauders, with the dimness of his 
 language respecting this approaching crisis, dimness 
 which is compatible with the most perfect confidence 
 as to its result, we shall learn much respecting the 
 character of prophecy itself. Joel, indeed, the earliest 
 of the written prophets, in a remarkable sense, prepares 
 us for those who are to follow him, as we sometimes 
 see the moon in her first quarter with one bright 
 luminous border and the complete orb lying pale and 
 shadowy within it. He foresees the very event which 
 Amos saw, with far more definiteness, because he con- 
 templated it in reference to the three and four evils 
 which it was to punish. Joel has spoken already of
 
 194 THE PEOMISED GIFT COME. [SERM. 
 
 punishments and of repentance ; lie now looks forwards 
 with certainty to some great struggle which shall test 
 the strength of Mount Zion and Jerusalem, and show 
 that those who believe in God have a sure foundation. 
 He is quite aware how little he knows of the circum- 
 stances of the coming day. He is not to strengthen 
 his countrymen for it. Before it comes, others will be 
 raised up to whom more full and clear vision will be 
 granted. God will not bring on the terrible conflict 
 till He has poured out His Spirit on His servants and 
 His handmaidens. 
 
 I think we shall find as we proceed that both 
 announcements had their exact and even their rapid 
 accomplishment. We are entering upon a period of 
 the history in many respects different from any that 
 we have contemplated hitherto, yet one for which 
 all previous periods have been preparing. The little 
 Jewish kingdom is to be brought into direct conflict 
 with the great Asiatic monarchies. There will be an 
 invasion which will fulfil all the expectations both of 
 Amos and Joel ; which will avenge the crimes of the 
 petty nations against each other; which will bring to 
 the ground the new prosperity of the ten tribes ; which 
 will show Judah its vanity and hollowness ; which will 
 attest the might of Him to protect it, in whom it has 
 not trusted. As that day approaches we shall find 
 that a flood of light is poured into the minds of the 
 seers who are to guide their country through its 
 judgment- day, light which was exactly adapted to 
 the needs of that day, and which has guided the steps 
 of His wayfarers in successive generations through 
 hours of gloom and terror. 
 
 And since this conflict, so far from having ceased
 
 si.] DIFFERENT DAYS OF DECISION. 195 
 
 when we enter into the period of New Testament 
 history, was then reaching its climax, since the full 
 battle between the kingdom of righteousness and the 
 kingdom of mere power was then brought to its great 
 arbitrement when the crucified Son of Grod was pro- 
 claimed as the head of a polity comprehending all 
 nations and languages, a polity as extensive as the 
 empire which had succeeded to the character and 
 pretensions of the old Asiatic monarchies, and since 
 our Lord had declared that there was to be in that 
 generation, a great crisis which should show whether 
 the powers of the earth would crush this feeble society, 
 or whether it would come forth a new Jerusalem out 
 of the ruins of the old, I apprehend St. Peter was not 
 applying an old prophecy carelessly or allusively, but 
 giving to it its full depth of meaning, when he said 
 that the Pentecostal gift was that which Joel had 
 spoken of generations before ; that the Spirit of power 
 and love and a sound mind which had been bestowed 
 upon them that they might testify of God's love and 
 redemption to the world, was the Spirit who had 
 spoken in old times by the prophets ; that a day was 
 at hand, which nothing but that Spirit could enable 
 any to pass through. 
 
 And like days of the Lord, like battles in the valley 
 of decision, have there been between the two kingdoms 
 which are striving together upon this earth, often 
 since that time. We may not be able to determine 
 who were the combatants on each side. In a thousand 
 cases it may be hard to say ' these were merely main- 
 taining the evil cause ; these were altogether on the 
 side of justice and truth and order/ There is often a 
 strange confusion of banners ; names and watchwords 
 
 2
 
 196 HOW TO PREPARE FOE THEM. [SEEM. 
 
 are imperfect helps in ascertaining who are doing 
 God's work, who are hindering it. We must be 
 content, yea rejoice, that their judgment is not with 
 us but with the Lord. The old prophets tell us that 
 Samaria was as evil as Tyrus, that there was, not 
 seldom, a worse spirit in Jerusalem than in Moab. 
 They tell us this. It is the main cause of their sorrow 
 and anguish. But it does not lead them to doubt 
 that there is a battle between God and His enemies. 
 It drives them to think of Him firstly and chiefly; 
 because He is light and in Him is no darkness ; 
 because all manner of evil in sinners and saints, in 
 those who confess His name or in those who are 
 ignorant of it, must be hateful to Him ; and all good, 
 wherever it lies scattered, must be from Him and 
 must be at last gathered to His side. 
 
 Oh, brethren, let us learn this great lesson. We 
 know not when the final day of decision is to be. But 
 there is some day of decision in every age, some 
 great battle of truth and falsehood, of righteousness 
 and injustice, of love and self-will, in which we must 
 one and all take part. There is a power of destruc- 
 tion at work in every society, in every heart. Do not 
 fancy that you are less in danger from it than your 
 forefathers were. It is nearest to you when you are 
 least aware of its approaches, when you are least on 
 your watch against it. A day may be very near at 
 hand when the question will be forced upon every one, 
 and when every one must give the answer to it, " Art 
 thou on the side of self-willed power or of righteous- 
 ness ? Dost thou worship the Devil or the Father of 
 lights ? " As that great and terrible day approaches, 
 terrible to every man who knows what the treachery
 
 XL] KEPENTANCE THE HIGHEST GIFT. 197 
 
 of his own heart is, and yet most blessed, because in 
 that day God will cast out the dividing destructive 
 principle on which He has pronounced His sentence, 
 which Christ died to overcome, we must seek a 
 fulfilment of the old promise which has never failed 
 yet. Before any critical event, any world epoch, there 
 has been vouchsafed to the humble and meek, greater 
 insight into the past, greater foresight of that which is 
 to come. There has been a power of vision, a capacity 
 of looking into the meaning of things, a discovery of 
 the springs which lie beneath the surface, which are 
 only granted when they are desired not for the glory 
 of the seeker, but for the necessities of the Church and 
 of mankind. It is not that there are more young or 
 old men dreaming dreams in the sense which we some- 
 times give to that phrase ; men flying from the facts 
 of the world, dwelling in a region of fancy. The 
 dreams which Joel and St. Peter speak of, indicate a 
 closer contact with realities, a more inward communion 
 with Him who is true, an intolerance of shadows, a 
 longing for substance. Such dreams come not through 
 the multitude of business nor through the listless- 
 ness which follows it. They come to earnest spirits 
 struggling for life, wearied with the noise of the world 
 with the strife of nations and opinions, distrusting 
 themselves, believing in God. 
 
 But that we may not receive, instead of this true 
 spirit of wisdom and light, a fanatical spirit, which 
 will fill us with conceits, which will divide us from 
 our brethren, which will drive us at last among the 
 world's swine and then down a steep place into the 
 deep, we should remember that the prophet who 
 speaks of seeing visions and dreaming dreams, speaks
 
 198 A PLEDGE OF BLESSINGS TO THE WORLD. [SEKM- 
 
 first of turning to the Lord with all the heart. Repent- 
 ance is God's choicest and deepest gift; repentance 
 for our habitual dreariness and coldness, for that 
 shallowness of heart which overtakes us when we are 
 surrounded with the tokens of His presence, when we 
 are partakers of the ordinances of His grace ; which 
 those very privileges seem to produce in us; from 
 which troubles individual or national cannot of them- 
 selves deliver us. Divines may have infinite refine- 
 ments about the mode, degrees, and effect of repent- 
 ance. That one phrase of Scripture, 'turning to God/ 
 contains I think all that we can say of it. 'Man, 
 thou art living, moving, having thy being in One 
 whom thou art habitually forgetting. That forgetful- 
 ness makes thee forget thy brethren ; yea, and in the 
 truest sense forget thyself. Thou dost not know 
 what thou art, whither thou art tending. All the 
 earth is a riddle to thee. Thy fellow-men are hin- 
 drances in thy way. Thou art thine own great curse 
 and terror. Recollect from whom come the thoughts- 
 and impulses of the mind and will within thee ; who- 
 can make those thoughts and impulses an order in- 
 stead of a chaos. Turn round to the light which is ever 
 sending flashes into the midst of thy darkness. Ask 
 that instead of such momentary appearances, from 
 which thou shrinkest as a guilty thing surprised, it 
 may penetrate thee and possess thee, and become thy 
 constant habitation. Open thine eyes and see what 
 witnesses there are of this light all around thee. 
 Every church, every prayer, every season of the year, 
 is testifying of it and reminding thee of it. These are 
 visible things, established upon earth, powerless in 
 themselves; but signs of a Kingdom of Heaven; signs
 
 XL] A PLEDGE OP BLESSINGS TO THE WORLD. 199 
 
 of a power which can transform thee and transform 
 the world. When thou yieldest thyself to its transform- 
 ing energy, thou wilt not bear to see the earth lying 
 crushed under the weight of its sins and oppressions. 
 Thou wilt believe in thy heart and declare with thy 
 lips that in Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, in the 
 Church which God has set up, in the people who 
 believe in His love, there is a prophecy of deliverance 
 for the universe/
 
 SERMON XII. 
 
 THE UNFAITHFUL WIFE. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 1st Sunday in Lent. Feb. 29, 1852.) 
 
 For she did not know that 1 gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and 
 multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal. 
 HOSEA ii. 8. 
 
 THE history of the ten tribes after the death of Jero- 
 boam II. explains and confirms the terrible warn- 
 ings of Amos. "Zechariah, the son of Jeroboam, 
 reigned over Israel for six months. And Shallum the 
 son of Joash conspired against him, and smote him 
 before the people, and slew him, and reigned in his 
 stead. Shallum reigned a full month in Samaria, for 
 Menahem the son of Gadi went up from Tirzah, and 
 came to Samaria, and reigned in his stead." This reign 
 lasted ten years. It is very memorable in the history, 
 for in the course of it, Pul the king of Assyria came 
 against the land. " And Menahem gave Pul a thousand 
 talents of silver, that his hand might be with him to 
 confirm the kingdom in his hand. And he exacted 
 the money of Israel, even of all the mighty men of 
 wealth, of each man fifty shekels of silver, to give to 
 the king of Assyria. So the king of Assyria turned 
 back, and stayed not there in the land." 2 Kings xv.
 
 SEKM. xii.] JUDAH AND ISRAEL. 201 
 
 Thus the first appearance of this great empire in con- 
 nection with the Palestine people, is a sure witness of 
 all that is to follow. The king becomes at once the 
 tributary; he trusts to Assyria to keep him on the 
 throne; he incurs the hatred of his most powerful 
 subjects to obtain this protection. His son reigns for 
 two years, "Then Pekah the son of Remaliah, a captain 
 of his, smote him in Samaria in the palace of the king's 
 house, with fifty men of the Gileadites : and he killed 
 him and reigned in his room." Possibly the Assyrian 
 tendencies of Menahem and his son were the cause of 
 this insurrection ; Pekah may have been the head of a 
 national or of an Egyptian party. He had certainly 
 ambitious projects, for he conspired with Rezin the king 
 of Syria against Jerusalem and its king, with the 
 deliberate purpose of overthrowing the house of 
 David. 
 
 The kings of that house after Joash, viz. Amaziah, 
 Uzziah, and Jotham, are all spoken of with respect; 
 "they did that which was right in the sight of the 
 Lord," but Amaziah vaingloriously "defied the king of 
 Israel to look him in the face, and Judah was put to 
 the worst before Israel; and Jehoash took Amaziah 
 king of Judah, and came to Jerusalem, and brake down 
 the wall of Jerusalem, and took all the gold and silver, 
 and all the vessels that were found in the house of the 
 Lord, and the treasures of the king's house, and hos- 
 tages, and returned to Samaria." This was the greatest 
 humiliation which Judah had suffered, just at a time 
 when it probably hoped to conquer the tribes that in- 
 flicted it. In Amaziah' s reign, and in that of his son 
 and grandson, we are told that the high places were not 
 taken away, that the people did sacrifice and burnt
 
 202 TIGLATH-PILESER. [SEUJI. 
 
 incense in them. There must have been therefore a 
 continual growth of superstition and idolatrous worship, 
 during the period before the reign of Ahaz. All the 
 open and latent corruptions and unbelief of the people 
 embodied themselves in this king. His predecessors 
 had not tried to extirpate the evil, though they were 
 personally pure from it. " He walked in the way of 
 the kings of Israel, yea, and made his sons to pass 
 through the fire, according to the abominations of the 
 heathen, whom the Lord cast out before the children 
 of Israel. And he sacrificed and burnt incense on the 
 high-places, and on the hills, and under every green 
 tree." One can understand how such a man would feel 
 and act when he heard that two neighbouring kings 
 were conspiring against him. The heart of him and of 
 his people, we are told, was moved by the news of it, 
 as the trees are moved by the wind. He could think 
 only of the immediate danger, and how to avert that. 
 " So he sent messengers to Tiglath-Pileser, king of 
 Assyria, saying, ' I am thy servant and thy son. Come 
 up and save me out of the hand of the king of Syria 
 and out of the hand of the king of Israel which rise up 
 against me/ And the king of Assyria hearkened unto 
 him; for he went up against Damascus and took it, 
 and carried the people of it captive to Kir, and slew 
 Rezin." 2 Kings xvi. 7. We are told before (xv. 29), 
 that ''he took Ijon, and Kedesh, and Hazor, and 
 Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Naphtali, and carried 
 them captive to Assyria." 
 
 By far the most profound commentary upon these 
 records, as they bear upon Judah, upon Israel, upon 
 the surroi nding nations,, upon the Asiatic Monarchies, 
 upon the Mature condition of God's kingdom and of
 
 xii.] HOSEA BORN IN THE NORTH. 203- 
 
 mankind, is to be found in the prophecies of Isaiah, 
 which I propose hereafter to consider. But there is an 
 earlier prophet who is the proper preparation for Isaiah ; 
 a prophet from whom one learns more perhaps than 
 from any other, the intensely individual and intensely 
 national character of that work to which prophets were 
 called; the actual meaning of the divine covenant; the 
 state and the sins of a people living under one; the 
 reason and method of the divine punishments; the 
 ground upon which a seer, crushed under the sense of 
 his nation's sins, could hope for its restoration. 
 
 Those who have studied the words of Hosea the son 
 of Beeri most carefully, are convinced that the greater 
 part of his life must have been passed in the kingdom 
 of Israel. He speaks, they say, of its hills and valleys, 
 of its villages and fenced cities, in a way which shews 
 that he had been brought up among them ; that they 
 had worked themselves into his heart, as only that 
 scenery can, which is dear from the associations of 
 childhood and home. He dwells upon the special 
 corruptions of the ten tribes, of their kings and priests, 
 like one who was in direct contact with them; who 
 knew what was going on in the land, and had looked 
 into the inmost heart of it. On the other hand it is 
 observed that when he turns to Judah he exhibits the 
 sympathy and affection of a child of Abraham ; but 
 still of a comparative stranger. He has at first well- 
 grounded hopes of it, such as he could not cherish for 
 his own soil; but as time advances, and his know- 
 ledge becomes greater, these hopes are united with 
 the saddest forebodings. One sister he finds is scarcely 
 less treacherous than the other, nay, the treachery of 
 Judah if less flagrant seems to him more deep; there
 
 204 HIS LIFE A PABABLE. [SERM. 
 
 is a falsehood in both which terrible fires must burn 
 out. These remarks are of great use, because they 
 show how real the diction of every true prophet is; 
 how directly it is drawn from actual nature : how 
 much of what we call oriental extravagance and 
 hyperbole is supplied by our own loose and careless 
 mode of reading. It saves us trouble to bestow some 
 general names of this kind, upon epithets and descrip- 
 tions which may indicate the clearest perception of 
 external objects, and are expressions of the most living 
 inward convictions. 
 
 We do not however want arguments of this kind to 
 prove that Hosea, at all events, was busy with facts 
 and not with fictions. He had to understand the 
 principles of his country's history by most fearful 
 passages in his own. Because the land had committed 
 great adulteries, departing from the Lord, he must 
 marry an adulteress, he must experience again and 
 again her infidelities ; she was to bear children, whose 
 names would denote her shame; for whom he must 
 feel a father's yearnings, yet whom he could not dare 
 to call his. The wife was at length to desert him for 
 her lovers. He was again to redeem her ; to endure 
 the intolerable anguish of love struggling with indig- 
 nation and disgust; to exhibit his love in the true and 
 only possible form of restraint and punishment ; to see 
 through that punishment glimpses of hope; faint 
 flickering tokens of reformation, in themselves quite 
 unsatisfactory, yet testifying that there is a power in 
 love which may triumph at last over the most obstinate 
 resistance. A fearful education for a man to pass 
 through, fearful beyond any racks and dungeons by 
 which saints in later days have been trained to faith
 
 xii.] THE CENTRAL THOUGHT. 205 
 
 and patience; yet it must have brought Hosea into 
 depths of insight and wisdom which all times may 
 discern and profit by. His words may have been 
 imperfectly understood, a number of his allusions may 
 baffle even learned interpreters ; but the most simple 
 have obtained from him hints of truths, which every 
 day's experience of themselves and of the world have 
 made more precious; and which, they believe, the 
 ages to come will not exhaust but develop. For there 
 is, I conceive, in every prophecy, and in every book 
 which God has intended for the instruction of men, 
 a leading thought which forces itself upon the mind 
 of a serious reader, though he is a mere wayfarer, 
 almost without his knowing it ; and this thought 
 becomes a part of him, and interprets perplexing fact& 
 which cross him in his ordinary path. If you question 
 him as to the way in which he arrived at his know- 
 ledge he may be quite unable to answer you ; his 
 impression of the surrounding details may be vague 
 and confused to the last degree; nevertheless he has 
 a secret which you must use if you would have a 
 clearer insight respecting those details. Apart from 
 the central truth, to which he is often led by what 
 may truly be called divination, the book is a rhapsody; 
 no geographical, chronological, or philological facts, 
 immeasurably valuable as they all are, can make it 
 orderly or reasonable. In Hosea's case the leading- 
 thought reveals itself without any divination. He 
 makes known to us at the outset of the book, the 
 fearful discipline which is the key to all the contents 
 of it. The mystery of marriage, the violation of vows, 
 the husband's long-suffering, the way in which it 
 works, these are not the ornaments of the book but
 
 206 OUR FALLEN CONDITION PRESUMED IN IT. [SERM. 
 
 the subjects of it; they are never absent for a moment 
 from the mind of the writer ; they should not be 
 absent from our minds if we would know what lessons 
 he has to teach respecting his own land, or our land, 
 or ourselves. The cardinal doctrine of Hosea's pro- 
 phecy and of his life, that without which one is as 
 unintelligible as the other, is that man being made in 
 the image of God, all human relationships are images 
 of divine relationships ; that through them God 
 acquaints us with His character and government; 
 that in them we are to show forth that character and 
 government. 
 
 Any verbal statement of this doctrine naturally 
 provokes this objection. ' That/ it is said, ' might 
 be true if human relationships were in their proper 
 reasonable condition. But manifestly they are not. 
 We are fallen beings. Our fallen condition lies at the 
 very root of our intercourse with each other, of our 
 affections and sympathies. You cannot without the 
 grossest extravagance, scarcely without blasphemy, 
 connect them with anything celestial or divine. They 
 are of the earth, earthly. You must acknowledge 
 them to have this origin, and then try as well as you 
 can, to rectify the more flagrant anomalies in them, by 
 the restraints of law, the arguments and influences of 
 .religion/ 
 
 Here is the answer. Hosea's marriage assumes, 
 if any one ever did, a false condition of things, the 
 existence of all possible evil and contradiction. There 
 is nothing Utopian surely in his view of domestic or 
 of public life. He enters with a foresight, very 
 imperfect doubtless, falling immeasurably short of the 
 dreadful reality, but still with a foresight, of the
 
 jn.] THE CONTRADICTION. 207 
 
 consequences, upon a life which he knows will be one 
 of personal misery. He does this expressly to illustrate 
 the course of the divine procedure. This was the 
 prophet's appointed duty. Explain it as you will, but 
 admit at least that he does not recognise the fallen 
 nature itself, or the most actual and terrible results of 
 that nature in the most depraved society, as setting 
 aside the order which God has established, or making 
 the exhibition of that order impossible. 
 
 Hosea began with the belief that his nation was 
 holy, called by God to be holy, because he was holy. 
 That belief had to struggle with evidence which 
 seemed to set it utterly at nought, to make it 
 absolutely ridiculous and monstrous. A holy nation ! 
 why ' there is no truth nor mercy nor knowledge of 
 God in the land/ A holy nation ! why ' by swearing, 
 and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing 
 adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.' 
 A holy nation 1 why ( it is like people, like priest, and 
 the prophets are with them/ A holy nation 1 why 
 'the king is glad with their wickedness and the 
 princes with their lies; the king is a drunkard; he 
 stretcheth out his hand with the scorners/ This a 
 holy nation 1 What, because Abraham its first father 
 was holy ? because it bears the sign of the covenant 
 which testified that he believed God, and which 
 denoted that he was separated from his own lust and 
 from the surrounding world to his Maker ? Could a 
 prophet, an earnest righteous man, believe such a 
 fiction as this ? And yet it stands written, f this is a 
 holy nation ! ' God who cannot lie has pronounced it 
 so. He has spoken not of a few individuals in it, 
 exceptions from the rest, as consecrated, redeemed,
 
 208 THE RECONCILIATION. [SEEM. 
 
 devoted to Him ; He has bestowed that title upon 
 Israel. What can it mean ? How can I a prophet 
 admit the facts of which my ear bears witness, and 
 yet cleave to these assertions which come as I have 
 always thought from One who knows what my eyes and 
 ears cannot tell me, who looks into the very secrets of 
 things ? 
 
 Hosea discovered the reconciliation of these divine 
 declarations, and these facts of human observation, in 
 one case, by realising it in another. Could he deceive 
 himself that the bond which united him to Gomer 
 the daughter of Dibleam, was a holy bond ? Was not 
 the ground of it holy ? God had instituted it. Was 
 not it holy in its very principle and nature ? It 
 expressed an entire love and devotion on his side to- 
 one who gave up herself to him. Did he not feel and 
 know that in trying to carry out the meaning of it 
 he was raised above himself ; that he acted in a way 
 in' which he could not have acted from any mere 
 impulses of his own ? Everything in his life tended 
 to awaken personal bitterness ; yet a tenderness was 
 called forth in him towards her which surmounted 
 that bitterness and transformed it. This tenderness 
 extended to her children ; it became a part of his life. 
 It did not exclude horror of her wrong-doings, they 
 grew up side by side ; one sustained the other ; each 
 was stronger as the mere sense of injury and insult 
 to himself was chastened and subdued. From what 
 source could such feelings come ; how were they kept 
 alive? They must be derived out of a higher love: 
 a love utterly unselfish; patient of the wrong-doer;, 
 detesting the wrong. That love must be the law of 
 His being who gives man His law; it must be the
 
 KII.] THE NATION'S ADULTERY. 209 
 
 guide and measure of His acts who directs the acts and 
 the will of man. 
 
 This was a revelation indeed, worth the cost of 
 unspeakable suffering. But see what was implied in 
 it. Hosea had not merely learnt how he might be a 
 gracious loving man, and might show forth grace and 
 love to one who had gone astray. He had not merely 
 learnt that God desired him to have this character 
 because it corresponded to His own. He had been 
 taught that when he was most true, most loving, most 
 holy, he was but conforming to an order ; and that his 
 wife when most false was but violating this order. He 
 was but submitting to follow a law under which he had 
 been placed ; to act out the relation into which he had 
 entered. She was claiming to have a way of her own, 
 refusing to be under a law ; saying that the relation 
 into which she had entered was a restraint upon her 
 liberty. Did not the interpretation of that seeming 
 opposition between faith and experience lie here ? Did 
 not experience itself offer the most perfect vindication 
 of faith ? Precisely what was true of this woman was 
 true of the nation to which she belonged. It was 
 brought into an order. The unseen Lord had declarec 
 that it was in an actual relation to Him ; that it stood 
 while it acknowledged Him and depended upon Him ; 
 that when it ceased to acknowledge Him it would fall 
 under the dominion of its own instincts and appetites ; 
 that these instincts and appetites would assuredly 
 make it the slave of all visible things. It had ceased 
 to acknowledge Him, to believe Him ; it had fallen into 
 this slavery. Kings, priests, people, prophets had 
 fallen into it. There was no need of arguments to 
 prove it. The low animal habits of the people declared
 
 210 IGNORANCE OF ITS OWN STATE. [SIB*. 
 
 on what objects they were setting their hearts ; every 
 high hill and grove showed how their religion was 
 working with their natural tendencies ; giving them a 
 sanction, aggravating them, receiving back ever fresh 
 corruption from them. What name could be found for 
 such offences ? a name denoting at once the principle 
 and effect of them. Hosea could only call them 
 adulteries. The nation had been married to an unseen 
 husband, to whom it was bound by all holy bonds and 
 covenants. These bonds and covenants might be 
 regarded as merely artificial and imaginary ; they would, 
 of course, be so regarded, the moment the nation had 
 become incapable of counting anything as real that was 
 not visible ; the moment it had passed into an utterly 
 idolatrous condition of mind. But their reality would 
 be proved by the gradual dissolution of all other bonds 
 and covenants; by the growing tendency in the 
 members of the nation to deny that they stood in any 
 relation to each other; by the practice of the majority 
 assuming that each man lived for himself; by the 
 increased strength and definiteness and popularity of 
 doctrines which justified that practice ; lastly by facts 
 which showed that those who treated the divine 
 covenant as a fantasy and a fiction, became themselves 
 the sports of every fantasy and fiction, that they could 
 confess nothing else, live in nothing else. This was the 
 condition into which the prophets saw that the land 
 of their fathers, every flower and stone of which was 
 dear to them, was actually hastening ; this utterly 
 bewildered condition in which all names and forms 
 were interchanged and inverted ; the great disease of 
 which was the utter unconsciousness of any disease, 
 the self-flattery which assumed the flush and fever
 
 xii.] THE COBN AND WINE AND OIL. 211 
 
 of consumption as signs of health, as pledges of 
 endurance. 
 
 Can you wonder that Hosea's words, just because 
 they were the words of a sane, thoughtful, far-seeing 
 man, should have seemed to those who heard them like 
 the ravings of a madman ? Men who have ceased to 
 believe in a Nation, who do not feel that the name 
 denotes anything substantial, who look upon it merely 
 as a collection of atoms, who have lost all sense of a 
 connection between past, present, and future, who only 
 know that they exist in the passing moment, and 
 suspect that a chaos lies before and behind them, 
 such men must mock at the discourses of a prophet. 
 He talks of a nation' s ruin, a nation's dissolution ; what 
 can that signify ? That which he dreads as the most 
 fearful of all consummations has for them taken place 
 already. Relationships have become to them non- 
 entities ; mere creatures of the imagination. What if 
 they should perish more completely still ? Would not 
 the corn and the wine, the silver and the gold still 
 remain ? Might not those who have these possessions 
 still enjoy them, and perhaps more abundantly ? 
 
 No ! says the prophet, this is part of the woe which 
 I am sent to pronounce upon you ; not the worst part 
 assuredly ; but a part which you can understand, and 
 which you must listen to. The corn and the wine and 
 the oil, the silver and the gold will not continue. 
 You do not know that the unseen God has given you 
 them; you are dedicating them to Baal; you are 
 worshipping a God of corn and wine and oil, of silver 
 and gold; a God whose main characteristic in your 
 judgment is, that He sends these things or withholds 
 them according to no rule at all, or according to the 
 
 p 2
 
 212 THE ANALOGY HAS MANY SIDES. [SERM. 
 
 rules which you follow in the distribution of your 
 treasures ; whom rich men therefore, by a profitable 
 outlay of a portion of their treasures in His service, 
 may induce to favour them, and to keep them superior 
 to the rest of their countrymen. It will not be, 
 cannot be. The coming and the going of these gifts 
 which you count so precious depend upon laws which 
 you hold vile and trample upon. These outward 
 things are contingent upon the moral laws, upon the 
 spiritual relations, in which you have ceased to believe. 
 When these are utterly set at nought you will seek in 
 vain for the others. You will invoke all your gods to 
 help you ; they will not nerve arms which indolence 
 and despair have palsied, they will not enable men to 
 work for a common object, who have learned to think 
 that each exists only for himself. 
 
 You will find that one great part of Hosea's prophecy 
 relates to this subject. The misery and poverty of his 
 treacherous wife, when she has betaken herself to her 
 seducers, are the inevitable consequences of her revolt 
 and their indifference ; the like effects will be produced 
 in the nation by the like causes. The analogy has 
 many sides. The lovers of Israel were not only the 
 false gods whom she chose instead of the true ; the 
 cowardice to which faithlessness and idolatry had given 
 birth led her, as we have heard, to turn to the human 
 powers which were threatening her existence. There 
 was a party which pointed to Egypt as their natural 
 ally and protector; another, and, in the ten tribes 
 apparently the most powerful, party which would stay 
 upon Assyria. 1 1 am thy servant and thy sou/ was 
 the ignominious confession which Menahem made by 
 his acts, and which the degenerate descendant of David
 
 xii.j NATURAL PUNISHMENTS. 213 
 
 afterwards uttered in express words. What would 
 come of it ? The invader having laid waste the land, 
 would be content for a time with homage and tribute; 
 through the effect of his devastation, from the reason- 
 able dread of his return, the land would beuntilled; when 
 he came again he would take not produce but people. 
 Shameful slavery might be nothing if the corn and wine 
 and oil might be saved ; but could they be saved ? 
 
 Bishop Butler has argued that the natural punish- 
 ment of human offences is so strictly analogous to the 
 divine punishment of them, that if experience forces 
 us to confess the one, reason cannot forbid us to believe 
 the other. Surely the Scripture goes a step further 
 It treats the natural mischiefs which flow from a certain 
 course of conduct, as witnesses that there is a divine 
 Law with which men are intended to be in conformity, 
 and that they have chosen to live as if no such law 
 existed. In this sense the natural punishments are 
 not analogous to the divine punishments, but identical 
 with them. And so long as punishment is merely 
 looked upon as natural, so long as it is merely the 
 fruit of my own devices, there is a hopelessness and 
 interminableness in it which language may seek to 
 express but cannot. It is a law which executes itself ; 
 and the violator of the law feels that every moment 
 the power of fulfilling it becomes less ; the desire to 
 transgress it greater. He feels, consequently, that evil 
 must go on perpetuating and multiplying itself; and 
 he feels that its death-wages must be punctually paid. 
 This is all that a man contemplating the world, either 
 as a mere Atheist or as a Theist, who supposes God 
 has left it to live without Him, under the guidance of 
 certain laws, which He imposed upon it thousands of
 
 214 SIGHS FOR HOME. [SEKM. 
 
 years ago, can arrive at. The heart may revolt at the 
 conclusion, there may be an inward cry of the spirit, 
 ' It cannot be so ; there must be something more than 
 this ; ' but the dry logical intellect can affirm nothing 
 more ; the most extensive and impartial survey of facts 
 seems to authorise nothing more. And there is a higher 
 moral instinct, a sense of justice, which affirms, ' So 
 it ought to be/ What disturbs the calculation ? What 
 introduces another element into it ? Human relation- 
 ships imply more than this mere natural sequence, than 
 this chain of antecedents and consequents. The re- 
 volted wife, when the corn and wine and oil which she 
 sought from her lovers have failed, will not only feel 
 that her own acts have made the failure necessary. 
 She will say, ' Did not my husband give me all these 
 things ? Was I not better with him ?' That thought 
 however, mixed with grossnessand selfishness. though 
 it may still dwell chiefly upon the external rewards of 
 love and obedience, though their own blessedness may 
 still be far off, yet indicates a dream and recollection 
 of another state. In the deepest degradation these 
 things could never be the only objects of desire. Some 
 distorted affection fora personal object, some incoherent 
 sense of attachment, had always prevented the spirit 
 from being absolutely mercenary, how near soever it- 
 might approach to that ruin. But now that thought 
 of a person becomes connected with the sense of 
 obligations, of plighted faith, of a moral order. What 
 had been felt as an iron chain is now thought of as a 
 silken cord, which need not have been broken ; to which 
 the spirit might have submitted, as a pledge of pro- 
 tecting, watchful, present love. Precisely this process 
 is exhibited to us by Hosea as passing in the heart of
 
 xii.] GRACIOUS PUNISHMENTS. 215 
 
 his fallen wife ; and leading to the resolution, weakly- 
 formed and soon to be evaded again, ' I will return to 
 my first husband.' And then the human punishment, 
 so different from the mere national punishment, yet 
 so carefully recognising the truth and justice and 
 necessity of that, begins ; the same discipline of re- 
 straint, the denial of enjoyments and luxuries ; the slow 
 education which may bring the spirit to understand 
 that it has infinite appetites which the corn and the 
 wine and the oil will not satisfy. 
 
 In carrying out this discipline, amidst all doubts and 
 anxieties as to the result of it, and in combining with 
 this discipline words and acts of gentle and gracious 
 loving-kindness, Hosea was exhibiting a true though 
 most imperfect analogon of that divine discipline, which 
 the inevitable laws of nature do not represent, but of 
 which they are the obedient ministers. Israel was eat- 
 ing the fruit of his own devices, Ephraim was joined to 
 his idols : the sentence might go forth, " Let him alone." 
 But the God who had bound the nation to Himself by 
 covenants as strong and real as the bond which He 
 established on the Creation-day for male and female, 
 covenants expressing a relationship resting on an 
 absolute and eternal goodness, would not suffer a self- 
 willed people to lose itself in perpetual degeneracy, in 
 utter slavery. The corn and the wine and the oil 
 should perish ; the Assyrian who had courted and be- 
 trayed should have his victim. But in every visitation 
 of famine or conquest brought on by the wife's adul- 
 teries, the voice of the first husband should still be 
 heard, " I love thee : return to me." 
 
 I have tried to tell you, brethren, what this prophet 
 was appointed to say to his wife and to his nation.
 
 216 IS GOD'S COVENANT WITH US A FICTION? [>ERM. 
 
 Shall I tell you what he is saying to us ? If I talk of 
 God being in covenant with this nation of England, of 
 His having adopted and claimed us as His own, I 
 should be accused by most persons of using a dialect 
 natural, innocent, professional, perfectly unmeaning, 
 without the slightest reference to existing facts and 
 experience. Religious people would perhaps take 
 another tone. One class of them would say, "You 
 are applying to the whole of the nation, language 
 which belongs to some members of it. We believe in 
 a covenant with God. But what has the ungodly 
 world about us to do with that ? " Another class 
 would say, " The great Catholic Church is in covenant 
 with God. Baptism has taken one divine society out 
 of the ruined mass. But why do you talk as if a race 
 of Saxons settled on this soil were like the Jews of 
 the former dispensation ? " If I were answering these 
 objectors, I should say to the first, "Assert individual 
 faith and individual responsibility as much as you 
 can. But take care that you have something to 
 believe in, something to be responsible for. If you 
 make your faith and your responsibility the conditions 
 of God's covenant, and not God's covenant the warrant 
 for your faith and your responsibility, I am greatly 
 afraid that you will soon believe only in yourselves 
 and submit to no judgment but your own." To the 
 others I would say, " Assert the universality of God's 
 covenant as broadly as you can. Let it not be limited 
 to any nation, any race. But take care that you do 
 not set up the Catholic Church against that humanity 
 which Christ took and for which He died. If you do, 
 if you make the baptized Church a witness against the 
 relation of mankind to God, and not the express and
 
 MI.] PRACTICAL EVIDENCE OF ITS TRUTH. 217 
 
 appointed witness for it, that Church, instead of stand- 
 ing out as an exception in an ungodly and immoral 
 world, will exhibit its immorality and ungodliness in 
 the foulest, most concentrated, most deadly form." 
 
 But I would rather address myself to-day to those 
 who, on no theological ground, but simply from 
 general incredulity, scoff at the notion that there 
 is a covenant with our Sovereign and people as real as 
 there was with the Sovereign and people of the Jews. 
 I press them with no arguments from Scripture at all. 
 I do not appeal to the creed of Christendom, which 
 they say they have outgrown. My evidence in 
 support of this (fiction) would be drawn from the 
 homes and hearths of England. I would say, "Look 
 well to it, you who have not made up your minds to 
 see all domestic bonds and relationships utterly set at 
 naught ; who still hold that any of the blessedness 
 and glory of your land is owing to them. Do you 
 think that the corn and the wine and the oil, the 
 silver and the gold, will preserve them ? Do you 
 think that all mechanical devices for the multiplication 
 of the corn and the wine and the oil will preserve 
 them ? Do you think that the pursuit or the acquisi- 
 tion of the silver and gold is preserving them ? Do 
 you not know that home affections and sympathies 
 are perishing through your devotion to these objects ? 
 Perishing among the rich, because the craving for 
 outward gratifications, and for the money which is to 
 purchase them, withers up the sympathies of the 
 parent, makes the restraints of authority and the 
 bonds imposed by birth irksome to the children (who 
 must have affinities and pleasures which they have 
 created for themselves); perishing among the poor,
 
 218 THE DEATH OF FAMILY AFFECTIONS. [SERM. XH. 
 
 because we regard them, and have taught them to re- 
 gard themselves, chiefly as instruments for producing 
 the corn and the wine and the oil, for increasing the 
 silver and gold; so that family life is an impossibility 
 and a dream to most of them, and their existence is 
 daily becoming more sensual and animal. I say, we 
 know that these things are so. We may disguise them 
 from ourselves and amuse ourselves with phrases about 
 national prosperity ; but there is a canker at the root 
 of it. It is spreading. Unless it is stopped, not the 
 Bible history only, but every history, tells us the 
 result of it. And how may it be stopped ? I answer, 
 " Only when we come seriously to believe that these 
 human relationships, these human affections, have a 
 ground deeper than themselves ; that there is an actual 
 relationship between us, our kings, our priests, and 
 God ; that it is based upon His own gracious will, upon 
 His own eternal love ; that He owns it though we deny 
 it. When once we have taken that conviction home to 
 our hearts, there is a hope of national restoration, of 
 the revival of all domestic affections. For then we are 
 no longer the victims and slaves of that necessity to 
 which our own self-will has subjected us ; we are no 
 longer bound to live for the sake of the corn and the 
 wine and the oil, the silver and the gold, or to make 
 others die for the sake of them. We can return to our 
 first Husband, and ask Him not to let these material 
 blessings, which have come from Him, turn into curses 
 and prove our destruction; but that He will, by taking 
 them from us, by any restraints or punishments which 
 may seem good to Him, bring us back to Trust in Him 
 to Fellowship with one another."
 
 SERMON XIII. 
 
 THE VISION OF THE KING. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 2nd Sunday in Lent. March 7, 1852.) 
 
 In the year that king Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon. 
 a throne high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple. 
 ISAIAH vi. 1. 
 
 THIS vision evidently contains the designation of 
 Isaiah to his work as a prophet. It does not follow 
 that he may not himself have put his book together 
 in the form, or nearly in the form, in which we have 
 received it. The early chapters, as they describe the 
 state of the people not at one particular moment but 
 through a course of years, announcing the punishments 
 which must follow from that state with the blessings 
 which would come out of them, are a living index to 
 the subsequent prophecies and history. The place 
 which they occupy, supposing it was assigned by 
 Isaiah, cannot hinder us from accepting his own 
 express words as a proof, that the year in which king 
 Uzziah died, was the critical one of his life, that which 
 explained to him why he had been sent into the world 
 and what task he had to perform in it. 
 
 In that year he saw the Lord also sitting upon a 
 throne. We are not told whether he saw this sight 
 before or after the death of Uzziah. That king had
 
 220 THE TEMPLE IN ISAIAH'S DAYS. [SE-M. 
 
 long been a leper dwelling apart from his people. 
 Isaiah might have been thinking that a time was near 
 when even this semblance of royalty would pass away, 
 when the poor stricken man would be gathered to his 
 fathers. Or he might be wondering at the wild pleasure 
 with which the people of Jerusalem hailed his successor, 
 at the indifference with which they remembered the 
 former ruler, at the dull mechanical way in which all 
 things went on as if the departure of a shepherd of 
 the people from the land left no gap in it at all. 
 Whatever thoughts were occupying him when he 
 entered into the temple, symbols were there which 
 told him of something more permanent and substan- 
 tial than the reign of a king or the recollections of his 
 subjects. There were the cherubim veiling the mercy- 
 seat ; there was the altar on which the daily sacrifices 
 were offered ; there was the holiest place into which 
 the high priest entered once every year. It was a 
 place full of wonder and mystery. And yet how little 
 consciousness of any wonder or mystery there seemed 
 to be in those who went in and out of it ; how little in 
 those who presented the offerings, and had " Holiness 
 to the Lord," written on their foreheads ! With what 
 hymns of joy had David entered into the city and 
 borne the ark to the holy mountain ! With what awe 
 had Solomon prayed that the presence of the Lord 
 might fill the house in which he and his people were 
 worshipping together ! What a sense of oppression 
 and death there was now over both ! No apparent 
 calamity approaching; everything even and regular 
 as it had been for many a year past ; but a feeling like 
 that of a hot evening before a thunderstorm, when all 
 looks serene, but there is no breath of air. What
 
 sin.] VISIBLE FORMS AND THEIR COUNTERPARTS. 
 
 221 
 
 could have relieved a man upon whose breast this 
 heavy burden was sitting, who had a feeling of end- 
 less weariness, monotony, insincerity in the ordinary 
 life of his fellow-citizens, in the most sacred and 
 divine ordinances ? 
 
 " I saw the Lord also sitting on a throne, and His 
 train filled the temple." Some of you may have been 
 watching a near and beautiful landscape in the land 
 of mountains and eternal snows, till you have been 
 exhausted by its very richness, and till the distant 
 hills which bounded it have seemed, you knew not 
 why, to limit and contract the view, and then a veil 
 has been withdrawn, and new hills not looking as if 
 they belonged to this earth, yet giving another character 
 to all that does belong to it, have unfolded themselves 
 before you. This is an imperfect, very imperfect; like- 
 ness (yet it is one) of that revelation which must have 
 been made to the inner eye of the prophet, when he 
 saw another throne than the throne of the house of 
 David, another king than Uzziah or Jotham, another 
 train than that of priests or minstrels in the temple, 
 other winged forms than those golden ones which 
 overshadowed the mercy-seat. Each object was the 
 counterpart of one that was then or had been at some 
 time before his bodily eyes ; yet it did not borrow its 
 shape or colour from those visible things. They 
 evidently derived their substance and radiance from 
 those which were invisible. Separated from them 
 they could impart no lustre ; for they had none. The 
 kings of the house of David reigned because that king 
 was reigning whom Grod had set upon His holy hill 
 of Zion ; because he lived on, when they dropped 
 one and another into their graves ; because in Him
 
 222 THE SERAPHIM. [SEHM. 
 
 dwelt the light and the power by which each might 
 illumine his own darkness, sustain his own weakness. 
 The symbols and services of the temple were not, as 
 priests and people often thought, an earthly machinery 
 for scaling a distant Heaven ; they were witnesses of a 
 Heaven nigh at hand, of a G-od dwelling in the midst 
 of His people, of His being surrounded by spirits 
 which do His pleasure hearkening to the voice of His 
 words. 
 
 "Above the throne stood the seraphim. Each one 
 had six wings. With twain he covered his face, and 
 with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did 
 fly." The sense of awe increasing with the clearness 
 and purity of a spirit and with the nearness of its 
 approach to God ; the face being veiled which receives 
 its light from Him, and most covets to behold Him ; 
 the absence of all wish to display their own perfections 
 in spirits that are perfect ; the freedom and the willing- 
 ness to go anywhere, to do any errands of mercy ; 
 these are some of the more obvious thoughts which 
 the study of this vision suggests. There are others 
 which lie hidden, which we may have a glimpse of 
 from time to time, and which words might mar. For 
 it is true of earthly symbols, still mors of heavenly 
 visions, that they are meant to carry us out of words 
 and above words ; not so that we despise them or 
 think lightly of them, but that we seeing the reality 
 of the invisible may not be greatly disturbed by the 
 processes and conceits of our minds. 
 
 " And one cried unto another and said, ' Holy, holy, 
 holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of 
 His glory.'" From what we have been told of the 
 eastern imagery of the prophetical writings, and from
 
 xin.J THE HOLY ONE. 223 
 
 the specimens we have had of other oriental writings, 
 we certainly should expect here some gorgeous accu- 
 mulation of superhuman glories. But the vision reaches 
 its highest point in the cry, Holy, holy, holy. It is the 
 holiness of God which the seraphim proclaim, that 
 which cannot be represented to the eye, that of which 
 descriptions and symbols offer no image. It is that 
 holiness which fills not the heaven of heavens only 
 but the whole earth, seeing that was made very good r 
 seeing that in its order and constitution it was still 
 perfectly good, though men defiled it by their deeds, 
 though the habitations of cruelty were set up in the 
 midst of it. 
 
 "And the posts of the door were moved at the 
 voice of him who cried. And the house was filled with 
 smoke." The posts of the door moved at the voice 
 which declared that the Holy One was there. The 
 house was filled with smoke because the fire of His 
 love was kindling the sacrifices. The sights and 
 sounds of Sinai would not have made the Israelites 
 tremble as they did if they had been merely sights 
 and sounds of overwhelming and destructive power ; 
 they spoke first of Truth, of Holiness. And that 
 Truth and Holiness did not dwell aloof and at a 
 distance from the man, as in the burning mountain, 
 but in the very house which every Israelite might 
 claim as his own. 
 
 It was this which led the prophet to say, " Woe is 
 me ! For I am undone ! Because I am a man of 
 unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean 
 lips. For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord 
 of Hosts." 
 
 When we try to convince ourselves or others of
 
 224, THE UNCLEAN HEART AND LIPS. J.SERM. 
 
 guilt, we often heap up epithets concerning the justice 
 of God, the demands which He makes upon the service 
 of creatures, the certainty that every transgression 
 must entail an unutterable punishment. I do not 
 think we find that such representations produce much 
 effect upon the conscience of our hearers. They 
 awaken a temporary dread of an unknown vengeance. 
 They do not awaken the sense of inward evil or lead 
 to the confession of it. The promises of mercy by 
 which we are obliged to mitigate these apparently 
 awful and hopeless statements, deprive them of al! 
 their sting. If not, there is an instinct in the heart 
 which rejects them as exaggerated, unless there is 
 another which drives it to despair. It is altogether 
 different when a Being who is saying to us, " Be ye 
 holy for I am holy," is presented to the conscience 
 and is recognised by it. Then there is no calculation 
 of possible consequences, no weighing and balancing 
 of what may come or may not come of resistance to 
 such a Being or of struggle with His will. Then and 
 there the man feels himself condemned. It is not a 
 future state, but his present state, which makes him 
 tremble. " Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean 
 lips. My words are not pure. The source from which 
 they spring is not pure. And I am brought face to 
 face with the Lord of my heart and reins, with Him 
 who has a right to rule my words, with the pure 
 spring from which my thoughts and desires and im- 
 pulses ought to flow. Mine eyes have seen the King, 
 the Lord of Hosts." In such a revelation the dis- 
 covery of personal evil conies first. The man does not 
 look about him to compare his offences with those of 
 other men and try which are the heavier. It is not
 
 MIL] THE PURIFICATION. 225 
 
 this or that particular offence, no, nor a multitude of 
 particular offences, that overwhelms him; it is the 
 feeling of a root of bitterness ; not ' I have done this 
 or that wrong,' but ' I am wrong/ Not however that 
 this thought could long be separated from the one of 
 which it must take precedence. " I dwell among a 
 people of unclean lips." There is the same pollution 
 in them which there is in me. Each of us is living to 
 himself. Each is living apart from that God who 
 has called us to be holy as He is. He is attended by 
 obedient Spirits, Spirits united in obedience, working 
 together as His servants, for the fulfilment of Hia 
 purposes. We are separate and broken; every man 
 following a way of his own ; not a people, because we 
 do not believe that a King is with us. 
 
 " Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a 
 live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the 
 tongs from off the altar. And he laid it upon my 
 mouth and said, 'Lo, this hath touched thy lips ; and 
 thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin purged.' " 
 The cherubim in the temple represented no doubt 
 spiritual powers and presences in the most general 
 sense, those who look upon God and reflect His light. 
 If we distinguish between them and the seraphim, as 
 we do in our " Te Deum," these last would seem more 
 especially to represent those divine energies and affec- 
 tions of which the zeal, devotion, and sympathy of 
 man are the counterparts. The altar on which the 
 sacrifices were offered denoted intercourse and com- 
 munion between the creature and the Creator, the 
 offering up of the man to God in the faith that God 
 had offered Himself to him. The live coal on the 
 altar is a substance dead and cold in itself, which has 
 
 Q
 
 *26 THE COMMISSION. [sum*, 
 
 been kindled from above, and therefore is capable of 
 imparting life and warmth. That warmth and life, 
 communicated to the prophet, take away his iniquity 
 and purge his sin. What he had been conscious of, 
 was coldness, indifference, estrangement. All his 
 uncleanness had come from this. He and his people 
 were impure because they had lost that common life 
 and love which belonged to them while they were 
 living as the people of God, while they were remember- 
 ing His presence among them. That was a quickening, 
 vivifying, uniting presence. Ceasing to acknowledge 
 it, they lost their national heart, they were a heap 
 of fragments divided and selfish ; therefore unclean. 
 Now this heart was restored to the prophet. The 
 zeal of God's house was consuming him. He was an 
 Israelite and a righteous man, for his mind was at one 
 with the mind of the King of Israel, the righteous 
 God. 
 
 " Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, 'Whom 
 shall I send, and who will go for us ? ' Then said I, 
 ' Here am I. Send me/ ' The mighty change which 
 has been wrought in him is soon apparent. He is sure 
 that God cares for Israelites and has a message to 
 them ; he is sure that a man is to be the bearer of that 
 message. The new fire which has entered into his 
 heart makes him ready to offer himself as that man; or 
 rather, he feels that he is called, and that he must go; 
 that a necessity is laid upon him, though his will has 
 been made cheerful and ready to own that necessity, 
 to go forth not as a drudge, but as the herald of the 
 only truth which was able to renovate his land. 
 
 But will it do that ? A sadder commission than 
 that one which followed was never given to a man.
 
 x-ii.3 WHAT HAD MADE THE EYES BLIND. 227 
 
 "And He said. 'Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, 
 but understand not ; and see ye indeed, but perceive 
 not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make 
 their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see 
 with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and under- 
 stand with their heart, and convert, and be healed/ " 
 How could a vision of the Divine King, with His 
 Seraphim crying, " Holy, holy, holy," be a preparation 
 for such a message as this ? Because the most awful 
 lesson which Isaiah had to teach his people was, that 
 God's own ordinances, the regular sequence of sove- 
 reigns, the duties and symbols of the temple, were 
 contributing to make their eyes dim, and their ears 
 deaf, and their hearts fat. They were seeing all the 
 outward tokens of the presence of an invisible King ; 
 but they perceived not Him. They were hearing His 
 words ; but they did not hear Him speaking these 
 words. They were worshipping in the presence of a 
 Searcher of hearts, of a divine inspirer ; and that very 
 blessing was helping to close their hearts against His 
 approaches and inspirations. A strange and fearful 
 announcement indeed. Perhaps this which we find in 
 the second chapter may explain it: "Their land is full 
 of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their 
 treasures. Their land also is full of horses, neither is 
 there any end of their chariots. Their land also is full 
 of idols j they worship the work of their own hands, 
 that which their own fingers have made. And the 
 mean man boweth down, and the great man humbleth 
 himself." There may have been actual idols of wood 
 and stone in the high-places which lasted through the 
 days of Uzziah and Jotham. I do not say that tho 
 prophet does not allude to these. He must allude to 
 
 2
 
 228 TRUTH MUST BE GOOD TO HEAR. 
 
 every form of corruption which existed in the land. 
 But I apprehend that here he is especially thinking of 
 the silver and the gold, the chariots and the horses, as 
 being themselves the idols to which the great men and 
 the mean men were bowing down. These were the 
 works of their own hands to which they were giving 
 up their hearts. These had made their hearts fat and 
 their ears dull of hearing. These had made the in- 
 visible world seem a dream, an unreality to them, the 
 visible world the only fact. And to men in such a 
 state of mind, so dulled and stupefied by the potions 
 which they had administered to themselves, the most 
 precious gifts of God, the instruments of His grace, 
 the signs of His presence, became themselves potions. 
 Those things which were meant to guide men out of 
 darkness into light, from the world to its Creator, 
 became a vale between Him and them, became the 
 means of confounding Him with the world, or of sub- 
 stituting its shadows for His substance. Merely to see 
 that there is such a law in human degeneracy as this, 
 that the evil heart can so assimilate good to itself and 
 convert it to its nature, is sufficiently appalling. To be 
 obliged to proclaim it with all its consequences, is 
 more appalling still. Only such a preparation as that 
 Isaiah had gone through, could have enabled him to 
 enter upon such a task or to fulfil it. But that did. 
 For it made him understand that truth must be always 
 good to hear and good to speak ; that you cannot shew 
 a man his evil or a nation its evil, without declaring to 
 both God's love and God's covenant; that if these be 
 ever so little perceived by that age, there is yet a 
 power in them which will go on blessing all ages to 
 oome ; that he who speaks, cannot in the least measure
 
 xin.] HOW LONG THE BLINDNESS WOULD LAST. 229 
 
 the effect of his own words, but must leave them with 
 God from whom they come, to do with them what He 
 wills ; finally, that He will make their power felt and 
 prove their dominion in calamities which would be 
 otherwise warrants for despair. 
 
 " Then said I, ' Lord, how long ? ' And He answered, 
 ' Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the 
 houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, 
 and the Lord have removed men far away, and there 
 be a great forsaking in the midst of the land/ " How 
 long shall this insensibility and hardness of heart go 
 on, increasing by every influence that should check it ? 
 The answer must have been crushing to the heart of a 
 patriot, and yet it shows that the heaviest woe which 
 could befall a land, might be welcomed as a blessing. 
 Some new kind of visitation, different from any which 
 the chosen people had experienced, was at hand. , It 
 would be no onslaught of Philistines, no mere raid of 
 Ammonites or Moabites or Syrians. The cities (we are 
 not told what cities, but the impression on the pro- 
 phet's mind must have been, that those of Judah as 
 well as those of the other province were intended) 
 would be wasted without inhabitant. It would not be 
 a mere destruction of fortified places. The " houses " 
 would be without inhabitant. Each particular family 
 would feel the shock of the general war. The land 
 would be left unploughed and unsowed. There would 
 not only be a slaughter in battles or sieges ; " men 
 would be removed far away." All these are warnings 
 of an invasion and a captivity which would rouse those 
 out of their slumbers whom no prophet's voice had 
 been able to waken. 
 
 " But yet in it shall be a tenth. And it shall return
 
 230 THE REMNANT. [SERU. 
 
 and shall be eaten ; as a teil tree, or as an oak, whose 
 substance is in them, when they cast their leaves. So 
 the holy seed shall be the substance thereof." There 
 is, I believe, no passage in the Scripture more important 
 for the understanding of Isaiah and of all the prophets, 
 than this one. It is very common to say that the 
 Jewish seers announce destruction to the body of the 
 Israelites ; but that they promise blessings and preser- 
 vation to certain individuals, a special remnant, the 
 true Israel in the midst of the nominal Israel. Seeing 
 that these true men would share of necessity a great 
 many of the tribulations which befell their countrymen, 
 seeing that some of them would be carried into captivity 
 along with the most godless and heartless, and that 
 others who were left behind would feel the consequences 
 of the threatened desolation and would have to mourn 
 for.much more than the loss of harvests, for the exiles 
 and deaths of kinsfolk and children, it is concluded 
 that the blessings promised them here are the blessings 
 of a future world. Though they might suffer loss and 
 a seeming death, they would have a hope full of im- 
 mortality. Sharing the temporary calamities, they 
 would escape the after doom of their countrymen. 
 Whatever mixture of truth there may be in this inter- 
 pretation (and the prophet may show us by-and-by 
 what mixture of truth there is in it), I believe we shall 
 utterly misunderstand him if we allow it to dwell in 
 our minds while we are studying his words, nay, if we 
 do not receive, at the outset, the altogether different 
 interpretation which he gives us himself. Consider 
 his illustration. He does not say that the oak tree OP 
 the teil tree is stripped of certain of its leaves by a 
 hurricane, and that it retains some of them which were
 
 xiii.] THE SUBSTANCE OF THE NATION. 23L 
 
 stronger and more fixed than the rest. He speaks of 
 the oak as utterly stripped, as quite bare, and yet 
 retaining its substance, having within it some principle 
 of life which enables it to last on and to send forth 
 fresh leaves another year. In like manner, he says, 
 the nation will be preserved ; the remnant, the tenth, 
 would be a pledge and witness of its preservation. 
 The best men of that remnant, instead of boasting that 
 they had avoided the sorrows of their country, would 
 have the greatest sympathy with them, the least wish 
 for some private and personal privilege. The worst 
 part of them, for there is no promise that bad men 
 might not be in this remnant as well as among those 
 who were carried away, might exult in their escape, 
 but would certainly not understand to whom they were 
 indebted for it, or why it had been accorded them. 
 But good or bad, their preservation would prove that 
 the nation was a sacred and immortal thing, because 
 the holy seed was in the midst of it, because it did not 
 derive its life or its unity from this or that believing 
 man or from a multitude of believing men, but from 
 Him in whom they believed ; from that divine King 
 who lived though king Uzziah and all other kings died, 
 nay, though the whole land should seem to die. 
 
 I have gone carefully, brethren, through this chapter, 
 because I believe that it leads us into the very heart of 
 Isaiah's teaching, and that all the portions of it which 
 we shall have to consider hereafter, are but expansions 
 of the hints in this opening vision. He is often called 
 the evangelical prophet ; by which it is meant that he 
 is especially the prophet of the Messiah. The language, 
 I believe, is strictly true. Yet it is language which 
 admits of various significations, and sometimes perhaps
 
 282 THE CHBIST. [SEEM. 
 
 is used in a perverted signification. It is not enough 
 to be told of a Messiah, a person sent from God ; we 
 want to know what manner of person the Messiah is, 
 and how He is related to all others who have a divine 
 mission as prophets or kings. Isaiah, I believe, will 
 enable us to answer these questions, not, however, by 
 merely predicting the advent of a divine Ruler on some 
 future day, but by showing how this divine Ruler was 
 then exercising the power which would afterwards be 
 fully manifested. We must look for the Christ not in 
 some detached phrases or intimations of the prophecy, 
 but as giving a purpose and unity to the whole of it, 
 not as one who disturbs the order of history and com- 
 pels us to forget that we are reading of events which 
 occurred in Isaiah's own day, but as one who explains 
 those events and shows how they were steps in the 
 evolutions of God's kingdom, exhibitions of the eternal 
 laws which are established in it. Viewed in this light, 
 the so-called Messianic aspects of Isaiah's discourses will 
 never lead us to overlook the denunciation of the sins 
 of the land at that time. They will only enable us to 
 see more clearly the source and character of those sins, 
 to see why they have reappeared, and are reappearing 
 in all generations and in all countries. Nor, again, will 
 the prominence which is given to the kingly office by 
 Isaiah, ever throw into shadow the office of the prophet 
 himself. We shall rather feel, what we have been learn- 
 ing imperfectly to feel from our previous readings, how 
 essential each office is to the other, how there must be 
 some One in whom they meet and harmonise. When 
 we have understood the reality and universality of the 
 truths for which the Jewish king, the Jewish priest, 
 and the Jewish prophet, as joint-representatives of the
 
 THE ANTICHRIST. 233 
 
 nation, were testifying, we shall understand better in 
 what sense Isaiah speaks to Gentiles as well as Jews 
 of punishments which would be common for both, of a 
 deliverer for both, of the special insensibility and the 
 special retribution which befall those who are entrusted 
 with the privilege of knowing and declaring God, and 
 who live in forgetfulness of Him. With this view of 
 his character and work, we shall also be at no loss to 
 perceive why the Assyrian invasion occupies so promi- 
 nent a place in the visions of Isaiah, why it is, in fact, 
 as truly the subject of his prophecy as Christ the divine 
 King is. For we shall find that he sees in that Assyrian 
 invasion, not merely the sudden outburst of a new 
 mighty enemy against Jerusalem, not merely the punish- 
 ment of Jews and of surrounding people, not merely a 
 power which was to be defeated in the moment when 
 victory seemed most certain; but the exhibition of that 
 kind of kingdom which is antagonist in all times, and 
 in all its shapes, to the kingdom of Him whose train 
 filled the Temple and before whom the seraphim veiled 
 their faces. Lastly, we shall find the idea of the con- 
 tinuance and everlasting endurance of that society 
 which seemed on the point of perishing then, and has 
 seemed often utterly to perish since, reconciled with 
 the most dismal facts which the prophet saw or could 
 not see ; the king victorious through suffering, and 
 bringing life out of death, being the key to that riddle 
 and to all riddles, past, present, and to come. 
 
 These hints and observations I hope to draw out in 
 two or three lectures upon the different sections of this 
 great prophecy. In the meantime I would fix your 
 thoughts upon the passage which has suggested them. 
 We have been hearing of a vision. Does that word
 
 234 VISIONS NOT CONFINED TO THE OLD WORLD. [SERM. 
 
 sound as if it belonged to times which we have left 
 far behind, as if it pointed to something fantastical 
 and incredible ? Oh ! if there were no such visions, 
 brethren, what an utterly dark and weary and unin- 
 telligible place this world would be ! How completely 
 we should be given up to the emptiest phantoms, to the 
 basest worship of phantoms ! What mere shows and 
 mockeries would the state and ceremonial of kings, 
 the debates of legislators, the yearnings and struggles 
 of people, become ! How truly would the earth bo 
 what it seemed to tLe worn-out misanthropical liber- 
 tine, "a stage, and all the men and women merely 
 players." A thousand times we have been all tempted 
 to think it so. The same painted scenery, the same 
 shifting pageants, the same unreal words spoken 
 through different masks by counterfeit voices, the 
 same plots which seem never to be unravelled, what 
 does it all mean ? How do men endure the ceaseless 
 change, the dull monotony ? Satirists and keen ob- 
 servers of the world's follies have asked this question 
 again and again. The best man may often doubt what 
 he should reply. But he hears a voice saying to him, 
 ' Try to be true thyself ; resist the powers which are 
 tempting thee to go through thy acts, common or 
 sacred, as if thou wert a mere machine j hold fast thy 
 faith that God is, and is working, when thou seest least 
 of His working, and when the world seems most to be 
 going on without Him ; assure thyself that there is an 
 order in the universe when all its movements seem 
 most disorderly. So will the things around thee by 
 degrees acquire a meaning and a purpose. Those 
 divine services and sacraments which have partaken 
 of their insincerity, which have become shadows like
 
 XIH.] HOW THEY MAY COME TO US 235 
 
 them, will show thee what a truth and substance lies 
 behind them. In English temples thou mayest hear 
 " Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts/' resounding 
 from the lips of seraphim. In them thou mayest 
 know that thou art in the midst of a company of 
 angels and archangels and just men made perfect, nay, 
 that thou art in the presence of Jesus the mediator of 
 the new covenant, and of God the judge of all. And 
 if the sense of that presence awaken all the conscious- 
 ness of thine own evil, and of the evil of the people 
 among whom thou dwellest, the taste of that sacrifice, 
 which was once offered for thee and all the world, will 
 purge thine iniquity. When that divine love has 
 kindled thy flagging and perishing thoughts and hopes, 
 thou mayest learn that God can use thee to bear the 
 tidings of His love and righteousness to a sense-bound 
 land that is bowing to silver and gold, to horses and 
 chariots. And if there should come a convulsion in 
 that land, such as neither thou nor thy fathers have 
 known, be sure that it signifies the removal of such 
 things as can be shaken, that those things which 
 <;annot be shaken may remain/
 
 SERMON XIV. 
 
 ISAIAH AND AHAZ. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 3rd Sunday in Lent. March 14, 1852.) 
 
 Moreover the Lord spake again unto Ahaz, saying, Ask thee a sign of 
 the Lord thy God ; ask it either in the depth, or in the height 
 above. But Ahaz said, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the 
 Lord. And he said, Hear ye now, house of David ; Is it a 
 small thing for yon to weary men, but will you weary my God 
 also ? Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign ; Behold, 
 a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name 
 Immanuel. ISAIAH vii. 10 14. 
 
 THE chapter from which this passage is taken im- 
 mediately follows the one upon which I spoke to you 
 last Sunday. The vision in the year that Uzziah died 
 prepares us for the message of Ahaz. Nevertheless a 
 considerable period, the whole reign of Jotham, 
 elapsed between them. Are we to suppose that the lips 
 which had been touched by the fire from the altar were 
 silent during that time, that the man who had said 
 ' Here am I, send me/ and had received so terrible a 
 message, did not deliver himself of it for sixteen years ? 
 If that had been so, I do not know that there may 
 not be many parallel cases in the ancient and modern 
 world. A man may feel that he is called to a work 
 long before the moment arrives when he can perform 
 it, long before the outward event occurs which cor- 
 responds to the inward impulse and explains its full
 
 SERM. xiv.] THE REIGN OF JOTHAM. 237 
 
 meaning. Such intervals, no doubt, make great demands 
 upon the faith and patience of him who is appointed to 
 pass through them. There is the strongest temptation 
 to doubt whether that which seemed to give a law and 
 purpose to his life was not itself a dream. There is a 
 temptation to create the occasion for speaking or acting 
 before it arises. But the delay is an education which 
 is profitable in proportion as the original inspiration 
 and conviction are kept alive ; it is necessary and often 
 lengthened, in proportion as the subsequent work is to 
 be of a powerful, terrible kind, such as may affect 
 generations to come. If the opinion which has been 
 ordinarily deduced from St. Paul's account of his stay 
 in Arabia in the Epistle to the Galatians be a true one, 
 he would offer the most memorable example of this 
 probation. 
 
 There is no reason, however, to suppose that Isaiah 
 was silent during the time I have spoken of. There 
 is the best evidence that he was not. What we may, 
 I think, fairly affirm is, that the events in the reign 
 of Ahaz, to which I alluded in a former lecture, the 
 conspiracy against him by the Samaritans and Syrians, 
 the appearance of the Assyrian hosts in Palestine, the 
 entreaty of Ahaz that Tiglath-Pileser would punish 
 his enemies, the fulfilment of that petition, and the 
 consequent preparation of a new and fearful calamity 
 for his son and his people, were the especial objects to 
 which Isaiah's vision pointed, and that the prophecy con- 
 tained in the text derives great part of its interpretation 
 from that vision. It is equally true that the connection 
 between them would not be intelligible, if the purged 
 eyes of the prophet had not been enabled to see the 
 condition of society in Judaea in the years of apparent
 
 238 CHAPTER I. PARTLY GENERAL. 
 
 prosperity and splendour which preceded the league- 
 of Pekah and Rezin, and if he had not given us a most 
 vivid and graphical description of that which he saw. 
 The first chapter of his prophecy can hardly be said 
 to contain this description. The words at the com- 
 mencement of it, " I' have nourished and brought up 
 children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox 
 knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib : but 
 Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider," 
 might apply to Jotham's time or any other. I hinted 
 last Sunday that they served as a kind of general 
 preface to the prophecy, indicating what the sin was 
 against which all the after denunciations of the seer 
 would be directed ; how it was the revolt of a people 
 from One who cared for them, watched over them, 
 loved them ; how it was the wild and wilful desire of 
 the heart to seek abroad for the treasures which it 
 would have found stored up at home. Something of the 
 same general character may be traced through the rest 
 of the chapter. But there are passages such as these, 
 " Your country is desolate, your cities are burnt with 
 fire ; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, 
 and it is desolate as overthrown by strangers. And 
 the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, 
 as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged 
 city/' which must, it would seem, refer to a much 
 later time, when either Shalmaneser or Sennacherib 
 had laid waste the greater part of Palestine, and when 
 Jerusalem was nearly the last hold of the chosen 
 race. Some may feel a difficulty in connecting the 
 following passages, which declare that their condition 
 would have been like that of Sodom and Gomorrah if 
 the Lord had not preserved a very small remnant, with
 
 xiv.] PARTLY BELONGING TO A LATTER TIME. 239 
 
 the time in which Hezekiah was reigning, after he 
 had commenced a great reformation. But we may 
 find as we proceed, what all reason and experience 
 would lead us to expect, that this reformation was 
 slow in its progress ; that it brought to light evib 
 which were lying very deep in the heart of the nation, 
 that some of the immediate household of the king 
 (Shebna the scribe is denoted by name as one of them) 
 fully deserved to be called " companions of thieves,, 
 men who loved gifts and followed after rewards, who 
 judged not the cause of the fatherless." And the 
 reaction in favour of the temple services and the 
 appointed feasts which was sure to follow the change 
 in the disposition of the king, may have led to that 
 semblance of faith which the prophet denounces in 
 the words, (f To what purpose is the multitude of your 
 sacrifices unto me ? saith the Lord : I am full of the 
 burnt -offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts ; and 
 I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or 
 of he-goats ; " together with that cry for an inward 
 and radical reformation, "Wash you, make you clean, 
 put away the evil of your doings from before mine 
 eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judg- 
 ment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead 
 for the widow." And the promises at the end or the 
 chapter that the city should become once more a city 
 of righteousness, a faithful city, point naturally to 
 that higher and nobler state of things which was to 
 be seen in the latter years of Hezekiah's reign after 
 the ministers of corruption had been swept away, and 
 the truer hearts had been purified by suffering. 
 
 But the most intelligent students of Isaiah have 
 believed, and apparently on the most reasonable
 
 240 CHAPTER II. TEXT PROM AN OLD PROPHET. [SERM. 
 
 grounds, that the next passage of his prophecy, from 
 the beginning of the second to the end of the fourth 
 chapter, belongs to the very commencement of his 
 work. There had been many allusions in earlier 
 prophets, we have noticed one in Joel, to a time of 
 great blessedness and glory, when Mount Zion should 
 be exalted above the hills, and the law of the Lord 
 should go forth from Jerusalem. Such sentences we 
 may easily suppose had become texts and common- 
 places among the people, often in the mouths of the 
 popular and court prophets, applied by them to the 
 state of things which was then established, or to some 
 one which would naturally grow out of it. A passage 
 of this kind it is supposed, and the hypothesis gives 
 great coherency to the whole discourse, is to be 
 found in the second, third, and fourth verses of the 
 second chapter. Adopting words which were well 
 known to his audience, from some venerable teacher 
 of the past, the prophet proceeds to comment upon 
 them and shew that they might indeed have been 
 fulfilled in that time, but that the sins of the nation 
 had produced a state as unlike as possible to that 
 which the seer spoke of. 
 
 No contrast can be more living and terrible than 
 that which the prophet draws between the actual 
 condition of things and that true and blessed one 
 which he as much as his predecessor looks for. The 
 first sign of corruption is that they were replenished 
 from the east, and pleased themselves in the children 
 of strangers. In other words, they had a love for all 
 foreign habits, luxuries, superstitions. Above all, they 
 had acquired a taste for enchantments, a delight, and, 
 if it were not profaning the word, a faith, in
 
 XIT.] CHAPTER III. THE BRIGHT DAY NOT AT HAND. 241 
 
 auguries drawn from visible portents, in whatever 
 wonders did not testify of a God of order. This sure 
 and fatal symptom of a people indifferent to realities, 
 occupied with self-exalting vanities, stood side by side 
 with the tokens of which I spoke last Sunday, the 
 multitude of chariots and horses, the abundance of 
 silver and gold, the practical worship of these, which 
 produced all other more obvious kinds of idolatry. 
 Before that bright day of the Lord can come, about 
 which the old prophet had spoken, a day must come 
 which would wither and consume all these vanities, 
 'a day which shall be upon every one that is proud 
 and lofty, and he shall be brought low : on the cedars 
 of Lebanon and the oaks of Bashan; on the high 
 towers and the fenced walls ; upon the ships of 
 Tarshish and the pleasant pictures/ ' A day in which 
 a man shall cast his idols of silver and of gold to the 
 moles and to the bats; to go into the clefts of the 
 rocks, and into the tops of the ragged rocks, for fear 
 of the Lord, and for the glory of His Majesty, when 
 He ariseth to shake terribly the earth/ 
 
 And there would be judgments preparatory to these. 
 "The Lord would take away from Jerusalem and 
 from Judah the mighty man, and the man of war, 
 the judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the 
 ancient, the captain of fifty, and the honourable man, 
 and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator. 
 And children should be their princes, and babes 
 should rule over them." The last sentence may 
 allude to Ahaz, who, as we are told in the Book of 
 Kings, was only twenty years old when he began to 
 reign, and whose acts shewed that he was a child in 
 character even more than in years. His father might 
 
 K
 
 242 CHAPTERS IV. AND V. [SEEM. 
 
 be declining and the boy exhibiting his character 
 when the prophet wrote. The next passage alludes 
 of course to the removal of old counsellors, either by 
 death or by the caprice of the young king. And this 
 want of all wisdom and power of government in the 
 ruler leads to the next sign of disorganisation, or at 
 least is almost inevitably coincident with it. " The 
 people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and 
 every one by his neighbour. The child shall behave 
 himself proudly against the ancient, and the base 
 against the honourable." There will come also a time 
 to Jerusalem, Isaiah declares, when the craving for 
 power, and even covetousness itself, will give place to 
 the dread of responsibility and shame; when people 
 shall say to a man, " Thou hast clothing ; be thou our 
 ruler. And he shall swear, ' I will not be a healer. 
 Make me not a ruler of the people/ ' Another sign 
 of a falling state Isaiah draws out with the minute- 
 ness and detail which are characteristic of a prophet. 
 " The daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with 
 stretched-out necks and wanton eyes, walking and 
 mincing as they go ; " filled with a thoughtless, heart- 
 less, self-seeking spirit which was bringing on a day 
 that would rob them of all that they had delighted in, 
 and would make them sharers in the misery which 
 they had not heeded. These are evils, the prophet says, 
 which must be washed away, nay, which require a spirit 
 of judgment and a spirit of burning to remove them. 
 And then will the good day come ; " then will the Lord 
 give His people a tabernacle for a shadow from the heat 
 and a place of refuge from storm and from rain." 
 
 This noble discourse is followed by the song con- 
 cerning the Lord's vineyard, which probably belongs
 
 xiv.] THE VINEYARD; THE RIGHT SEED. 243 
 
 to the same period of the history. The vineyard is on a 
 very fruitful hill, it has been fenced, the stones have 
 been gathered out of it, the choicest vine has been 
 planted in it, a tower has been built in the midst of it, 
 a wine-press has been made in it. The owner of it 
 looked that it should bring forth grapes ; and it brought 
 forth wild grapes. That truth is here asserted in the 
 strongest manner which penetrates the whole prophecy, 
 and apart from which no word of it has any meaning, 
 that the nation of Israel was brought into an entirely 
 right state; that it was wholly a right seed', that it 
 had all capacities and appliances for being right and 
 for doing right ; that when it brought forth wild grapes 
 it was severing itself from its root ; it was doing some- 
 thing disorderly, irregular, in one sense of the word 
 unnatural. The use of the phrase wild grapes, shows 
 indeed that it was yielding to the impulses of nature. 
 But then the very idea of a covenanted people is of one 
 raised above these impulses, brought into the true 
 human condition, the condition of dependence upon 
 God which He intends for the creature whom He has 
 made in His image. The prophet here, as always, does 
 not rest in generalities. He tells us what the wild grapes 
 are which the vineyard has brought forth, what signs 
 the House of Judah has given, that it is yielding to 
 nature, not to God, and so is becoming unnatural and 
 inhuman. The possessors of land come first in his 
 arraignment. " Woe to them that join house to house, 
 that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they 
 may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." Then 
 come the luxurious men of cities. " Woe to them that 
 rise up early in the morning that they may follow 
 strong drink ; that continue until night till wine 
 
 R 2
 
 244 SIGNS OF NATIONAL DECAY. [SEKM. 
 
 inflame them. And the harp, and the viol, the tab ret, 
 and the pipe, and wine, are in their feasts ; but they 
 consider not the work of the Lord, nor the operation of 
 His hands." Then we have the scorners, those who do 
 not believe that any judgment can overtake them, who 
 think that everything is as it ought to be and as it 
 must be. They say, " Let Him make speed and hasten 
 His work, that we may see it. And let the counsel of 
 the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we 
 may know it." Then those who use false conventional 
 phrases to describe acts and qualities, or who deny a 
 standard of right and wrong. " Woe to them who call 
 evil good, and good evil ; that put darkness for light, 
 and light for darkness." Then those that glory in their 
 wisdom or their righteousness. " Woe to them that 
 are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own 
 sight." Then again those that boast of their sottishness, 
 and who yet retain enough of sense and cleverness to 
 abuse it for the purposes of injustice. " Woe to them 
 that are mighty to drink wine ; and men of strength to 
 mingle strong drink, which justify the wicked for re- 
 ward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous 
 from him." And there is one general cause of ruin 
 which the prophet looks upon as comprehending all 
 these particular causes. My people are in captivity or 
 bondage because they have no knowledge. The sensu- 
 ality, the covetousness, the self-glorification, the prac- 
 tical disregard of right and wrong in their dealings 
 with each other, are destroying all faculty of moral 
 discernment, and making them brutish and slavish. 
 Their honourable men and the multitude become alike 
 incapable of recognising a law of Truth and Righteous- 
 ness as governing themselves, and therefore of believing 
 in a God of Truth and Righteousness who is the author
 
 xiv.] THE MESSAGE TO AHAZ. 245 
 
 and upholder of that law. " They do not know, they 
 cannot understand/' these are phrases occurring con- 
 tinually in the prophets to describe the extinction of 
 that perception in a nation which is the proper attri- 
 bute of man, and the consequent triumph of all mere 
 animal propensities, together with a resolute, deliberate 
 selfishness which is not found among animals but only 
 among fallen spirits. 
 
 It has been supposed that there are many passages 
 scattered through the later chapters of Isaiah which may 
 belong to the same period with these, another principle 
 than a chronological one having apparently determined 
 the arrangement of his utterances. But the specimens I 
 have given will be quite sufficient to explain the crisis 
 in which the prophet received the following command. 
 
 " Then said the Lord unto Isaiah, Go forth now to 
 meet Ahaz, thou and Shear-jashub thy son, at the end 
 of the conduit of the upper pool, in the highway of the 
 fuller's field; and say unto him, Take heed, and be 
 quiet; fear not, neither be faint-hearted for the two 
 tails of these smoking firebrands, for the fierce anger of 
 Rezin with Syria, and the son of Remaliah. Because 
 Syria, Ephraim, and the son of Remaliah, have taken 
 evil counsel against thee, saying, Let us go up against 
 Judab, and vex it, and let us make a breach therein for 
 us, and set a king in the midst of it, even the son of 
 Tabeal : thus saith the Lord God, It shall not stand, 
 neither shall it come to pass. For the head of Syria is 
 Damascus, and the head of Damascus is Rezin ; and 
 within three score and five years shall Ephraim be broken, 
 that it be not a people. And the head of Ephraim is 
 Samaria, and the head of Samaria is Remaliah' s son. If 
 ye will not believe, surely ye shall not be established." 
 
 You might have supposed in such a time as that
 
 246 THE CALL TO CONFIDENCE. [SERM. 
 
 which has been described to us, that the prophet would 
 have spoken to Ahaz of coming danger rather than 
 have cheered him to confidence and hope. Was this 
 fulfilling his commission ? Was this in the spirit of 
 that discourse wherein he had told them that there 
 must be a dark terrible day of the Lord before any 
 brightness could be looked for ? I conceive that Isaiah 
 could not have explained the import of the divine vision 
 which he saw in the temple, or of the warnings and 
 threatenings which the sins of the people had drawn 
 forth from him, so effectually as by this exhortation to 
 faith, undoubted faith, in the divine covenant with the 
 house of David. He had been shewn the ground for 
 this faith, how certainly a divine King was in the midst 
 of the people from generation to generation; with them 
 while one visible ruler after another was taken from 
 them. Confidence in the calling of the family, in its 
 preservation, was really confidence in Him ; its suc- 
 cession existed to testify of Him. And want of this 
 confidence would indicate as surely that the belief in 
 the unseen ruler was failing or had disappeared ; it 
 would be the natural consequence of all those habita 
 which Isaiah had denounced as ominous of coming de- 
 struction. Here was a test of the condition of the king- 
 and the kingdom. Did he think that his house would 
 fall before the son of Tabeal ? It was clear, then, that 
 the promises to David seemed to him mere fantasies or 
 fictions ; he despised his birthright ; he did not know 
 that his race was chosen for any high and divine pur- 
 pose by the Lord of the whole earth. The courage 
 which had enabled Moses to lead the people through 
 the desert, Joshua with his little bands to drive out the 
 nations, the judges, one after another, to deliver their
 
 xiv.] SIGNS. 247 
 
 country from its oppressors, grew out of this faith; 
 when the effect ceased it was clear the cause had ceased; 
 cowardice was another name for distrust. And it was 
 certain that distrust in an invisible power would in- 
 volve silly slavish confidence in some visible power. 
 If Ahaz did not say to the Guide and Deliverer of his 
 land. Save me, I am thy servant and son, he would 
 offer that prayer and confession to the Assyrian. 
 
 Here lies the first obvious explanation of the words 
 which I took for my text. Isaiah is desired to offer 
 Ahaz a sign either in the depth or the height. That 
 the Jewish economy was in some sense an economy of 
 signs we all admit. I have striven in former lectures 
 to ascertain in what sense. We are not surely autho- 
 rised to say that we see no signs. What are all out- 
 ward appearances but signs of some power or principle 
 which is working unseen ? What is the function of 
 the physical student or philosopher but to discover the 
 power or principle of which any appearances or facts in 
 nature are the indexes ? What is the function of the 
 political or moral student, but to ascertain of what 
 power or principle any appearances or facts of in- 
 dividual experience or general history are the indexes ? 
 The Jewish prophet was to call the attention of his 
 countrymen to these signs, to discover the signification 
 of them. For the more effectual carrying out of this 
 purpose, he was directed sometimes to make signs ; he 
 was empowered to do some unusual thing that men 
 might be stirred by it to inquire for the purpose which 
 was latent in it. In this respect, too, he was a guide to 
 future ages in understanding what befalls them. Rare 
 appearances and acts must have their law as well as 
 those that are more regular ; they rouse the attention
 
 248 THE CHILD. [SEEM. 
 
 of the torpid, they fulfil their part in the great scheme 
 of man's education. Our Lord laid down the whole 
 doctrine upon this subject when the Pharisees sought 
 a sign from Him. He had given them signs of healing, 
 life-giving power, proofs that a present God was with 
 them. But they wanted a sign from Heaven, the token 
 of some distant God in the sky. That, He said, was 
 the craving of an adulterous or sense-bound generation ; 
 and He asked them whether there were not signs in 
 the sky at morning and evening by which they deter- 
 mined whether there would be a fine or a cloudy day 
 on the morrow, and whether there were not signs of 
 the times which were warning them of evils to come. 
 The new world has been just as rich in these signs as 
 the old. But God's mercy to the old in giving them 
 special clues to the purpose and moral of His signs, 
 will save us from the wish to have any other pheno- 
 mena than those which testify of His regular and daily 
 government. If we do not use these, we may have 
 others ; but it will be because we are an adulterous 
 and sinful generation, and need the portents and pre- 
 sages of an approaching downfall. 
 
 Ahaz said, " I will not ask, neither will I tempt the 
 Lord my God." It was an hypocritical phrase : he did 
 not fear to tempt the Lord his God, he did not believe 
 Him. He feared lest the prophet should show him 
 some terrible sights, such as those an enchanter would 
 have shewn him. He feared lest the God of his fathers 
 should do him some injury. " house of David/' 
 said Isaiah, " is it not enough for you to weary man, 
 but will you weary my God also ?" You have worn out 
 the patience of men ; but do you think that you can 
 wear out the patience of God ? Do you think you can
 
 xiv.] IMMANUEL. 249 
 
 change His purposes, because you are incredulous and 
 heartless ? No ; " the Lord Himself shall give you a 
 sign. A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and 
 shall call his name Immanuel." 
 
 It is added in the next verse but one : " Before the 
 child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, 
 the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken of both 
 her kings." These words introduced so distinctly, 
 compel us, if we would not utterly set aside the letter 
 of Scripture, to believe that a child was born shortly 
 after this time either of the royal stock or to the 
 prophet. There are probabilities in each interpretation. 
 There is no warrant at all (as we are told nothing 
 further upon the subject) for supposing that the birth, 
 though it may have been unlocked for, was, in the sense 
 we commonly give to the word, miraculous. We 
 cannot anticipate an after and more glorious event by 
 supposing the exact parallel of it to have occurred 
 now. But we are bound to suppose, because we are 
 expressly told so, that an event which was the sign to 
 Ahaz that the enemies whom he feared would be 
 destroyed, actually occurred. 
 
 "And they shall call his name Immanuel." The 
 name of the child was to intimate that God was with 
 them. The name takes great possession of the pro- 
 phet's mind. It becomes a sort of key-word with him. 
 You would expect it to be so. The King whose train 
 filled the temple was the God-with-us, the divine 
 Teacher, the present Deliverer, the everlasting Word 
 to whom kings did homage, who spoke by prophets. 
 All visible kings Isaiah regards as signs of Him. All 
 prophets live to make Him known. But there were 
 events preparing for the land of their fathers which
 
 250 THE ASSYRIAN. [SHRM. 
 
 made it needful that His Name should be declared 
 with especial emphasis, which assured the prophet that 
 there would be a more complete revelation of His 
 Majesty than had been made yet. " The Lord shall 
 bring upon thee," he said to Ahaz, "and upon thy 
 people, and upon thy father's house, days that have 
 not come, from the day that Ephraim departed from 
 Judah; even the king of Assyria/' This visitation, 
 which begins to be announced now with a breadth and 
 distinctness befitting its near approach, does not in- 
 volve merely the coming of one host. It has been well 
 said that Palestine occupied for some ages a place in 
 oriental history, not unlike that which the Low Coun- 
 tries have occupied in modern Europe. It was not 
 merely exposed to the attacks of a single power : it was 
 a battle-field between two. "The Lord," it is said, "shall 
 hiss for the fly that is in the uppermost part of the rivers 
 of Egypt, and for the bee that is in the land of Assyria. 
 And they shall come, and shall rest all of them in the 
 desolate valleys, and in the holes of the rocks, and upon 
 all thorns, and upon all bushes/' It is added that "in 
 that day, where there were a thousand vines at a 
 thousand silverlings, it shall be for briers and thorns/' 
 From this time we may observe a continual recur- 
 rence of those two ideas, frequently in direct conjunction, 
 always following close upon each other, the Assyrian 
 invader, and the Immanuel, the God with us. In the 
 following chapter, the birth of a son to the prophet is 
 carefully recorded as a sign. " For before the child 
 shall have knowledge to cry ' my father ' and ' my 
 mother/ the riches of Damascus and the spoil of 
 Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria/' 
 But though this punishment is especially denounced
 
 xiv.] ST. MATTHEW'S USE OF THE TEXT. 251 
 
 against the two confederate nations, it is added, " He 
 shall pass through Judah. And the stretching out of 
 his wings shall fill the breadth of thy land, Im- 
 manuel." Then he bids the Syrians and Israelites " take 
 counsel together, but it shall come to nought. Speak 
 the word, and it shall not stand : for God is with us." 
 He declares that " the Lord will be for a sanctuary ; 
 but for a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence to 
 both the houses of Israel, for a gin and a snare to the 
 inhabitants of Jerusalem." He speaks of himself and 
 the children whom God has given him ; where by 
 children, he seems not only to mean the one who had 
 been lately born to him and the one who accompanied 
 him on his message to Ahaz, though these are certainly 
 included ; but the prophetical school by which he was 
 surrounded, those whom he calls in the sixteenth verse 
 his disciples. All these were to be living signs, con- 
 tinual testimonies of an impending ruin and of a great 
 Deliverer, of One to whom every Israelite might turn 
 with his heart, and in whom he might find rest and 
 salvation; but whose presence would stir up all the 
 dark and evil and rebellious thoughts of those who 
 would not yield themselves to Him. (viii.) 
 
 I purposely abstain from entering upon the memor- 
 able passage which opens the ninth chapter; which, like 
 the one I have been considering to-day, is associated 
 with our Christmas recollections and thanksgivings. 
 Perhaps you will feel that I have done something 
 to weaken that application of the words which were 
 spoken to Ahaz. By taking them in connection with 
 the falling and rising again of many in Israel in Isaiah's 
 day, I may seem to have denied the truth of St. 
 Matthew's sentence, " Now all this was done, that it
 
 252 KNOWLEDGE OF THE CHRIST. [SERM. 
 
 might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the 
 prophet : Behold a Virgin shall be with child and bring 
 forth a Son, and they shall call his name Immanuel, 
 which is, being interpreted, God with us." I hope 
 and trust that I have rather been helping you to see 
 the full power and exact truth of that sentence. If 
 Isaiah gave this sign to Ahaz because he doubted 
 whether the promise would be fulfilled to David 
 that his seed should be established for ever, the 
 sign could not be fulfilled, that is to say the perfect 
 meaning of it could not be realised, unless One should 
 be raised upon his throne, of whose kingdom there 
 should be no end. If the wonderful promise had been 
 made to David on the day when he sat before the Lord 
 and meditated on His gracious covenant, " I will be to 
 Him a Father, and He shall be to me a Son," the king 
 he expected could only perfectly fulfil the sign, pro- 
 vided He were the Son of God. If He were to be the 
 Son of God, and yet to be an actual child, eating 
 ordinary human food, learning like other children to 
 " choose the good and refuse the evil/' brought up 
 under actual human guidance, then the sign would only 
 be fulfilled if an actual virgin conceived and bore a son. 
 And yet again if this son was He whose goings forth 
 had been of old, from everlasting, the sign could only 
 be fulfilled provided He were then the Immanuel, the 
 God with us, in whom Isaiah could bid Ahaz trust, in 
 whom he trusted himself, the testimony of whom he 
 bequeathed to his children and his disciples. 
 
 We must be content to see the idea of this Divine 
 Person evolving itself slowly in the mind of the 
 prophet; now one aspect of His character, now another, 
 presenting itself to him as he mused and sorrowed and
 
 xiv.] IT IS WON THROUGH SUFFERING. 253 
 
 hoped for himself and for his country and for mankind. 
 And, dear brethren, we must be content that the know- 
 ledge of Him should evolve itself slowly in our minds; 
 we must be thankful if any perplexities and sorrows, 
 from within or from without, prepare us for it. The 
 Name of Him who was born of the Virgin may be 
 familiar to us, it may be surrounded with many beau- 
 tiful and venerable associations, it may recall moments 
 of youthful tenderness or remorse or enthusiasm. 
 And yet it may rather hover about our minds than be 
 rooted in them ; we may be trying by acts of memory 
 or fancy, or strong passionate efforts of what we call 
 faith, to bind it to us more closely. What we want, I 
 think, is to know the barrenness and hollo wness of 
 our own selves. If there is not some One beneath 
 ourselves, the ground of all that we desire and believe 
 and are, the spring of our hopes and the consummation 
 of them, the fountain of all love in every creature and 
 the satisfaction of its love, life is a very miserable 
 sleep, full of turbulent broken dreams mixed with a 
 strange dread of awaking. It is in vain that men seek 
 to soothe us with outward images and pleasant pictures. 
 There is a presence near us and within us that cannot 
 be put by. It haunts us, waylays us, torments us. 
 It is indeed a rock of stumbling and a stone of offence 
 to us. The consciousness of it produces irritation and 
 fever. It seems as if all outward nature presented it 
 to us in dark signs and hieroglyphics that we cannot 
 decipher. But if we have once courage to ask boldly, 
 " Who art Thou that wilt not leave me wherever I 
 am, or whatever I am doing, whose voice I cannot 
 silence, whose eye will not cease to look into me?" 
 the awful form of the judge and the accuser will be
 
 254 ALL THINGS SIGNS OF HIM. [SERM. xiv. 
 
 seen to change into the gracious form of sympa- 
 thising Friend and Brother. And as the face becomes 
 better known, without losing this human aspect, still 
 bearing all the traces, deeper than ever, of birth and 
 poverty, of sorrow and death, it will yet be seen to 
 be royal and divine ; we shall be sure that the Man is 
 the King; and the King will be the Immanuel, God 
 with us ; not with one of us only, but with all of 
 us ; most real, though the eye cannot see Him ; 
 certainly near, though the heart do not confess Him ; 
 He in whom alone we are all men and all brothers ; 
 in whom alone our Father can behold us and we Him. 
 When we have learnt to live in this conviction, or 
 rather when God, by giving us perpetual experiences 
 of our failures and follies and vanities, has made 
 it impossible for us to live in any other, then we shall 
 not need signs in the height or the depth that He will 
 put down our enemies. Quid times ? Ccesarem vehis 
 The Son of God is in the vessel, will be an answer 
 to all suggestions of the cowardly nature within us that 
 the Father of Spirits will desert the work of His own 
 hands. " Associate yourselves and ye shall be broken 
 in pieces, powers of darkness and evil ! for God is with 
 us." And we shall desire and hope that we and the 
 children whom God had given us, may be signs to the 
 world of His kingdom and His victory. The commonest 
 birth into the world will be a wonder, since He has been 
 born into it. The continuance of every family in spite 
 of its sins and strifes will speak of Him as the Ever- 
 lasting Brother; even as the endurance of the earth 
 itself, amidst all that is shaking it, will bear witness 
 that He sitteth above the water-floods, a King for ever.
 
 SERMON XV. 
 
 THE LIGHT IN DARKNESS. 
 (Z/mcoZn's Inn, 4>th Sunday in Lent. March 21, 1852.) 
 
 Nevertheless, the dimness shall not be such as was in her vexation, 
 when at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the 
 land of Naphtali, and afterwards did more grievously afflict her 
 by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations. 
 The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light : 
 they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them 
 hath the light shined. Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not 
 increased the joy : they joy before thee according to the joy in 
 harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. For thou 
 hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, 
 the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian. For every 
 battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled 
 in blood ; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire. For 
 unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given : and the govern- 
 ment shall be upon his shoulder : and his name shall be called 
 Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, 
 the Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and 
 peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon 
 his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and 
 with justice, from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the 
 Lord of hosts will perform this. ISAIAH ix. 1 7- 
 
 THE separation of Israel from Judah reached its con- 
 summation in the time of Ahaz. The confederacy 
 of the Samaritans with the Syrians against Judah 
 was encountered by the confederacy of Judah with 
 Assyria against Israel. It was no mere border war. 
 Each sought the extermination of the other. These 
 confederacies betokened the spirit which was at the
 
 256 THE HATRED OF THE TRIBES. [SERM. 
 
 root of all the crimes which Isaiah had deplored 
 and denounced. The acknowledgment of a common 
 king had bound the tribes together, so long as that 
 implied the acknowledgment of a common God. 
 Idolatry had broken the tie and had kept them 
 asunder. But the present scheme of Samaria to 
 extinguish its rival even at the cost of giving an 
 ascendency to the uncircumcised king of Damascus, 
 showed clearly enough that the last link of brother- 
 hood was broken, because the last feeling of the divine 
 calling, which had made them a nation of brothers, 
 was gone. The more plausible, really more insane, 
 desire of Ahaz to secure the favour of an empire 
 which was the common enemy of all nations, that he 
 might get rid of the two which were tormenting him, 
 showed that faith had departed from Judah also. The 
 idols of silver and gold had driven God out of its 
 heart, and made the worship of Him a mockery. 
 
 It was at this time that Isaiah's child was born. 
 He received it, we have seen, as a sign and wonder 
 from the Lord of Hosts. It was a sign of the coming 
 fall of Samaria and Damascus. Before the child had 
 knowledge to cry ' My father and mother/ the spoils 
 of both would be taken before the king of Assyria. 
 But that prospect, however cheering it might have 
 been to Ahaz if he had believed Isaiah, would only 
 have oppressed the prophet himself. 
 
 The destruction of a part of the covenant people, 
 even the destruction of any nation, was to him an 
 awful event. Had this been all, the child would have 
 been an omen of evil, not of good. But something 
 was awakened in his mind by the sight of it, and by 
 all the affections and sympathies that accompanied
 
 xv.] THEIR COMMON MISERY. 257 
 
 it, which lifted him to a higher and securer ground of 
 confidence for the land and for himself. Laws and 
 principles were connected with that relation of child 
 and father, which he could dimly discern, not measure 
 or understand. Truths which did not stand aloof from 
 him, which were associated with his own being, had their 
 root and ground somewhere else. A ladder which was 
 set upon earth reached to Heaven, and it was one upon 
 which the angels of God might descend and ascend. 
 
 The prophet had need of this new strength to bear 
 the gloomy visions which pressed more and more heavily 
 upon him, of a people hardly bestead and hungry, who 
 would fret themselves and curse their king and God 
 and look upward ; of a people who, in their despair of 
 any divine help, would turn to wizards that peeped and 
 muttered, " of a people who would then look upon the 
 earth ; and behold trouble and darkness, and dimness 
 of anguish, and who should be driven into darkness." 
 This prostration of all moral strength and hope, this 
 utter dreariness of spirit, is just what was to be augured 
 of men like the Israelites of the north, who had given 
 themselves up to vanities and delusions, who had 
 believed a lie and worshipped it. And winy should the 
 hypocritical Judah with her unbelieving king sink into 
 a darkness less utter ? 
 
 "Nevertheless," says the prophet, "the dimness 
 shall not be such as was in her vexation, when at the 
 first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land 
 of Naphtali, and afterwards did more grievously afflict 
 her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of 
 the nations. The people that walked in darkness have- 
 seen a great light : they that dwell in the land of the 
 shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.*' 
 
 8
 
 258 ZEBULUN AND NAPHTALI. [SKRH. 
 
 It is clearly indicated here that a body of Israelites, 
 who in other comparatively light visitations had re- 
 mained shut out from the privilege of their countrymen, 
 a set of border-outcasts, consigned to Heathenism, 
 should now in this more troublous time, when the 
 whole people seemed likely to share their full and ex- 
 clusion, receive a new and sudden illumination. The 
 hour of utter dislocation and dissolution, when, in the 
 prophet's language, " they were eating every one the 
 flesh of his own arm," when Manasseh was against 
 Ephraim, and Ephraim against Manasseh, and both 
 together against Judah ; in that hour would there be 
 some unlooked-for testimony that they were all one 
 people. Some light from Heaven penetrating the 
 darkest corners of the land would show that it was still 
 a Holy Land. If you turn to the thirtieth chapter of 
 the second Book of Chronicles, you will see that be- 
 tween the invasion of Tiglath-Pileser and that of 
 Shalmaneser, when a great body of the Israelites had 
 been carried captive and the power of the Assyrian 
 Empire had been fully realised, but while they were 
 still dwelling in their old cities and allowed to claim 
 Samaria as a capital, an event occurred which must 
 have seemed utterly strange and wonderful to all 
 the tribes, but especially to those Zebulonites and 
 Naphtalites in whom the idea of a covenant, the sense 
 of kindred and race, had so nearly perished. 
 
 " And Hezekiah sent to all Israel and Judah, and 
 wrote letters also to Ephraim and Manasseh, that they 
 should come to the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, to 
 keep the passover unto the Lord God of Israel. For 
 the king had taken counsel, and his princes, and all the 
 congregation in Jerusalem, to keep the passover in the
 
 T.] THE GREAT PASSOVEE. 259 
 
 second month. For they could not keep it at that 
 time because the priests had not sanctified themselves 
 sufficiently, neither had the people gathered them- 
 selves together to Jerusalem. And the thing pleased 
 the king and all the congregation. So they established 
 a decree, to make proclamation throughout all Israel, 
 from Beer-sheba even to Dan, that they should come 
 to keep the passover unto the Lord God of Israel at 
 Jerusalem : for they had not done it of a long time ill 
 such sort as it was written. So the posts went with 
 the letters from the king and his princes throughout 
 all Israel and Judah, and according to the command- 
 ment of the king, saying, Ye children of Israel, turn 
 again unto the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, 
 and He will return to the remnant of you, that are 
 escaped out of the hand of the kings of Assyria. And 
 be not ye like your fathers, and like your brethren, 
 which trespassed against the Lord God of their fathers, 
 who, therefore, gave them up to desolation, as ye see. 
 Now be ye not stiff-necked, as your fathers were, but 
 yield yourselves unto the Lord, and enter into His 
 sanctuary, which He hath sanctified for ever : and 
 serve the Lord your God, that the fierceness of His 
 wrath may turn away from you. For if ye turn again 
 unto the Lord, your brethren and your children shall 
 find compassion before them that lead them captive, 
 so that they shall come again into this land : for the 
 Lord your God is gracious and merciful, and will noi 
 turn away His face from you, if ye return unto Him. 
 So the posts passed from city to city, through the 
 country of Ephraim and Manasseh, even unto Zebulun : 
 but they laughed them to scorn and mocked them. 
 Nevertheless divers of Asher and Manasseh and of 
 
 8 2
 
 260 ALL THE PEOPLE SUMMONED. [SER. 
 
 Zebulnn humbled themselves, and came to Jerusalem. 
 Also in Judah, the hand of God was to give them one 
 heart to do the commandment of the king and of the 
 princes, by the word of the Lord. And there assem- 
 bled at Jerusalem much people to keep the feast of 
 unleavened bread in the second month, a very great 
 congregation. And they arose, and took away the 
 altars that were in Jerusalem, and all the altars for 
 incense took they away, and cast them into the brook 
 Kidron. Then they killed the passover on the four- 
 teenth day of the second month : and the priests and 
 the Levites were ashamed, and sanctified themselves, 
 and brought in the burnt-offerings into the house of 
 the Lord. And they stood in their place after their 
 manner, according to the Law of Moses the man of 
 God : the priests sprinkled the blood which they 
 received of the hand of the Levites. For there were 
 many in the congregation that were not sanctified : 
 therefore the Levites had the charge of the killing of 
 the passovers for every one that was not clean, to 
 sanctify them unto the Lord. For a multitude of the 
 people, even many of Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar 
 and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet did 
 they eat the passover otherwise than it was written. 
 But Hezekiah prayed for them, saying, The good Lord 
 pardon every one that prepareth his heart to seek God,, 
 the Lord God of his fathers, though he be not cleansed 
 according to the purification of the sanctuary. And 
 the Lord hearkened to Hezekiah, and healed the 
 people. And the children of Israel that were present 
 at Jerusalem kept the feast of unleavened bread seven 
 days with great gladness : and the Levites and the 
 priests praised the Lord day by day, singing with loud
 
 xv.] THE FACT AND PROPHECY CONNECTED. 261 
 
 instruments unto the Lord. And Hezekiah spake 
 comfortably unto all the Levites that taught the good 
 knowledge of the Lord : and they did eat throughout the 
 feast seven days, offering peace-offerings, and making 
 confession to the Lord God of their fathers. And the 
 whole assembly took counsel to keep other seven days, 
 and they kept other seven days with gladness. For 
 Hezekiah king of Judah did give to the congregation a 
 thousand bullocks and seven thousand sheep : and the 
 princes gave to the congregation a thousand bullocks 
 and ten thousand sheep: and a great number of priests 
 sanctified themselves. And all the congregation of 
 Judah, with the priests and the Levites, and all the 
 congregation that came out of Israel, and the strangers 
 that came out of the land of Israel, and that dwelt in 
 Judah, rejoiced. So there was great joy in Jerusalem: 
 for since the time of Solomon, the son of David, king 
 of Israel, there was not the like in Jerusalem/' 
 
 You will remark the many curious coincidences 
 between this passage and the one which is before us, 
 and you will ask yourselves, whether an Israelite 
 acquainted with the words of Isaiah could possibly fail 
 to connect them in some way or other with this 
 memorable act of Hezekiah. 
 
 But would he therefore be authorised to say that 
 the next clause of my text applies to Hezekiah, " For 
 unto us a Child is born ; unto us a Son is given : and 
 the government shall be upon His shoulder ? " Words 
 follow which may well make us tremble at such an 
 interpretation. And yet with the facts which show 
 that in the days of this prince a greater calamity was 
 preparing for both Samaria and Judah than any which 
 had ever befallen them, and that just then there was to
 
 262 THE GREATNESS OF HEZEKIAH. LSERM. 
 
 be this invitation of all the tribes to a union which they 
 had not known for generations, this actual acceptance 
 of it by some, this divine pledge in the old national 
 feast that God Himself intended it for them all, I 
 cannot think that we are justified in setting aside the 
 reference to Hezekiah as blasphemous, till we have 
 thoroughly considered what such a reference could imply. 
 The peculiarity of Hezekiah's act was this. He did 
 not, like Rehoboam, Amaziah, or any of his predecessors, 
 seek to recover the ten tribes to himself as part of his 
 possession and appanage because he was the heir of 
 David. He did not treat them as mere revolters, who, 
 if they would not submit to him, must be left to- 
 their own courses. Nor on the other hand did he, like 
 Jehoshaphat, make alliances with them in spite of their 
 idolatry. What he did was to claim one and all of 
 them as children of God's covenant; as entitled to 
 a share in the feast which declared that they were 
 delivered from Pharaoh and brought under a divine 
 and gracious government. All past grudges and 
 offences were forgotten. The civil objection that they 
 were once in rebellion, and had become corrupted in 
 blood by long adherence to rebellion, was cast aside. 
 The religious objection that the worship of calves and 
 of Baal had cut them off from their ancient rights, 
 that they had in effect made themselves heathens, was 
 overcome even in the instances where the proof in 
 favour of it appeared most decisive and overwhelming. 
 Even the divinely ordained formalities for the festival 
 were not allowed to stand in the way. They had not 
 cleansed themselves. 'They ate otherwise than it was- 
 written/ Still Hezekiah prayed, ' the good Lord 
 pardon every one/
 
 xv.J HEZEKIAH'S GOSPEL. 263 
 
 What would be the result of such a noble unselfish 
 policy upon the minds of those who heeded the call to 
 the passover, ultimately perhaps, in after days of 
 humiliation and captivity, on the minds of many who 
 mocked at it ? They would at once be led back, 
 the king being their guide, to thoughts of another 
 King than him, of One who at whose words the hosts 
 of the oppressor had sunk like lead in the mighty 
 waters, who had gone with them through the wilder- 
 ness, who had claimed them as a people of inheritance 
 to Himself. Conceive a race sitting in great darkness, 
 not less idolatrous than the people among whom they 
 dwelt, but with a vague sense of being separated from 
 them by some peculiar traditions and external signs 
 which made a hearty participation in their idolatry 
 impossible a people which had the lowest, basest, most 
 frightful notions of some unseen power whom they 
 ought if possible to propitiate, either by Phoenician rites 
 or by some half-remembered, miserably distorted, forms 
 which their fathers had taught them, conceive such 
 a people sunk in hopelessness, sensuality, slavery, hear- 
 ing the message that the God of their fathers was 
 seeking after them, was inviting them to join with all 
 their kinsmen and countrymen in praising Him as 
 their past and present deliverer, the God who would 
 remain the same, though the earth should melt and 
 the foundation of the hills should be dissolved. It is 
 difficult to find any language sufficient for such an 
 occasion. This gospel was the revelation of a God to 
 this poor degraded people ; one most unlike any in 
 whom they had believed, yet not a new God ; the very 
 God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the very one of 
 whom their consciences testified in the midst of their
 
 264 THE BEAL KING. [SEEM. 
 
 sensuality and idolatry. It was the revelation of a 
 fellowship with a people whom they had looked upon 
 as enemies, to a set of men who had never known 
 what fellowship was among themselves ; yet who had 
 a thousand tokens in their domestic relations, even in 
 their ordinary occupations, most of all in the deep 
 yearnings of their hearts, that they were not meant for 
 isolation, rivalry, hostility. 
 
 Supposing, then, the prophet were merely speaking 
 of the light which Hezekiah diffused among these 
 ignorant people, his words could not be limited to 
 Hezekiah. Hezekiah could not be the Light, though 
 he might bear witness of the Light. The very wonder 
 of the people would be that he was not exalting his 
 own power over them, that he was not plotting to 
 bring them under his yoke, but was claiming them as 
 the subjects of One to whom he himself did homage. 
 They would feel indeed that in this act he was ex- 
 hibiting the rarest example of kingly grace they had 
 ever known; but only because he was the image of 
 some higher King in whom that grace must dwell 
 more completely, from whom it must flow forth more 
 abundantly. A like impression would communicate 
 itself to the people who did acknowledge Hezekiah as 
 their sovereign. One can well believe the statement 
 of the historian, that no passover had ever been cele- 
 brated with the gladness of heart with which that was 
 celebrated. In the ordinary temple services which 
 Hezekiah had restored, there may still have been a 
 great mixture of formality, self -righteousness, hypocrisy. 
 They may have been performed merely in obedience 
 to the precept of the king, because it was the fashion 
 to perform them, or because they marked the differ-
 
 iv.] WHAT ISAIAH THOUGHT OF THE SON". 265 
 
 ence between themselves and the calf -worshippers of 
 Samaria. But a feast to which they came simply 
 because the Lord God of Israel had called them to it, 
 as Israelites; casting aside their local prejudices and 
 distinctions, will have unfolded in them that sense of 
 an unseen and common Deliverer, which would enable 
 them to eat the lamb, first indeed with the bitter herbs 
 of penitence for their unbelief and separation, but 
 afterwards with united blessing and thanksgiving. 
 
 But will Isaiah himself have been tempted to 
 identify the child that was given to the land with the 
 son of Ahaz ? I apprehend he may have perceived in 
 him, whilst still a youth, much promise of after good, 
 signs perhaps of sorrow at the alliance which his father 
 was making with Assyria, and dislike to the new altar 
 and the degraded worship which he and his priest 
 Urijah were introducing into Jerusalem. Or if he was 
 too young and too humble to discover this disgust, yet 
 Isaiah may have seen in him tokens of a sincere and 
 earnest spirit, a determination to do right and resist 
 such temptations as a young prince was exposed to, a 
 love for his country's history, a belief in the glory that 
 was destined for it. These would be warrants for hope. 
 The prophet might have the strongest divine assurance 
 that this youth was destined to do what the youth for 
 whom Virgil prayed to the gods of his country was 
 not destined to do 
 
 Everso succurrere saeclo. 
 
 All these observations and indications would be present 
 to the prophet's mind when he meditated upon the 
 present and future condition of his land. His heavenly 
 Teacher would bring them before him. They would 
 give him a warrant for exclaiming, " Unto us a child
 
 265 THE WONDERFUL. [SKRM. 
 
 is born, unto us a son is given : and the government- 
 shall be upon his shoulder." But Hezekiah could as 
 little represent the thoughts with which the prophet's, 
 mind was big, as the little infant who had been given 
 to himself could. That we may be sure was at least as 
 near his recollection and his heart, as the royal youth, 
 even if this youth was his scholar. And neither sepa- 
 rately, but both together, will have helped to bring out,. 
 in its fulness and power, the truth which was needed for 
 his land and for himself : the truth which had been 
 partially made known to him in his vision in the temple r 
 tvhich had been deepened by his message to Ahaz ; 
 which enabled him to understand how the union of 
 Israelites might spring out of their worst divisions,, 
 how a new birth might come out of death. 
 
 The growing youth was the type of a regenerated 
 royal race, the prophet's child of a regenerated nation. 
 But were these pledges and types merely addressed to- 
 the fancy ? Were they merely soothing suggestions 
 which might keep alive a hope soon to be crushed 
 utterly by facts ? No, for the original stock of royalty 
 was not David ; the nation did not derive its vitality 
 from Abraham. There was a divine stock, an eternal 
 seed, out of which both had proceeded. That stock 
 could not wear out, that seed could never become less- 
 vital or germinant than it had been. The word* 
 " Unto us a child is born ; unto us a Son is given," 
 were the rapturous tvprjKa of the prophet when this 
 truth had dawned with full power on his spirit. But 
 that spirit at once confesses that the truth has been 
 given ; the search may have been long, the travail hard, 
 but God was Himself leading him on to the discovery. 
 And what a discovery ! Beneath the infinite confusion
 
 iv.J THE PEINCE OF PEACE. 267 
 
 into which the land had fallen there lay a principle of 
 unity which nothing could break or destroy. That is 
 our cold, hard, unreal phraseology. Isaiah could use 
 words that were true and living. The principle is a 
 Person ; the centre of unity is a Son ; the government 
 is on His shoulders ; He is an actual King. His name 
 is Secret or Wonderful ; the eye sees Him not ; the 
 heart owns Him with awe and confusion ; He is the 
 Counsellor, the source of Wisdom, the spring of all 
 intuition and all discourse ; the discerner of intents, 
 the guide to acts. He is, it must be spoken, ' He 
 can be, none else than the Mighty God, the Creator of 
 Man ' He who said, Let us make man in our own 
 image, after our own likeness. He it is who imparts 
 to the generations of men that fixedness which man 
 owns amidst all the transitoriness and vicissitudes that 
 he experiences. He is the Father of the everlasting 
 age. And lastly, for thus we end where we began, 
 He is the Prince of Peace, the bond of that fellowship 
 which all the wilfulness of kings and the disorders of 
 tribes could not sever. 
 
 This centre of unity Isaiah opposes to all the petty, 
 paltry confederacies which the tribes were forming 
 against each other. They would all be broken in 
 pieces. A sweeping whirlwind would carry them all 
 away. But here was a safe resting-place for the hopes 
 of all true Israelites ; here was a certain assurance of 
 revival amidst the confusion of parties, amidst the 
 utter failure of human leaders. Not some great 
 champion suddenly appearing cheered the soul of the 
 prophet. Champions were gone. Isaiah had seen 
 every staff broken upon which the people might lean. 
 The birth of a child in weakness into an unintelligible
 
 263 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE LOCAL COMBINED. [SERM. 
 
 distracted world was the symbol of triumph ; for that 
 showed that the Son of God was Himself come down 
 to the battle-field, that He was gathering together the 
 hosts, few and feeble in the eyes of man, which were to 
 avenge the cause of Israel. 
 
 When I say the Son of God, I do not mean to pro- 
 nounce how far Isaiah was conscious whether the title 
 ' Son ' referred to a human or a divine parentage. The 
 truth had dawned upon him that there must be One 
 intimately related to God, and also the Lord and Prince 
 of His nation, One who bore up the pillars of the earth, 
 though those who were called the children of the Most 
 High were dealing madly and were to die like men. 
 It required fresh sorrows, fresh revelations, to bring 
 that truth into perfect clearness in his mind, to show 
 that the Son of God must in the fullest sense be the 
 Son of Man. We must not anticipate the gradual un- 
 folding of so mighty a conviction, which if it is really 
 to dwell in every heart, must penetrate all its other 
 thoughts and beliefs, and subordinate them to itself. 
 Least of all, must we complain if the prophet passes 
 from a glorious announcement which concerns all times, 
 us more than himself, to the local incidents and 
 troubles that were affecting his own generation. If 
 we do not care to follow him when he denounces 
 Samaritans, who say, " the bricks are fallen down, but 
 we will build with hewn stones; the sycamores are 
 fallen down, but we will change them into cedars ; " 
 if we think it signifies nothing to us whether or not 
 Manasseh vexes Ephraim or Ephraim Manasseh; if 
 we would pass over the description of the Assyrian 
 hosts and the exposition of the divine purpose in 
 sending them against a hypocritical nation ; if we see
 
 xv.] ST. MATTHEW'S USE OF THE TEXT. 26 
 
 no force or comfort in the declaration that the tyrant 
 of the earth fancied he had a power of his own to cut 
 down the trees of Lebanon, whereas he was but the 
 axe with which God was hewing them; if we pass 
 by all these utterances that we may dwell on some 
 favourite passage like that of which I have been 
 speaking to-day, or like that in the eleventh chapter 
 which describes the lamb and the lion feeding together, 
 we shall, I fear, lose the full and true meaning of 
 the sentences which we have chosen for our exclusive, 
 certainly not for our exaggerated, admiration. If 
 we adopt the headings which divines or printers have 
 affixed to our chapters, and determine that such and 
 such a paragraph denotes the flourishing state of the 
 Kingdom of Christ, we may extract from them a kind 
 of meaning, we shall extract the indication of an 
 excellent meaning ; but I am afraid that we shall ga 
 away with a very loose notion of this kingdom, of what 
 makes its state weak or flourishing, of the relation 
 in which our own times or our own selves stand to 
 it. Whereas, if we had allowed the prophet to teach 
 us how he had acquired his lore respecting a divine 
 King and a divine kingdom, I believe we should under- 
 stand infinitely better in what way his prophecies 
 relate to after periods in the life of the Church and of 
 the world, and how it has pleased God to educate one 
 and another into the knowledge of Himself. 
 
 If you consider the application which St. Matthew 
 makes of the words, " The people which sat in darkness 
 have seen a great light, and to them who sat in the 
 region and shadow of death, light is sprung up," you 
 will find how much the thoughts in Isaiah's mind re- 
 specting the divisions of his land and the heathenism
 
 270 THE LIGHT THAT LIGHTENETH EVERY MAN. [SERM. 
 
 of a great part of it, help to explain our Lord's 
 teaching and work, as well as to unfold the mystery of 
 His person. He went into the further coasts of 
 Zebulun and Naphtali, to that Galilee of the Nations 
 of which Isaiah had spoken ; so, says St. Matthew, his 
 words were fulfilled. Just as the summons to the 
 Passover taught the outcasts in these regions, seven 
 hundred yeai's before, that they were the children of 
 the divine covenant, for whom the unseen Ruler of the 
 land cared; so did the appearance of Jesus among 
 them, and His words and acts of love, break down the 
 barriers which the Pharisee had raised between them 
 and Himself, and claim all Galileans and Samaritans, 
 publicans and harlots, for members of a flock which the 
 chief Shepherd loved, and the poorest sheep of which 
 He would go into the wilderness to seek and to fetch 
 home. The voice which spoke to them was mighty 
 hecause the heart and conscience confessed that it was 
 a divine voice. The light which shined upon the 
 people of Zebulun. and Naphtali, half heathen now as 
 in the days of old, was that light which lightens every 
 man who comes into the world. It was the light 
 which Pharisees and Scribes must own if they would 
 not sink into deepest darkness, and which, if they did 
 own it, would show them that every publican and 
 sinner was their brother. 
 
 And if we, brethren, would know who Christ is, 
 and what He was come into the world to do, we must 
 feel strifes which rend asunder the Church Universal, 
 our own nation, every family, every man in it, as Isaiah 
 felt those which tore Ephraim from Manasseh and set 
 them both against Judah. We are not to learn, 
 we cannot learn, who He is from books, however
 
 XT.] CHRIST THE CENTRE OF UNITY. 27i 
 
 precious they may be, not even from the book which 
 contains the Revelation of Him, unless we are con- 
 tent that God should reveal Him to us as He did to 
 His chosen servants and teachers. And thus this 
 blessed revelation may come to you. Look round 
 upon Christendom. Look into the darkest, as well 
 as into what are called the brightest, corners of it. See 
 idolatry here; pride and exclusiveness there. See men 
 disputing, reviling, slandering, on all sides of you, 
 about the faith that has been delivered to them. See, 
 while these things are going on among those who 
 boast that they have the doctrine which can renew 
 the world, what utter heathenism, brutality, atheism 
 is reigning among the masses who are sealed with 
 the seal of God's covenant. Do not trust to your own 
 observation of these facts. Take with you the most 
 scoffing infidel you can find to show them to you, to 
 force them upon your notice, to draw his natural 
 inferences from them. Let him point out to you the 
 different plans of comprehension and reconciliation 
 which wise and religious men have devised, and tell 
 you, with infinite ridicule, how they have all come to 
 nought. Let him show you how, in fact, each of these 
 plans of compromise is really a confederacy among 
 certain sections of the church, for the destruction of 
 some other. Acknowledge the truth of this boast that 
 each school and church is glad of help from statesmen 
 whom they all denounce as oppressors, yes, from the most 
 absolute, godless tyrannies, to accomplish their own 
 ends. Nay, stop not yet. Go into some smaller circle of 
 persons separating themselves from others, and making 
 the establishment of peace and unity among men their 
 watchwords. Mark the jealousies, strifes, heart-burn-
 
 272 THE DEMAND OF THE HEART SATISFIED. [SEEM. xv. 
 
 ings among- them. Oh, yet once mor^ ! See them in 
 your own heart; those lusts that war in your members 
 they cause all the wars and tumults without. 
 
 And then ask yourself whether you can meditate 
 on such a world as this, whether you can explain how 
 society has been possible in it, how families, nations, 
 churches can have existed in it, how there has been 
 order and fellowship amidst so much hatred and 
 anarchy, unless there were a centre of unity, a divine 
 source of life and regeneration such as Isaiah confessed 
 when he cried " Unto us a Son is given : and the 
 government is on His shoulder; and His name is 
 Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlast- 
 ing Father, The Prince of Peace/' I know that there 
 is a conscience and reason within us which say, ' Such 
 a One there must be.' And, oh ! are we to refuse to 
 believe, because the Bible has said it, because the creeds 
 of Christendom have said it, because myriads of suf- 
 fering men and women in all corners of the earth 
 have said it, ' Such a One there is ' ? Do you desire 
 some new king or prophet to arise or tell you a truth 
 which you never heard before ? Kings and prophets 
 we shall have if we need them ; but they can only 
 repeat the old lesson ; they can only say, ' He is come, 
 and unto Him the gathering of the people shall be.' 
 They can but do what each one of us in his own place 
 and vocation may do now ; proclaim that the great 
 Christian passover is prepared ; that men of all habits, 
 opinions, races, are invited to sit down at it ; that the 
 poor, the halt, the blind will be welcomed by Him who- 
 lived with them and died for them ; that upon them 
 who sit in darkness and the shadow of death a Light 
 has risen which no powers in earth or hell can quench.
 
 SERMON XVI. 
 
 THE PROUD CITY DOOMED. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 5th Sunday in Lent. March 29, 1852.) 
 
 The burden of Babylon, which Isaiah the son of Amoz did see. 
 
 ISAIAH xiii. 1. 
 
 IN the seventeenth chapter of the Second Book of 
 Kings, we find these words : " In the twelfth year of 
 Ahaz king of Judah began Hoshea the son of Elah to 
 reign in Samaria over Israel nine years. And he did 
 that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, but not 
 as the kings of Israel which were before him. Against 
 him came up Shalmaneser king of Assyria; and Hoshea 
 became his servant, and gave him presents. And the 
 king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea : for he 
 had sent messengers to So king of Egypt, and brought 
 no present to the king of Assyria, as he had done year 
 by year : therefore the king of Assyria shut him up, 
 -and bound him in prison. Then the king of Assyria 
 came up throughout all the land and went up to 
 Samaria, and besieged it three years. In the ninth year 
 of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and carried 
 Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah 
 and in Habor, by the river of Gozan, and in the cities 
 of the Medes." Then follows a long enumeration of 
 the sins which had brought this divine visitation 
 upon the ten tribes, ending with the words, " So was 
 
 T
 
 274 THE SUCCESSIVE CAPTIVITIES. [SERM. 
 
 Israel carried away out of their own land to Assyria 
 unto this day." 
 
 When we speak of two great captivities we allude to 
 the one which is spoken of here, and to the one which 
 took place after Nebuchadnezzar had plundered Jeru- 
 salem and destroyed the temple. But no one can read 
 the history attentively without perceiving indications 
 of a series of captivities. I alluded in a former lecture 
 to those of which Joel speaks, captivities that had 
 already taken place in his time, not into Assyria, but 
 into the Isles of Greece in Phoenician ships. These, 
 as I remarked, are to be separated from all that follow. 
 Joel looks forward to a great judgment upon the 
 Tyrians and Sidonians who had been concerned in 
 them, a judgment to be brought about by the agency 
 of some power, which was not discernible by his eyes. 
 When kings of Assyria appeared in the land, it became 
 clear to every divinely instructed observer, how the 
 prediction of Joel, as well as that with which the book 
 of Amos opens, would be verified. This prophet said 
 that the three and four sins of Tyre and Damascus, of 
 Moab and Samaria, were bringing on their appointed 
 punishment. He saw also in what manner this 
 punishment would be executed. There might be a 
 temporary imposition of tribute, which the kings of 
 the nations would pay as long as they were under the 
 fear of an immediate invasion; which they would 
 withhold whenever they had confidence in their own 
 strength, or were encouraged by the promises of any 
 powerful neighbour. But, ultimately the rule of ancient 
 oriental conquest would be enforced ; the people would 
 be carried away in smaller or greater portions into the 
 land of the victors, and be reduced to slavery there.
 
 xvi.] THE DREAMS OF A PERISHING PEOPLE. 275 
 
 Accordingly I read to you three Sundays ago, in the 
 2 Kings xv. 29j an account of a captivity in the days 
 of Pekah, king of Israel, one which we are told affected 
 Gilead and Galilee and all the land of Naphtali. 
 The more complete captivity of Damascus, which took 
 place at the same time, is recorded in the ninth verse 
 of the sixteenth chapter. The one under Shalmaneser 
 was therefore merely the pursuance of a policy which 
 had been already commenced. There was an interval 
 during which the Israelites could still reckon them- 
 selves a nation, though a tributary one ; but the sen- 
 tence was hanging over them ; it might be completely 
 executed at any time. 
 
 This succession of events gives great force and 
 reality to those often-repeated words of Isaiah, " For 
 all this His anger is not turned away, but His hand is 
 stretched out still." The captivity under Tiglath- 
 Pileser may have easily seemed to the people of Israel 
 the fulfilment of all the threatenings which their 
 prophets had pronounced against them. With their 
 view of the character of God, they would naturally 
 think the loss of a few cities and a portion of their 
 people a sufficient satisfaction of His wrath for their 
 transgressions. Looking at moral evil, not as de- 
 structive in itself, as that which makes men's lives 
 wretched and the earth barren, they inquired, not 
 what methods He would take to deliver men and the 
 earth from it, but what amount of physical evil He 
 might inflict as a compensation for the injuries which 
 He had received. They did not therefore turn to Him 
 that smote them. There was no earnest reformation. 
 They sought help from Egypt ; they talked of replacing 
 buildings of brick with buildings of stone, houses of
 
 276 THE SECURITY OF THE PKOPHET. [SERM. 
 
 sycamore with houses of cedar. The prophet had 
 need to tell them that the punishment was not over, 
 since the work for which it was sent was not accom- 
 plished. A righteous Being seeks to set righteousness 
 on the earth. If men will hear His voice and submit 
 to be made righteous, He has no pleasure in destroying 
 them. But by all means, the earth must be pui-ged of 
 its tormentors ; the proud, the careless, the oppressors 
 must be made to humble themselves, to understand 
 that life is not a play, to know that their words and 
 their deeds are not their own, that men are not their 
 property, that they cannot do what they like. There- 
 fore, if Tiglath-Pileser went home and came no more, 
 another would come instead of him. When Shalmaneser 
 had done all that he had to do with Samaria, there 
 would still be a Sennacherib to invade Judah. Nay, 
 if their race failed, there would be another race. If 
 the scourge was no longer in the hands of the king 
 of Assyria, it would be transferred to other hands not 
 less terrible. 
 
 Would this scourge destroy the life of the Jewish 
 nation ? This was the awful question which presented 
 itself to the minds of the prophets when they saw one 
 and another limb of this nation lopped off, when they 
 foresaw that a great numerical majority of the tribes 
 would be carried away. We have heard how Isaiah 
 was enabled to face this question. His eyes were 
 opened to see whence the permanence of the race was 
 derived, how great critical moments of its life discovered 
 Him who was everlastingly present with it. The child 
 born in hours of trouble and rebuke, had borne witness 
 to him of the continuance of the regal family as well 
 as of the people of God's covenant, when the rage
 
 xvi.] THE HOD OUT OF JESSE. 277 
 
 of their enemies, as well as their own faithlessness, 
 were threatening them with certain destruction. Nor 
 was this all. In the miserable heartless reign of Ahaz, 
 the vision had been presented to him of a " Rod coming 
 out of the stem of Jesse, which should stand for an 
 ensign of the people. To it should the Gentiles seek ; 
 and his rest should be glorious/' The immediate fruits 
 which Isaiah saw coming out of this root might have 
 appeared in the days of any patriotic and prosperous 
 prince, and did actually appear in the latter days of 
 Hezekiah. No doubt at that time ' a remnant of the 
 people which were left/ were drawn back by the sum- 
 mons of the king and by his influence with the sur- 
 rounding kings, ' from Assyria, and from Egypt, and 
 from Pathros, and from Gush, and from Elam, and from 
 Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the Islands of the 
 Sea.' Such words do not necessarily indicate more than 
 the recovery of a multitude of Jewish slaves out of 
 the bondage into which they had been brought by the 
 neighbouring people ; Assyria, which had in the mean 
 time been weakened by internal revolutions, being just 
 as likely to give up a portion of her booty as any of 
 those whom she had herself crushed and made feeble. 
 No doubt Hezekiah might become, and did actually 
 become, c an ensign to the nations/ just as Solomon had 
 been before him, one to whom they brought presents, 
 whose alliance they sought, whose elevation out of a 
 deep calamity was a proof that some mighty God was 
 with him. No doubt ' Ephraim did not in those days 
 envy Judah or Judah vex Ephraim/ as they had done 
 before through so many ages. There was a feeling of a 
 benignant native ruler who cared for all the people of 
 God alike. He must have been the one powerful king
 
 278 WHAT IT BETOKENED. [SEKM. 
 
 who was left in that whole region ; so that ' the Philis- 
 tines and Edom and Moab and the children of Amnion* 
 would naturally ' obey him.' Egypt would be no more 
 a dangerous neighbour to such a prince; it would 
 respect him as it had done his great predecessor; men 
 might ' go dryshod' over the river which had once been 
 beset by hostile armaments. And though there might 
 be still multitudes of Jews left in the cities of Assyria, 
 there would be ' a highway open to them/ a preparation 
 for them to come back into their land, if their own 
 unwillingness, or the death of the king and the reign 
 of some evil successor, did not hinder it. 
 
 But though we need not seek in any more distant 
 days than those of Hezekiah, for a very satisfactory 
 fulfilment of these predictions (and let it never be for- 
 gotten that what may seem to us, when we look back 
 over three thousand years, an exaggerated description 
 of deliverance and restoration, must have seemed 
 inadequate and almost cold to those who experienced 
 the blessing), though Hezekiah was a rod out of the 
 stem of Jesse, and though the Spirit of the Lord did rest 
 upon him, ' the spirit of wisdom and understanding, 
 the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge 
 and of the fear of the Lord ; though he did judge the 
 poor with righteousness and reprove with equity for 
 the meek of the earth/ though the peacefulness and 
 order of his last years might faithfully carry out the 
 symbols of the wolf and the lamb lying down together, 
 yet it was no less impossible for the prophet to think 
 chiefly of Hezekiah when he was uttering these words, 
 than it would have been for him to fancy that he was 
 the King whom he saw sitting on the throne, and his 
 train filling the temple in the year that Uzziah died.
 
 BURTHENS. 279 
 
 The more he saw of what corresponded to this descrip- 
 tion in the actual monarch, the more would his thoughts 
 be drawn to the One in whose name and in whose 
 might he was reigning, to Him from whom the Spirit 
 came by which he was quickened. Hezekiah he could 
 but look upon as exhibiting some few rays of His splen- 
 dour, the feeble image of His righteous government. 
 The Counsellor, the mighty God, the Prince of Peace, 
 upon whom that government rested, was the upholder of 
 the Jewish people. Apart from Him it was merely the 
 miserable heap of fragments which we so often suppose 
 must be carried away before the Assyrian whirlwind. 
 
 There was, however, this great blessing which came 
 to Isaiah from his being able to connect the divine 
 King with an actual man. The belief that a Man must 
 embody and present the Godhead, that only in a man 
 could its blessedness and glory appear, that belief 
 which we saw slowly developing itself in the prophet's 
 mind, acquired a force and vividness from his hope 
 of Hezekiah's government and from his actual expe- 
 rience of it, which we may say, without rashness or 
 prof aneness, would have been otherwise wanting in him. 
 In using that language, I am only affirming that any 
 method but the one which we know the Divine Wisdom 
 has adopted for conveying a truth to a man's spirit 
 must be an imperfect method. Hezekiah's existence 
 was necessary to the instruction of Isaiah, and through 
 him of all generations to come. Perhaps we may find 
 that Shalmaneser and Sennacherib were scarcely less 
 necessary. 
 
 Apparently the prophet passes in our chapter to an 
 entirely new subject. The Assyrian, of whom he had 
 epokeu so much before, and of whom he speaks so often
 
 28D SUPPOSED INTEKPOLATIONS. [SERJT. 
 
 again, seems to be forgotten. He opens with the burden 
 of Babylon. He goes on to the burden of Damascus, 
 the burden of Moab, the burden of Egypt, the burden 
 of the Valley of Vision, the burden of Tyre. The occur- 
 rence of the word ' Babylon ' led commentators of 
 the last age to conclude that he must mean to foretell 
 the downfall of that kingdom, which took place in the 
 reign of Belshazzar. Some of the bolder critics of our 
 own time, finding great difficulties in an interpretation 
 which breaks the harmony of the prophet's visions, and 
 destroys their application to the people among whom 
 he was dwelling and whom he was sent to warn, have 
 decreed that all these passages, together with all the 
 chapters after the fortieth, must have been written 
 subsequently to the Chaldean captivity, probably in 
 the age of Ezra, and that they have been mixed with 
 the genuine discourses of Isaiah by a compiler. I do 
 not wonder that this theory should have startled and 
 shocked readers who have been wont to regard the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth chapters (to say nothing of 
 the fortieth and the fifty-third) as containing the very 
 inmost spirit of the Esaian prophecies. Still, the mere 
 sentimental feeling which attaches a particular passage 
 to a particular name will be readily sacrificed by a 
 lover of truth. The more firmly we believe the Bible 
 to be from God, the less serious will that sacrifice seem 
 to us. We shall hear God's voice speaking to us by 
 whatever appellation we denote him who is the instru- 
 ment of the communication. It is, however, a grave 
 question whether we ought to abandon a venerable 
 tradition which has connected itself with the feelings 
 of Jews and Christians for generations, not because 
 there is any decisive external proof that it is untenable,
 
 xvi.] BABYLON UNDER ASSYRIA. 281 
 
 but merely in order to escape from a difficulty which 
 perhaps we have created for ourselves. That it is a 
 difficulty I at once acknowledge. Not only the coherency 
 of the prophet's discourse is lost, if we feel that we are 
 reading in one paragraph of an event soon to occur, 
 and in the next of one which would not happen for 
 two hundred years, and which has no internal con- 
 nection with it, not only are we unable to understand 
 how such a prophecy could contain any lesson for the 
 contemporaries of Isaiah, but we are forced to outrage 
 the letter and to misrepresent the character of the very 
 discourses which we seek to preserve. I am persuaded 
 that it is impossible for anyone to read attentively the 
 brilliant description of a conqueror or destroyer of 
 boundaries in the fourteenth chapter of Isaiah, and to- 
 think of it as applying to such a mere voluptuary 
 as Belshazzar is represented to be in the book of 
 Daniel. The description is doubtless more applicable 
 to Nebuchadnezzar ; yet Jeremiah never speaks of him 
 without some respectful epithet (such as ' the servant 
 of the Lord'), and his government, as the prophet of 
 the captivity represents it, stands out in advantageous 
 contrast to that of all his predecessors and followers. 
 Moreover, there was no destruction of Babylon in his 
 day ; it was the time of its highest glory. On the other 
 hand there is the very closest resemblance between the 
 picture of a Babylonian monarch which is drawn in 
 this chapter, and the language respecting the Assyrian 
 which was used in the tenth, and with that which is 
 applied directly to Sennacherib in the thirty-eighth. 
 These remarks may lead us to inquire whether it may 
 not be a safer course to reconsider our own theories of 
 the divine book, before we unsettle its order that we
 
 282 THE ORIGINAL BABEL. [SERM. 
 
 may make it accord with them. Babylon, it is ad- 
 mitted, was a powerful city dependent at this time on 
 the Assyrian Empire. It may have been regarded as 
 the sacred city of the Empire, even while Nineveh or 
 any other place was the capital of it; just in the same 
 way as the glory of Mecca was not diminished in 
 Mahometan eyes by the residence of the caliphs in 
 Bagdad, and has scarcely suffered from the reputation 
 of any later metropolis of the sultans. There is some- 
 thing in Isaiah's language which would favour such an 
 hypothesis as this, for he speaks of Babylon as especially 
 the seat of the graven images of the gods, of the gods 
 falling when the city falls. But without resorting to 
 any conjecture, we know positively what image the 
 name Babylon must have called up to a Jewish seer 
 who meditated on the divine word by day and night. 
 Long before he had the least reason to connect that 
 particular city with the punishment of the Jewish 
 tribes, long after its importance had disappeared and is 
 had given place to capitals which were mud villages 
 or fishermen's huts when chariots were passing over its 
 walls, the name still continued in permanent associa- 
 tion with the experiment of building a tower whose top 
 should reach to heaven, that the sons of Noah might 
 not be scattered abroad upon the earth, as God had 
 purposed that they should, according to their tribes, in 
 their families, in their nations ; and in association also 
 with the dynasty which was set up by Nimrod the 
 great hunter before the Lord. In other words, Babel or 
 Babylon represented to the prophets the attempt to 
 establish a universal society without respect to tribes, 
 nations, families, not upon the acknowledgment of 
 divine care and protection, but upon the acknowledg-
 
 IYI.] THE CRITICAL MOMENT ARRIVED. 283 
 
 ment of a mere power in nature against which men must 
 try to measure their own. It pointed to the actual estab- 
 lishment of such a power, not on a scale commensurate 
 with the original design, but on the same principle, the 
 great hunter or tyrant confessing no landmarks, owning 
 no responsibilities, believing that the earth was intended 
 for his possession, that the gods were sovereigns raised 
 above all law and obligation, that the human sovereigns 
 were most like them when they could most cast such 
 fetters aside. In lecturing on the Old Testament, I 
 have been obliged again and again to remind you of the 
 existence of such a power, of its first appearance in the 
 world, of the way in which the order and history of the 
 Jewish nation were made, from age to age, silently to 
 testify against it. What I wish you to observe now is 
 that the critical moment had arrived, when the testi- 
 mony could not any longer be a silent one. The 
 prophets could not in the least have understood what 
 was about to happen in their land, the length and 
 breadth of the conflict in which it was to engage, 
 they would have been completely crushed at once by 
 the confused aspects of it, and by the almost inevit- 
 able issue of it, if they had not been led into a much 
 deeper apprehension than their fathers ever possessed, 
 of the position which they occupied, of the work which 
 they had to do, of their influence upon all the after 
 destinies of mankind. And for this end, it was quite 
 necessary that they should have a name by which to 
 denote the power which was coming against them, a 
 name significant of its continuous nature, a name which 
 .should have associations with the present as well as 
 with the past, a name suggesting features which they 
 should have to look upon with their own eyes, and the
 
 281 BABYLON ATTACKED BY MEDES. [SERM. 
 
 description of which might be an heirloom to their 
 descendants, enabling them to trace the same in a 
 succession of men and of dynasties. 
 
 Isaiah's prediction, I think, exactly fulfils these con- 
 ditions. "Babylon is the glory of kingdoms^ the beauty 
 of the Chaldees* excellency. But her time is near to 
 come, her days shall not be prolonged. The Medes have 
 been stirred up against her ; their bows shall dash the 
 young men to pieces, they shall have no pity on the 
 fruit of the womb, their eye shall not spare children/* 
 That this is the description of an event about to befall 
 the actual Babylon, then a leading city of the Assyrian 
 Empire, I cannot doubt. The Medes would be the 
 tribe to make such an invasion. They were notoriously 
 the power which threatened Assyria at this time, which 
 robbed it of some of its provinces, which finally over- 
 threw it. They are described as a mountain tribe care- 
 less of silver and gold, very unlike what they were in 
 the days of Cyrus. I apprehend that the attack made 
 upon Babylon while Sennacherib was invading Syria,. 
 Ethiopia, and Egypt, may have been as fierce as Isaiah 
 represents this, destructive of temples and gods,- 
 ominous of one which should be like the overthrow of 
 Sodom and Gomorrah. The words, "It shall never be 
 inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation 
 to generation, neither shall the Arabian pitch his tent 
 there, neither shall the shepherds make their fold there j 
 but wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their 
 houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and owls shall 
 dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there/' may refer to 
 the desolation which Assyrian and Chaldean travellers 
 witness in our day. They cannot have the least applica- 
 tion to the state of things under the Medo-Persic rulej
 
 xvi.] WHAT IS DENOTED BY IT. 285 
 
 for during that Babylon continued to be a conspicuous 
 city, a summer residence for the kings. 
 
 But they must refer to more than the destruction of 
 , certain Chaldean city then or afterwards. How can we 
 limit them to it when I find such words as these, " I 
 will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for 
 their iniquity. I will cause the arrogancy of the proud 
 to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. 
 I will make a man more precious than fine gold, even a 
 man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will 
 shake the Heavens, and the earth shall remove out of 
 her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts and in the 
 day of his fierce anger." I want to know why the first 
 Babylon fell, and why the last Babylon fell ; I want to 
 know what makes any city deserve the name of a city 
 of confusion ; I want to know why a city that does 
 deserve that title, may yet be suffered to lay waste the 
 earth and lead nations into captivity. Isaiah answers 
 all these questions together. A man in the old Babylon, 
 a man in every later Babylon, was not accounted more 
 precious than the golden wedge of Ophir. It was the 
 principle of the society that he should be accounted 
 less precious ; for the sake of the outward splendour 
 and glory the human being was sacrificed ; the person 
 was given up for the thing. Here is the one adequate, 
 satisfactory exposition of the cause of the fall of empires. 
 Hence we understand how great empires have become 
 the scourge of small nations. When they have adopted 
 the Babylonian principle into their hearts, when it has 
 penetrated and pervaded their acts and their lives, 
 when it has overturned or made contradictory all the 
 deeper and truer principles which are embodied in 
 their constitutions, then those huge tyrannies, which
 
 286 WHY CITIES PERISHED. [SEEM, 
 
 realise the inhuman godless maxim most perfectly, 
 which recognise no law but that, are commissioned to- 
 sweep and devastate, that the tribes which have adopted 
 their lie, and mimicked their crimes, may feel in them- 
 selves the full pressure of both. And this that all 
 may understand how impossible it is to build human 
 society upon another ground than that upon which 
 God has built it, how certainly the most splendid city 
 that was ever raised in the earth will fall down, and all 
 its palaces perish, if it is merely formed of bricks and 
 slime, which men have substituted for the living stones 
 which God has hewn out and fitted together. 
 
 All the chapters in Isaiah which follow, till that one 
 in which he says, " Behold the Lord maketh the earth 
 empty and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down 
 and scattereth the inhabitants thereof," are setting forth 
 one aspect or another of that great judgment by which 
 it was proved that a man is more precious than the 
 golden wedge of Ophir; a judgment in which Samaria 
 and Judah suffer with Moab and Tyre, because they 
 are sharers in the same sin. But the fall of Babylon is 
 a blow to the Asiatic empire, which declares how little 
 it has cause to exult in the ruin it is producing, how 
 certainly that ruin will return upon itself, because it 
 springs from evils which are lying more deeply and 
 radically within it, than within any of the people whom 
 God hath sent it forth to punish. Instead of being an 
 interpolated fragment in the midst of Isaiah' s discourses, 
 the burden of Babylon comes in to make all the visi- 
 tations upon the other tribes of the earth intelligible^ 
 and to relieve our minds of the infinite oppression which 
 we should otherwise have in contemplating them. 
 They are diverse but harmonious portions of the same
 
 xvi.] THE SONG AT HIS FALL. 287 
 
 divine message to men, a message of terror but also 
 of deliverance and hope. In the fourteenth chapter we 
 feel how wonderfully these are combined. The hearts 
 of people in all ages have been stirred by these words, 
 " In the day when the Lord shall give thee rest from 
 thy sorrow and from thy fear and from thy hard bond- 
 age wherein thou wast made to serve, thou shalt take 
 up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, 
 How hath the oppressor ceased ! the golden city ceased ! 
 The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked and the 
 sceptre of the rulers. He who smote the people in 
 wrath with a continual stroke, he that ruled the nations 
 in anger, is persecuted, and none hindereth. The whole 
 earth is at rest and is quiet; they break forth into 
 singing. Yea, the fir-trees rejoice at thee, and the 
 cedars of Lebanon, saying, Since thou art laid down no 
 feller is come up against us. Hell from beneath is- 
 moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming ; it stirreth 
 up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the 
 earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the 
 kings of the nations. All they shall speak, and say 
 unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we ? art thou 
 become like unto us ? Thy pomp is brought down to 
 the grave, and the noise of thy viols : the worm is spread 
 under thee, and the worms cover thee. How art thou 
 fallen from heaven, Lucifer, son of the morning ! 
 how art thou cut down to the ground which didst 
 weaken the nations ! For thou hast said in thine 
 heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne 
 above the stars of God ; I will sit also upon the mount 
 of the congregation, in the sides of the north : I will 
 ascend above the heights of the clouds ; I will be like 
 the Most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to
 
 -288 THE MAN-GOD. [SEEM. 
 
 hell, to the sides of the pit. They that see thee shall 
 narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is 
 this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did 
 shake kingdoms ; that made the world as a wilderness, 
 and destroyed the cities thereof ; that opened not the 
 house of his prisoners ? All the kings of the nations, 
 even all of them, lie in glory, every one in his own 
 house: but thou art cast out of thy grave like an 
 abominable branch, and as the raiment of those that 
 are slain, thrust through with a sword, that go down to 
 the stones of the pit ; as a carcass trodden under feet. 
 Thou shall not be joined with them in burial, because 
 thou hast destroyed thy land, and slain thy people; 
 the seed of evil doers shall never be renowned. Prepare 
 slaughter for his children for the iniquity of their 
 fathers j that they do not rise, nor possess the land, nor 
 fill the face of the world with cities. For I will rise 
 up against them, saith the Lord of hosts, and cut off 
 from Babylon the name, and remnant, and son, and 
 nephew, saith the Lord. I will also make it a posses- 
 sion for the bittern, and pools of water : and I will 
 sweep it with the bosom of destruction, saith the Lord 
 of hosts." 
 
 But though most feel something of the grandeur of 
 this poetry, and a few the truth of this prophecy, we 
 do not enough consider upon what both are founded. 
 We have heard how the God-Man was the ground upon 
 which the Jewish nation stood, that which it was in 
 due time to make known to all nations as the ground 
 upon which they must stand. Here you have the con- 
 trast, the Man-God, he who would ascend up to Heaven 
 and exalt his throne above the stars of God. This is 
 the natural ruler of a society which counts the gold of
 
 xvi.] THE TWO IMAGES. 289 
 
 Opbir more precious than human beings. For in some 
 way or other, man must have his glory; it may be as a 
 tyrant trampling upon his fellows as if they were mere 
 things created for his use ; it may be as one bearing the 
 image of God, and claiming his brethren as intended to 
 bear that image. He who would be a Lucifer, a son of 
 the morning, must seek to be a God by rising above 
 men and degrading men. He who is the Son of God, 
 one with the Father, must prove that He has that glory 
 by humbling Himself and becoming of no reputation, 
 by taking upon Him the form of a servant. The one 
 wants to be above all law, that he may assert his own 
 will and subject all wills to his ; the other makes 
 Himself subject to law, that He may show forth His 
 Father's will and give up his own, and redeem men from 
 slavery into the service which is freedom. The one 
 saith, " By the strength of my hand have I done it, 
 and by my wisdom, for I am prudent. And I have 
 removed the bounds of the people, and have robbed 
 their treasures, and I have put down the inhabitants 
 like a mighty man. And my hand hath found as a nest 
 the riches of the people, and as one that gathereth eggs 
 that are left, have I gathered all the earth. A ad there 
 was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, 
 or peeped." The other prays for His poor family upon 
 earth, " that all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in 
 me and I in Thee, that they ail may be one in us." 
 
 Yes, brethren, we have here the Babylonian power 
 and the Jerusalem power, that parody of human and 
 divine greatness which is seen in an earthly tyrant, that 
 perfect reconciliation of divinity and humanity which 
 is seen in the Redeemer. Consider both images well. 
 Both are presented to us ; we must admire and copy one 
 
 u
 
 290 "WHO IS THIS SON OF MAN?" [SERM. 
 
 of them. And whichever we take, we must resolutely 
 discard the other. If we have ever mixed them to- 
 gether in our minds, a time is at hand that will separate 
 them for ever. One was marked on your foreheads in 
 childhood when you were signed with the sign of the 
 cross, and the prayer was prayed for you, that you might 
 not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified 
 against sin, the world, and the devil. The other, the 
 Babylonian mark and image, your own evil nature, a 
 corrupt society, the evil spirit, have been striving to 
 stamp you with ever since. Each hour you are tempted 
 to think a man less precious than the gold of Ophir. 
 The current maxims of the world take for granted that 
 he is ; you in a thousand ways are acting on those 
 maxims. Oh, remember that in them, and in the habits 
 which they beget, lies the certain presage of slavery for 
 men and nations, the foretaste of decay and ruin, which 
 no human contrivances can avert, which the gifts and 
 blessings of God's providence only accelerate. And 
 think this also. When once this disease has penetrated 
 into the vitals of a people, it may be very decorous and 
 very religious ; but it cannot believe in the Son of Man. 
 " How sayest thou that the Son of Man must be lifted 
 up ? " asked the religious, gold-worshipping Jew of our 
 Lord ; " Who is this Son of Man ? " He had answered 
 that question by stooping to the lowest state of men, by 
 living with fishermen, by eating and drinking with pub- 
 licans and sinners. But this answer only confounded 
 them the more. " Such a one cannot be Christ the 
 King/' they said. And so, when Pilate brought forth 
 Jesus crowned with thorns and said, " Behold the Man, 
 behold the King/' and " Shall I crucify your King?" 
 the high-priests, those who spoke the voice of the
 
 xvi.] STRENGTH IN GOD. 291 
 
 people, those who represented their belief, cried out, 
 " We have no king but Csesar." A Man-God is our 
 choice, the God-Man shall not reign over us. 
 
 Brethren, may God in His mercy grant that our 
 English faith may never express itself in the same way, 
 or give birth to acts differing only in form, not in 
 essence, from that which the Jewish nation perpetrated. 
 May God grant us power to cast Babylonian principles 
 out of our hearts, that when they come before us em- 
 bodied in some person, sustained by some mighty 
 physical force, we may despise them and laugh them 
 to scorn, knowing that not against us, but against the 
 Holy One, our enemy is exalting himself and lifting up 
 his voice on high. God grant that in that day we may 
 be able to sing the song which the prophet said should 
 be sung in the Land of Judah : e< We have a strong city. 
 Salvation will God appoint for walls and bulwarks. Open 
 ye the gates that the righteous nation which keepeth 
 the truth may enter in. Thou wilt keep him in perfect 
 peace whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth 
 in thee. Trust ye in the Lord for ever, for in the Lord 
 Jehovah is everlasting strength." 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 " In the time of Sanherib (Sennacherib)," says Niebnhr, " Babylon 
 acknowledged the supremacy of Assyria and had, perhaps, even been 
 compelled to submit to Shalmanassar. Hagisah, a brother of San- 
 herib, was king of Babylon, but that kingdom revolted and Hagisah 
 was slain. Merodach Baladan then raised himself to the throne." 
 Lecture* on Ancient History. I. 31, 32.
 
 SERMON XVII. 
 
 THE SUFFERING KING AND PEOPLE. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, Palm Sunday. April 4th, 1852.) 
 
 Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my son! 
 delighteth ; I have put my spirit npon him ; he shall bring forth 
 judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not cry, nor lift up, nor 
 cause his voice to be heard in the street. A bruised reed he 
 shall not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench ; he 
 shall bring forth judgment unto truth. ISAIAH xlii. 1 3. 
 
 THE burden of Babylon, of which I spoke last Sunday, 
 is said to have been in the year that Ahaz died. In 
 that year Isaiah warned the whole of Palestine that it 
 must not rejoice because the rod of him that smote 
 it was broken ; for out of the serpent's root should 
 come forth a cockatrice, and his fruit should be a fiery 
 flying serpent. Yet he tells his countrymen that the 
 poor shall feed and the needy shall lie down in safety. 
 The Lord hath founded Zion ; the poor of His people 
 shall trust in it. 
 
 I said that Isaiah evidently expected that this new 
 calamity would soon overtake the land. He tells Moab 
 that in " three years its glory shall be contemned with 
 all its great multitudes." He goes barefoot three years 
 as a sign to the Egyptians and Ethiopians that the 
 young and old should be led captives by the Assyrians.
 
 SERM. xvn.J WOES APPROACHING OR ARRIVED. 293 
 
 He says that Kedar shall "be wasted within a year. 
 The desolation will be a very sweeping one. The 
 prophet looks to see the whole earth turned upside 
 down, the land emptied, the master and the servant 
 perishing, money-lenders and money-borrowers, all 
 classes of men, cast into utter ruin. 
 
 There were two great invasions of Palestine in the 
 reign of Hezekiah ; that which took place under Shal- 
 maneser in his fourth year, that of Sennacherib in his 
 fourteenth. I apprehend that most of the calamities 
 which are spoken of in the twenty-fourth chapter were 
 fully realised in the former. 
 
 I have spoken already of the hopes which dawned 
 upon the prophet's mind in the midst of its gloom, of 
 his assurance that the time of discomfiture and over- 
 throw to all surrounding nations, of terror to his own, 
 would nevertheless be in some respects a better and 
 more blessed time than most which had preceded it. 
 The confidence grows brighter and firmer as the cloud 
 becomes nearer and more portentous. The prophet 
 does not merely trust that light will follow when the 
 darkness is scattered. He sees the light present in 
 fche midst of the darkness. The depth of the night 
 makes him know that there is a dayspring from on 
 high, which will visit his land and all lands. It 
 is difficult to say whether the song of trust and 
 thanksgiving in the twenty-fifth chapter is one of 
 anticipation or whether it was uttered in sight of a 
 ruin which had already more than fulfilled all his 
 saddest forebodings. The visions of a prophet, con- 
 cerning that which is to be, are so full of present 
 force and reality; his contemplation of that which has 
 happened is so necessarily involved with foresight of
 
 294 CONSOLATIONS. [SERM. 
 
 its issues, that nothing is harder, as all interpreters 
 have felt, than to fix the boundaries between the two. 
 If we could do it accurately and decisively, much of 
 the very meaning of prophecy would be lost ; it would 
 be far less a guide to us in our own meditations upon 
 the world we read of, the world we behold, and the 
 world that shall be, than (if we use it rightly) it is 
 now. And music or song seems so specially ordained 
 to give a sense of wholeness and unity to those thoughts 
 which ordinary discourse breaks up into successive 
 instants, that when the prophet pours forth a lyrical 
 rapture, we should try more than at other times to- 
 follow the movements of his spirit in the certainty that 
 they cannpt be defined by chronological landmarks. 
 Nevertheless, it is the impression, I think, upon the 
 minds of most readers, and, I cannot doubt, a right 
 impression, that this chapter, if it is in a measure 
 prospective, yet must have been written during the 
 Assyrian invasion. I do not rest anything upon tenses. 
 Every reader of the prophets must feel how ambiguous 
 they are. But still the words, " Thou hast made of a 
 city an heap ; of a def enced city a ruin ; a palace of 
 strangers to be no city;" and these, "Thou hast been 
 a strength to -the poor, a strength to the needy in his 
 distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the 
 heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm 
 against the wall/' do seem to describe an actual ex- 
 perience. One can hardly help thinking that the man 
 who wrote such words, had just heard of some old and 
 famous Palestine city which had been sacked, if he was 
 -pot walking amidst the ruins of it ; and that he was at 
 the same time drinking in consolation from the thought 
 that the cry of a number of serfs and bondsmen, which
 
 xvii.] THE USE OF JUDGMENTS. 295 
 
 had gone up to Heaven against the oppressors in their 
 own country, was answered by this visitation. It was 
 not merely that their wrongs were thus avenged. The 
 humbling of the proud men of their own cities may 
 have been an actual immediate blessing to them. The 
 rich men and rulers of neighbouring lands may have 
 been awakened by the common danger to a sense of 
 sympathy and brotherhood which they had neve* 
 known before. At all events, an eternal law was 
 revealed to the prophet's mind, and in greater or less 
 clearness to the minds of others who witnessed the 
 same events, a law which decreed that mere force 
 should not prevail, that the strong should be laid low, 
 that the weak should be raised up ; a law which con- 
 tained a sure pledge that some day or other " God 
 would destroy the face of the covering cast over all 
 people, and the veil that was spread over all nations, 
 that He would swallow up death in victory, and wipe 
 away tears from all faces/' 
 
 We have all of us witnessed enough of remarkable 
 changes and sudden revolutions, to be capable of under- 
 standing passages in the prophet's discourse which at 
 first sound puzzling and contradictory. "When thy 
 judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the 
 world will learn righteousness." " Let favour be showed 
 to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness." 
 " In the land of uprightness, will he deal unjustly and 
 will not behold the majesty of the Lord." " Lord, 
 when thy hand is lifted up, they will not see. But 
 they shall see." It is thus that two opposing sides of 
 truth present themselves to a divinely taught man. 
 There is a blindness, an insensibility, a lightness of 
 heart, which at one moment strikes him as quite incorr
 
 29C HOPES OF REFORMATION. [SERM. 
 
 ceivable in those who are passing through fires which 
 will leave effects behind them for generations to come. 
 Then he perceives that after all the visitation has not 
 been in vain, that men have seen and felt a meaning in 
 it even when they have been trying to harden them- 
 selves, nay when they have even plunged into worse 
 courses than those which it was sent to warn them of ; 
 they have confessed that a divine hand has been lifted 
 up, though they have invented a number of dry and 
 empty formulas to persuade themselves that what Las 
 happened has no reference to their evil doings ; their 
 consciences have been awakened, though the awaken- 
 ing out of such a sleep and such fever-dreams as theirs, 
 is to terror not to repentance. But meantime there has 
 been the peaceable fruit of righteousness slowly, not 
 suddenly or immaturely, coming forth in those who 
 desired to know more of God and His ways, who dimly, 
 amidst many contradictions of thought and practice, 
 yet confessed a law of right and tried to follow it. 
 *'0h Lord our God," such persons will cry out, "other 
 gods beside Thee have had dominion over us ; but by 
 Thee only will we make mention of Thy Name. They 
 are dead; they shall not live. Therefore Thou hast 
 visited and destroyed them, and made all their memory 
 to perish." 
 
 To understand when a national reformation has taken 
 place, when even there has been any solid commence- 
 ment of it, is the hardest of all things. A prophet 
 shows his wisdom to be above that of other men, not 
 by pronouncing upon the diagnostics of such a change, 
 but by marking all the various fluctuating symptoms 
 which ever and anon tempt him to doubt the reality 
 of it, and then shew that it is in process ; still more by
 
 xvii.] TIME BETWEEN THE TWO INVASIONS. 297 
 
 connecting these symptoms with others which he dis- 
 covers in himself, with his own strange vicissitudes and 
 inconsistencies, with the deep conviction which he has 
 at one time of God's truth and love, and his thankful- 
 ness that they should in any wise make themselves 
 manifest, and then with the utter dreariness, barrenness, 
 heartlessness of his inner soul and of his outward acts. 
 " From the uttermost parts of the earth have we heard 
 songs, even glory to the righteous. But I said, My 
 leanness, my leanness, woe unto me ! The treacherous 
 dealers have dealt treacherously, yea, the treacherous 
 dealers have dealt very treacherously." He understands 
 the treachery of other men's dealings with God's pro- 
 mises and His covenant by the treachery of his own. 
 And so, wonderful and gracious result of such baffling 
 and bewildering experiences, he is thrown back upon 
 those promises and that covenant, or rather upon God 
 Himself, the Author of them. He discovers a ground 
 deeper than human faithfulness; the faithfulness and 
 righteousness of God. And that is sufficient to sustain 
 his hopes, not for himself, not for a few men in whose 
 truth he can confide better than in his own, but for his 
 nation with all its sins and idolatries, for the universe 
 which God has created and not forsaken. (xxiv., xxvi.) 
 I apprehend that Isaiah had need of all these lessons 
 so hardly learnt, not merely that he might be able to 
 judge of the state of his nation while it was under- 
 going this visitation or had just escaped from it, but 
 that he might think rightly and speak wisely in the 
 ten more peaceful years which followed. To these 
 years I think we may refer most of the discourses 
 which are contained between the twenty-seventh and 
 thirty-sixth chapters of this book.
 
 298 PLEAS FOB SELF-CONFIDENCE. [SKBM, 
 
 We do not need a prophet to tell us how very soon 
 the mere impression of any great calamity passes away 
 from the majority of a people, when the visible signs 
 of it are not present. It becomes a topic for men to 
 talk of. Some may smart under the recollection of 
 lands devastated or friends perished; but soon all seems 
 to have returned to its old course. In many there is a 
 strange sense of security from the notion that they 
 have had their fill of startling occurrences, and that 
 any repetition of them can scarcely be looked for in 
 their day. The people of Jerusalem had more than 
 ordinary excuse for this confidence. Their city had 
 escaped the general wreck. A feeling, strangely mixed, 
 of faith and fatalism might lead them to think that it 
 would be eternal. Moreover, that great blessing which 
 Isaiah had looked forward to, and which connected itself 
 with all his deepest intuitions respecting a divine Ruler, 
 the blessing of a King reigning in righteousness, had 
 been granted to the land. Hezekiah probably began to 
 remove some of the abuses which his father introduced, 
 before Shalmaneser's invasion. He must assuredly have 
 been one of those who received precious instruction from 
 that judgment. It found him with an open, prepared 
 heart ; it must have changed him rapidly from a pro- 
 mising youth into a sobered and saddened man. It had 
 given him, too, facilities which he had not possessed 
 before. The portion of the ten tribes which remained 
 would be glad of his protection, might welcome his 
 invitations to come up to Jerusalem and worship. The 
 surrounding people would respect the king who had 
 survived when theirs had fallen. These effects, at which 
 I hinted in my last sermon, must have been more 
 remarkable in a later part of his reigu ; but there will
 
 xvii.] PEOOFS OF WEAKNESS. 299 
 
 have been enough of them even at this time to elate 
 the inhabitants of Judaoa with a sense of their own 
 power and superiority. The feeling would be all the 
 stronger because it was a rebound from a state of de- 
 pression and shame. With it, and with the returning 
 prosperity of the land, would come fresh wantonness 
 and self-indulgence, the old oppression of the poor, of 
 the debtors, of the slaves; the old sottishness. To these 
 evils would be added that one upon which Isaiah dwelt 
 so much in the introduction to his book, the multitude of 
 sacrifices; unrighteous dealings, indifference to human 
 beings, being glossed over with the show and phantom 
 of religion. There would be politicians too in this 
 society. Some who were confident in the friendship of 
 the Assyrian, and thought he could never return to 
 their land; some who believed that with the help of 
 the Pharaohs no evil could overtake them ; some who 
 fancied that they might form a native force strong 
 enough to drive off any invader. 
 
 To all these different tendencies of the people's 
 mind, Isaiah addresses himself in this grand series of 
 discourses. The drunkards of Ephraim, the scorners, the 
 sleeping prophets and priests and rulers of Jerusalem, 
 the rebellious children who would strengthen them- 
 selves in the strength of Pharoah and trust in the 
 shadow of Egypt, the men who stay on horses and 
 trust in chariots because they are many, all pass be- 
 fore his eyes, all receive his awful rebuke. There will 
 be a tempest of hail, a new destroying storm in the 
 fat valleys which are bringing forth the wine. An 
 overflowing scourge will pass through the land. Morn- 
 ing by morning shall it pass over, by day and by night. 
 Those who are mocking at the coming danger, will find
 
 SCO THE GOOD AND EVIL COUNSELLORS. [SERM. 
 
 it a vexation only to hear the report. There will be 
 heaviness and sorrow in Ariel the city of David, there 
 will be a camp round about it, forts will be raised 
 against it. It shall be brought down and speak out of 
 the ground ; its speech shall be low out of the dust as 
 of one that hath a familiar spirit. The Egyptians will 
 be ashamed of a people that could not profit them nor 
 be a help to them, but only a reproach. If they did 
 help, they would help in vain. The Egyptians are 
 men and not God, horses are flesh and not spirit. 
 " When the Lord shall stretch out his hand, both he 
 that helpeth shall fall, and he that is holpen shall fall 
 -down, and they both shall fail together." 
 
 Hezekiah seems to have had two sets of advisers, 
 one represented by Shebna the Scribe, one by Eliakim 
 who was over the house. The former Isaiah denounces 
 as utterly base and selfish ; the other, it is said, shall 
 be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem and to the 
 house of Judah. The king, it would seem, must at this 
 time have yielded to the meaner and more cowardly 
 policy. He might be just in his ordinary dealings, a 
 refuge for the poor, a destroyer of idols, and yet not 
 have thought or understood that flesh is weaker than 
 spirit; the horses of Egypt than the word of God. No 
 doubt he thought he trusted God. He had given some 
 proofs that he did trust Him. But perhaps he had 
 begun to trust his own faith, to glorify that; not 
 Him who had been the object of it. A man soon finds 
 what a reed that is to lean upon ; and then he naturally 
 looks for other reeds to help out its weakness. In a 
 moment of vain self-confidence Hezekiah seems to have 
 refused tribute to the kings of Assyria. We have a 
 .right to give the act that name, and to suppose that he
 
 xvii.] THE CORNER STONE. 301 
 
 was prompted to it by his Egyptian advisers, for the- 
 first appearance of the enemy daunted him and led 
 him (so the Second Book of Kings tells us) to make 
 the most abject submission. 
 
 The prophet, joyfully as he had hailed the reign of 
 the new king, much as he honoured him, does not point 
 to him as any ground of confidence to the inhabitants 
 of Jerusalem, in the hour of trial which he said was 
 approaching. That other King who had been the first 
 inspirer of his words, who had been more and more 
 clearly manifesting Himself to him in all that he had 
 seen or foreseen since, was the one support of his hopes. 
 ' Behold/ he says to the rulers in Jerusalem, ' I lay m 
 Zion a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious corner 
 etone, and he that believeth shall not make haste.' To 
 know the actual living centre of the nation was, "we 
 have seen, the great gift which the prophet had derived 
 from the teaching he had received hitherto; all new 
 trials and disappointments were to bring this centre 
 more clearly before him ; he could not but contemplate 
 this as the great end and interpretation of them to the 
 whole people. The certainty of this truth does not 
 permit him to make haste. In the days of Ahaz he 
 had been taught to despise the plots of Samaria and 
 Syria and Judah against each other; these had come to 
 nought. The devices of the feeble men about Hezekiah, 
 who could not look beyond the moment, who could only 
 invent expedients, seemed to him as contemptible; still 
 more shameful the ignorance of the prophets and priests 
 who should have taught the eternal principles, which 
 the book of their country's history proclaimed; but. 
 who pretended they could not read it because it was 
 sealed. God, however, was bringing these principles
 
 302 WHY ISRAEL MUST LIVE. [SERM. 
 
 into light. A day was at hand which would enable the 
 deaf to hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the 
 blind to see out of obscurity. A revelation there would 
 be of the divine purpose in maintaining the chosen race 
 from age to age ; a proof that the promises to Abraham 
 were not empty promises ; signs that visible priests* 
 prophets, kings, had all their appointed functions, had 
 all been bearing their mighty testimony that there 
 was a Priest, Prophet, King, of whom they were only 
 the emblems and spokesmen. The prophet's words^ 
 therefore, are as full of encouragement as they are 
 of warning and terror ; not of encouragement con- 
 tingent upon certain acts or lines of conduct which 
 their country might pursue; of encouragement as 
 absolute as any fatalist could derive from the convic- 
 tion that Jerusalem had a charmed life which no ill- 
 doings or negligence could destroy. Only there was 
 this amazing difference. The pledges of the nation's 
 endurance were also pledges that every form of evil 
 should be put down; that truth and righteousness 
 should stand. Its existence meant that, nothing but 
 that. It was the appointed proclaimer to all nations 
 of a law of right and truth to which they were subject ; 
 of a God of right and truth who was their God ; of a 
 divine Image of that God who would confound the 
 images which they had made of Him. Through this 
 part of Isaiah's prophecy, through all the visions of 
 deep unutterable weakness and shame which were to 
 come upon his land, through all the visions of glory 
 behind and beneath that weakness and shame, the 
 same truth is working itself out into clearness. Jeru- 
 salem must live because it has a message to deliver, a 
 message of blessedness and freedom to all the tribes of
 
 xvu.] JERUSALEM BESIEGED. 303 
 
 its own land. Israel must live because it has a message 
 of blessedness and power to all the people of the earth. 
 Let it sink as low as it may ; in the depth of humiliation 
 it will be a prophet to the universe ; nay, it can be a 
 true prophet to the universe only when all its imagir ary 
 false strength is taken from it, and when it is able in 
 utter nothingness to realise the divine help which is 
 within it. (xxvii. xxxvi.) 
 
 Such were Isaiah's preparations for the event which 
 took his master and people by surprise, and set their 
 hearts to meditate terror, each one saying, " Where is 
 the scribe ? where is the receiver ? where is he that 
 counted the towers ? " In the fourteenth year of king 
 Hezekiah, we are told, ' Sennacherib, king of Assyria, 
 came up against all the fenced cities of Judah and took 
 them. And he sent Rabshakeh from Lachish to Jeru- 
 salem with a great army ; and he stood by the conduit 
 of the upper pool.' He sent a message of scorn to the 
 king ; of scorn which must have been felt not only 
 because there was an army to enforce it, but for the 
 deep truth which lay in it. Sennacherib challenged 
 Hezekiah to bring forth all his horses and he would put 
 riders upon them. He bade him understand that Egypt 
 was a broken reed which would go into the hand of 
 every one that leaned upon it. He said they might 
 talk of trusting in the Lord, but he was not come up 
 without the Lord against that city. He appealed to 
 all the cities he had destroyed already, and the little 
 help which their gods had given them. The words of 
 the Assyrian were, as always happens in such cases, the 
 words which the patriot prophet had uttered in vain ; if 
 the people had heeded them when they came from his lips 
 they would not have heard them from the oppressor's.
 
 304 HEZEKIAH'S SICKNESS AND RECOVERY. [SER*. 
 
 It was only the prophet who could answer these worrta, 
 and cheer the people who had regarded him as their 
 enemy. Hezekiah, despairing of Egypt, had cast 
 himself before the living God and besought Him to 
 show whether He was indeed like the gods which the 
 Assyrians had cast into the fire. His heart had caught 
 a new inspiration as he prayed. He said, ' Save us r 
 Lord our God, save us from his hand, and let all the 
 kingdoms of the earth know that thou art the Lord, 
 even thou only/ Then came the answer. Isaiah spake 
 and said, "This is the word of the Lord concerning him. 
 The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee 
 and laughed thee to scorn ; the daughter of Jerusalem 
 hath shaken her head at thee. Against whom hast 
 thou exalted thy voice, and lifted up thine eyes on 
 high? even against the Holy One of Israel." (xxxvii.) 
 In these words lies, I believe, the secret not merely 
 of that well-known history, but of all that follows in 
 this book. When the city had been delivered from its 
 enemies and the brighter days to which the prophet 
 looked forward were actually commencing, Hezekiah 
 fell sick. He had to experience in his own person the 
 prostration of strength and spirit which his people had 
 felt before. The first prayer in his sickness shews that 
 he was still clinging to what he had done and what he 
 had been. " Consider how I have walked before thee 
 with a perfect heart." Yet there was in him an under- 
 current of real trust in God. His thanksgiving for his- 
 recovery shews how wonderfully his self -righteousness 
 had been taken away, how he had been brought to 
 feel that in God only was the life of his spirit. The 
 lesson was a precious, though not a complete one ; at 
 least, it was not proof against a new temptation. After
 
 xvii.] THE VISITORS FKOM BABYLON. 305 
 
 the defeat of Sennacherib the city began speedily to 
 recover its strength. Treasures poured into it once 
 more. The king received them in the right spirit as 
 gifts of God, as tokens of his deliverance. (xxxviii.) 
 
 But the tendency to worship the gold of Ophir, 
 to think of that as the strength of men and nations, lay 
 near the heart of this king and people, as it is near the 
 heart of us all. There came messengers from a far 
 country to greet the king on his recovery. It was not 
 unnatural they should come, for the far country was 
 Babylon, which had broken loose from the Assyrian 
 government and was therefore likely to fraternise with 
 one who had so successfully thrown off its yoke. 
 Hezekiah shewed them all his treasures. To him, the 
 name Assyria was one of fearful omen : Babylon meant 
 nothing. It was otherwise with the prophet. He 
 had been taught to look through the mere temporary 
 representatives of a false principle to the principle 
 itself. Babylonia, he saw, would be as terrible to the 
 descendants of Hezekiah and the world as Assyria had 
 been. Out of the serpent's root another cockatrice 
 was springing. He told Hezekiah that the sons which 
 he should beget should be taken to the palace of the 
 king of Babylon. These words, we shall hear, were 
 literally fulfilled to Manasseh the son of Hezekiah. 
 The prophet therefore does not project himself at once 
 into a distant future when he speaks of a Babylonian 
 captivity. He speaks, no doubt, of a series of evils 
 which might stretch over years or even centuries ; of 
 punishments that would befall the land; of deliverances 
 that would be wrought for it. But I apprehend we 
 have given a precision and definiteness to his words on 
 this subject in the later chapters of his book, which,
 
 306 AN IMMEDIATE CAPTIVITY THREATENED. [SERM. 
 
 if carefully and patiently considered, they will not be 
 found to bear. Divines, eager to catch at a proof of the 
 fulfilment of prophecy, have insisted that the account 
 of the taking of Babylon by Cyrus which is given in 
 Herodotus should have its exact counterpart in Isaiah. 
 Now, I do not venture to say that the expression " two- 
 leaved gates " may not have some reference to the 
 construction of the city of Nitocris or Nebuchadnezzar, 
 or that the drying of rivers may not mean the altering 
 of the course of the Euphrates. But I should be very 
 sorry to build an argument on any subject trifling or 
 important upon the assumption of such correspondences. 
 The use of the name Cyrus undoubtedly suggests the 
 thought of the Persian king who has been the subject 
 of so much Greek as well as Oriental romance. But 
 if we were not familiar with his traditionary history 
 (which is so differently represented by the two Greek 
 authorities) I do not think that we should at once have 
 resolved that that particular Persian king, or perhaps 
 any other, must be indicated by the prophet's language. 
 The often-repeated story that the words were shewn 
 to Cyrus, and that they determined him to allow the 
 chosen people to go forth, is a mere legend resting on 
 no evidence at all. And it is at least singular that 
 Ezra, in the first chapter of his book, alludes distinctly 
 to a prophecy of Jeremiah which was accomplished in 
 Cyrus, but does not point out a passage apparently so 
 much more definite and emphatic. (xxxix.) 
 
 This last argument may be turned to a different use 
 by those of whom I spoke last Sunday, who hold that 
 all the chapters in Isaiah after the fortieth were written 
 by another person and at another period of the history. 
 They might say (though I suspect this evidence would
 
 XTII.] THE LATER CHAPTERS. 307 
 
 prove too much), that the silence of Ezra was favour- 
 able to the notion that this part of the prophecy had 
 not yet become one of the recognised Jewish oracles. 
 The answer to them lies not in detached sentences or 
 paragraphs, but in the whole tenor of these chapters. 
 There is only one ambiguous and difficult passage to 
 connect them with a period subsequent to the de- 
 struction of the temple, or even with any anticipation 
 of such destruction; whereas every characteristic of 
 Isaiah's mind and discipline which we have traced 
 through the earlier chapters reappears in these, only 
 with such expansions and developments as we should 
 naturally look for. 
 
 Babylon is still as before the great Babel, the city of 
 confusion ; that which is setting up idols in place of 
 God ; that which is the destined punisher of the Babel 
 notions and habits that have infected the holy city ; 
 which is blindly, inhumanly, godlessly executing a 
 mighty commission ; which carries its doom written on 
 its greatest triumphs. Jerusalem is always the society 
 which is called out to witness by its words, by its acts, 
 by its sufferings, for the power of weakness ; for the 
 fact that a city does not stand by walls and fortresses ; 
 for the presence of an in visible king reigning through- 
 out generations. But that special discovery which was 
 made to the prophet, by the share which Judaea had 
 in the fall and rising of the other nations, by its extreme 
 peril, by its unlooked-for rescue, that it was to be the 
 herald of a deliverance for all kindreds and races, comes 
 forth with quite a new power, as the prophet looking 
 through the vista of years sees how it may be destined 
 to still closer and more humiliating connection with the 
 great empires of the world. The burst with which 
 
 x2
 
 308 GKOUNDS OF COMFORT. [SEEM. 
 
 the fortieth chapter opens, u Comfort ye, comfort ye my 
 people, saith your God," is not suggested merely by 
 the past redemption of the city. That would be a 
 very insufficient consolation, one which Esarhaddon or 
 Merodach-Baladan might speedily set at nought. But 
 it was grounded upon a voice which the prophet heard 
 crying in the wilderness, " Every valley shall be exalted, 
 and every mountain and hill shall be made low," by 
 the assurance that ' all flesh was as grass, and the good- 
 liness thereof as the flower of grass, that the grass 
 withereth and the flower fadeth, but that the word of our 
 God should stand for ever/ It was grounded upon the 
 assurance that Jerusalem had good tidings to bring, 
 that she could lift up her voice and say to all the cities 
 of Judah, " Behold your God," that she could announce 
 Him not as a tyrant such as they had imagined Him 
 to be, a counterpart in the sky of the Assyrian upon 
 earth ; but as a shepherd who gathers the lambs with 
 his arm, and carries them in his bosom, and gently 
 leads those that are with young. (xl.) 
 
 Proclaiming this Gospel to the cities of Judah which 
 had yielded to all the idolatries of the nations round 
 about, she could challenge those nations to bring forth 
 their likenesses of God, all the images which they had 
 made after the notions of their own minds, after the 
 works of their own hands, after the things in heaven 
 or earth or under the earth. Let them show, one and 
 all, what these gods had done for them or could do for 
 them, what help, or guidance, or power of foresight 
 against coming evil lay in them, what capacity they 
 had of working good or evil. As the prophet's vision 
 becomes brighter and his divine confidence stronger, 
 he invites all the islands to enter into this controversy,
 
 xvn.] THE CHALLENGE. THE ELECT ONE. 309 
 
 to meet the feeble Israelite, the mere worm of the 
 earth, and see whether the God in whom he trusts is 
 not indeed the God of the whole earth, He who has 
 ordered the times and seasons, the fate of nations, the 
 revolutions of history. At each step the grandeur of 
 his people's mission in being able to make their own 
 life, even their own sins, witnesses of a kingdom which 
 stretches over every land, over Moabite, Edomite, 
 Egyptian, Assyrian, becomes more evident to him. 
 At each step he sees more how its weakness is the 
 secret of its power. (xli.) 
 
 Were the nations then wrong in thinking they re- 
 quired a likeness, a human likeness, of God ? Were 
 they merely to be thrown back upon the idea of an ab- 
 solute Being separated from their sorrows and sympa- 
 thies ? Such a doctrine, however seemingly magnificent, 
 would really have led them by another route to an 
 Assyrian god, a god of mere power, not a Shepherd, 
 not a Redeemer, not a Holy One. No, there must be 
 an image. Isaiah has seen it and felt it all along. 
 Now, he is permitted to trace, one by one, each feature 
 of that image, to see it rising up a living whole before 
 his spirit. " Behold my servant whom I uphold, mine 
 elect in whom my soul delighteth. I have put my 
 Spirit upon him. He shall bring forth judgment unto 
 the Gentiles/' Here is the beginning of a stream of 
 prophecy which runs on gathering new strength and 
 sweeping away countless obstacles before it. I will 
 stop at one point in that stream, at the words which we 
 shall be reading to-morrow. " Who is this that cometh 
 from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah, this that 
 is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of 
 his strength ? " The Jew asks whether this is not the
 
 310 THE CONQUEEOE FEOM BOZRAH. [SKRM. 
 
 description of a triumphant conqueror returning from 
 the defeat of the Heathen. Unquestionably. The 
 Church which appointed the service for Passion-week 
 did not wish us to forget that all the symbols of the 
 prophet pointed to such a Person. Only she would 
 have us remember that He is the same person whose 
 visage is said to be marred more than any man's ; who 
 is declared to be the despised and rejected of men a 
 man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. She asks 
 us to understand that out of that contempt, sorrow 
 and humiliation, all might comes ; that the nations 
 could never be subdued except by one who wrestled 
 with the death and sin which all nations share together. 
 The Jew asks again whether the man of sorrows may 
 nofc be Isaiah or Hezekiah, the deserted prophet, the 
 humbled king; whether he may not exhibit the condi- 
 tion of the Jewish race ? Unquestionably. Isaiah was 
 a man of sorrows; throughout the most blessed periods 
 of Hezekiah's life he was a man of sorrows. The Jewish 
 race is represented throughout the prophecy as crushed, 
 helpless, broken; by its misery and desolation, the 
 channel of blessings to mankind. The more Isaiah, 
 Hezekiah, the Jewish nation, understood this great 
 secret, this divine paradox, the more was each enabled 
 to do the work which they were appointed to do in the 
 world. And this because the image of a higher and 
 more perfect sorrow, of the man who could alone be 
 called the man of sorrows, of Him who enabled them to 
 be true sorrowers, of one sympathising with the mind 
 of God and the woes of His creatures, rose then more 
 clearly and brightly and perfectly before them. (liii.) 
 Christian brother ! if thou believest in such a man of 
 sorrows, ask how thou mayst exhibit His image by
 
 xvn.] THE MAN OF SORROWS. 311 
 
 suffering with thy fellows. Let Passion-week be indeed 
 a witness to thee that thou art the heir of the same 
 nature, of the same death, of the same redemption 
 with them. Jew, Turk, Heretic, Infidel brother ! try 
 whether thou canst not be what in thy best hours thou 
 desirest to be ; then thou wilt believe that thou needest 
 a sacrifice offered for the sins of the whole world ; that 
 thou needest a brother, a king, who can make thee at 
 one with thy Father in Heaven, and so enable thee to 
 be at one with His children upon earth.
 
 SERMON XVIII. 
 
 THE JEW CONQUERING THE NATIONS. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, Easter Sunday. April 11, 1852.) 
 
 Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us 
 and Israel acknowledge us not. Thou, O Lord, art our Father, 
 our Redeemer ; Thy Name is from everlasting. ISAIAH Ixiii. 16. 
 
 THE last passage in Isaiah's prophecies to which I 
 alluded, was that which begins with the words, tf Who 
 is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments 
 from Bozrah ? " I could not doubt that these words 
 contained the description of a mighty conqueror ; I 
 could not deny the Jewish assertion that the whole 
 scenery of the passage, as well as the context of it, led 
 us to think of a Jewish conqueror returning from a 
 victory over Gentile hosts. 
 
 This being admitted, the question to be considered 
 was, what is the nature of the triumph here described, 
 how was it or will it be won, in what sense and upon 
 what terms has the Gentile world, represented by these 
 cities of Edom and Bozrah, done homage or will it 
 do homage to the Jewish race and to a sovereign of 
 Jerusalem ? With the consideration of this question, 
 I shall conclude what I have to say upon this great 
 prophet. Without it I believe we could neither under- 
 stand the visions which he saw concerning Judah and
 
 SERM. xvni.] THE CLIMAX OF ISAIAH'S HOPES. 313 
 
 Jerusalem, when lie declared that God had nourished 
 and brought up children and that they had rebelled 
 against Him, that God would ease Him of His adver- 
 saries and avenge Him of His enemies, that the strong 
 should be as tow, and the maker of it as a spark, and 
 that they should both burn together and none should 
 quench them, nor that vision of a new heavens and a 
 new earth, when Jerusalem should be a rejoicing and 
 her people a joy, when the voice of weeping should no 
 more be heard in her, nor the voice of crying, which 
 cheered him, as we have been wont to believe, before 
 his race was run and the torch of prophecy was given 
 into some other hand. 
 
 I am aware that an argument may be drawn from 
 those allusions to Gentiles upon which I propose to 
 speak, in favour of the notion that the later chapters of 
 this book were not written by Isaiah. Why, it will be 
 asked, should such allusions be so much more frequent 
 in these discourses than in the others ? Must not we 
 suspect that they belong to a later stage of the history 
 when the Jews had been groaning under Gentile govern- 
 ment, as in the seventy years' captivity, rather than 
 to the time of Hezekiah, when they had had no such 
 experience ? To the first suggestion I answer, that the 
 relations into which Samaria was entering with the 
 heathen Syria, and Ahaz with the heathen Assyria, were 
 the hint and occasion of Isaiah's earliest inspirations ; 
 that a struggle between heathendom concentrated in the 
 person of the Assyrian monarch, and the holy city ruled 
 by Hezekiah, is the subject of the chapters preceding 
 the fortieth ; that what one finds in the succeeding 
 chapters is not the record or anticipation of a conflict 
 of a different kind, but a clear intimation that the
 
 314 THE APOSTLE AND THE PKOPHET. [SERM. 
 
 same conflict would be prolonged for many generations. 
 To the reason given for referring these discourses to the 
 later years of the captivity, I answer that the symbols 
 of the warrior who fights with Edom and Bozrah, are 
 the symbols of a native prince, and that I cannot see 
 why upon any view of Isaiah's mission these should have 
 been more natural in a time when there was no native 
 prince and no prospect of any, when the restoration 
 of the city, of the temple, of the order of the priests 
 and sacrifices, not the establishment of a throne in 
 Jerusalem, was that which patriots and holy men were 
 expecting, than to one living in a time when there 
 was such a throne, an actual heir of David sitting upon 
 it, a righteous ruler, one who had been permitted to 
 assert the glory of Israel and of the Lord God of Israel. 
 
 I do not refer to the authority of St. Paul in the 
 Epistle to the Romans to decide this question. It may 
 be said reasonably enough, that he would of course 
 quote any prophecy by the title which it ordinarily 
 bore in his day, and that he was too much occupied 
 with his subject to engage in a discussion which had 
 no direct bearing upon it. But I refer to him for 
 the light he throws upon the actual intention of the 
 passages which I am considering. 
 
 In the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans 
 he had been speaking of the great heaviness and con- 
 tinual sorrow which he had in his heart when he 
 thought of the condition of his countrymen. They 
 were his kinsmen according to the flesh ; to them per- 
 tained the adoption and the glory and the covenants 
 and the giving of the law and the promises. Theirs 
 were the fathers ; " of them/' he adds, " as concerning 
 the flesh, Christ has come, who is over all, God blessed
 
 xviii.] ST. PAUL'S SORROW. 315 
 
 for ever." The inheritors of all these mighty blessings 
 were, it seemed to him, cutting themselves off from 
 them. He could not help seeing that a tremendous 
 crisis was at hand, that in a few years the holy city 
 and the temple would be trampled under foot by the 
 Gentiles, that the great empire of the world would 
 extinguish the nation which it had subdued. With that 
 prospect before him the apostle had wished, could 
 even then wish, that he might himself be accursed if 
 his race could be preserved. And this was not merely 
 a patriot's passion. The truth and faithfulness of God, 
 upon which his own existence and all his hopes stood, 
 seemed involved in the continued preservation of the 
 people who had been called out to be His witnesses. 
 To contemplate the world without them, was like 
 believing that all the past had been nothing, that the 
 whole scheme of the divine government had been set at 
 nought and defeated by man's wilfulness. No dream 
 of a possible future, no thought of blessings for new 
 tribes and kindreds of the earth, could console the 
 apostle under such a thought. It was anguish to him, 
 not as a Hebrew of the Hebrews only, but as a man. 
 For what had man to hope for but the knowledge of 
 God ? And if God were other in the present and the 
 future than He had revealed Himself in the past, what 
 knowledge could there be of Him or of His ways ? 
 
 But a deep discovery had been made to the inmost 
 heart of St. Paul, which had sustained him through 
 that tremendous personal conflict that is described to us 
 in the seventh chapter of his Epistle, and which was not 
 less available in these doubts concerning the destiny 
 of his own race and of mankind. He had been taught 
 that in himself, that is in his flesh, dwelt no good
 
 316 HIS DISCOVERY. [SEBM. 
 
 thing. As a separate creature lie could do nothing 
 that was right to do. Yet there was that in him which 
 was perpetually aiming at something good, perpetually 
 struggling and desiring to be in conformity with this 
 good. This will, this spirit in him, what was it ? 
 Whence did it come ? It pleased God to show him that 
 there was a mighty Deliverer who had asserted His 
 own dominion over this feeble, struggling, sinking 
 spirit, who had declared that it had a life in Him 
 which it had not in itself. He believed that this Deli- 
 verer was the Son of God, and He had been manifested 
 that men might become sons of God in Him. 
 
 Saul of Tarsus, circumcised the eighth day, brought 
 up at the feet of Gamaliel in the straitest sect of his 
 religion, had learnt in mature life that his descent from 
 Abraham, his circumcision, his knowledge of the law, 
 and his strictness in fulfilling it, did not make him a 
 true and righteous man; that circumcision and the law 
 were witnesses that he had no righteousness of his own, 
 but was righteous only in virtue of his relationship to 
 the righteous God. This relationship he now knew to 
 be a real one. Christ by taking flesh, by dying, by 
 rising again, had proved it to be fixed, eternal, de- 
 pendent on no accidents, grounded on the divine 
 constitution of things. What a light did this throw 
 npon the calling of the Jewish nation, upon the end 
 for which it existed ! Was it not chosen out to testify 
 of this divine relationship ? Were not the covenant 
 and the law and the promises, all so many declarations 
 that God who is a Spirit claims the spiritual creature 
 whom He had formed in His own image, as His servant 
 and His child ? Was not the sin of the Jews of St. 
 Paul's day, of the Pharisee as well as of the Sadducee,
 
 xviir.] THE TRUE SEED OF ABRAHAM. 317 
 
 that he did not estimate enough his own high calling, 
 that he was content to be a child of Abraham, when 
 he should have asserted his right to be a child of God? 
 What was his denial of Jesus, his cry "This Man 
 blasphemeth, because he saith he is the Son of God," 
 but saying ' there is no relationship, no living bond 
 between us and God ' ? 
 
 Now such men, St. Paul saw, could not be the 
 representatives of the Jewish nation, could not per- 
 petuate its existence. They denied the very law and 
 principle of its existence ; they set up a law and prin- 
 ciple directly in opposition to that. They said, " we 
 are Jews simply because we can trace our pedigree up 
 to Abraham ." By taking that ground, they renounced 
 all that was peculiar in their position, all that made it 
 other and nobler than that of any heathen people. 
 They simply measured their privileges of descent 
 against the privileges of Persian or Greek or Latin 
 descent, when their legislator had heaped contempt 
 upon all such pride, bidding them come with their 
 baskets of fruits before the Lord and say, " A. Syrian 
 ready to perish was my father." In all the most 
 memorable passages of their history, those which 
 they most delighted to dwell upon, because they seemed 
 to cut them off from the neighbouring tribes, in the 
 rejection of Ishmael, in the preference of Jacob to Esau, 
 a testimony had been given that not the seed of the 
 flesh, but the seed of the promise, was the heir, that 
 God not Abraham was the source of their national life. 
 And therefore the apostle triumphantly argues, that 
 those Israelites who like himself were maintaining the 
 reality of these promises, their own actual relationship 
 to God, and were looking upon their descent from
 
 318 APPEAL TO ISAIAH'S TESTIMONY. [SKRM. 
 
 Abraham as entirely accidental and subordinate to this, 
 were in fact maintaining the perpetuity of the Jewish 
 nation; that in them God's assurance that its perma- 
 nence should be greater than that of the hills and 
 mountains, that he had not and would not cast away 
 His people, was vindicated and accomplished. 
 
 Now when he had made this statement good by 
 other arguments and appeals to other passages of 
 Scripture, he adds, "Esaias also crieth concerning 
 Israel, 'though the number of the children of Israel be 
 as the sand of the sea, a remnant shall be saved. For 
 He will finish the work and cut it short in righteous- 
 ness : because a short work will the Lord make upon 
 the earth/ And as Esaias said before, ' Except the Lord 
 of Sabaoth had left us a seed, we had been as Sodoma 
 and been made like unto Gomorrha.' '' Here then is 
 St. Paul's inspired commentary upon that series of pas- 
 sages in Isaiah's prophecies which speak of a remnant, 
 a series most memorable and most characteristic of 
 the earlier portion of the book, as some of the learned 
 and intelligent writers who are anxious to separate it 
 from the latter portion, have clearly perceived. But 
 understand Isaiah's doctrine respecting the remnant as 
 St. Paul understood it (and I remarked in a previous 
 lecture that we must utterly distort the prophet's 
 plainest illustrations and destroy the contrast as well 
 as the connection of his book, if we put any other sense 
 upon these expressions, if we suppose for instance that 
 the remnant were merely a few faithful men saved out 
 of a ruining nation instead of being the proof that it 
 was not ruined, that the kernel of it lived when the 
 leaves and boughs were broken off), and then the 
 most characteristic parts of the latter prophecy also
 
 xrni.] THE SECRET OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 319 
 
 acquire a new and striking significance. For instance, 
 the words which I have taken as my text this after- 
 noon, seem as if they were written expressly to estab- 
 lish the truth which St. Paul discovered in the prophet, 
 and by doing so they illuminate and harmonise a multi- 
 tude of passages in these discourses with which they 
 have no apparent relation. The sore and tremendous 
 discipline to which the nation has been subjected, 
 leads it to exclaim at last, " Doubtless thou art our 
 Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us and Israel 
 acknowledge us not." God had been leading it by all 
 its humiliations to this conviction. Once brought to 
 it, this race was what God had meant it to be ; it was 
 capable of doing the work and achieving the victories 
 which He had destined for it. 
 
 What these victories were, St. Paul, still continuing 
 to illustrate and interpret Isaiah, will also teach us. 
 He begins by explaining the nature of his countrymen's 
 unbelief. He does it in the words of our prophet. 
 " They stumbled," he says, " at that stumbling-stone, 
 as it is written, 'Behold I layinZion a stumbling-stone 
 and a rock of offence : and whosoever believeth on him 
 shall not be ashamed/ '' He makes the application of 
 this passage clear by saying that his countrymen have 
 a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge, for 
 being ignorant of God's righteousness and going 1 about 
 to establish their own righteousness, they have not 
 submitted to the righteousness of God. ' Christ/ he 
 adds, ' is the end of the law for righteousness to every 
 one that believeth/ This foundation, this under-ground 
 of the national fabric, this corner-stone of its unity, he 
 proclaims to be a living and righteous Person. He who 
 stood on this ground, he who believed in this righteous
 
 820 THE JEW AND GENTILE. [SERM. 
 
 Person, was righteous, was united to his brethren. He 
 who sought to be righteous in himself, lost his righteous- 
 ness by that very effort; he became selfish, self -exalting, 
 separate from his fellows. The one was ' not ashamed/ 
 was not disappointed of that which he sought ; he had 
 a real righteousness, which made itself visible in his 
 acts. He 'did not make haste;' he was not restless 
 and feverish, striving to justify himself, to make out a 
 case for himself, or to obtain an apparent righteousness 
 in the sight of men. The other was always busy, con- 
 triving, inventing fresh plans to make amends for past 
 disappointments, exhibiting no results of his weary 
 activity, but discontent with himself who was ever 
 twining ropes of sand; discontent with God who reaped 
 where He had not sown ; discontent with his brethren 
 who were always hindering him or eclipsing him. The 
 quiet faith in the foundation as opposed to this restless- 
 ness, St. Paul describes in words taken from the book 
 of Deuteronomy, and which he interprets by the divine 
 Light, " The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and 
 in thy heart : that is, the word of faith, which we 
 preach ; that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the 
 Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath 
 raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." 
 
 He repeats again part of Isaiah's words that we 
 may know he is still commenting upon them. Then he 
 passes by what may seem at first a sudden transition 
 to the Gentiles, and the relation between them and the 
 Jews. " For there is no difference/' he says, "between 
 the Jew and the Greek : for the same Lord over all 
 is rich unto all that call upon Him. For whosoever 
 shall call upon the Name of the Lord, shall be saved." 
 What is the connection between these passages ? I
 
 xviii.] THE JEW ALWAYS A PREACHER. 321 
 
 apprehend it is this. As long as his countrymen were 
 seeking to establish their own righteousness, so long 
 they could not acknowledge a common ground for them 
 and for other men to stand upon. They must prove a 
 title for themselves resting on their hereditary privi- 
 leges or on their personal holiness which would exclude 
 others. But the moment they acknowledged the foun- 
 dation which was laid, the moment they felt it to be 
 the rock on which they were standing, not a rock of 
 offence, that moment they confessed a foundation 
 large enough for the whole human race, they asserted 
 their privilege to be this, that they were heralds of 
 blessing to the human race. St. Paul goes on to show 
 how Isaiah having seen and understood this to be 
 the basis of his nation's existence and glory, imme- 
 diately perceived that it must be a herald to the world. 
 He quotes the words from the fifty- second chapter, 
 " How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the 
 Gospel of peace, and bring gla-1 tidings of good things \" 
 The apostle does not, indeed, pretend that these words 
 were first of all applicable to the Gentiles. He knew 
 that the prophet had said in that chapter, " Say to the 
 cities of Judah, Behold your God." He knew that the 
 first work of the righteous king, the first duty of every 
 righteous Jew, was to tell his countrymen of the cove- 
 nant which God had made with them, of the founda- 
 tion which God had laid for them in Zion. But he 
 quotes again from the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, the 
 words, " Lord, who hath believed our report," to shew 
 that the message was delivered, and that those to whom 
 it was proclaimed did not receive it. And therefore be 
 adds, " Isaiah is very bold and saith, ' I was found of 
 them that sought me not ; I was made manifest unto 
 

 
 822 AND A PREACHER OF CHRIST. [SERM. 
 
 them that asked not after me/ but to Israel he saith, 
 ' All day long have I stretched forth my hands unto a 
 disobedient and gainsaying people.' ' 
 
 These are not mere chance passages taken out for a 
 particular purpose. They suggest hints which discover 
 to us the whole mind of the Prophet as well as of the 
 Apostle, and the close national and spiritual sympathy 
 by which at the distance of seven hundred years they 
 were united. Isaiah was profoundly convinced that 
 the words which he had quoted from an older seer 
 would be fulfilled ; that the mountain of the Lord's 
 house would be established on the top of the mountains, 
 and all nations should flow unto it ; from Zion should 
 go forth the law and the word of the Lord from Jeru- 
 salem. He was learning all his life, till the very end 
 of it, what made such a prediction apparently incredible 
 and impossible, most incredible and impossible to the 
 wisest man who knew his country best. He was all 
 his life, to the very end of it, learning in what way 
 this assurance would be realised. And now that he 
 has fully apprehended the presence of the invisible 
 Redeemer and King, the Wisdom, the Counsellor, now 
 that sorrow has taught him not only to reconcile the 
 characters of the sufferer, the despised and rejected, 
 with the warrior and the conqueror, but to feel that 
 every great battle must be fought by self-sacrifice, that 
 the greatest conquest must come through the greatest 
 humiliation; now he is prepared for the last and highest 
 revelation, the revelation of the great Head of Humanity, 
 of Him in whom all the nations are to be blessed. It 
 was not a future king of Israel that was revealed to him, 
 but One who was then reigning. It was not a stone 
 that was to be hereafter laid that was revealed to him,
 
 xvni.] THE BATTLE AND VICTORY. 323 
 
 but one that was laid then. It was not some great 
 champion of humanity who should appear at some 
 distant time, but One who was then and always had 
 been, the Light of men. It was not some future con- 
 queror that should arise to claim the Gentiles as his 
 subjects; it was One who was then asserting by judg- 
 ments and deliverances His dominion over all the ends 
 of the earth ; who was declaring Himself King of Kings, 
 and Lord of Lords ; who was putting down the inhuman, 
 anarchical, godless power, which asserted its own title 
 to universal dominion. 
 
 Isaiah then had a gospel for the nations in his own 
 day. He felt that his high calling as a Jew was to 
 preach that gospel. But if it was a true gospel, it must 
 contain in itself a pledge and promise of acts to be 
 done that had not yet been done, of words to be spoken 
 that had been kept secret from the foundation of the 
 world. The Word, the Counsellor, the Prince of Peace, 
 could not always be hidden, could not always be seen 
 in imperfect human mirrors, could not always work 
 through secondary agents. The Sufferer could not 
 always be known only in the sufferings of those who 
 had caught a portion of His life and sympathy. The 
 Conqueror could not only assert His dominion over 
 Edom or Bozrah, or over even one mighty empire that 
 tried its strength with His. There must come a 
 moment, when all the subordinate actors in God's 
 drama should give way to the one central hero of it : 
 when all its preparatory conflicts and crises should be 
 gathered up into one which He should carry on alone, 
 having of the people none with Him. " That moment," 
 says St. Paul, "is come. The battle is fought, the 
 victory is won. The Son of God ' has been down into 
 
 T 2
 
 824 THE MIGHT OF THE JEW. [SERW. 
 
 death, and the grave, and hell. With the enemies of 
 Jews, with the enemies of Gentiles, He has fought. I 
 proclaim Him the Deliverer and King of Mankind, 
 the spring and source of a new life to a race of fallen 
 spirits, created to be the sons of God, created to bear 
 His likeness. We bid you believe that God in raising 
 Him from the dead, has claimed you for his children 
 and given you a right to say, ' Doubtless Thou art oar 
 Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel 
 acknowledge us not. 5 I bid you not only believe this 
 with your heart, but confess it with your mouth. I 
 bid you say to all the nations, Doubtless He is your 
 Father, though you can make out no proof that you 
 are sons of Abraham. And thus, and thus only, shall 
 the Gentiles be subdued to Judah and Jerusalem ; thus 
 only shall it be seen that a word has gone forth from 
 Mount Zion which has power to make all things new, 
 yea, to create a new heaven and a new earth." 
 
 St. Paul has commented upon Isaiah; the history 
 of the modern world has commented upon St. Paul. 
 Is it a dream or a fact that the Jewish nation has been 
 a sharp threshing instrument, beating in pieces the 
 nations, that it has asserted its dominion over them, 
 that it has compelled them, however reluctantly, to 
 accept the yoke of a Son of David ? When you think 
 of those you have seen or heard of who bear the name 
 of Jews, you are disposed to answer that there has been 
 indeed a very powerful influence going forth from them, 
 that all Europe has felt it and confessed it ; but that 
 so far from being a spiritual or elevating influence, it 
 has been utterly immoral and anti-spiritual, the most 
 formal and systematic assertion ever put forth in the 
 world, that money is the power which rules it, the
 
 xvni.] THE NEW HEAVEN. 325 
 
 god which is to be worshipped in it. But a moment's 
 thought will shew you that when you are making this 
 statement, you are not speaking of a Jewish nation at 
 all, but merely of those who exist in every land to 
 proclaim that there is no Jewish nation, that there is 
 nothing to bind together the fragments which might 
 compose one. However much you may wonder at the 
 mysterious and awful power which these chaotic relics 
 of a former universe have been able to exert over 
 civilised societies, at the influence which they have 
 obtained over the counsels of statesmen and princes ; 
 however striking the fact may seem to you (and there 
 are few facts more striking) that in every temple of 
 Mammon there are men bearing witness of a living God, 
 reverencing the books which declare that they are meant 
 to be a race of priests to Him, you must be very blind 
 to all the records of history if you suppose that this is 
 the kind of trophy by which the Hebrew race has 
 asserted and is asserting its dominion over Gentile faith 
 and Gentile intellect. The fishermen of Galilee, the 
 tent-maker of Tarsus, when they had once learnt to say, 
 ft Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be 
 ignorant of us and Israel acknowledge us not/' went 
 forth with that proclamation of a one Father who had 
 sent forth His only begotten Son, to adopt all kindreds 
 of the earth into His family and to baptise them with 
 His Spirit. Before that testimony, proceeding from 
 those insignificant lips, backed by no authority, defended 
 by no subtle arguments, the Roman Pantheon fell down. 
 All the attempts of Greek Neo-Platonic wit and wisdom 
 to reconstruct it, to fill the heavens with a new set 
 of earthly demons surmounted by a philosophical 
 abstraction, failed utterly. The power of emperors
 
 826 THE NEW EARTH. [SSKM. 
 
 was as weak as that of teachers ; they struggled, 
 persecuted, succumbed, and were broken in pieces. 
 Was not this the triumphant march of a conqueror, 
 coming with dyed garments, travelling in the greatness 
 of his strength ? And was not this Conqueror He of 
 whom it was written in letters of Greek and Latin and 
 Hebrew, " This is the King of the Jews " ? And was 
 not the cross on which those letters were written the 
 symbol of His triumph ? Was it not the cross in which, 
 as St. Paul declares, the Wisdom and Power as well as 
 the Love of God manifested themselves to man ? 
 
 Here was a new heaven, more perfectly a new heaver, 
 than Isaiah had ever dreamed of ; a heaven peopled 
 no longer with dark, capricious, malignant forms, such 
 as it appeared to the eye of the poor wayfarer, and no 
 less to the eye of the priest who was busy in devising 
 means of making some one of these forms propitious to 
 the particular locality over which it ruled ; nor yet a 
 cold expanse lighted up by a distant star here and 
 there, as it looked to the philosopher ; but the home of 
 One who, of His tender love towards men, gave His 
 only Son to take their flesh upon Him and suffer 
 death, that all mankind should follow the example of 
 His great humility ; a heaven from which there came, 
 and could come, nothing but light and blessing to the 
 earth. And just so far as this new heaven was con- 
 fessed, as fresh mists from below did not darken and 
 conceal it, there was also a new earth. Men went 
 forth to till and subdue the ground with a sense that 
 they had a Father's blessing and a Father's command 
 to cheer them and give them confidence in the work. 
 The woman rose to her rightful glory as one of her 
 race and kindred, whom He that is mighty had magni-
 
 xviii. J CHfilSTIANITY EEVIVED BY JUDAISM. 327 
 
 fied ; the serf knew that he was the brother of the 
 King who had taken the form of a servant, of the Son 
 who came to make all free. All this came to pass 
 when the root out of the dry ground which Isaiah 
 spoke of, proved to be the root of the feelings, thoughts, 
 habits of mind which had sprung up, not untended, 
 not neglected by the Divine Husbandman, on the 
 Gentile soil ; when the God of Abraham was shewn to 
 be the great King above all gods. 
 
 But the new heaven has been darkened with the old 
 idolatrous and evil forms, and therefore the new earth 
 has been stained with the old crimes and oppressions. 
 Christian men, forgetting the great truth which they 
 have inherited from the Jew, have relapsed into 
 heathen notions and conceptions, have thought of God 
 as altogether such an one as themselves. Again and 
 again these tendencies have reached a fearful height 
 in the Christian Church, men have wearied themselves 
 in the greatness of their way, they have become ex- 
 hausted with their multitudinous superstitions and 
 with the philosophical schemes and scoffs which have 
 encountered them. Then there has come a revival 
 always brought about by a recurrence, too often a 
 partial and one-sided recurrence, to old Hebrew 
 maxims and principles. Mahometanism proclaiming 
 an absolute divine Sovereign, to whom all owed 
 allegiance and devotion, struck at one part of the 
 heathenism to which Christendom had yielded. It had 
 the blessed effect of teaching Christendom by its great 
 denial, practically as well as theoretically, to grasp the 
 truth, that, if the Sovereign is to be a Father, there 
 must be a Son who is honoured even as He is honoured. 
 When that belief had degenerated into the ackaow-
 
 328 WHAT IT MAY DO HEREAFTEB. [SJSBM. 
 
 ledgment of an earthly Father as the centre and bond 
 of Christian society : when heathen notions of sacri- 
 fices, heathen confusions between the sacrifice and 
 Him to whom it was presented, had crept in under the 
 shadow of that doctrine ; when the classical heathenism, 
 which arose with the revival of letters, had partly 
 shaken the ecclesiastical heathenism, partly incorpo- 
 rated itself with it ; the Jewish faith of the Reformers 
 appeared with its protest against idolatry, with its 
 assertion of a direct relationship between God and 
 man, with a Gospel from God to man. 
 
 But it must not be concealed that Christ is regarded 
 by the successors of Reformers, as well as by those who 
 oppose them, rather as the head of their sect who has 
 persuaded the Lord of the universe to save them from 
 the ruin which he had designed for it, than as the 
 well-beloved Son who has perfectly accomplished His 
 Father's will by giving Himself up for men, in whose 
 lovingkindness we see the perfect image of His loving- 
 kindness, from whom He came and with whom He 
 dwells. Instead of beginning with a declaration of 
 God's will to men as Jewish prophets and apostles did, 
 we are trying to heap up mountains by which men may 
 climb to heaven, like the giants of heathen fable. And, 
 as always must be the case where there is such an in- 
 version of right order, our schemes and devices become 
 infinite. Each asserts a right to his own, each com- 
 plains of the arbitrariness and uncertainty of every 
 other. There are hopeless attempts to settle all 
 questions by appeal to some absolute authority ; as 
 hopeless attempts to settle them by appeals to each 
 man's individual judgment. Divines, churches, sects 
 dispute ; statesmen and economists say that the earth
 
 xvni.] PilOPHECY FULFILLED. 329 
 
 has maxims of its own, which regulate it wholly 
 irrespective of any divine Law of Righteousness, the 
 nature of which we seem unable to settle. Those 
 maxims are found by the peoples of all lands intoler- 
 able, setting man against man, making the gold of 
 Ophir precious above all the beings who toil for it. 
 The stronger of them say, " We will have a new earth, 
 at least, since we cannot have a new heaven/' Their 
 endeavours to produce one on such conditions prove 
 anarchical and suicidal. 
 
 It is no strange faith, at such a time, which many 
 brought up in most different schools seem beginning to 
 entertain, that the old Jewish race may still have its 
 old work to do for the world, that it may re-appear as 
 a nation, a nation of conquerors, when men least 
 expect it, that so the visions of prophets may very 
 strictly and literally accomplish themselves. It is no 
 strange faith, but one which men reading the book of 
 God's word by the light of facts find it hard to escape 
 from. I would check no one either in the indulgence 
 of the salutary terrors which may arise in his mind 
 wh^r he reads St. Paul's words, " Thou wilt say then, 
 ' the branches were broken off that I might be graffed 
 in.' Well ; because of unbelief they were broken off, 
 and thou standest by faith. Be not highminded, but 
 fear. For if God spared not the natural branches, 
 take heed le^t He also spare not thee." Highminded 
 Greeks, Latins, Teutons ! surely we may all think of 
 this solemn saying, and tremble lest God's vineyard, 
 the fruits of which we have not rendered to Him but 
 taken to ourselves, should be given to another race. 
 Nor will I quench any hope which has been drawn 
 from the words, " And they also if they abide not in
 
 830 WE MAY ACT AS IF IT WEBB. [SERM. 
 
 unbelief, shall be graffed in. For God is able to graft 
 them in again." A thought most cheering surely^ 
 with whatever punishments to ourselves it may be- 
 accompanied ; a promise that the new heaven and the 
 new earth shall both have their realisation. But I 
 would desire that we should connect these thoughts 
 with two others. One is that this blessing can only 
 come to the outcasts of Israel when they shall give up 
 saying to themselves, " We have Abraham to our 
 father ; " when renouncing all faith in the power of 
 their gold, in their intellectual gifts, in their Caucasian 
 blood, they shall cry, " Doubtless Thou art our Father,, 
 though Abraham be ignorant of us and Israel acknow- 
 ledge us not." So they will establish their spiritual 
 descent from all the great men who have been before 
 them, so they will claim to be parts of an organic 
 nation which has never been extinct, because though 
 it has been banished from its old soil it has stood in 
 the person of its divine King. 
 
 The other caution is this. We, brethren, have na 
 right to believe that these prophecies, whatever fresh 
 fulfilments may come out of them, are yet unfulfilled. 
 We exist only to witness of their fulfilment. Easter- 
 day says to us, a new and regenerate life of the uni- 
 verse has begun. We baptized men are to tell all 
 nations that it has begun. If you say, " Doubtless 
 Thou art our Father," to whatever tribe, or race, or 
 nation you belong, " our Father who hast redeemed 
 us, justified us, reconciled us, given us a new and 
 divine life in Thy Son," you dwell in a new heaven. 
 If, in the faith of that heaven and of your citizenship 
 in it, you go forth to all your duties as members of a 
 nation, as members of families, if you remember that
 
 WE MAY ACT AS IP IT WEKE. 831 
 
 the Lord by whom you live has died and lived for 
 every man whom you meet, that any good you do that 
 man is a good done to Him, that any wrong you do 
 that man is a wrong done to Him, you will prove 
 that there is a new earth receiving light from that new 
 heaven, an earth wherein also dwelleth righteousness 
 and peace. The visions in the sixty-fifth chapter of 
 Isaiah, visions for Gentiles as well as Jews, are visions 
 indeed of all spiritual blessings, of that which the eye 
 cannot see, nor the ear hear, nor the heart conceive. 
 But grounded on these are visions of earthly blessed- 
 ness which God has joined to them, which we must not 
 put asunder. " They shall build houses and inhabit 
 them. They shall plant vineyards and eat the fruit of 
 them. They shall not build and another inhabit; they 
 shall not plant and another eat. For as the days of a 
 tree, are the days of my people, and mine elect shall 
 long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not 
 labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble. For they 
 are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their 
 offspring with them. And it shall come to pass, that 
 before they call, I will answer ; and while they are yet 
 speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb shall 
 feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the 
 bullock, and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They 
 shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, 
 saith the Lord."
 
 SERMON XIX. 
 
 THE VILLAGE GREATER THAN THE CITIES. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 1st Sunday after Easter. April 18, 1852.) 
 
 But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the 
 thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me 
 that is to be ruler in Israel ; whose goings forth have been from 
 of old, from everlasting. MICAH v. 2. 
 
 MICAH the Morasthite was a contemporary of Isaiah. 
 The word of the Lord is said to have come to him in 
 the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. From a 
 passage in Jeremiah, which I shall notice hereafter, it 
 would seem that his prophetical work belongs to the 
 last of these reigns. He was therefore younger than 
 Isaiah. He may have been one of those disciples to 
 whom he committed his testimony. There are many 
 striking resemblances in his short book to the one which 
 we have been examining during the last six weeks. 
 He quotes the passage respecting the last days which 
 Isaiah himself probably quoted from an older prophet. 
 Though his commentary is very different, his attention 
 may first have been drawn to it by hearing Isaiah's 
 discourse. The woes which he denounces upon the 
 great ' men of the land who practise evil because it is 
 in the power of their hand ; who covet fields and take 
 them by violence ; who oppress a man and his house,
 
 6RRM. TIX.] HOW PROPHETS LEARN OF EACH OTHER. 33$ 
 
 even a man and his heritage/ recall those splendid 
 passages in which Isaiah laid bare the corruptions of a 
 time of seeing, nay of actually commencing, reforma- 
 tion. The hypocrisy of that time presents itself to 
 Micah with the same terrible force as it did to the son 
 of Amoz. There is a community of sentiment between 
 them which indicates, I think, more than the fact that 
 they were writing concerning the same condition of 
 society ; though one cannot dare positively to affirm 
 that they stood in the relation of master and scholar. 
 
 The influence of Isaiah upon him, however exerted, 
 we may be sure served to awaken his spirit, not to 
 crush it, to make him conscious of a native inspira- 
 tion, not to supply him with second-hand phrases and 
 notions. He may have had a pious affection for expres- 
 sions, modes of thought, subjects which his predecessor 
 and guide had first brought before him ; he might like 
 to recur to them, nay prefer them to those which 
 strictly belonged to himself. But his delight in them 
 would arise from the fact, that the hour when he re- 
 ceived the lesson was one of new inward revelation ; or 
 that, if he did not understand or heed it at first hear- 
 ing, it came back to him in some time of confusion and 
 distress, telling him where he might find the clearness 
 and deliverance which no school and no mortal voice 
 could impart. I do not know whether there are any 
 passages in this book, which give us more the feeling 
 that Micah was standing face to face with both the 
 visible things and the invisible truths which he speaks 
 of, than those which he has in common with Isaiah, 
 and which some might say he borrowed from him. He 
 appears to have lived in the country parts of Judaea, 
 while Isaiah's work was mainly in the city. The
 
 334 MIOAH A COUNTRY PROPHET. [s*wr. 
 
 phenomena of natnre are therefore all familiar to him. 
 He connects with the convulsions of the earth political 
 storms and earthquakes which were about to visit his 
 country. " The Lord cometh forth out of His place, 
 and will come down, and tread upon the high places of 
 the earth. And the mountains shall be molten under 
 Him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the 
 fire, and as the waters that are poured down a steep 
 place. For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and 
 for the sins of the house of Israel." The grasping land- 
 holder ; the poor man cast out of the house in which 
 his fathers dwelt; the reckless violence of the soldiers 
 spread over the country, " who pulled off the robe with 
 the garment of them that passed by securely as men 
 averse from war;" the women and children driven from 
 their houses by creditors, who, in violation of the Mosaic 
 law, seized their goods and their raiment for the debts 
 of their husbands and fathers ; these are no pictures 
 presented to the imagination of the prophet ; he has 
 seen them with his eyes. And when he cries at the 
 sight of them, " Arise and depart, for this is not your 
 rest," meaning by those words, I believe, " Begone, 
 tyrants, into a land of captivity, for you have deter- 
 mined that this land of yours shall be polluted and 
 shall be no resting-place for you or for your brethren," 
 he has the clearest assurance in his own mind that 
 this must be the effect of the evils which he beholds, 
 though he may have first learnt from Isaiah, or from 
 some other holy man, the eternal connection between 
 mortal sins and divine judgments. 
 
 Micah had therefore a special education of his own. 
 Critics have remarked the effect of it in giving a 
 roughness and abruptness to his style which makes it
 
 nx.] HE DENOUNCES THE CAPITALS. 335 
 
 A striking contrast to the lyrical freedom and richness 
 of Isaiah's. But there is another point, apparently the 
 characteristic one, of Micah' s prophecy, which is closely 
 connected with the circumstances of his outward life. 
 The word of the Lord which came to him, we are told 
 in the first verse of this book, was concerning Samaria 
 and Jerusalem. These cities do not merely stand for 
 the countries of which they were capitals. " What is 
 the transgression of Jacob ? " Micah asks at the very 
 commencement of his prophecy. " Is it not Samaria? 
 What are the high-places of Judah ? Are they not 
 Jerusalem ? " In other words, he views all the corrup- 
 tions of the land, those which were bringing ruin upon 
 every part of it, as gathered up in these the supposed 
 centres of its strength. They stood out as rivals one 
 to another, representing the quarrels and hostility of 
 the tribes. They stood out as the representatives of 
 the religion of Israel and Judah respectively. Though 
 the first calves had been set up in Bethel, Samaria since 
 the time of Ahab had become the seat of the graven 
 images of the gods. She had gathered from all the 
 land the tributes which were to maintain her idolatries. 
 "And all these harlot hires," he now declares, will be 
 carried off into another land, still to be turned to the 
 same use, to enrich the idol-temples of Assyria. 
 
 Such an expectation, I said, when I was speaking of 
 a similar prophecy in Isaiah, would have sounded most 
 cheering to the inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem, as 
 it was the announcement of the fall of an enemy, of 
 that country which then, or a very short time before, 
 they had regarded as their most hateful, nay even, in 
 conjunction with Syria, as their most formidable, enemy. 
 But when Micah contemplates this coming judgment,
 
 336 HE IS NO FLATTERER OF HEZEKIAH. [SERM. 
 
 he "wails like the dragons, and mourns as the owls." 
 And this not merely because a portion of the Lord's 
 people is going into captivity, that indeed fills him 
 with sorrow, as he sees one and another city and village 
 of the land humbled and crushed by the invader, but 
 because their captivity is a sure witness of downfall to 
 the whole of it. Samaria with her graven images is 
 not, in Micah/ s mind, the contrast to Jerusalem, or the 
 rival of it. The evils of one he looks upon as essen- 
 tially the evils of the other. Therefore he anticipates 
 the same judgments for both. 
 
 It is in this way that the prophets tear off the masks 
 which hide the true condition of a people. We are 
 told frequently that they had the most exclusive pre- 
 ference for the religion of Jehovah, the religion of their 
 fathers, the most passionate and intolerant hatred of 
 every other. I alluded to this charge when I was 
 speaking of Elijah. I shewed you then how the pro- 
 testant against sensual and divided worship went to 
 Zarephath, a city in the country from whence Jezebel 
 and the Baal worship came, took refuge with a widow 
 of that city, treated her as one in behalf of whom all 
 the healing powers of the prophet, all the kindly offices 
 of the human brother, were to be exercised. Here is a 
 test of another kind. Micah is writing in the days of 
 Hezekiah. The worship of Jehovah had been re-estab- 
 lished in Jerusalem ; a king, evidently right-minded, 
 had himself been the restorer of it. What a moment 
 for a sectarian prophet to exhibit his gall against the 
 fallen or falling idolaters, his adulation of the pious 
 monarch, his exultation in the triumph of his own faith! 
 How stand the facts ? Micah perceives the same un- 
 rio-hteousness and oppression among the princes of
 
 six.] THE LYING PROPHETS. 33? 
 
 Judah as among those of the ten tribes ; therefore he is 
 certain that there is the same practical inward idolatry 
 among them. So far from thinking that the religion 
 of Samaria has destroyed it, and that the religion of 
 Jerusalem will save it, the religion and the religious 
 men of the one city as much as of the other are those 
 who fill him with terror and trembling. " They build 
 up Zion with blood," he exclaims, "and Jerusalem with 
 iniquity. The heads thereof judge for reward, and the 
 priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof 
 divine for money. Yet will they lean upon the Lord, 
 and say, ' Is not the Lord among us ? None evil can 
 come upon us.'" The men who assumed divine in- 
 spiration excited his indignation above all. We have 
 heard how every true prophet has denounced the 
 traders in prophecy, the men who lived by flattering 
 rulers or people, who frightened and cajoled them by 
 turns with lying guesses, who strengthened them in 
 sensual worship, in cowardice, oppression, and practical 
 unbelief. But from the time that the promise of Joel 
 began to be fulfilled, when the Spirit of the Lord was 
 so remarkably preparing the land for the great and 
 terrible day of the Assyrian invasion by raising up a 
 race of men of profound insight and foresight, when 
 their office began to acquire something of the stability 
 of the other offices in the commonwealth, when their 
 words were no longer merely preserved in the memories 
 of the people, but reduced to writing, then the coun- 
 terfeit race would exhibit a corresponding organisation 
 and development. Their trade would become more 
 systematised, their tricks and deceptions less gross, en- 
 riched by experience, perfected by the hints and phrases 
 which they could appropriate from the faithful and wise 
 
 z
 
 83S THE WICKED TRAFFIC IN WOKDS. [SEEM. 
 
 teachers. Accordingly, from this time we shall find the 
 exposure of these lying seers not prophets of Baal at 
 all, but men who used the name of Jehovah, canted 
 about the burden of the Lord, regarded the temple with 
 the profoundest veneration occupying a most conspi- 
 cuous place in all these books. Such exposures occur 
 frequently in Isaiah ; but amidst the many-sided reve- 
 lations which were made to him, we may easily overlook 
 them. Micah forces them upon us. " If a man," he 
 says, "walking in the spirit and falsehood do lie, 
 saying, I will prophesy to thee of wine and strong 
 drink ; he shall even be the prophet of this people*" 
 Again, " Thus saith the Lord concerning the prophel* 
 that make my people err, that bite with their teeth 
 and cry Peace : and he that putteth not into their 
 mouths, they even prepare war against him. Therefore 
 night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision,, 
 and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine ;. 
 and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the 
 day shall be dark over them. Then shall the seers be 
 ashamed and the diviners confounded : yea, they shall 
 all cover their lips, for there is no answer of God." 
 The feeling which these passages express, is that the 
 false prophet was far worse than the mere idolater, 
 that he was trifling with the very Spirit of truth, 
 misinterpreting a divine message which he was ap- 
 pointed to deliver. For Micah does not make the 
 falsehood of the prophet consist in this, that he pre- 
 tended to be taught when he had no Divine Teacher, 
 but that he abused the divine teaching to vile merce- 
 nary ends, that being conscious of a spiritual power and 
 illumination, he acted as if his words were his own 
 and he might sell them to the service of a great man.
 
 xix.] FUTURE VICTORIES OF ZION. 839 
 
 or a mob. The sacredness of words almost overwhelms 
 the mind of the prophet ; he knows them to be powers 
 greater than all which the mightiest animals can put 
 forth, greater than the most wonderful energies of 
 nature. And these, even these, the false prophet 
 Jhinks he may play with, and use for his own paltry 
 purposes, not considering that he is poisoning the very 
 source of a nation's life, that he is leading men to be- 
 lieve in a spirit of lies, instead of a God of truth, and 
 in all their daily acts to honour the one and deny the 
 other ! It is not wonderful, therefore, that a conscious- 
 ness of the reality of the divine commission grows 
 stronger in Micah as he apprehends the infinite 
 wickedness of this perversion of it. " Truly," he says, 
 " I am full of power by the Spirit of the Lord, and of 
 judgment, and of might, to declare unto Jacob his 
 transgression and to Israel his sin." And he adds 
 boldly, addressing himself to the capital of the house 
 of David which boasted of its freedom from all the 
 idolatries of Samaria addressing himself even to the 
 temple in which Jehovah was worshipped " Therefore 
 shall Zion for your sake " (that is to say, for the sake 
 of you, the rulers, the priests, and the prophets) " be 
 ploughed as a field and Jerusalem shall become heaps, 
 and the mountain of the house as the high places of 
 the forest." 
 
 Yet with all this, he is sure that the words of the old 
 prophet, which his countrymen loved to repeat, would 
 be fulfilled. " The mountain of the house of the Lord 
 shall be established on the mountains, and it shall be 
 exalted above the hills ; . and people shall flow unto it." 
 The vision of the fall of Jerusalem, even of the fall of 
 the Temple, does not shake his confidence in the least. 
 
 z 2
 
 340 BABYLON IB TO FIT HEE FOR THEM. [*" 
 
 It is when he has encountered this vision and fully 
 considered it, that his hopes become fixed upon a rock. 
 " All people," he says, " will walk every one in the name 
 of his God, and we will walk in the name of the Lord 
 our God for ever and ever." " And I will make her 
 that halted a remnant, and her that was cast far off a 
 strong nation : and the Lord shall reign over them in 
 Mount Zion from henceforth, even for ever. And thou, 
 tower of the flock, the stronghold of the daughter of 
 Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; 
 the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem/' 
 This strange contradiction, that the city should perish 
 and become heaps, and yet that it should become a 
 lawgiver among the nations that it should exercise a 
 power which it had never exercised in the days of its 
 splendour is the very one which we considered last 
 Sunday, the one which Isaiah brought before us in his 
 later chapters, and of which St. Paul gave so grand an 
 interpretation. But the contrast becomes even more 
 vivid in Micah than it was in Isaiah, both because it is 
 gathered up into fewer sentences, and because the mind 
 of Micah was more especially directed against the pride 
 and glory of the chief city. In the next verse we have 
 the very solution of the difficulty which Isaiah has 
 been giving us. " Now why dost thou cry out aloud ? 
 Is there no King in thee ? Is thy Counsellor perished ? 
 For pangs have taken thee as a woman in travail. Be 
 in pain, and labour to bring forth, daughter of Zion. 
 For now shalt thou go forth out of the city, and thou 
 shalt go even to Babylon. There shalt thou be de- 
 livered; there the Lord shall redeem thee from the 
 hand of thine enemies." To Micah, as to Isaiah, the 
 great truth has been revealed, that the strength and
 
 xix.] THE SHEPHERD. 841 
 
 unity of the nation stood not in any city, but in the 
 invisible King who was reigning within that city. To 
 him it has been revealed, that the nation must pass 
 through a death-travail, before the full power of life 
 which is within it can be manifested. To him it has 
 been made known, that there must be a battle between 
 the Jerusalem and the Babel power, and a great appa- 
 rent victory of the latter, before the chosen people can 
 freely fulfil its appointed task. 
 
 Micah adds, " Now also many nations are gathered 
 against thee,that say, 'Let her be defiled and let our eye 
 look upon Zion/ But they know not the thoughts of 
 the Lord, neither understand they His counsel : for He 
 shall gather them as the sheaves into the floor. Arise 
 and thresh, daughter of Zion, for I will make thy 
 horn iron, and I will make thy hoofs brass, and thou 
 shalt beat in pieces many people." We have here some 
 of those phrases which remind us so powerfully of 
 Isaiah, and make us feel that Micah may have studied 
 in his school. And it is not merely an outward re- 
 semblance. The actual Assyrian invasion led Isaiah to 
 meditate upon the Babel power generally ; the news of 
 a revolution in the city of Babylon and the embassy 
 from Merodach-Baladan led him to foresee the perils to 
 which Jerusalem would afterwards be exposed from 
 that land. Micah, in like manner, connects all that is 
 hereafter to befall Zion with the crisis she was passing 
 through in his time. He evidently anticipates that her 
 travail will even then issue in a glorious birth, that the 
 King of Judah shall even then be great unto the ends 
 of the earth. 
 
 But there is one passage in this part of Micah's 
 prophecy, to which there is nothing corresponding in
 
 312 BETHLEHEM AND JERUSALEM. [SERM. 
 
 Isaiah. It is that which I have chosen for my text. 
 " And thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little 
 among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall 
 He come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel ; 
 whose goings forth have been from of old, from ever- 
 lasting/' The humiliation of Jerusalem has been 
 especially present to the mind of our seer. Though it 
 calls itself the city of David, he believes that there will 
 be a stain upon its glory. He is taught to remember 
 that David's own birthplace was not that city, but 
 a little village, insignificant amidst the thousands 
 of Judah. He is led to anticipate that this place, 
 celebrated besides as that in which Rachel travailed 
 and died, will in some way be connected with a ruler 
 and deliverer, who should "stand and feed in the 
 strength of the Lord, in the majesty of the Name of 
 the Lord his God; who should be the peace when 
 the Assyrian should come into the land ; who should 
 waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land 
 of Nimrod in the entrances thereof." Such expressions 
 sufficiently shew, that Micah looked to this Ruler as a 
 present helper and deliverer, as one who should set 
 Judaea free from the enemies who were then oppressing 
 it. And yet this same Person was also to do works 
 which could not be accomplished in that generation, 
 which must spread through many generations. The 
 prophet could hardly suppose that the enemies of 
 Judah would then be completely destroyed; for he 
 had spoken of a terrible discomfiture and captivity as 
 preceding the emancipation. And even if he had such 
 a thought, the last words refer to a gradual influence 
 which his countrymen were to exert over other lands. 
 " The remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many
 
 six.] THE KING FROM EVERLASTING. 843 
 
 people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon 
 the grass, that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for 
 the sons of men." This is precisely the kind of 
 influence which the Jews in the Babylonian 'empire, or 
 elsewhere, might exert, when they were no more 
 united in a holy city, but when they became conscious 
 of another more mysterious unity in a Divine King 
 who made their apparent dissolution the means of 
 binding them more effectually and inwardly together. 
 
 I apprehend that Micah was divinely appointed to 
 speak of this unity, especially in opposition to that 
 other artificial and material unity which his country- 
 men were resting in. In this sense he contrasts 
 Bethlehem with Jerusalem. He may not have perceived 
 in what way the Ruler or Shepherd he spoke of would 
 be connected with Bethlehem. The name may have 
 been a seed dropped in the ground to die and bear 
 fruit some other day. Nor may he have had as distinct 
 and full a view of the Shepherd himself as Isaiah had. 
 Yet he saw as clearly that he could not be confounded 
 with any temporary earthly prince. " His goings 
 forth were of old, from everlasting." He had been the 
 King in the days of David and Solomon, He had not 
 been deposed among the ten tribes because Jeroboam 
 set up calves in Bethel. Whether Ahaz stooped to 
 Assyria, or Hezekiah shook off its yoke, he remained 
 the same. All great days of the Lord were days which 
 revealed His presence. Material earthquakes, inva- 
 sions of Sennacherib, all forms of evil and confusion, 
 were proclaiming Him as the only rock upon which 
 that nation could stand. Its high calling was to declare 
 Him as the rock upon which all men must stand. 
 
 A very memorable chapter of Micah's prophecy
 
 344 BALAAM'S WISDOM. [SERM. 
 
 follows that of which I have been speaking ; it is the 
 one which our Church has chosen as a specimen of 
 the whole book. I believe the selection has been 
 rightly made, and not only on account of its sublimity. 
 " Hear ye, mountains, the Lord's controversy, and 
 ye strong foundations of the earth : for the Lord hath 
 a controversy with His people, and He will plead with 
 Israel." This chapter contains all the great character- 
 istics of Micah's prophecy, and leads us to the inner- 
 most heart of it. A God whose voice is echoed by the 
 hills and mountains, caring to reason with His people, 
 explaining to them His own ways and judgments, 
 beseeching them to listen to him ! think of such a 
 Being presented to the mind of a man who is bowing 
 down to a mere god of power, whom he fancies that 
 by some means or other he is to appease. And such a 
 god was the god of the priests and prophets of Samaria 
 and Jerusalem, whose falsehoods Micah had been 
 laying bare. An utterly dark and false notion of Him 
 lay at the root of all their contrivances and impostures. 
 Till they thought otherwise of Him, they must be self- 
 deceivers and deceivers of their brethren. And yet 
 there was nothing new in Micah's view of the divine 
 character; it was precisely the one which the law and 
 history of Israel had been setting forth. "0 my people, 
 what have I done unto thee ? and wherein have I 
 wearied thee ? testify against me. For I brought 
 thee up out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed thee 
 out of the house of servants ; and I sent before thee, 
 Moses, Aaron, and Miriam." Nay, the false prophet, the 
 very type of false prophets, himself had been brought 
 in an hour of humiliation and revelation to confess that 
 this was the Being with whom he had to do. " my
 
 xix.] DARK HOURS. 315 
 
 people, remember now what Balak king of Moab con- 
 sulted, and what Balaam the son of Beor answered 
 him from Shittim unto Gilgal ; that ye may know the 
 righteousness of the Lord." This was the answer of 
 the man whose eyes were opened, who saw the vision 
 of the Almighty. "Wherewith shall I come before the 
 Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I 
 come before Him with burnt-offerings and calves of a 
 year old ? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands 
 of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil ? Shall I 
 give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my 
 body for the sin of my soul ? He hath shewed thee, 
 O man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord require 
 of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with thy God ? " God uses Balaam as a teacher 
 of the prophets and priests and people of Israel. These 
 words explain the cause of the judgments which He is 
 bringing upon them. There are wicked balances, there 
 are bags of deceitful weights. " The rich men are 
 full of violence; the inhabitants of the cities have 
 spoken lies, and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth. 
 Therefore is He making them sick in smiting them, and 
 making them desolate in their sins." A wonderful 
 passage surely, proving, I think, that all substantial 
 practical morality must have its basis in a substantial 
 theology ; how needful it is that we should confess a 
 righteous God if we would be righteous ourselves ; 
 what a mockery it is to call upon men to be just and 
 honest, if we do not present God to them as One 
 who is seeking to make them what He is; how 
 utterly vain and vague all spiritual teaching is, 
 merely tending to pamper spiritual pride and produce 
 spiritual wickedness, if it does not connect the
 
 346 MICAH'S WORDS IN AFTER DAYS. [SERM. 
 
 commonest outward acts with all inward and mysterious 
 principles. 
 
 The last passages in Micah describe a tremendous 
 struggle in his own mind, when he looked round and 
 saw the faithlessness, heartlessness, selfishness of the 
 people among whom he was dwelling, of that people with 
 whom God was holding this controversy. " The best 
 of them is as a brier : the most upright is sharper than a 
 thorn hedge. The day of thy visitation cometh." There 
 is a dark moment in which he exclaims, " Trust ye not 
 in a friend. Put ye not confidence in a guide : keep the 
 doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom." 
 But that hour passes away. "I will look unto the 
 Lord ; I will wait for the God of my salvation. My God 
 will hear me." His anger against others ends in a con- 
 fession of his own evil. " I will bear the indignation 
 of the Lord because I have sinned against Him, until 
 He plead my cause, and execute judgment for me." And 
 then comes a vision of blessedness for his land as well 
 as for himself. " Who is a God like unto Thee, that 
 pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression 
 of the remnant of His heritage ? He retaineth not 
 His anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. 
 He will turn again, He will have compassion upon us j 
 He will subdue our iniquities. Thou wilt perform the 
 truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which Thou 
 hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old." 
 
 There are two comments upon Micah, one in the Old, 
 one in the New Testament, which throw, I think, great 
 light upon this book and upon the nature of prophecy, 
 and contain much instruction for ourselves. We are 
 told in the twenty-sixth chapter of Jeremiah that the 
 priests and the prophets spoke unto the princes and
 
 xix.] INFERENCE OP THE SCRIBES. 347 
 
 unto all the people of Jerusalem, saying, ' This man 
 Jeremiah is worthy to die, for he hath prophesied 
 against this city, as ye have heard with' your ears/ 
 Jeremiah told them that he was in their hands, but if 
 they put him to death they would bring innocent blood 
 upon themselves and upon the city. " Then rose up 
 certain of the elders of the land, and spake to all the 
 assembly of the people, saying, ' Micah the Morasthite 
 prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and 
 spake to all the people of Judah, saying, " Thus saith 
 the Lord of Hosts ; Zion shall be ploughed like a field, 
 and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of 
 the house as the high places of a forest." Did Hezekiah 
 king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death ? 
 Did he not fear the Lord, and beseech the Lord, and the 
 Lord repented of the evil which he had pronounced 
 against them ? Thus might we procure great evil 
 .against our souls/ " Now it should be remembered that 
 Micah' s prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem was 
 not fulfilled as he perhaps expected it to be in his own 
 -day. There was therefore a pretext for saying he was 
 a false prophet like those whom he had denounced. 
 But the wisest of the elders of the people of Judah 
 felt that this was not the test of truth and falsehood. 
 Micah had spoken right ; he had declared that certain 
 effects must follow from certain causes. Where there 
 was pride, oppression, hypocrisy, there would be 
 judgments, there would at last be utter destruction. 
 Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, Hezekiah humbled 
 himself ; the city and temple were preserved. But the 
 words lived on, established, not belied, by that ap- 
 parent confutation of them. The conscience of the people 
 in Jeremiah's day recognised them as addressed to them-
 
 848 THEY WERE TIED TO NAMES. [SERM. 
 
 selves ; their literal accomplishment to that generation 
 stamped them as sure decrees for Jerusalem and for 
 every other city of the earth in all generations to come. 
 The passage in the New Testament is this : When 
 Herod had gathered all the chief priests and scribes 
 of the people together, he demanded of them where 
 Christ should be born. And they said unto him, 
 " In Bethlehem of Judaea. For thus it is written by 
 the prophet : ' And thou, Bethlehem, in the land of 
 Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda j for 
 out of thee shall come a Governor that shall rule my 
 people Israel. " } There are those who would discredit 
 this passage of St. Matthew's Gospel, because they 
 say it was so likely that this prophecy should have 
 been thought to be applicable after the event, so un- 
 likely that it should have suggested itself to any as 
 determining such an event. I apprehend, from all we 
 know of the Jewish mind either before or since that 
 time, it was exceedingly likely that all passages of this 
 kind would be noted in connection with the coming 
 of the expected king, and that precisely the part of 
 them, which would fix the attention of the Rabbis, 
 would be the topographical or merely incidental part. 
 I do not see that it was any disparagement to their 
 wisdom, that they recognised a divine order and con- 
 trivance even in such circumstance as these. Places 
 sometimes serve very remarkably to connect together 
 different periods in the life of an individual man. A 
 house or field which belonged to the associations of the 
 child becomes quite unexpectedly identified with the 
 history of his later years. Old men long to lay their bones 
 where they played as boys. Devout men welcome 
 such coincidences and recurrences as proofs that they
 
 xix.] THE TRUTH BENEATH THE NAMES. 349 
 
 are under a divine education. Why should the like be 
 wanting in a national story ? Why should they not 
 be noted in a book which traces all the parts of it as 
 the fulfilment of a divine purpose ? We do not com- 
 plain of the Jewish doctors because they had skill in 
 detecting such indications in their Scriptures, but 
 because they could detect no others. Micah saw that 
 honour had been put and would be put on Bethlehem 
 to humble the pride of Jerusalem. The scribes, full of 
 the pride of their city, full of personal pride, could read 
 the name of the village ; the moral of it was utterly 
 lost upon them. And therefore when He who was 
 born at Bethlehem appeared before them as the man of 
 Nazareth, Micah's sentence, which might have enabled 
 them to understand that part of Christ's humiliation 
 also, became a stumbling-block to them. e Search and 
 look/ they said, ' for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.' 
 The signs and tokens of the Divine Man were nothing; 
 the place was everything. And the last words were 
 utterly forgotten. They thought of One who was to 
 come as their Ruler and Prince. They did not think 
 of One whose goings forth had been of old, from Ever- 
 lasting. They wanted a stronger Herod, a native 
 Augustus; they did not want God manifest in the 
 flesh. 
 
 And, dear brethren, it will not avail us much to 
 believe that a child has been born at Bethlehem 1850 
 years ago, or even to believe that He will come again 
 in the glory of His Father and of the holy Angels. 
 Unless we confess Him as our Ruler and Shepherd 
 now, our thoughts of His past humiliation and of His 
 future greatness will alike deceive us. Our pride will 
 not give way before the dim recollection of what He
 
 350 THE TRUTH BENEATH THE NAMES. [SEEM. xu. 
 
 was, our hopes will not be kindled by the vague dream 
 of what He may be. To know that He is, and that 
 He is with us as He was with our forefathers, and as 
 He has promised to be with our children's children, 
 this is the strength and consolation that we need ; this 
 only can enable us to do justly, to love mercy, and to 
 walk humbly with our God. His going forth was of 
 old, from Everlasting; therefore may we bring Him our 
 gold and frankincense and myrrh, as those did who 
 kneeled before the cradle in the manger; therefore 
 may we hope to be like Him, when we shall see Him 
 as He is, in that Kingdom which shall have no end.
 
 SERMON XX. 
 
 THE EVIL CITY SAVED AND DESTBOYED. 
 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 2nd Sunday after Easter. April 25, 1852.) 
 
 The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the 
 Elkoshite. NAHUM i. 1. 
 
 THERE are two prophetical books in the Old Testa- 
 ment which have no direct reference to the chosen 
 people, those of Jonah and of Nahum. Both of them 
 are concerned with the fate of Nineveh. I alluded to 
 Jonah when I was speaking of Jeroboam II., in whose 
 reign he is said to have lived. But I merely alluded to 
 him because I was then occupied with the history of 
 the ten tribes, upon which the book of Jonah throws 
 no light, and because that book, though it records a 
 passage in the life of an old prophet, does not profess 
 to have been written by him. It may have been put 
 together, as eminent critics think it was, in a time much 
 later than that of Jeroboam. I now propose to speak 
 of these prophets. The city of which they both speak 
 was the capital of the empire which has been brought 
 so frequently before us by Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and 
 Micah. Jonah and Nahum, though they contemplate 
 this empire in different periods, both see it not trium- 
 phant but tottering. They present it therefore to us
 
 352 THE UNSCRIPTl'RAL LOVE OP MARVELS. [SKRM. 
 
 in a new point of view, and they illustrate the office 
 of the Jewish prophet the more strikingly for their 
 apparent neglect of Jewish affairs. 
 
 The book of Jonah, the son of Amittai, has seemed 
 to some so curiously contrived to explain that office and 
 the office of the Jewish people, that they have fancied 
 it contains a parable instead of a history. Several 
 circumstances have tended to strengthen them in this 
 opinion. I have admitted that it differs from the other 
 books with which it is associated, in that it appears to 
 be a narrative written by a third party, rather than a 
 discourse proceeding from the person whose name it 
 bears. Moreover there is one event related (very briefly) 
 in that narrative, which has drawn away the minds of 
 readers, especially trivial and superficial readers, from 
 the other parts of it. The passion for mere wonderment 
 is in general so little gratified by the sacred records, 
 so much less than by almost any books ancient or 
 modern that one can read, the divine element in these 
 books is so closely associated with common earthly life, 
 its miracles are such assertions of eternal laws, and 
 such protests against the irregular acts of the magician 
 and the enchanter, that those, who in their hearts 
 prefer an oriental, classical, or middle-aged legend to 
 their plain statements of facts or profound revelations 
 of principles, eagerly seize upon every Biblical story 
 which has obviously a rare and exceptional character. 
 The enemies of the Scriptures, of course^ readily 
 gratify their propensity, allowing them to maintain, 
 and vigorously supporting the opinion, that these are 
 the standards by which we are to judge the book ; that 
 throughout it is in contradiction to human experience, 
 not the discovery of something which lies deeper than
 
 xx. J PACTS AND MOEALS. 353 
 
 human experience. Accordingly, the words, "The 
 Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah : 
 and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days 
 and three nights," have given occasion to a series 
 of refinements, speculations, explanations, arguments, 
 respecting the nature and possibility of the incident, 
 which it is wearisome and humiliating to read or to think 
 of. One who considers how great and wonderful a thing 
 a preservation from the deep is, who believes that the 
 Lord is the author of every such preservation, who feels 
 at the same time that he does not understand, and is 
 never likely to understand the method of this particular 
 preservation, dwells on that which must at all events 
 be the essence of the story, and leaves its incidents as 
 he finds them. To the mere hunter for rarities and 
 curiosities, the accident is everything, the essence 
 nothing. He pores over the whale, he forgets God. 
 To the mere critic the appearance of such a prodigy is 
 decisive as to the character of the whole story. It must 
 be merely composed, he concludes, for the sake of a 
 moral ; it either is not meant to describe what actually 
 occurred, or the narrator was deceived by a loose 
 tradition of it which had come down from a distant age. 
 Now, assuredly, if a holy man of some later time 
 were led to meditate upon a story which had been 
 preserved respecting some venerable seer, and to put it 
 forth for the benefit of his contemporaries, there is no 
 doubt that the truth which he saw in it would be more 
 important in his eyes than the man who was the sub- 
 ject of it, or than any good or ill fortune which befell 
 him. He would not have been a holy or inspired 
 man if he had not cared more to understand the 
 principles of God's government, and to make them 
 
 2 A
 
 354 REALITY OF THE BOOK OF JONAH. [SERM. 
 
 known, than to hear or tell any new thing. But a fact 
 may embody a divine meaning at least as well as a 
 fiction. The self-will and transgression of an actual 
 individual may be the most complete of all parables to 
 illustrate the self-will and transgressions of his class or 
 his nation. A man should be an artist to write a 
 biography as much as to write a romance ; he will not 
 make the story of a life intelligible if he has not some 
 knowledge beyond what he derives from the mere 
 statistics of it. A divine artist, we might expect, would 
 especially delight to shew us how a few years or days 
 of a man's experience may exhibit, as in a glass, not 
 only the meaning of his own vocation but the vocation 
 of his order and race, and so might gather into itself 
 centuries and cycles of history. 
 
 I can find no pretext for the notion that the book of 
 Jonah does not describe actual events and actual pro- 
 cesses in the heart of a real man. It does not bear the 
 slightest resemblance to any of the books which are 
 compiled in after times to magnify the characters of 
 heroes and saints, upon which a vague traditional glory 
 rests. Jonah, who is said to have foretold the success 
 of Jeroboam II., who must have been remembered with 
 honour in all parts of the land, is here presented to us, 
 not as a model but as a beacon ; not as embodying in 
 himself all the transcendent qualities of a seer or the 
 higher graces of a man; but as disobedient, selfish, 
 hard-hearted. A sophist using an old name to conceal 
 a composition of his own, betrays the fraud by some 
 chronological inaccuracy and some violation of costume. 
 The critics and condemners of this narrative admit 
 that they do not detect any of these signs here. 
 Nineveh was beginning to be known in the Holy Land
 
 xx.] JONAH THE PEOPHET AND MAN. 355 
 
 in the reign of Jeroboam II. ; it was the very reign in 
 which Amos went into the North country and told 
 how its seeming prosperity would be crushed by a new 
 and strong invader. There was the vague grandeur 
 then attaching to the great capital which might well 
 terrify a humble Israelite! His flight to Joppa and the 
 finding a ship sailing to Tarshish are incidents quite as 
 suitable to that age as to any subsequent one. It is very 
 true that there are no specific circumstances recorded 
 concerning the nature of the calamity which was to 
 come upon the city, such as we should certainly look 
 for in a contemporary record. " Within forty days and 
 Nineveh should be destroyed," is all that we hear. 
 Such an omission indicates that the writer of the narra- 
 tive had an object which made him indifferent about 
 details ; for his purpose it did not signify whether the 
 city was in danger of plague, famine, or invasion. It 
 had perished perhaps already. Nineveh had become to 
 him only a name. But the want of these accessories 
 indicates also his simplicity and guilelessness. A man 
 conscious of invention would have availed himself of 
 some local traditions to make his tale plausible. And 
 if we turn from the outside of the story to its inward 
 characteristics we shall find, I believe, a moral coherency 
 and truth in it which will make us inclined to think 
 that its figurative worth cannot be separated from its 
 worth as a document concerning one of our own flesh 
 and blood. Jonah is, in fact, more completely the com- 
 bination of the individual with the prophet than one 
 finds anywhere else. We shall see the two characters 
 blended and struggling together in Jeremiah ; much of 
 the deep pathos of his book consists in their conflict ; 
 but in Jonah the poor insignificant creature of the earth 
 
 2 A 2
 
 356 HIS ANGER. OERM. 
 
 stands out in the same strong contrast to the man trans- 
 figured by a divine calling and impulse, which we have 
 traced through all the earlier books. A voice, strong 
 and clear, tells him that he is to go to Nineveh and 
 denounce its wickedness. He has no doubt whence 
 that voice proceeds. But the mission is a strange and 
 terrible one. He runs from it ; he is in a storm j that 
 storm he is sure is pursuing Mm, testifying against him. 
 He tells his heathen comrades so. They are not guilty 
 of producing the storm, but he is ; if they would be 
 saved, he must be cast out. They are unwilling to 
 execute the sentence which he has pronounced upon 
 himself ; they toil hard in rowing, but in vain ; they 
 must obey the prophet. In the jaws of desolation and 
 death, he cries to God, confesses his sin, submits to his 
 punishment. He is delivered, and goes forth once more 
 on his errand. The king and people listen to him, 
 humble themselves in dust and ashes, show all the signs 
 of a true conversion. The city is spared. The prophet 
 complains that he has been mocked ; that that has not 
 come to pass which he said would come to pass. He 
 goes forth in his anger to the east side of the city, makes 
 him a booth and sits under the shadow of it that he 
 may see what will become of the city. " And the Lord 
 God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over 
 Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head to 
 deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding 
 glad of the gourd. But God prepared a worm when the 
 morning arose the next day, and it smote the gourd that 
 it withered. And it came to pass, when the sun did 
 arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind ; and 
 the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted,, 
 and wished in himself to die, and said, ' It is better
 
 xx.] THE PROPHET GUILTIER THAN THE HEATHENS. 357 
 
 for me to die than to live.' And God said to Jonah, 
 1 Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd ? ' And 
 he said, 'I do well to be angry, even unto death/ 
 Then said the Lord, ' Thou hast had pity on the gourd, 
 for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it 
 grow ; which came up in a night, and perished in a 
 night. And should not I spare Nineveh, that great 
 city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons 
 that cannot discern between their right hand and their 
 left hand ; and also much cattle ? ' 
 
 The writer of this book must have been a very 
 courageous as well as a very profound man to have 
 imagined a story of this kind. For it strikes at every 
 prejudice which was most close to the heart of his 
 countrymen. It lays bare their national disease. It 
 attacks these prejudices and exhibits this disease, not 
 in a formal didactic manner, but by discovering a train 
 of thought the most natural and likely to have arisen 
 in the mind of a Jew or a man ; yet the one which the 
 countrymen of a prophet and we ourselves should be 
 most slow in attributing to him. We are taught that 
 a prophet of the ten tribes, an almost immediate 
 successor of Elisha, was sent as a witness into a heathen 
 land, a land beyond the circle, so he must have be- 
 lieved, of the covenant and the promises. We are told, 
 nevertheless, that it was a completely overpowering 
 divine conviction which was driving him there. He 
 felt it was his duty not to speak to the king in Samaria, 
 or the priests in Bethel, but to tell men whom he only 
 knew of as idolaters, that the God of his fathers was 
 their God, and would punish them for their iniquities. 
 We may remember how Abraham felt and acted when 
 he came among a people in whom he said the fear of
 
 358 THE PROPHET GUILTIER THAN THE HEATHENS. [SEEM. 
 
 God did not dwell. It was still more likely that Jonah 
 should tremble at the thoughts of what might befall 
 him in a city which he was openly to defy ; that he 
 should be quite unable to understand how God's 
 words could reach such a people, what they had to do 
 with Him. It must have been a strange discovery 
 to him that the mariners in his ship had that in them 
 which recognised the Being of whom he spoke, and 
 that they shewed a kindliness and a sense of righteous- 
 ness which he could not give himself credit for. It 
 must have been stranger still to feel, that the God 
 whose servant he was, the God who had chosen his 
 nation, was charging him with a sin which He did 
 not charge upon them ; that he stood really and con- 
 sciously guilty of that of which they were not guilty. 
 In whatever prison-house Jonah's body was shut up, 
 this was a prison-house for his spirit, close, narrow, 
 stifling beyond all imagination, one from which it 
 seemed as if there could be no escape. A favoured man 
 no longer, his pre-eminence above others seemed to be 
 that he was the bearer of a heavier burden, that he was 
 crushed under a more terrible curse. And yet out of 
 this deep pit he could be heard. There was a deliverer 
 even there ; God had known him, and had not forgotten 
 him even while he had been teaching him to regard 
 himself as worse than those whom he had supposed 
 were entirely excluded from the Divine compassion. 
 He is yet a servant and prophet of the Most High, he 
 may yet perform His work. He is a new man; he 
 who was lately shut up in death, can speak of God's 
 truth and righteousness. That is what he seems 
 appointed to speak of. Though he has experienced 
 much mercy, he is not told to proclaim mercy. He is
 
 xx.] RIGHTEOUSNESS AND MERCY. 359 
 
 to cry aloud in all the streets of the great Nineveh, 
 that sin has been committed and that sin must bring 
 death. He has been used to utter such sounds in 
 Samaria and they have fallen utterly dead. No one 
 has thought them worth listening to. Unspeakable 
 marvel ! Here, instead of being dead words, they seem 
 able to waken the dead. They are confessed to come 
 from One who has a right to speak them, from One of 
 whom Jonah perhaps thought the king and people of 
 Nineveh were utterly ignorant. 
 
 The message has done its work. God has triumphed. 
 But Jonah has not triumphed. He is utterly con- 
 founded and sick at heart ; he has deceived others and 
 deceived himself. He had expected to see men, women, 
 children, cattle, all perishing ; but they all lived. He 
 had expected, had he hoped it ? Yes, that truth is 
 brought home to him ; he had wished that it should be 
 so. But that blessed gourd which had shadowed him 
 from the heat ; had he wished that to perish ? was he 
 content that it should ? No, when that withered he 
 was angry unto death ; he did well to be angry. Jonah 
 cared for the gourd ; he was taught that God cared 
 for the men and women and children and cattle of 
 Nineveh. He was taught that the mind of Him who 
 sent the message to the city, and the mind of him who 
 bore it, were not at one but at war. And this was 
 the blessing of the servant, his highest blessing, that 
 his mind should not be at war with his Master's but 
 at one with it. 
 
 So, then, it was the result of all this discipline that 
 the Jewish prophet knew he was to be the herald of 
 God's mercy as well as of God's righteousness to all the 
 nations ; nay, that he could not be the herald of the
 
 360 NAHUM THE ELKOSHITE. [SBBM. 
 
 one trnless he were also of the other. God's righteous- 
 ness is shewn in making men righteous. If they will 
 submit to be made so, then His end is accomplished: 
 if they will resist, then His vengeance will go forth, 
 not because He has forgotten mercy, but because that 
 which is unmerciful and hard-hearted shall not possess 
 the earth which He claims for His dominion. 
 
 This truth connects the vision of Nahum with 
 that of Jonah. It had been proved that an Assyrian 
 monarch and people were under the government of the 
 same righteous and gracious Lord who had chosen 
 Israel for His inheritance. It was proved that there 
 was an ear in an Assyrian monarch and people which 
 could be opened to hear God's word, a heart which 
 ould acknowledge His presence and His authority. 
 The evidence had been clear and triumphant that there 
 was nothing in the circumstances of that people or 
 any people which made it impossible that they should 
 understand God's word and should yield to it. But 
 they chose another course. Lucifer the son of the 
 morning became the pattern of Assyrian kings. To 
 exalt themselves above law, to make the earth a wilder- 
 ness, had been the ambition of the whole empire. And 
 therefore Jonah's words were as true and as much 
 alive as when he first pronounced them. If the city 
 had perished when he desired it to perish, the truth of 
 God would have been immeasurably less asserted than 
 it was by the reformation which delayed, and the evil 
 doings which brought down, the punishment. 
 
 There has been much doubt about the time in which 
 Nahum lived. He is described simply as the Elkoshite. 
 Jerome speaks of a village bearing a name like this in 
 Galilee, and even says that a few relics of it were
 
 ix.j NAHUM ONE OF THE CAPTIVES. 261 
 
 pointed out to him by a dweller in the district. Such 
 a, testimony is of course much more valuable than that 
 of any Church-father unacquainted with Palestine ; if 
 it were received, we should have no reason for not 
 accepting Jerome's other suggestion, that Nahum wrote 
 in the days of Hezekiah to console the tribes which had 
 just been taken captive, by the prospect of the destruc- 
 tion of their oppressor at some distant day. But there 
 is that in the character of the prophecy which has 
 forced modern students to think of a different place as 
 well as time from those which Jerome imagined. The 
 exceeding vividness of all the descriptions seems to indi- 
 cate that Nahum was placed in the heart of the country 
 which he was threatening. The divine illumination of 
 the Prophets had a higher object than to make them 
 acquainted with national scenery or with the outward 
 condition of a land. These, as we have observed in 
 the cases of Amos, Hosea, Micah, were brought directly 
 before their eyes and ears. They heard the sound of 
 the earthquake; the army of locusts was devouring the 
 land in which they were dwelling; the Assyrian was 
 come to Aiath, he had passed to Migron, at Michmash 
 he had laid up his carriages, when Isaiah called his 
 countrymen to turn to the God of their fathers. Those 
 who think that the prophets lose any of their divinity 
 when we thus connect them with present and passing 
 events, have, I fear, borrowed their notions of what is 
 divine from heathen oracles, from the soothsayers and 
 diviners whom the prophets denounce, and whom they 
 existed to put down. The meaning of the mosC distant 
 future emerges out of their discourses, not when we 
 divorce them from local and immediate occurrences, 
 but when we see how they brought eternal truths to
 
 362 THE CONVULSIONS IN ASIA. [SERM. 
 
 bear upon them. For this reason, it is strictly accord- 
 ing to analogy, I think, to suppose that Nahum did not 
 live before the captivity of the ten tribes or just at the 
 commencement of it, but that he was one of that 
 captivity. A village named Alcosh, not far from Mosul, 
 has been pointed out as the probable place of his birth 
 or residence ; it is a reasonable supposition that he lived 
 just when Cyaxares and the Medes were threatening 
 Nineveh, which, according to all authorities, they 
 utterly destroyed. The date of that event has been 
 settled, apparently on good evidence, as falling between 
 the years 610 and 600 before Christ. If this view of 
 the prophecy be the true one, it gives us some hints 
 respecting the tribes in their Assyrian banishment 
 which we cannot obtain elsewhere. The Apocryphal 
 book of Tobit throws a valuable light upon their per- 
 sonal and domestic life, and shews how the good men 
 among them cherished the old faith and the old sym- 
 pathies. But the deeper learning which they derived 
 from the events that befell the great world about them, 
 the way in which those events confirmed the past 
 history of their country, and assured them that the 
 truths which it had revealed would stand the test of all 
 possible circumstances, were not affected by their own 
 overthrow, would make themselves good in all ages to 
 come, this must be understood from some more 
 instructed and less superstitious Israelite than Tobit. 
 
 Great revolutions were then shaking Asia. The 
 Median power had for some time been the mightiest ; 
 the irruption of Scythian hordes for a while checked 
 its advances : when they melted away or emigrated 
 towards the west, the destined hour for the fall of the 
 old Assyrian tyranny was come. The period that
 
 ix.] CONTEASTS. 363 
 
 followed brings to light the Babylonian empire of which 
 Nebuchadnezzar was the restorer, and in which the old 
 Chaldean faith and wisdom were to reappear in new 
 strength, probably combined with some new elements. 
 
 What had a lonely captive to do with such convul- 
 sions as these ; how could he interpret them ? They 
 threw him back upon Him who is, and was, and is to 
 come. The rise and overthrow of dynasties repeated 
 the two great seemingly opposed lessons which his own 
 suffering had been teaching him. 
 
 " God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth; the Lord 
 revengeth, and is furious : the Lord will take vengeance 
 on His adversaries, and He reserveth wrath for his 
 enemies. The Lord is slow to anger, and great in power, 
 and will not at all acquit the wicked : the Lord hath 
 His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the 
 clouds are the dust of His feet." (i. 2, 3.) 
 
 Oh, comfort beyond and beneath all words that he 
 can speak, all thoughts that he can think ! There is an 
 order in the midst of this anarchy; there is a Person 
 upholding this order ! He is not unconcerned about 
 that which is going on in His earth. Medes, Baby- 
 lonians, Scythians, captive Jews, not one is forgotten. 
 He, the least of all, the lowest of all, he can say, 
 This God is our God, I know what His purposes are, 
 I know the will that is guiding us through the storms 
 and hurricanes by which thrones and kingdoms will 
 be swept away. The seeming contrast in the laws of 
 the universe, which staggered others, found a recon- 
 ciliation in the heart of this outcast. 
 
 " Who can stand before His indignation ? and who 
 can abide in the fierceness of His anger ? His fury is 
 poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down
 
 364 THE CITY OP BLOOD. [SERM. 
 
 by Him. The Lord is good, a strong hold in the day 
 of trouble; and He knoweth them that trust in 
 Him/' (i. 6.) 
 
 The oppressor is falling : 
 
 " And the Lord hath given a commandment con- 
 cerning thee, that no more of thy name be sown : 
 out of . the house of thy gods will I cut off the graven 
 image and the molten image : I will make thy grave ; 
 for thou art vile/' (i. 14.) 
 
 But then, again : 
 
 " Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that 
 bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace ! 
 Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows : for 
 the wicked shall no more pass through thee; he is 
 utterly cut off." (i. 15.) 
 
 So speaks, with deep pathetic energy, one who can 
 no longer keep the solemn feasts except in secret, who 
 sees nothing but molten images all around him. He 
 implores his countrymen to consider what those things 
 mean which have become to them mere names and 
 forms of something departed and dead. They are 
 witnesses of a living and true and gracious God. 
 They are good tidings for the whole earth, that the 
 Lord is not an Evil Spirit, but one who has made man 
 to be His servant and His child, who will destroy the 
 bloody city that is full of lies and robbery let it be 
 where it may, let it have what greatness it may. 
 
 " Woe to the bloody city ! it is all full of lies and 
 robbery ; the prey departeth not ; the noise of a whip, 
 and the noise of the rattling of the wheels, and of the 
 prancing horses, and of the jumping chariots. The 
 horseman lifteth up both the bright sword and the 
 glittering spear : and there is a multitude of slain, and
 
 M.J THE TWO AGES OF ASSYKIA. 365 
 
 a great number of carcases ; and there is none end of 
 their corpses ; they stumble upon their corpses ; because 
 of the multitude of the whoredoms of the well-favoured 
 harlot, the mistress of witchcrafts, that selleth nations 
 through her whoredoms, and families through her 
 witchcrafts. Behold, I am against thee, saith the Lord 
 of hosts ; and I will discover thy skirts upon thy face, 
 and I will shew the nations thy nakedness, and the 
 kingdoms thy shame. And will cast abominable filth 
 upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a 
 gazingstock. And it shall come to pass, that all they 
 that look upon thee shall flee from thee, and say, 
 Nineveh is laid waste : who will bemoan her ? whence 
 shall I seek comforters for thee ?" (iii. 17.) 
 
 " All thy strongholds shall be like fig-trees with the 
 first-ripe figs : if they be shaken, they shall even fall 
 into the mouth of the eater. Behold, thy people in the 
 midst of thee are women : the gates of thy land shall be 
 set wide open unto thine enemies : the fire shall devour 
 thy bars. Draw thee waters for the siege, fortify thy 
 strongholds : go into clay, and tread the mortar, make 
 strong the brick-kiln. There shall the fire devour 
 thee ; the sword shall cut thee off ; it shall eat thee up 
 like the cankerworm : make thyself many as the canker- 
 worm, make thyself many as the locusts. Thou hast 
 multiplied thy merchants above the stars of heaven : 
 the cankerworm spoileth, and fleeth away. Thy 
 crowned are as the locusts, and thy captains as the 
 great grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the 
 cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and 
 their place is not known where they are. Thy shep- 
 herds slumber, king of Assyria : thy nobles shall 
 dwell in the dust : thy people is scattered upon the
 
 366 JONAH IN THE GOSPELS. [SEMI. 
 
 mountains, and no man gathereth them. There is no 
 healing of thy bruise ; thy wound is grievous : all that 
 hear the bruit of thee shall clap the hands over thee : 
 for upon whom hath not thy wickedness passed 
 continually ? "(in. 12-19.) 
 
 The books of Jonah and Nahuin then, taken together* 
 enable us to contemplate a great historical cycle. The 
 one stands at the beginning, the other at the end of a 
 period. The Assyrian Empire comes before us in its 
 first and in its last relations to the chosen people, or 
 rather to that which is higher than the chosen people, 
 the witness which they were to bear for the God of 
 the whole earth. If the compiler of the book of Jonah, 
 in the form in which we have it, lived subsequently to 
 Nahum, he was called to supply a chasm in the life of 
 his people, by shewing the work which from the very 
 first they had to do for the surrounding nations, by 
 explaining how a failure in that work was a sentence 
 of doath upon themselves. Nahum not only carries on 
 the testimony of Jonah respecting the certain doom of 
 an evil city ; he also shews us how the called race, 
 in its deepest humiliation as much as in its greatest 
 prosperity, was still the preacher to the human race ; 
 how its existence as well as its words interpreted the 
 mystery of the universe and made the rise and fall of 
 empires, with all the dark crimes that led to both, give 
 out pledges of consolation and hope. 
 
 And thus we are enabled to understand better the 
 New Testament use of these Old Testament teachers. 
 To Nahum I am not aware that there is any direct 
 allusion in the Gospels. Jonas the prophet is referred 
 to in a memorable discourse of our Lord's, recorded 
 both by St. Matthew and St. Luke. There is a passage
 
 xx.] OUR LORD'S DEATH AND RESURRECTION. 367 
 
 in the twelfth chapter of t. Matthew, to which there 
 is no parallel in St. Luke, and which apparently breaks 
 the connection between the thirty-ninth and forty-first 
 verses of the chapter in which it occurs. It is the one 
 which says that as Jonas was three days and three 
 nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of Man be 
 three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. 
 I dare not venture to use this passage for the 
 establishment of any doctrine, because I have heard 
 no satisfactory explanation of it. 
 
 The solemn week, through which we have lately 
 passed, has taught us that the period between our 
 Lord's death and i-esurrection was not three days and 
 three nights. We cannot give up the direct assertions 
 of all the Evangelists, the sacred convictions of eighteen 
 centuries, that we may force the greatest facts in the 
 history of the world into accordance with this sentence. 
 It would be a far less serious alternative to admit that 
 it may have crept into the text from the gloss of some 
 commentator, just as the most intelligent divines have 
 yielded to the belief that a text affirming an infinitely 
 more important doctrine crept into the fifth chapter of 
 the first Epistle of St. John ; an admission which, so far 
 from weakening their faith in that doctrine, has helped 
 them to see it unfolding itself through the whole of 
 Scripture and underlying the history of the Church and 
 of Mankind, when they were apt to look for the main 
 proof of it in a single text. I do not say that we have 
 any authority for so bold a course as this. I merely 
 urge it as a duty that we should be silent when we are 
 ignorant. If we have real reverence for Scripture, and 
 a firm belief in that which it declares, we shall never 
 strain a single one of its words or phrases, or strain a
 
 368 NINEVEH JUDGING JERUSALEM. [SERM. 
 
 single fact to make it fit them. Abstinence from such 
 dishonesty will assuredly bring its reward in clearer 
 apprehensions of the whole record hereafter. 
 
 But the words, "An evil and adulterous generation 
 seeketh after a sign, and there shall no sign be given to 
 it but the sign of the prophet Jonas/' illustrated by the 
 words of St. Luke, "As Jonas was a sign unto theNine- 
 vites, so shall the Son of Man be to this generation," as 
 well as by the further words, "The men of Nineveh 
 shall rise up in the judgment with this generation and 
 shall condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of 
 Jonas, and behold a greater than Jonas is here/' contain 
 a meaning which is not affected by the omission of this 
 clause. The Jews asked our Lord for a visible sign in 
 the heavens to confirm His authority. He answered 
 them that Jonah himself and the message which he 
 brought were sufficient signs to the heathens of 
 Nineveh. Their consciences confessed that God was 
 speaking to them ; they felt that a King whom they 
 could not see was near them claiming their homage ; 
 they turned to Him. The Jews, the people of God, 
 chosen out of all the countries to acknowledge that 
 unseen Presence and proclaim it, they had become such 
 idolaters, so blind and deaf in heart, that they could 
 believe only some outward visible image; the cry to turn 
 to their King was utterly lost upon them. He himself 
 was among them, the Word by whom all their prophets 
 had spoken, the King who was sitting on the holy hill 
 of Zion. Why were they not able to hear Him? Was 
 it not because He was the Son of Man ? because He 
 came with a message to Man, and they, shut up in their 
 pride and exclusiveness, did not like to take up their 
 position among men, did not care for a voice which was
 
 xx.] THE JUDGMENT OF THE CHURCH. 3G9 
 
 addressed to men ? The people of Nineveh therefore 
 repented at the preaching of Jonah ; the people of Jeru- 
 salem did not repent at the preaching of Jesus. The 
 Jew, because he was inhuman, was necessarily ungodly. 
 He would not acknowledge the Son of Man ; practically 
 he could not believe in Jehovah. And so the city, that 
 holy city, would become the bloody city ; in it would 
 be fulfilled the law which had been fulfilled in the 
 Assyrian capital. Awful and everlasting witness of the 
 divine order ; which asserted itself without respect of 
 persons then, which will assert itself without respect of 
 persons always ! The Christian Church, the Church of 
 the human race, has been almost as slow to maintain its 
 true privilege of preaching the glad tidings of Love and 
 Truth to the human race as the Jewish nation its fore- 
 runner was. Christian prophets have shrunk from their 
 commission, fled from the face of the Lord, been angry 
 that God was more gracious than they were, mourned 
 over their perishing gourds, have distrusted Him who 
 cares for the men and the women and the cattle in every 
 country under heaven. But the Church must publish 
 God's righteousness and God's grace to men, let its 
 members be ever so unwilling. If the tongues of 
 prophets are silent, if divine feasts and worship cease, 
 then by its own captivity it will be taught itself, it will 
 teach mankind, who is its King, its Judge, its Saviour. 
 
 2 R
 
 SERMON XXI. 
 
 MANASSEH AND JOSIAH; ZEPHANIAH AND HABAKKUK. 
 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 3rd Sunday after Easter. May 2, 1852.) 
 
 Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him : but the 
 just shall live by his faith. HABAKKUK ii. 4. 
 
 THERE is a tradition that Isaiah survived Hezekiah, 
 and suffered death in the days of Manasseh. Even 
 the manner of his death has been determined ; it has 
 been said that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
 refers to him when he speaks of some having been 
 sawn asunder. A vague rumour of this kind cannot 
 be of the least help in determining the application of 
 a prophecy, and there are no words in the book of 
 Isaiah which warrant us in extending any part of it 
 beyond the time denoted by the opening verse. The 
 belief that he became a martyr arose from the im- 
 probability that any righteous man could be suffered 
 to live in the days of Manasseh. 
 
 These days are described to us as darker than any 
 which had preceded them in the kingdom of Judah. 
 " The king did that which was evil in the sight of 
 the Lord, after the abomination of the heathen whom 
 the Lord ca^t out before the children of Israel. For 
 he built up again the high-places which Hezekiah his
 
 BEBM. xxi.] THE YEARS AFTER HEZEKIAH. 371 
 
 father had destroyed ; and he reared up altars for 
 Baal, and made a grove as did Ahab king of Israel ; 
 and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served 
 them. And he built altars for all the host of hsaven 
 in the two courts of the house of the Lord. And he 
 made his son pass through the fire, and observed 
 times, and used enchantments and dealt with familiar 
 spirits and wizards. . . . Moreover, Manasseh shed 
 innocent blood very much, till he had filled Jerusalem, 
 from one end to another/' (2 Kings xxi. 2-16.) 
 
 This state of things must have lasted a long time. 
 He was but twelve years old when he began to reign, 
 so that the violent change may not have begun at 
 once, though it is quite possible that some of the 
 counsellors, who had brought vain oblations and been 
 very active on the new moons and Sabbaths during 
 the reign of the father, may have cultivated all the 
 superstitions and idolatrous tendencies that were 
 ripening in the mind of the son, and may have 
 encouraged him to set up groves and high-places even 
 during his minority. However, as he reigned fifty 
 and five years, this supposition is hardly necessary 
 to account for the extent and completeness of the 
 reaction. Nor will any attentive reader of Isaiah and 
 Micah feel astonished by it. They, especially the 
 last, enable us to see the seeds of all corruption in a 
 period of health. The lying prophet, the drunken 
 priest, may have been hidden, even may have been 
 externally reformed, in the later golden years of 
 Hezekiah ; but the soil, out of which they had grown, 
 and which had cherished them, was sure to produce 
 the like weeds afterwards whenever the diligent 
 culture was withdrawn from it, even if their growth
 
 372 MANAS SEH A CAPTIVE. [SERM. 
 
 was not fostered and quickened by the hands which 
 should have extirpated them. 
 
 We do not hear of any special prophet at this time. 
 Probably there was no one then whose visions were 
 committed to writing, no one perhaps whose visions 
 extended beyond the immediate evil and its coming 
 punishment. Mere simple denunciations, such as we 
 heard of among the early seers of Israel, may have 
 supplied the place of the winding discourse and the 
 song that rose from the depths of earth to the heights 
 of Heaven. This we should infer from the words in 
 the Book of Kings ; " The Lord spake by His servants 
 the prophets, saying, Because Manasseh king of Judah 
 hath done these abominations, and hath done wickedly 
 above all that the Amorites did, which were before 
 him, and hath made Judah also to sin with his idols : 
 therefore thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Behold I 
 am bringing such evil upon Jerusalem and Judah, 
 that whosoever heareth of it, both his ears shall tingle. 
 And I will stretch over Jerusalem the line of Samaria, 
 and the plummet of the house of Ahab : and I will 
 wipe Jerusalem as a man wipeth a dish, wiping it and 
 turning it upside down. And I will forsake the rem- 
 nant of mine inheritance, and deliver them into the 
 hand of their enemies ; and they shall become a prey 
 and spoil to all their enemies ; because they have done 
 that which was evil in my sight ; and have provoked 
 me to anger, since the day their fathers came out of 
 Egypt, even unto this day." (2 Kings xxi. 10-15.) 
 
 The immediate accomplishment of this prediction 
 is thus recorded in the Second Book of Chronicles, 
 xxxiii. 2 : " Wherefore the Lord brought upon them the 
 captains of the host of the king of Assyria, which took
 
 xxi.] HIS BABYLONIAN EXPERIENCE. 373 
 
 Manasseh among the thorns, and bound him with fetters 
 and carried him to Babylon." Babylon, which had 
 revolted from the Assyrian Empire, had again become a 
 portion of it. That empire was exhibiting in its latter 
 days all its ancient character. But its former capital was 
 beginning to be threatened by the Medes. Babylon, 
 the old glory of the Chaldees, soon to become the centre 
 of a new Chaldean empire, having recovered from the 
 effects of its siege, was probably the centre of Asiatic 
 religion and civilisation. Manasseh would find himself 
 surrounded there by the gods of whom he had set up 
 images in Jerusalem; he would see that in its per- 
 fection which he had tried to imitate on a poor and 
 insignificant scale. And he would be under the rod 
 with which he had wished to scourge his subjects. This 
 was the kind of lesson which all the prophets had pre- 
 pared their kings for. They had dallied with idolatry t 
 there was something in it specially attractive, it seemed 
 so much more passionate, devout, sympathetic, than 
 that worship which the law of their fathers had pre- 
 scribed. Their taste would be gratified. They should 
 experience this worship in the length and depth and 
 breadth of it. They had dallied with tyranny j what 
 old decrees and statutes had power to bind them, the 
 rulers of the land ? what obligations had they to their 
 serfs and bondsmen ? No remedy can be effectual for 
 such thoughts, but that which is said to have been tried 
 upon the Sicilian masters in the days of Timoleon 
 the becoming serfs and bondsmen themselves. In this 
 case we are told it was effectual. Manasseh humbled 
 himself, turned to the Lord God of Israel, was brought 
 back to Jerusalem another man. Probably he was able 
 to effect a very partial cure of the evils which he had
 
 374 ZEPHANIAH, CHAP. I. [SERM. 
 
 caused and of the confusion from which the land must 
 have been suffering during his captivity. The short 
 reign of his son is represented as not less corrupt than 
 the greater part of his own had been ; it was ended by 
 conspiracy and assassination. Josiah, a boy of eight 
 years old, was left. There may have been a promise of 
 good in himself from his childhood ; but the first years of 
 his reign must have exhibited all the crimes and miseries 
 which had been ripening for more than half a century. 
 To this period the prophet Zephaniah belongs. In 
 the opening of this book, we are told that the word of 
 the Lord came to him in the days of Josiah the son of 
 Amon. We have a right to suppose that they were 
 his earliest days, for this book does not allude to any 
 symptoms of reformation. The sentences with which 
 it commences are all indicative of coming woes and 
 present idolatry. " I will utterly consume all things 
 from off the land, saith the Lord. I will consume man 
 and beast; I will consume the fowls of the heaven, and 
 the fishes of the sea, and the stumbling-blocks with 
 the wicked. And I will cut off man from off the land, 
 saith the Lord. I will also stretch out my hand on 
 Judah, and upon all the inhabitants of Jerusalem; and 
 I will cut off the remnant of Baal from this place and 
 the name of the Chemarims with the priests. And 
 them that worship the hosts of heaven upon the house 
 tops ; and them that worship and swear by the Lord, 
 and that swear by Malcham ; and them that are turned 
 back from the Lord ; and those that have not sought 
 the Lord nor inquired for Him." All these different 
 classes of evil-doers the prophets, priests, and de- 
 votees of the old Phoenician worship ; those of the new 
 Sabaean or Babylonian worship ; those who had nomi-
 
 xxi.] WOES TO ALL LANDS. 875 
 
 nally adhered to the worship of Jehovah, but secretly 
 swore by some other name; those that without any 
 forms of false religion had become utterly indifferent, 
 heartless, unbelieving, are warned that a day of the 
 Lord is at hand, a great sacrifice to which He had 
 bidden His guests. 
 
 There is a vagueness in the prophet's description of 
 the approaching calamity. But he is vague no longer 
 when he speaks of the evils which the day of the Lord 
 is to bring to light and punish. He is as distinct as 
 any of his predecessors in declaring that it would 
 disturb them " who are settled on their lees/' who say, 
 ' The Lord will not do good, neither will He do evil.' 
 He says that "the princes' and the kings' children 
 and those who were clothed with strange apparel," 
 that is to say, all the proud and luxurious courtiers, 
 " those that leap on the threshold, and fill their masters' 
 houses with violence and deceit," that is to say, the tools 
 of injustice, legal or military, who violated the sanctity 
 of the humble man's dwelling to obtain treasures for 
 their employers; those who dreamed that their silver 
 and their gold would be able to deliver them in the day 
 of the Lord's wrath; all would be guests at the sacri- 
 fice; their goods would become a booty and their homes 
 a desolation. Instead of the ordinary cry of the seller, 
 there would be a cry from one gate and a howling from 
 another, that the enemy was approaching. They would 
 walk like bewildered blind men, " their blood would be 
 poured out as dust, and their flesh as the dung." 
 
 These heaviest threatenings apply to Judah and 
 Jerusalem. But such a day as this would affect them 
 just because it would affect all the nations. In this sense 
 Zephaniah, like every other prophet, is a leveller. The
 
 876 BLESSINGS TO JUDAH. OERM. 
 
 people of God has to take its lot among the other 
 people. Its sin brings the same punishment as theirs. 
 The only difference is, that its sins are represented as 
 more cardinal, more radical than those of all others ; 
 there is in them more of conscious disobedience ; they 
 spring from a more direct resistance to a Will which 
 has revealed itself, has made its righteousness and 
 mercy visible in acts. Zephaniah proceeds to speak 
 of this judgment as one that would make "Gaza 
 forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation, which would drive 
 out Ashdod at the noonday and root up Ekron, which 
 would bring woe upon the inhabitants of the sea-coast 
 and destroy the land of the Philistines, which would 
 cause Moab to be as Sodom, and the children of Ammon 
 as Gomorrah, which would slay the Ethiopians with 
 the sword;" finally, "which would destroy Assyria 
 and make Nineveh a desolation." (ii. 413.) 
 
 And yet here the same paradox encounters us which 
 we have met with elsewhere. A vision of blessedness 
 to the chosen race, to the Jews already in captivity as 
 well as to those who might hereafter go into it, seems 
 to come out of this expected ruin. The deserted sea- 
 coast ' shall be for the remnant of the house of Judah ; * 
 'in the houses of Ashkelon shall they lie down in the 
 evening ; ' ' the residue of my people shall possess the 
 land from which Ammonites and Moabites have been 
 cast out/ Were such promises to comfort those that 
 were dwelling in the security that they were the blessed 
 of the Lord, and that all others were cursed and hated 
 by Him ? No, they were to comfort " the meek of the 
 earth, those who were seeking righteousness and seek- 
 ing meekness." Those who desired to see righteousness 
 and meekness triumphant over wrong and violence,
 
 xxi.] JUDAH A BLESSING TO ALL LANDS. 377 
 
 were to learn that this was the end of all these punish- 
 ments, that they were to bring down the haughtiness 
 of the Jews as much as Gentiles, to crush them in 
 themselves that they might become faithful witnesses 
 of God. If a remnant of their own tribes would take 
 possession of villages and coasts from which the races 
 about them had been cast out, it would not be till they 
 had shared their misery and been taught to know that 
 their God was not one of those carnal separate gods 
 whom men set up, but was the God who ordered 
 the times before appointed and the bounds of man's 
 habitation, that in every place they might be led 
 to seek Him. No sorrow could be too tremendous 
 which fixed the truth in the mind of Israelites 
 that they were to be a bond of peace to all lands, 
 not at once the imitators and the pattern of their 
 hatreds. 
 
 Therefore, when Zephaniah has foretold the cutting 
 off of the nations, the desolation of their towers, the 
 emptying of their cities, he says to Israel, " I will take 
 away out of the midst of thee them that rejoice in thy 
 pride, and thou shalt no more be haughty because of 
 mine holy mountain. I will also leave in the midst of 
 thee an afflicted and poor people, and they shall trust 
 in the Name of the Lord. The remnant of Israel shall 
 not do iniquity nor speak lies ; neither shall a deceitful 
 tongue be found in their mouth." (iii. 11-13.) 
 
 He had already uttered another promise which 
 Israelites might well claim, but which they could not 
 limit to themselves. " For then will I turn to the 
 people a pure language, that they may all call upon the 
 Name of the Lord, to serve Him with one consent." 
 (iii. 9.) Such an expectation of a universal kingdom
 
 378 JOSIAH'S EEFORM. [SER*. 
 
 the prophet knew must be the most consolatory of all 
 to those who were sorrowful in the solemn assembly, 
 to whom the reproach of Israel was a burden. They 
 would feel that a blessing to all nations was the 
 highest blessing which they could desire themselves, 
 that when it was fulfilled, they should know that " the 
 King of Israel, even the Lord, was in the midst of them; 
 and that Ho had turned back their captivity from 
 before their eyes." 
 
 It is not a new, and certainly it is a very reason- 
 able supposition, that these earnest exhortations of 
 Zephaniah may have been at least one influence in 
 bringing about the great reformation which com- 
 menced in the eighteenth year of king Josiah's reign. 
 His name, however, does not occur in the passage of 
 the Book of Kings which describes that reformation. 
 The book of the law of the Lord, it seems, had become 
 a strange and unknown book even to Shaphan the 
 scribe and to Hilkiah the priest. When Hilkiah read 
 it before the king, we are told that "he rent his clothes 
 and said, 'Enquire of the Lord for me, and for the 
 people, and for all Judah, concerning the words of this 
 book that is found. For great is the wrath of the Lord 
 that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not 
 hearkened to the words of this book, to do all that is 
 written concerning us.' " The person they consult is 
 not Zephaniah (who may perhaps have gone to his 
 rest), but Huldah the prophetess. She declares that 
 the words of the book of the law would be fulfilled 
 against Judah and Jerusalem ; but that the king, 
 whose heart was tender and who had humbled him- 
 self, should not see all the evil which should be 
 brought on that place. (2 Kings xxii.)
 
 *.] THE PASSOVER. 379 
 
 The reformation was searching and vigorous in 
 proportion to the humiliation and shame which had 
 preceded it. It was grounded upon an acknowledg- 
 ment of the covenant which the living God had made 
 with the people. All the vessels that had been made 
 for Baal and for the grove, and the chariots of the sun, 
 were burnt with fire ; the idolatrous priests were put 
 down, the high-places were defiled, the altars which 
 Ahaz and Manasseh had set up were broken in pieces 
 and their dust cast into the brook Kidron ; every relic 
 of the Solomon idolatry was extinguished. The images 
 in Samaria and Bethel were treated like those in 
 Jerusalem. The moral abominations which had accom- 
 panied these idolatries, and the different forms of devil- 
 worship which had prevailed in all parts of the land, 
 were rooted out so far as it was possible for a king to 
 root them out. Finally, the king commanded all the 
 people, saying, " Keep the passover unto the Lord your 
 God, as it is written in the book of the covenant." 
 This great pledge of the national unity seems to have 
 been hailed by the people in the distant parts of the 
 land more than it was in Hezekiah's days, when the 
 Samaritans could still cling to their separate king and 
 their private altars. For the historian says, " Surely 
 there was not holden such a passover from the days of 
 the judges that judged Israel, nor in all the days of 
 the kings of Israel, nor of the kings of Judah." 
 
 AsHuldah the prophetess declared, the terrible judg- 
 ment, which Zephaniah saw overhanging the land, did 
 not come upon it in the days of Josiah. But a calamity 
 was at hand, and the king himself was the author of it. 
 It was the precursor of all those which his repentance 
 had delayed. Like the best of his predecessors, the
 
 880 EGYPTIAN ASCENDANCY. [SERM. 
 
 young king could not resist the vanity of speculating 
 upon the relations of the great powers to each other 
 and of plunging into foreign wars. While Asia was in 
 tumult, it was not unnatural that Egypt should seem 
 to him his most formidable enemy. He fancied he 
 could resist it. He went out against Pharaoh Nechoh, 
 and his servants carried him in a chariot dead from 
 Megiddo, and brought him to Jerusalem, and buried 
 him in his own sepulchre. 
 
 This was the beginning of a temporary Egyptian 
 ascendancy. His son Jehoahaz reigned but three 
 months in Jerusalem. And Pharaoh Nechoh put him 
 in bonds at Kiblah in the land of Hamath, and he 
 went to Egypt and died there. Zephaniah's predic- 
 tions were partially fulfilled. Princes and kings were 
 becoming guests at a sacrifice ; their goods were 
 becoming a booty, and their houses a desolation. It 
 seemed as if Egypt might be the enslaver of the 
 children as it had been of the fathers. " For Pharaoh 
 Nechoh made Eliakim king in the room of Jehoahaz 
 his father, and turned his name to Jehoiakim. And 
 Jehoiakim gave the silver and the gold to Pharaoh j 
 but he taxed the land to give the money according to 
 the commandment of Pharaoh : he exacted the silver 
 and the gold of the people of the land, of every one 
 according to his taxation, to give it unto Pharaoh 
 Nechoh." (2 Kings xxiii. 31-35.) 
 
 But a day of the Lord was at hand for Pharaoh as 
 well as fci* the kings of Judah. 
 
 "In his days Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon came 
 up, and Jehoiakim became his servant three years; then 
 he turned and rebelled against him. And the Lord 
 sent against him bands of the Chaldees, and bands of
 
 xxi.] THE BANDS OF FREEBOOTERS. 381 
 
 the Syrians, and bands of the Moabites, and bands of 
 the children of Ammon, and sent them against Judah 
 to destroy it, according to the word of the Lord, which 
 He spake by His servants the prophets. Surely at the 
 commandment of the Lord came this upon Judah, to 
 remove them out of his sight, for the sins of Manasseh, 
 according to all that he did ; and also for the innocent 
 blood that he shed (for he filled Jerusalem with inno- 
 cent blood) ; which the Lord would not pardon." 
 (2 Kings xxiv. 14.) 
 
 This passage describes, in the first place, the irrup- 
 tion of different inorganic bands of freebooters. The 
 time of it may correspond to the time of that Scythian 
 domination of which Herodotus speaks. In such an 
 anarchy, waifs and relics of the different nations which 
 had been extinguished by the Assyrian Empire, would 
 be gathered together. What the Greek historian 
 describes under one vague general name, would present 
 itself to each particular land as a collection of different 
 neighbouring tribes, one more conspicuous and civilised 
 than the rest as its leader. Nebuchadnezzar now first 
 presents himself to us as the head and representative 
 of the Chaldean race, as the organiser of these loose 
 bands into a new empire, as the conqueror of Egypt, 
 as the Babylonian ruler of his day. 
 
 For the full interpretation of his commission and 
 of the reign of Jehoiakim, we must turn to the prophet 
 Jeremiah. But there is another prophet whose visions 
 seem to refer precisely to this period ; who describes 
 the Chaldeans, not as they would appear to one who 
 lived in an earlier time when they were connected 
 with the older Asiatic civilisation, nor yet at a later 
 when Nebuchadnezzar's empire had been completely
 
 882 HABAKKUK. [_ SEHM - 
 
 consolidated. No date is assigned to the prophecy of 
 Habakkuk in any part of his book ; but the following 
 passage has determined eminent critics, apparently 
 with the best reason, to connect it with this crisis of 
 the national history. 
 
 "Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and 
 wonder marvellously : for I will work a work in your 
 days, which ye will not believe, though it be told you. 
 For, lo, I raise up the Chaldeans, that bitter and hasty 
 nation, which shall march through the breadth of the 
 land, to possess the dwelling-places that are not theirs. 
 They are terrible and dreadful : their judgment and 
 their dignity shall proceed of themselves. Their horses 
 also are swifter than the leopards, and are more fierce 
 than the evening wolves; and their horsemen shall 
 spread themselves, and their horsemen shall come from 
 far ; they shall fly as the eagle that hasteth to eat. 
 They shall come all for violence : their faces shall sup 
 np as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity 
 as the sand. And they shall scoff at the kings, and 
 the princes shall be a scorn unto them : they shall 
 deride every strong hold ; for they shall heap dust, 
 and take it. Then shall his mind change, and he shall 
 pass over, and offend, imputing this his power unto 
 his god." (i. 5-12.) 
 
 In the following chapter the picture is somewhat 
 changed. We have still the same clear and living 
 indications of a lawless, reckless race. But along with 
 these, there is the image of a great conqueror who is 
 coveting an evil covetousness to his house that he 
 may set his nest on high and be delivered from the 
 power of evil, of one who is building a town with blood 
 and establishing a city with iniquity, of one who is
 
 xxi.] THE NEW CHALDEAN EMPIRE. 383 
 
 making the people to labour in the very fire, and the 
 people to weary for very vanity ; of one who is saying 
 to the wood, ' Awake/ and to the dumb stone, ' Arise, 
 and it shall teach, for it is laid over with gold and 
 silver/ Such a description would admirably accord 
 with the words of Nebuchadnezzar, " Is not this great 
 Babylon which I have built ? " It would point out 
 the tasks which he was imposing on the people whom 
 he had vanquished, whilst he was establishing himself 
 in his palace and introducing new images into his 
 temple. Whilst the old Babel kingdom of Assyria 
 was sinking, and prophets were singing of its ruin, 
 Habakkuk from his watch-tower beheld this new Babel 
 kingdom coming forth into the world ; its birth fittingly 
 celebrated by the shouts of the Chaldean plunderers, 
 and by the death-groans of their victims. 
 
 " O Lord," thus the prophet speaks when this new 
 vision dawns upon him, " Lord, how long shall I 
 cry, and thou wilt not hear ! even cry out unto thee of 
 violence, and thou wilt not save ! Why dost thou 
 shew me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance ? 
 for spoiling and violence are before me ; and there are 
 that raise up strife and contention. Therefore the 
 law is slacked, and judgment doth never go forth : for 
 the wicked doth compass about the righteous ; there- 
 fore wrong judgment proceedeth." (i. 14.) 
 
 Josiah's reformation had taken place between the 
 time of Zephaniah and Habakkuk. There had been 
 pledges and foretastes of a righteous government 
 upon the earth ; all, as it seemed, in vain. The good 
 king was hardly taken from the land, before it was 
 given up to ruffians who mocked at law and right, 
 and did whatever was in the power of their hands.
 
 384 THE PROPHET'S DOUBTS. [SERM. 
 
 The prophet is cast down, but not in despair. He 
 cries out, "Art thou not from everlasting, Lord my 
 God, mine Holy one ? we shall not die. Lord, thou 
 hast ordained them for judgment : and, mighty God, 
 thou hast established them for correction." He knew 
 that that was true : and there was comfort in the 
 knowledge. But a man cannot sustain himself on a 
 maxim or a proposition. He must speak out his doubt 
 and his anguish. 
 
 " Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and 
 canst not look on iniquity : wherefore lookest thou 
 upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy 
 tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is 
 more righteous than he ? And makest men as the 
 fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no 
 ruler over them ? They take up all of them with the 
 angle, they catch them in their net, and gather them 
 in their drag; therefore they rejoice and are glad. 
 Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn in- 
 cense unto their drag ; because by them their portion 
 is fat, and their meat plenteous. Shall they therefore 
 empty their net, and not spare continually to slay the 
 nations ?" (i. 12-17.) 
 
 A heathen, and alas ! how many a Christian, would 
 be afraid thus to reason with God concerning His 
 judgments. He would cover his practical unbelief and 
 inward murmuring with the hollow phrases, ' No 
 doubt all is for the best;' ' It is the will of God and 
 must be right/ The Jewish prophet believed in God 
 as a Person, and not as a dark blank fate ; and therefore 
 he could boldly say, ' I know this is not right. Oh ! 
 Thou who art altogether right, explain to me the 
 contradictions in Thy universe; tell me why Thou
 
 xxi.j HE DOES NOT HIDE THEM. 385 
 
 sufferest evil to dwell in it. Let me not have words 
 to solve the dark enigmas of fact, but give me some 
 ground upon which I can stand when all is reeling 
 and shaking around me. And let it be a ground upon 
 which I may rest my hope, not for myself only, but 
 for my race upon which these oppressors are trampling.' 
 The prayer was heard. The words which I have taken 
 for my text give the answer : ' His soul which is lifted 
 up is not upright in him ; but the just shall live by 
 his faith/ The secret of all Chaldean and Babylonian 
 oppression lies there ; the man is lifted up in himself. 
 He thinks he has something of his own upon which he 
 may exalt himself ; therefore he treats human beings 
 as if they were creeping things or fishes of the sea. 
 There lies the secret of the life of an Israelite ; he shall 
 live by his faith. Feeling and knowing himself to be 
 nothing, he is obliged to cast himself wholly upon God. 
 And anything which takes away that self-confidence, 
 and anything which brings forth that faith, is blessed, 
 is divine ; let the outward aspects of it be as dark, let 
 the inward anguish which it produces be as terrible, 
 as it may. Here is the solution of the riddles of the 
 universe ; here is the key to God's dark and inscrutable 
 ways. Not a solution which we can resort to as if it 
 were a formula of ready application, which may stifle 
 questioning and set our minds at ease. Not a key 
 such as empirics and diviners use, pretending that 
 they know all the wards of every mystery and can 
 open it at their pleasure, but one to which the humble 
 and the meek can always resort when most baffled, 
 when most ignorant, one which helps them to wel- 
 come their own tribulations, and to see in the tribula- 
 tions of the world a sure witness that the earth shall 
 
 2 o
 
 386 REJOICING. [SERM. 
 
 be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, 
 as the waters cover the sea. 
 
 In this spirit Habbakuk stands and waits. He 
 writes the vision and makes it plain upon tables that 
 he that runneth may read it ; that men in after-days 
 may know how their forefathers have suffered and 
 sorrowed, and may know where they could not find 
 and where they did find deliverance. He does not see 
 to the end of the vision ; he does not ask to see. There 
 is yet an appointed time ; to tarry is his task, yes, 
 and his privilege. For no sudden discovery could give 
 him the simple dependence, the thorough confidence, 
 to which he is trained amidst clouds and darkness. 
 Out of that darkness there rises, not some Atlantis, 
 some island of the blessed, whither men may fly from 
 the misery that is about them. He says 
 
 " God came from Temau, and the Holy One from 
 Mount Paran. Selah. His glory covered the heavens, 
 and the earth was full of His praise. And His bright- 
 ness was as the light ; He had horns coming out of His 
 hand : and there was the hiding of His power." 
 (iii. 3, 4.) 
 
 The land in which he dwelt, the mountains on which 
 lie had looked from childhood, these and not some 
 far-off world spoke to him of the Divine Presence. 
 God was there. And this God was He who had 
 delivered His people, who cared for the poor and 
 needy, who had declared war against the proud and 
 oppressor. To see the pestilence and the burning coals 
 working as His ministers, the everlasting mountains 
 swallowed at His word, the rivers cleaving the earth, 
 the sun and moon standing still or moving at the 
 light of His arrows ; this was fearful, it made his lips
 
 xxt.] FOR US AS WELL AS HABAKKUK. 387 
 
 quiver and his hands tremble. Yet the sight gave him 
 rest in the day of trouble. At the root of confusion was 
 eternal order ; every dark power in Nature, every human 
 will, must work out the purposes of Eternal Love. 
 
 " Although the fig-tree shall not blossom, neither 
 shall fruit be in the vines ; the labour of the olive shall 
 fail, and the fields shall yield no meat ; the flock shall 
 be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in 
 the stalls : Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in 
 the God of my salvation." (iii. 17, 18.) 
 
 The saddest of all prophecies ends with a song, 
 the stringed instruments give out a music which is 
 deeper than all the discords and wailings of Creation. 
 Brethren ! may it be granted to us with purged ears 
 to hear that music ; may it have an echo in our inmost 
 hearts ! We shall hear it best, we shall join in it most 
 fervently, when we have confessed how little fruit we 
 have ourselves brought forth to God, when we have 
 mourned over the dryness and barrenness of God's 
 Church. Then when we have felt how death is written 
 upon all things, we shall begin to know the power of 
 the risen life ; we shall understand the truth, Jesus 
 Christ was crucified in the flesh, that He might be 
 quickened in the Spirit, and that, together with His 
 own body, He might quicken us and the whole universe. 
 
 2c 2
 
 SERMON XXII. 
 
 TEMPTATION THE SCHOOL OP THE PBOPHET. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 4>th Sunday after Easter. May 9, 1852.) 
 
 Then said I, "Ah Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak, for I am a 
 child." But the Lord said unto me, " Say not, I am a child : for 
 thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I 
 command, thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for 
 I am with thee to deliver thee," saith the Lord. JBR. i. 6-9. 
 
 IT is not improbable that Jeremiah was almost a child 
 when he spoke these words. The earliest of the 
 prophets was called to his office when he was girded 
 with the linen ephod which Hannah had made for 
 him. The king of the land at the time when the 
 word of the Lord first came to Jeremiah was a child, 
 and yet knew that he was destined to do a great work. 
 Josiah had clear evidence that he was designated to 
 his task before his birth ; it devolved upon him simply 
 because he was the heir of the house of David. The 
 like assurance came in another way to the young priest 
 of Anathoth. To him it was revealed, "Before I 
 formed thee in the belly I knew thee; before thou 
 earnest out of the womb I sanctified thee and I 
 ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." 
 
 I do not believe it would have been possible for
 
 SERM. xxii.] THE SENSE OP A CALLING, 889 
 
 either of them, when he became a man, to have 
 suffered life without this conviction. If the king had 
 thought that he held his power because there were 
 some special virtues in him which entitled him to it ; 
 if Jeremiah had fancied that he was a prophet because 
 there was in him a certain aptitude for uttering divine 
 discourses and foreseeing calamities, who can tell the 
 weariness and loathing which each would have felt for 
 his task when it led to no seeming result, except the 
 dislike of all against or for whom it was exercised, 
 still more when the powers and graces which were 
 supposed to be the qualifications for it became con- 
 sciously feeble. Nothing but a witness, the more sure 
 for being secret, ' thou wast marked and sealed for this 
 function before thou hadst done good or evil ; all thy 
 powers are endowments to fit thee for fulfilling thy 
 vocation, but do not constitute it ; they may perish, 
 the comfort and inward satisfaction in the work may 
 perish, it may produce nothing but pain to thyself 
 and to those who are brought within thy influence, or 
 harder still, it may be regarded with utter indifference 
 and contempt by others till thou almost art taught to 
 despise it thyself : still the words must be spoken ; the 
 acts must be done ; for they are not thy words or thy 
 acts ; ' nothing, I say, but such a persuasion as this, 
 written and rewritten in a man's heart, could sustain 
 him against the conflicts outward and inward which 
 pursue the righteous king and the true prophet. 
 
 In proportion, then, as a man had to sustain a more 
 than usual amount of such conflicts, one might suppose 
 that his discipline would begin early, that there would 
 be intimations to him in boyhood, which would assure 
 him afterwards that he had not rushed into his office
 
 890 THE CHILD AND THE MAN. [SEBM. 
 
 through some momentary impulse, but that a hand, 
 which he could not shrink from or shake off, had been 
 leading him, drawing him, even dragging him, forwards 
 when he was most reluctant and would most readily 
 have gone some other way. 
 
 This conclusion is strengthened by some evidence 
 in the case of Jeremiah. Considering the time to which 
 he lived he must have been young in the thirteenth 
 year of Josiah, young enough to make the most 
 literal sense of the expression in the text a reasonable 
 one. Nevertheless, I cannot think that the force of 
 it depends upon that evidence. The feelings which 
 Jeremiah experienced now were those which Moses 
 experienced when he was eighty years old. He who 
 said, " I am not eloquent, neither heretofore nor since 
 Thou hast spoken to me ; " said in fact, ' I am a child 
 only able to lisp the words that Thou wouldest have 
 me utter in the ears of Pharaoh and of my country- 
 men ; a helpless stranger in an inhospitable world/ 
 When Jeremiah was eighty years old, I do not suppose 
 that he would have used these words with less sense 
 of their truth, than when he first felt the divine 
 compulsion. All the intermediate time he was only 
 learning more thoroughly how true they were, and 
 how true the answer to them was. 
 
 No doubt there was something in the character and 
 temperament of the man, which made this language 
 more natural to him than it was to Moses. The meek- 
 ness which is attributed to him must have been of 
 slow growth, brought out by a long discipline. All his 
 early acts exhibit him to us as fervid and vehement ; 
 traces of that disposition appear even in his latest 
 years. Jeremiah has a kind of feminine tenderness
 
 xxii.j THE PROPHET A SUBVEETER. 891 
 
 and susceptibility ; strength was to be educed out of a 
 spirit which was inclined to be timid and shrinking. 
 Think of such a vision as this being presented to a 
 mind cast in that mould ; " See I have this day set \ 
 thee over the nations and over the kingdoms to root I 
 out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw ' 
 down, to build, and to plant." 
 
 At first we should be disposed to say, ' Such words 
 can never have applied in their strict and literal import 
 to any seer or teacher. They belong to the warrior 
 and the conqueror. We must explain them by a figure 
 of speech. One who discourses of the fall of kingdoms, 
 must be represented as himself the overthrower of 
 them.' I do not think that either the analogy of 
 language or the facts of the case justify that me i hod 
 of interpretation. If the prophet only talked of what 
 was^ happening or what was to happen, no poetical, 
 licence could permit us to confound him with the 
 subverters of thrones and societies. But have we yet 
 to learn that a great teacher or reformer, though he 
 may never take a sword into his hands, does that 
 which swords cannot do; that swordsmen, in fact, only i 
 carry out upon the surface that which he is doing under- 1 
 ground ?/The uprooting of the thoughts and principles 
 in which acts originate, the planting the seeds of life 
 which are hereafter to bring forth fruits that all will 
 recognise, are his functions./ If he has received any 
 inspiration, any vital power at all, it must be one 
 which enables him to produce a movement at the very 
 heart of human life and society, in a region of which 
 the ordinary statesman knows nothing. We shall 
 find hereafter that Jeremiah did pull down and 
 destroy, and plant, and build, and that his countrymen
 
 392 A POLITICIAN AND WAREIOS. [SEEM. 
 
 felt and knew that he did. And at the very commence- 
 ment of his work he has an inward certainty that he 
 must be a man of war. The surrounding world, his 
 own people, his nearest kinsfolk, will regard him as 
 their enemy. A strange anticipation for one whose 
 temptation would have been to purchase their good- 
 will at almost any price; who would have longed to 
 go anywhere that he might avoid strife ! Yet so it 
 must be. There is no flight for him into quiet religious 
 contemplation ; he cannot persuade himself that he is 
 to prove his difference from his countrymen and his 
 superiority to them by withdrawing from the circle of 
 interests in which they are dwelling. He may pass 
 hours or months of solitude ; but he will not be away 
 from the events which are befalling them ; he will be 
 more deeply occupied with them; he will be contem- 
 plating them with a closeness and intensity to which 
 the mere actors in them are strangers. The poor young 
 priest of Anathoth can in no way sever himself from 
 the policy of nations and rulers; Judsea, Egypt, Chaldea, 
 every tribe and power of the earth, must be about him 
 in his closet, must enter into his most inward personal 
 experiences and sufferings./ 
 
 This was the law under which every Jewish prophet 
 lived ; but in no case is it so vividly exemplified as in 
 Jeremiah. We are brought into more direct personal 
 intercourse with him than with any one of his order; 
 the sensitiveness of his spirit made him more conscious 
 than sterner natures are of shocks from those with 
 whom he was in contact directly, and even through a 
 number of intermediate hands ; the time in which he 
 lived compelled every man to consider what his exist- 
 ence as a Jew meant, and what it had to do with his
 
 xxii.] THE SIGNS SHEWED TO JEKEMIAH. 393 
 
 existence as a man. We shall not therefore understand 
 the struggles or aspirations of his individual soul, if we 
 go to the prophecy for the purpose of observing them. 
 He did not think or speak of his soul, but of God. He 
 did not know that he had a" soul except so far as God 
 revealed Himself to him as the Lord God of Israel. 
 
 Jeremiah is instructed himself, as he is to instruct 
 others, by signs. The two signs which he tells us of at 
 the commencement of his book, presuppose a man full 
 of earnest thoughts and meditations. The sight of a 
 tree tells him that the Lord will hasten His word to 
 perform it. It is not easy to trace the process by 
 which any visible thing suggests to a man a deep 
 conviction, which a long course of experiments is 
 afterwards to establish. Often some slight accident, 
 something in the name or look of the object which any 
 other person would not take notice of, meets with a 
 series of thoughts previously awakened, and leads to a 
 discovery which must have come from another far 
 deeper source. A tree, however, even without such 
 associations, by its orderly growth, by the invisible 
 energy within, foretelling the appearance of the fruits 
 in their appointed season, was perhaps of all symbols, 
 the one which would be most likely to remind him of 
 a power as remote from mere sensible observation, as 
 certain to produce sensible effects, which was working 
 in the acts of men and the changes of the world. 
 
 The other image was still more obvious. A seething- 
 pot with its face towards the north, told him that out 
 of the north an evil should break forth upon all the 
 inhabitants of the land. We have heard what strange 
 elements were boiling and fermenting in the north j 
 Zephaniah had seen them in a distant vision; but
 
 391 STATE OF THE NATION. [SERSU 
 
 he could not tell whether Egypt might not be the 
 destined successor of Assyria. Habakkuk clearly saw 
 that Chaldea was the appointed scourge. Jeremiah is- 
 shewn at the very commencement of his work, when 
 the king and his advisers* thought the Pharaohs were 
 their chief remaining enemies, that the seething-pot 
 had not its face in that direction. This revelation also 
 clearly points to that gathering of bands, that mixture 
 of different races, in the attack upon Palestine, which 
 was described in the passage I quoted last Sunday from 
 the Book of Kings : " Lo, I will call all the families of 
 the kingdoms of the North, and they shall come." But 
 the issue of the struggle is one which even Habakkuk 
 did not foresee. " They shall set every one his throne 
 at the entering of the gates of Jerusalem, and against 
 all the walls thereof round about, and against all the 
 cities of Judah." This was the outward event for 
 which the prophet was to prepare himself and his 
 people. Bat he was not chiefly to speak of that. 
 The event itself was as much a sign as the almond-tree 
 or the seething-pot. It denoted an internal condition 
 of the nation and a design of Him who was the ruler of 
 it. " I will utter my judgments against them touching 
 all their wickedness, who have forsaken me, and have 
 burnt incense unto other gods, and worshipped the 
 works of their own hands." We perceive as much 
 from the words of the prophet as the history, that this 
 idolatry has now become deep and radical. We do not 
 1 hear chiefly of altars raised to Baal or the Queen of 
 I Heaven, but of the result to which these altars have 
 been leading. The state of mind which was latent in 
 them, and which they brought forth into full conscious 
 activity, is represented as an apostate state; not so-
 
 HEATHEN FIDELITY TO THEIR GODS. 395 
 
 much an adoption of false gods as a denial of the true. 
 There is a very great practical difference between the 
 frivolous, heartless taste for foreign novelties, which 
 was denounced by the earlier prophets, and the utter 
 incapacity for acknowledging a god not appealing to the 
 senses which Jeremiah discovers in his contemporaries. 
 He boldly sets up the faith of the heathen as a lesson 
 to the Israelites. " Pass over the Isles of Chittim and 
 see : and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently, and 
 see if there be such a thing. Hath a nation changed 
 their gods, which yet are no gods ? But my people hath 
 changed their glory for that which doth not profit." 
 He perceives among all the heathen people a tenacity 
 of the traditions they had received from their fathers. 
 They were clinging to names and forms which had no 
 substance in themselves; still, in so far as they were 
 inherited, the affection for them was a confession of 
 permanence, of something which the worshipper did not 
 make for himself. But they to whom the permanent 
 Being had revealed Himself, they whom He had chosen 
 as His witnesses to all nations that He is and that He 
 abides, they were always seeking to shake off the 
 feeling of His reality as if it were an oppression, and 
 to set up self -chosen symbols in place of Him. 
 
 Hosea was taught what the dispersion of the tribes 
 would mean, by the infidelity and revolt of his wife. 
 Jeremiah is taught to understand what is coming upon 
 Judah, by the same terrible analogy. 
 
 "Thus saith the Lord; I remember thee, the 
 kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals* 
 when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land 
 that was not sown." Amidst all the variations of the 
 discourse which follows, this is evidently the key-note.
 
 396 PEOGEESS OP DISCOVERY. [SERM. 
 
 The thought of a divorce between creatures and their 
 Creator, wilfully effected by the determination of the 
 creatures not to acknowledge their relation to the 
 Creator, by their determination to create gods for 
 themselves, recurs to him continually, and always with 
 fresh astonishment and awe. If the tenderness of his 
 spirit disposed him to dwell upon this kind of illustra- 
 tion, if he grew more feelingly alive to the truth of it 
 as bonds of friendship and kinsmanship were in his 
 own case dissolved, yet there is a fear and amazement 
 lying beneath all his gentler emotions, and making 
 language, which would be more pathetic than that of 
 any of his predecessors, at times more stern and terrible. 
 The reason, I believe, is one from which we may 
 draw great consolation. The discoveries and revela- 
 tions to the minds of the prophets became deeper, in 
 proportion as they approached nearer to some great 
 crisis in their country's history. It was possible for 
 the Israelite of an earlier time, even for the instructed 
 Israelite, to think of the covenant which God had 
 made with His people as an act of grace, expressing, 
 no doubt, the mind of a gracious Being, but still as 
 almost arbitrary. We have seen how Isaiah was 
 gradually educated to know that the covenant denoted 
 a real and eternal relation between God and man in the 
 person of a Mediator. If that truth is not brought out 
 with the same force and distinctness in Jeremiah, if he 
 is not in the same sense as the other the evangelical 
 prophet, yet he had even a deeper conviction that a 
 divine Spirit was with him continually, a Spirit which 
 was seeking to subdue his will and all wills to itself. 
 That men should break loose from this gracious 
 government, should choose to be independent of it,
 
 KXII.] THE DIVINE MAERIAGE. 397 
 
 seemed to Mm the saddest and strangest thing in the 
 world. It was not the casting off of an outward legal 
 yoke; it was the refusing to be under a sceptre of 
 Love; it was a fight in the innermost sanctuary of 
 man's being against Good and for evil ; a determination 
 that not God but the opposite of God, the enemy of 
 God should have the homage of the heart and reins. 
 And yet at the same time he was learning from his 
 own experience, how natural it was for the spirit of 
 man to engage in this strife. How often was he con- 
 scious of it in himself ! How often the thraldom of 
 Love was galling to him ! How ready was he at one 
 moment to disbelieve in the very existence of the 
 power, which at another presented itself to him with 
 an overwhelming evidence, humbled him, elevated 
 him, made him able to teach or to defy the people of 
 the earth ! 
 
 Suppose he could have thought, as religious men 
 often think in our day, that these inward battles were 
 confined to him and a few rare and select persons, and 
 that it was altogether an absurdity and a profaneness 
 to speak of them as having any connection with the 
 wild ungodly people about him, he would never have 
 poured out his lamentations over Jerusalem or been a 
 prophet to the nations. But the only singularity which 
 he could claim was this, that he was taught to observe 
 in himself what was going on in other men who did 
 not observe it. He dares not say that the Spirit which 
 was speaking to him, demanding his submission, offer- 
 ing him the promise and blessings of obedience, was 
 not striving also with his countrymen. The message 
 to them was this : 
 
 "Go and proclaim these words towards the north, and
 
 398 THE PROPHET'S SELF-KNOWLEDGE. [SEBK. 
 
 say, Return, thou backsliding Israel, saith the Lord ; 
 and I will not cause mine anger to fall upon you : for I 
 am merciful, saith the Lord, and I will not keep anger 
 for ever. Only acknowledge thine iniquity, that thou 
 hast transgressed against the Lord thy God, and hast 
 scattered thy ways to the strangers under every green 
 tree, and ye have not obeyed my voice, saith the Lord. 
 Turn, backsliding children, saith the Lord; for I am 
 married unto you : and I will take you one of a city, 
 ^nd two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion : and 
 I will give you pastors according to mine heart, which 
 shall feed you with knowledge and understanding." 
 
 These words, you perceive, are addressed to the 
 North. They affirm that a mysterious bond, which no 
 sin of theirs had been able to break, united even those 
 tribes which were gone into captivity to the God of 
 Abraham ; that He was still holding intercourse with 
 them and seeking to bring their hearts back to Himself. 
 All religious people have felt that the bond of which 
 Jeremiah speaks cannot be an outward or a formal one ; 
 that his words denote the most inward spiritual rela- 
 tionship. Their inference is, that Israel cannot mean 
 Israel, that it must mean believing men. They are so 
 convinced that a relationship cannot exist between God 
 and those who are not confessing it, that they will 
 practise any outrage upon the inspired utterances of 
 prophets and apostles, rather than permit them to 
 proclaim what according to this theory is a flagrant 
 contradiction But. we must violate more than the 
 letter of Jeremiah's prophecy, if we hold it to be a con- 
 tradiction. All his most bitter and painful inward 
 experiences were teaching him that if he only trusted 
 in God because he was a faithful man, he could not
 
 xxii.] TIME BEFORE JOSIAH'S REFORM. 399 
 
 really trust in Him at all. The deceitfulness of other 
 men's hearts became known to him through the 
 deceitfulness of his own. His unwillingness to speak 
 any more words in God's name enabled him to under- 
 stand the rebellion of his countrymen. He needed to 
 have the precious and the vile separated in himself, 
 that he might teach all Israelites how the good seed in 
 them might be made victorious over their evil nature, 
 when they acknowledged that the one was all of God, 
 the other all their own. He had to be delivered from 
 his own false confidences again and again, before he 
 could teach the rich man not to glory in his riches, or 
 the wise man in his wisdom, but all to glory in knowing 
 Him who executed righteousness and truth in the earth. 
 The first chapter of Jeremiah, like that of Isaiah, is 
 an introduction to the book. The next five to the 
 beginning of the seventh may belong to his life before 
 he left Anathoth ; the discourse with which the seventh 
 opens, was preached, he says, at the gate of the Lord's 
 house in Jerusalem. As we advance further, the book 
 becomes more obviously and directly mixed with his- 
 torical details. The first of these portions we may 
 reasonably refer to the five years between the thirteenth 
 and the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign, before his 
 reformation had begun. There is no hint of any 
 improvement. The prophet sought in vain for a man 
 in Jerusalem who executed judgment and desired the 
 truth. The poor men and the great men had equally 
 broken the yoke and cast aside the bonds. None would 
 stand in the old ways and ask for the old paths. Such 
 a description answers well to the time when the Book 
 of the Law was a treasure unknown to priests, scribes, 
 and king. But the utter hollowness which the prophet
 
 400 THE SMALL FRUIT OF IT. [SERM. 
 
 lays bare, the deep-seated inward corruption, above 
 all, the utter vanity of the priests and prophets, he 
 could not expect to see cured by any outward return 
 to the services of the temple, any formal reverence for 
 the Book of the Law. " Circumcise your hearts/' is 
 the cry of Jeremiah. If that cry was not heeded, the 
 prophets might promise them peace ; they might turn 
 to Assyria or to Egypt to save them, but all would be 
 in vain ; the wound of the Daughter of Zion could not 
 be healed by empty words or by foreign medicines. 
 
 However, therefore, Jeremiah may have sympathised 
 with the zeal and nobleness of the king (and he speaks 
 of him after his death with affectionate reverence), it 
 does not seem that he hoped much from his reform, or 
 that he had any commission to encourage him in it, 
 further than as all right and brave words must 
 encourage all right and brave acts. Some of the inci- 
 dental consequences of that reform, or, it would be 
 more correct to say, the necessary consequences of the 
 previous state of the people's mind when Josiah had 
 ruffled its surface without disturbing its depths, 
 Jeremiah was called to denounce. Perhaps not in the 
 days of Josiah, but in those of his successors, he was- 
 sent to preach at the temple door against those whose 
 new-found zeal was making the sacredness of the 
 temple a plea for formalism and self-righteous security. 
 We shall find also that the reverence for the Book of 
 'the Law, which the young king had promoted, was 
 leading to self-conceit and the fancy that the book had 
 some charm and power of its own, apart from the 
 living wisdom which was in it. 
 
 " How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of the 
 Lord is with us ? Lo, certainly in vain made He it,-
 
 xxii.] THE EVIL PRIESTS. 401 
 
 the pen of the scribes is in vain. The wise men are 
 ashamed, they are dismayed and taken : lo, they have 
 rejected the word of the Lord ; and what wisdom is in 
 them ? 
 
 But the greatest cause of dismay to Jeremiah, both 
 before and after this external change, was the false 
 hood of the priests and prophets. He did not grow up 
 in Jerusalem within sight of the temple ; in a country 
 district he was likely to feel with greater liveliness 
 than in a city all the impressions and associations 
 which belonged to a member of the Levitical tribe. 
 Are we to suppose that when he became a man he 
 threw these influences and associations aside, forgot 
 that he was a priest, strove to regard himself merely 
 as one of the people, every one of whom was holy ? 
 Had he done so, he would have found a number to 
 sympathise with him, whose consciences had been 
 revolted by the inconsistencies and corruptions of the 
 priests, or who were impatient of the restraints which 
 their existence seemed to prescribe. Jeremiah was 
 not to find any such disciples. He thought more of 
 the sacredness of the order than the other members of 
 it ; it was because their position seemed to him so 
 very awful and responsible that he provoked their 
 rage by telling them how they forgot the covenant of 
 the Lord, how little they believed that He was in the 
 midst of them. It was their unbelief, not their belief, 
 which he complained of, their low estimate of their 
 calling, not their exaggeration of it. No doubt he 
 believed that the deepest sympathy with the sorrows 
 and sins of the people, the humblest judgment of 
 themselves, was demanded of those who offered sacri- 
 fices for the sins of the people, who were compassed 
 
 2 D 
 
 -I/
 
 402 THE FALSE PROPHETS. [SERM. 
 
 about with their infirmities. No doubt the official or 
 personal self-conceit which arose from their forget- 
 fulness of their relation to the people at large was one 
 of their greatest offences in his eyes. But these sins 
 arose from their not confessing that they were called by 
 the Lord to be witnesses of His sympathy ; whenever 
 they were not witnesses for Him they were necessarily 
 proud and self-seeking. Jeremiah therefore could 
 only be qualified for this part of his work, or for any 
 other part of it, by feeling in himself every one of 
 those evil tendencies which he imputed to the priests 
 generally. He had to feel all the peculiar temptations 
 of his tribe and class to vanity, self-glorification, 
 self-indulgence, to feel how quickly they might fall 
 into all the commonest, grossest habits of other men, 
 while there is also a subtle, radical, internal wicked- 
 ness, the secret source of the overt acts which the 
 law takes notice of, that is nearer to them than to 
 those whose offerings they present. Fearful discovery ! 
 the man to whom it is made must see the abyss of 
 evil at times closer to his own feet than it can be to 
 those who live more on the outside of things, and 
 have never been taught to look at their properties and 
 principles. 
 
 The false prophet was even a more fearful spectacle 
 to Jeremiah than the godless priest. We have seen 
 how Micah trembled at the mysterious evil and the 
 mysterious power of this class of deceivers who were 
 trafficking with the word of the Lord ; speaking a lie 
 and saying, He hath said it. That was terrible ; but 
 to see that the Spirit of God Himself was with them, 
 and in them ; that they were bidding Him depart from 
 them ; that they were giving themselves up to an Evil
 
 KXII.] THE DANGER NOT EXTINCT. 403 
 
 Spirit with a kind of reckless unbelief, of half-serious 
 atheism, this was a darker vision ; it was the one 
 which rose up full upon the mind of Jeremiah, and 
 which made him look upon the false prophet as at 
 once the type of the depravity of his nation and the 
 mightiest instrument in cultivating it and hastening on 
 the desolation which would be the consequence of it. 
 Yet here again it was a prophet, and only a prophet, 
 who could have entered into the sin of the prophets. 
 If he had not believed in an actual divine teaching and 
 commission and inspiration, in a power mightier than 
 all external power whatever, he could not have perceived 
 what this prostitution of it signified; if he had not 
 been himself in danger every hour of prostituting it 
 himself to his own purposes, and had not been certain 
 that only God himself could preserve him from that 
 peril, he might have raved at the mischiefs which the 
 false seers wrought in the land : he could never have 
 followed their mischiefs up to their source. 
 
 Brethren, I may speak to you hereafter of Jeremiah 
 as the teacher of Israel in the reigns of Jehoiakim and 
 Zedekiah. Let me speak of him to-day as the teacher 
 of us, the English priests, and prophets, and people, in 
 the reign of Queen Victoria. Or, if there are some 
 thoughts rising out of this subject, too sacred and 
 awful to dwell upon in any public assembly, then let 
 me beseech you to desire for your own sakes, and for 
 ours, that we may think of them when we are not dis- 
 coursing to others, but are alone with our own hearts and 
 with God. Let me call upon you very solemnly not to 
 regard the follies and sins which you discover continually 
 in those who minister to you as light things, which 
 you may make a jest of ; which you may dwell upon, as 
 
 2 D 2
 
 404 THE HELP AGAINST IT. [SEEM. 
 
 proofs that those who are hound by holy professions 
 are not better than others ; which you may exult in 
 because they cause any evils or falsehoods of yours to 
 look less black. Be assured that if we are trivial, the 
 whole land becomes infected with triviality ; if we are 
 insincere in our dealings with God, that insincerity will 
 be reproduced in all the ordinary relations of life. If 
 the priest draws nigh to the altar with an unbelieving 
 heart, you will find the statesman base and treacherous 
 in the council- chamber and the senate ; if the prophet 
 or preacher speaks words in God's name merely to please 
 or injure men, the clerk and the shopkeeper will be 
 fraudulent likewise. Is there a danger that we shall 
 play with the most dreadful words as if they were 
 counters, shall use the Names of Heaven and Hell, and 
 of God Himself, as if they were instruments of our 
 trade ? Is there a danger that there shall be nothing 
 answering in our acts to our words, that we shall be 
 more grovelling than ordinary men in the one, in pro- 
 portion as we are more magnificent in the other ? An 
 infinite danger, a danger to be averted by no contri- 
 vances, not by flying from the world that we may be 
 above it, not by mixing with it lest we shall be puffed 
 up with spiritual pride. God only knows which course 
 is the safer or the more perilous ; in general it seems 
 wiser to take that which the tradition of our country 
 suggests, because it implies least of self-will and self- 
 dependence. But either way we shall be tempted to 
 vanity, servility, untruth. Oh ! if you have ever learnt 
 any truth, or received any nobler impulse from any of 
 us ; or if, wanting that personal motive, you care for 
 the well-being of your country ask of Him who has 
 promised to hear, that He will give us firmer wills,
 
 xxn.] THE HELP AGAINST IT. 405 
 
 more childlike hearts, greater boldness in denouncing 
 evil because it is hateful to God and destructive of men-; 
 greater tenderness for the evils of others because we 
 feel them bitterly in ourselves. Ask that our lips may 
 be silent if we cannot speak words of health, and that 
 we may not call upon you to make sacrifices, if we are 
 not willing to offer ourselves as sacrifices in His name 
 who is the High-priest of the whole family in Heaven 
 and Earth.
 
 SERMON XXIII. 
 
 THE POTTER'S WORK. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, Sunday after Ascension. May 23, 1852.) 
 
 The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, Arise, 
 and go down to the potter's house, and there will I cause thee 
 to hear my words. Then I went down to the potter's house, and, 
 behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that 
 he made of clay was marred in the hands of the potter ; so he 
 made it again another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to 
 make it. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, O 
 house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter ? saith the 
 Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in 
 mine hand, O house of Israel. JEREMIAH xviii. 1-6. 
 
 I HAVE spoken of the two signs by which Jeremiah 
 was instructed in the gradual and certain fulfilment of 
 God's purposes, and in the woe which was coming 
 upon his people from the North. There are other 
 signs scattered through the book, some merely 
 addressed to the prophet himself, some which he was 
 to shew to the people or to make use of as parables for 
 their instruction. A girdle which he hid in the hole 
 of a rock till it was marred and profitable for nothing, 
 taught him how close and intimate had been the bond 
 between God and His people, and how, through their 
 own act, all fellowship betwe'en Him and them had 
 been destroyed.
 
 SERM. xxiii.] THE GIRDLE. 40? 
 
 In each of these cases, in the last especially, 
 much pains are taken to impress the force of the sign 
 upon the prophet's mind. He must actually wear the 
 girdle; he must take a journey to the Euphrates to hide 
 it. He is not allowed to think of it as a fancy which has 
 struck him and which he may let go or exchange for 
 some other. He must exhaust the full meaning of it 
 before he has done with it. The study of it must be a 
 serious occupation, suspended perhaps for a time, but 
 to be taken up again; the first thought suggested being 
 part of a chain to which the last is linked. I apprehend 
 this was a very wonderful education of a man's spirit, 
 one which may supply very precious hints to ourselves 
 for the discipline of our own. What we want in every 
 occupation is some means of preserving the continuity 
 of our thoughts, some resistance to the influences which 
 are continually distracting and dissipating them. But 
 it is especially the student of the events of his own 
 time, of the laws which regulate them, of the issues 
 which are to proceed from them, who has need to be 
 reminded that he is not studying a number of loose 
 unconnected phenomena, but is tracing a principle 
 under different aspects and through different manifes- 
 tations. A sensible illustration, if we would condescend 
 to avail ourselves of it, would often save us from much 
 vagueness and unreality as well as from hasty and 
 unsatisfactory conclusions. 
 
 Jeremiah's studies in the potter's house were com- 
 menced, like those of which I have spoken, deliberately. 
 He felt that he was commanded to go down to it. He 
 was to consider the whole course of the potter's work 
 as one which contained a meaning that he could not 
 dispense with. If not as unsightly an image as the
 
 408 SIGNS REQUIRE MEDITATION. [SEEM. 
 
 marred girdle, it had at least nothing picturesque to 
 recommend it. An orator would never choose such an 
 instance for the purpose of making an impression on 
 his audience ; still less for the purpose of exhibiting 
 his own skill and liveliness. It must be for business, 
 not for amusement, that such a process is observed. 
 Let us consider what Jeremiah's business was, and 
 how the potter might help him in understanding and 
 performing it. 
 
 Josiah had been as thorough a reformer as it was 
 possible for a king to be. The prophet, it would seem, 
 remained silent while he was carrying on his work ; 
 speech was not needed when there was such vigorous 
 and consistent action. It might have been expected 
 that when the task was completed he would again 
 open his lips in a song of triumph upon its success. 
 But there were prophets enough to perform that service. 
 Those who had followed Manasseh in raising altars to 
 Baal and the Queen of Heaven, learned with great 
 rapidity to talk of the Temple of the Lord, when. 
 Josiah had restored it to be the centre of worship ; to 
 boast that they had a perfect law when it was brought 
 out of its obscurity and when the king trembled as 
 he heard the words of it. It was wonderful to 
 hear how these converts caught the tones and phrases 
 of the old prophets now that they were the favourites 
 of the court again ; how they could utter their 
 " burden" just as Hosea or Isaiah had uttered his. 
 But the tones and the phrases were all which could 
 be copied. The actual burden of the old seer was a 
 warning of ruin which the sins of the land must bring 
 forth ; the burden of the new seer was Peace, Peace. 
 The king had restored faith; the land had been
 
 ixm.J WHO ARE THE MOST GUILTY. 409 
 
 reformed; what had they to do but rejoice that such 
 blessings had been vouchsafed, and to expect all the 
 further blessings which were promised to a faithful 
 and righteous nation ? 
 
 Now began the special work of Jeremiah, that one 
 which was to draw upon him such hatred from all among 
 whom he dwelt, and which was to cause him a secret 
 anguish of which they knew nothing. . He had to say 
 boldly, Your faith has not been restored ; your land is 
 not reformed ; you have no right to expect the blessings 
 of a faithful nation ; for your nation is not faithful : 
 you must look for destruction; you have brought it 
 and are bringing it on yourselves. So much he might 
 perhaps have said and have been pardoned. General 
 charges against a nation are borne without much 
 indignation. They may not be believed, they may be 
 thought troublesome and the utterances of a gloomy 
 temper. But they can be easily evaded. They may 
 even impart a certain pleasure to a certain class and 
 be made reasons for self -congratulation. ' No doubt 
 what you say is sadly true about the mass of our 
 countrymen : we, the religious men, the prophets and 
 the priests, feel it ; but what can we do ? ' How 
 comfortable when we can thus sever ourselves from 
 the sins of the world around, and make them a foil 
 to shew off our own excellence ! It was just this 
 unction which the prophets had administered to their 
 own souls and to the souls of their admiring hearers. 
 It was just this which Jeremiah was to take from them. 
 It is against you, he said, the bright exceptions, you 
 the religious men, the priests, the prophets, that I am 
 to testify. You are making the land corrupt ; you 
 are doing more than all others to hasten its captivity.
 
 410 JEREMIAH TEMPTED TO BE FALSE. [SEEM. 
 
 For whence come the outward acts of unrighteousness, 
 but from the unrighteous heart and will ? And what 
 is an unrighteous heart or will but a heart or will 
 which has severed itself from a Righteous Being and 
 is making another object of worship for itself ? Upon 
 them he charges the adulteries, robberies, perjuries, of 
 the land ; upon them all the open idolatries in groves 
 and high-places, which the people had practised before 
 Josiah's purification, and into which they would 
 assuredly relapse the moment the external restraint was 
 removed. The distinction, therefore, which seemed to 
 exist between the different classes of Israelites was 
 sternly broken down by the prophet ; or rather another 
 distinction was set up instead of it. The great moral 
 offenders were declared to be those who exalted them- 
 selves into moral teachers, who boasted of spiritual 
 illumination. 
 
 But was not Jeremiah in the like danger ? What 
 right had he to separate himself from other prophets, 
 if their sin consisted so especially in the effort which 
 they made to separate themselves from other men ? 
 You must read and meditate on his book to hear how 
 great his danger was, and how he was delivered from it. 
 You will find him recording very strange experiences 
 indeed, and uttering very strange words. You will 
 sometimes exclaim, ' If I had not met with that expres- 
 sion in the Bible, if it had not been attributed to a 
 great prophet, I should have called it wild, almost 
 blasphemous/ You will find him calling the Lord of 
 all to witness, " I have not hastened from being a 
 pastor to follow Thee; neither have I desired the 
 woeful day ; Thou knowest : that which came out of 
 my lips was right before Thee. Be not a terror unto
 
 HOW HE WAS KEPT HONEST. 411 
 
 me : Thou art my hope in the day of evil." He had 
 said before, " Thy words were found, and I did eat 
 them ; and Thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing 
 of my heart." " I sat alone because of Thy hand, for 
 Thou hast filled me with indignation. Why is my 
 pain perpetual and my wound incurable which refuseth 
 to be healed ? Wilt Thou be unto me altogether as a 
 liar and as waters that fail ? " These last words do not 
 occur only in one place. " O Lord," he says, " Thou 
 hast deceived me and I was deceived." And again, 
 " Righteous art Thou, Lord, when I plead with Thee. 
 Yet let me talk with Thee of thy judgments. Where- 
 fore doth the way of the wicked prosper ? Wherefore 
 are all they happy that deal very treacherously ? 
 Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root ; 
 they grow, yea, they bring forth fruit." Brethren ! 
 It was this boldness of the prophet, this divine bold- 
 ness, in laying bare the actual thoughts of his heart, 
 the confusions by which it was tormented, that kept 
 him true, that made him unlike the men whom he 
 denounced and who denounced him. He looked the 
 facts of the world in the face. He could not interpret 
 them. No man could interpret them to him. He looked 
 at that which was going on in himself. There the same 
 puzzles repeated themselves ; nay, were not the puzzles 
 of the outward world rather the echoes and repetitions 
 of those which he discovered within ? Must not the 
 explanation of them begin there ? Must he not ask 
 the ruler of the inner world to set that right ; to purge 
 the eye which was to behold and judge that? which was 
 passing around him ? Was not this the beginning of 
 reformation ? 
 
 Do I mean that Jeremiah was taught in this way
 
 412 WHAT THE POTTER DESIGNED TO DO. [SEEM. 
 
 the doctrine which we hear often announced so oracu- 
 larly, " You must reform yourself before you try to 
 reform the world ? " No, brethren. I believe, on the 
 contrary, that Jeremiah was taught in this way that 
 he could reform himself just as little as he could reform 
 the world. I believe he was taught that his evils were 
 the evils of the world, and that both needed the same 
 kind of reformation, which must be carried on by the 
 same Person, in the same method. I believe he was 
 taught that the reformation which his individual soul 
 demanded was one which could not be effectual for it, 
 if it were not available for his nation and mankind. 
 And this was the lesson which would answer the 
 questionings that God had awakened in his heart ; the 
 one which he was to gain from the potter's house. 
 
 " Behold, he wrought a work on the wheels." These 
 wheels, it is said, were two circular stones placed one 
 upon another ; the lower fixed, the upper turning on an 
 axis and moved by the feet of the workman. The 
 nature of the machine, however, does not engage the 
 prophet's principal attention. He sees a man engaged 
 in a task to which he is devoting all his thoughts. He 
 designs to make some clay into a vessel of a certain 
 shape ; the form or pattern is present to his mind : he 
 is fully resolved that the material with which he is 
 working, shall come forth in that form and no other. 
 But apparently it disappoints him. One piece of clay 
 after another is marred in his hands ; it takes a shape 
 different from that which he would give it ; he has to 
 break his vessel again and again ; he goes on persever- 
 ingly till he has done the thing which he intended to 
 do. " He made it again another vessel, as it seemed 
 good to the potter to make it." As Jeremiah pores
 
 xxiii.] HIS PERSEVERANCE. 413 
 
 over the sight, the word of the Lord comes to him : 
 IC ' house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this 
 potter ? ' saith the Lord. ' Behold as the clay is in 
 the potter's hand, so are ye in miue hand, house of 
 Israel.' " Commentators have no doubt what this 
 must signify. The potter could do what he liked with 
 the clay, he could destroy it if he pleased. So, it is 
 said, God can destroy the Israelitish nation or any 
 nation when and how He pleases. Very well. But 
 when Jeremiah was sent to study the potter's work, 
 he was sent to ascertain, not what the potter might do 
 i/he liked, but what he liked. He desired to make a 
 vessel of a certain form. That was the end for which 
 he laboured. If there is any force or worth in the 
 analogy at all, it must mean that there is a form 
 according to which God is seeking to mould men and 
 nations. It must imply that He is not doing any single 
 act arbitrarily or without reference to a purpose; it 
 must imply that He is patiently, continually working 
 for the accomplishment of this purpose. All such 
 language would be absurd, incredible, contradictory, 
 if we started with the assumption of a dry Omnipo- 
 tence, which is merely uttering decrees respecting 
 human beings as to their condition now or hereafter. It 
 is perfectly consistent .with itself and with the whole 
 tenor of Scripture, because here and everywhere men 
 are assumed to have will, upon which no mere blind 
 mechanical power can operate, but upon which God, 
 a living Person, is operating by gracious, mysterious, 
 orderly processes, that He may make them in His own 
 likeness. And if they do not submit to this process, if 
 they persist in not taking the mould which he would 
 give them, then the clay is broken that it may be
 
 414 THE SIGN A NATIONAL ONE. [SERM. 
 
 reformed, that the original intent of the owner of the 
 clay may still be carried out. 
 
 Here, then, was the mystery of a people's repent- 
 ance. If they acknowledged this Will which was 
 working upon them, if at any time they yielded to it 
 and desired to be formed by it, this was that conversion 
 and inward change which He was seeking to produce ; 
 this was the commencement of that true and radical 
 reformation which would certainly affect in due time 
 the whole surface of life and of society. "At what 
 instant," so Jeremiah applies the image, " I shall speak 
 concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck 
 up, and to pull down, and to destroy ; if that nation, 
 against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, 
 I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto 
 them." Marvellous ! that persons should see in this 
 symbol nothing but an assertion of the sovereignty 
 of God, of His right to do what He likes with His 
 creatures; while the whole course of the prophet's 
 thought under the divine teaching has been to lead 
 him to think of the order of God's proceedings with 
 men, the methods which He uses to bring them to a 
 knowledge of Him and submission to Him, the fulfil- 
 ment of His design, when, and only when, He has 
 produced this voluntary obedience. 
 
 But there are two points in the prophet's applica- 
 tion of the sign which especially require to be noticed. 
 The first is that he looks upon this symbol as teaching 
 him the principle of God's government of a people. 
 We might say, ' All this is very true no doubt about 
 an individual ; God tries these processes certainly to 
 bring this and that man out of darkness into light, 
 to awaken in him the thought of his evil, to make him
 
 NATIONAL REPENTANCE. 415 
 
 conscious of a deliverer. But what has it to do with a 
 nation ? That is an outward body, a formal corpora- 
 tion, of which no spiritual emotions can be predicated, 
 which it is absurd in any wise to connect with them/ 
 Most absurd undoubtedly, if that is the meaning and 
 definition of a nation, which we have chosen to invent 
 when we depart from all the representations of Scrip- 
 ture respecting it, from all that the conscience of men, 
 when it is most alive, testifies their own nation to be. 
 But the time is come, let us say it boldly, when the 
 Bible must be thrown either into the fire as an old 
 worn-out document, or when a nation must be felt to 
 be not a formal corporation but a spiritual reality, a 
 society of which we can predicate spiritual conditions 
 and spiritual emotions, which can repent and can be 
 reformed as truly as an individual can. Nay, I appre- 
 hend that we shall learn some day, that the call to 
 individual repentance and the promise of individual 
 reformation, has been feeble at one time, productive of 
 turbulent, violent, transitory effects at another, because 
 it has not been part of a call to national repentance, 
 because it has not been connected with a promise of 
 national reformation. We may appeal to men by the 
 terrors of a future state; we may use all the machinery 
 of revivalists to awaken them to a concern for their 
 souls ; we may produce in that way a class of religious 
 men who pursue an object which other men do not 
 pursue (scarcely a less selfish, often not a less outward 
 object) ; who leave the world to take its own course; 
 who, when they mingle in it, as in time they must do 
 for the sake of business and gain, adopt again its own 
 maxims, and become less righteous than other men in 
 common affairs, because they consider religion too fine
 
 416 APPLICATION OP JEREMIAH'S WORDS. [SERM. 
 
 a thing to be brought from the clouds to the earth, 
 while yet they do not recognise a lower principle as 
 binding on them. But we must speak again the 
 ancient language that God has made a covenant with 
 the nation, and that all citizens are subjects of an 
 unseen and righteous King, if we would have a hearty, 
 inward repentance, which will really bring us back to 
 God ; which will turn the hearts of the fathers to the 
 children and of the children to the fathers ; which will 
 go down to the roots of our life, changing it from a 
 self-seeking life into a life of humility and love and 
 cheerful obedience; which will bear fruit upwards, 
 giving nobleness to our policy and literature and art, 
 to the daily routine of what we shall no more dare to 
 call our secular existence. 
 
 You may think that, at all events, I have been 
 betrayed into a deviation from the strict language of 
 the text when I have given it this modern application. 
 Jeremiah, you will say, when he spoke of a nation, 
 meant the chosen nation. He begins with an appeal to 
 the House of Israel. Assuredly he does. I am most 
 anxious to remember it, and that his intention was 
 expressly to prepare his countrymen for a change 
 which would very speedily take place in their own 
 condition. But the second point to which I alluded 
 as so important in this passage was that Jeremiah 
 could not bring the image of the potter's work to bear 
 with its proper force upon Israelites at that moment, 
 if he confined the purpose of God within the limits 
 which they had fixed for it. He says, "At what 
 instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concern- 
 ing a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to 
 destroy it ; if that nation turn from their evil, I will
 
 xxiii.] ISRAEL REPRESENTS MANKIND. 417 
 
 repent of the evil which I thought to do them/' We 
 do not want the instance of Nineveh, which we con- 
 sidered in a former lecture, or the language of Amos 
 respecting Moab and Ammon, to know how literally any 
 honest Israelite must have interpreted this sentence. 
 For Jeremiah goes on, "And at what instant I shall 
 speak concerning a nation and a kingdom, to build and 
 to plant it if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not 
 my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I 
 said I would benefit them." Here is that levelling tone 
 which we have traced through all the prophets ; which 
 never becomes so emphatical as when they are insisting 
 upon the worth of the divine covenant with the 
 children of Abraham and are calling upon them to 
 confess it. The prophets uniformly take Israel and its 
 polity as a sample of God's dealings with His creatures, 
 as a witness to them all of what He is, and what He 
 is doing with and for the children of men. This was 
 their high calling; it was their privilege and their 
 glory to proclaim by their words, their acts, their very 
 existence, the God who executes righteousness and 
 judgment in the earth. It was because they did not 
 understand this privilege and glory because at one 
 moment they made themselves like the people round 
 about, stooping to all their grovelling, dividing idol- 
 atries at the next, set up themselves as if they were 
 unlike all other people and might despise them in 
 both cases equally denying their covenant and Him who 
 had made it with them ; that Jeremiah wept in secret 
 places over their pride, that he wished his head were 
 waters and his eyes a fountain of tears. And when 
 the whole truth flashed upon him, as he gazed on the 
 potter, and saw how one piece of clay after another 
 
 2 E
 
 418 WHY THE VESSEL IS MAKEED. [SEEM. 
 
 was marred, and yet how the thing he designed was 
 at last done ; it came with an awful vision of what 
 was preparing for his land, with a bright vision of 
 what must ultimately follow from every judgment. 
 The clay was broken ; it was not the fitness of that 
 particular lump to receive the shape intended for it 
 which determined or frustrated the will of the artist. 
 That which seemed now compact, and yet which 
 consisted of elements that were always ready to 
 separate from each other, might split into fragments : 
 but the vessel must be made ; not after some different 
 type, but after the original and perfect type which 
 dwelt not in the dead matter but in the living mind of 
 Him who was shaping it. A particular race might be 
 cast aside, not wilfully, not in rage, but after a series 
 of gracious, merciful experiments had been made upon 
 it, after it had resolutely refused to be that which it 
 was meant to be and to do that which it was meant 
 to do. In every case the cause of ruin would be not 
 some weakness or flaw in the constitution of this 
 race, not some adverse circumstances, but pride; a 
 determination to exist for itself and by itself ; a deter- 
 mination issuing in a moral incapacity for understand- 
 ing the grace of its Ruler, for exhibiting any qualities 
 but those which are most opposed to His grace, most 
 hateful and destructive. And so the divine righteous- 
 ness would be vindicated; for never could one of thesf 
 racss be dashed in pieces by the divine decree till all 
 the life that was in it had departed, till all its substance 
 had been preserved and reclaimed for some future and 
 higher use, till its existence was felt to be a curse and 
 a plague to the nations, till its fall would call forth the 
 shouts and pasans of sufferers proclaiming, " There is
 
 xxin.] THE RESULT. 419 
 
 surely a God that judgeth the earth/' Thus the 
 destruction, which Jeremiah had foreseen to be ap- 
 proaching his land, justified itself to his conscience 
 and heart. He shruuk from it through the tenderness 
 of his nature, through the patriotism which had 
 become keener and intenser with every woe he had 
 been obliged to pronounce upon his country, with 
 every insult he had endured from it. But beneath all 
 these feelings there lay an inward satisfaction in the 
 triumph of that which was right and true; in the 
 certainty that the divine type and form of Humanity 
 would be brought forth and exhibited in some way or 
 other through human clay, in some way or other 
 through Iris own race, however the members of it 
 might try to resist the process, however one genera- 
 tion or another might have to be broken that the end 
 might be accomplished. 
 
 I have dwelt on this particular passage not only 
 for its own sake, but because I can find none which 
 throws so much light upon the whole prophecy and 
 upon the mind of the prophet. What reformation is 
 not, he has learnt too painfully by what he had seen 
 in Jerusalem and in the whole land. The sweeping 
 away of abuses and abominations only revealed the 
 inward corruption which had produced them. The 
 further he looked into the state of his people the 
 deeper that corruption appeared. The springs of it 
 were in the very fountains whence life and healing 
 ought to have issued? What a bewildering discovery ! 
 And this in the chosen land ; this in the land which 
 was to declare the name of God to all lands ! And 
 yet he has not reached the most terrible depth of all. 
 In himself, the witness and protestant against the 
 
 2E-2
 
 420 THE REPEOVER. [SERM. 
 
 evils which he saw in people, prophets, and priests, 
 they were all gathered up. Within him lay the anger, 
 bitterness, turbulence, pride, which were spreading 
 curses in every family, which were making the houses 
 of Israel a desolation. Were these evils less in him 
 than in those in whom they broke out into open 
 excesses ? Had he not rather to meet them in their 
 first essence, in their inmost malignity? But what 
 were they in him or in others ? The strife of the clay 
 with the Potter ; the struggles of men, against a divine 
 Artificer, not to be brought into their true, reasonable, 
 healthy condition ; not to be at peace with each other 
 by being at peace with Him who had made them to 
 bear a common image, to be partakers of a common 
 life. And here was the power which could reform 
 individuals and reform society. Captivity, destruction, . 
 was itself a method of reformation ; God could bring 
 life out of death, even as man was bringing death out 
 of life. This marring of the clay was a fearful sight ; 
 the patience, long-suffering, final victory of the Potter 
 a glorious one. 
 
 And, brethren, if we would meditate on the past, the 
 present, or the future, if the study of all these is not 
 to be an arid, heartless, distant speculation, or else one 
 which drives us mad, we must read them by this 
 light ; we must be willing to go down to the potter's 
 house and consider what it has to tell us. Oh, how 
 easily some persons can talk about the course of the 
 world, the disappearance of races, the downfall of 
 empires, as if they were only busy with a geological 
 record, as if human history were a series of formations. 
 How pleasant it is to have ' ideas/ as people call them, 
 about these changes and developments. And after
 
 xxiii.] THE MEANING OP HISTORY. 421 
 
 all, they were beings of our own race who were the 
 subjects of them ; the successive strata were men and 
 women who suffered, rejoiced, feared, hoped, had their 
 aspirations after all good and temptations to all evil, 
 as we have. And the relations in which they stood 
 to each other as members of families and communities 
 were interwoven with all their personal thoughts and 
 desires ; the last became utterly dead or utterly miser- 
 able, the thoughts of a prison-house or the dreams of 
 delirium, when they ceased to be conscious of the 
 first. What does it all mean ? Are these chance 
 scenes from a drama in which there is no unity, no 
 centre, no catastrophe ? Take this simple image 
 with you, and see if the one thought of a living and 
 righteous Being, working amidst the changes of times, 
 working upon human wills for a loving and gracious 
 purpose, working for a purpose which has been realised, 
 does not give you a power of understanding facts 
 which you were content to leave unexplained, does not 
 enable you to bear your ignorance of those which you 
 cannot explain. I do not say that it will be so if you 
 are not convinced that the perfect ideal of Humanity 
 has been brought forth; that a man, who perfectly 
 submitted that the clay which He bore should be 
 moulded according to the will of an Almighty Father, 
 is the centre of Human life, Society, History. But 1 
 am sure, if that faith is fully received into your hearts, 
 that the weary maze will become a blessed order; 
 and that you will think of the condition of your race 
 and of its members with a sympathy and a hope 
 which no theories of perfectibility can impart, which 
 only the God of Sympathy and Hope and Consolation 
 can bestow.
 
 422 SCHEMES OF IMPROVEMENT. [SEEM. 
 
 But, brethren, to bear the days in which they live 
 is harder for most than to consider the days that are 
 gone. The actual sins and miseries by which a land 
 is vexed should be more to us than all which we hear 
 of by distant report. Whether greater or less, they 
 are those with which we are concerned ; they are the 
 beams in our eyes which must make our discernment 
 of the motes in the eyes of others uncertain and 
 hazardous. Yet so many are disposed to dwell on the 
 last and forget the first : to pour forth felicitations on 
 our blessed freedom from corruptions and idolatries, 
 or forms of unbelief which afflict neighbouring lands ; 
 that other men, experiencing how great our idolatry is, 
 how deep our unbelief, are easily tempted to think we 
 might advantageously change conditions with almost 
 any of those whom we have been used to fly from or 
 despise. There are some who, being at the furthest 
 remove from this opinion, yet feeling how much we 
 need reformation, hope that it may come through the 
 acts of civil rulers. There are some who, scorning all 
 such help, would cry out, that powers, now withheld 
 from the priests and prophets of the land for removing 
 their own grievances, should with all speed be restored 
 to them. Brethren, we may take up with any of these 
 conclusions; we may exchange one for another very 
 frequently, we may at last acquiesce in the -opinion 
 that the Church in this land, perhaps in all lands, is 
 destined to perish by slow decay or sudden violence, 
 till we learn to feel how deeply rooted the evil is, how 
 closely it touches the vitals of society, how near it is 
 to ourselves. Then we shall give over hoping anything 
 from assimilations to foreigners, we shall think that, 
 even when the original in its own region is innocent
 
 xxiii.] THE TEST OF THEM. 423 
 
 and laudable, the copy is likely to be insincere and 
 unnatural; that in general, when we set out with a 
 purpose of imitating, we shall choose what is worst 
 in the practices of others and omit what is best ; that 
 the hankering after novelties is the sign of a disease 
 within, which the obtaining of them certainly would 
 not cure. Then we shall say, ' The rough work which 
 civil rulers can do in cutting up weeds may be inevit- 
 able; but it will be done blindly and ignorantly, it 
 will probably destroy as much of wheat as of tares, it 
 will certainly not destroy any of the corruptions in 
 the soil which cause the tares to spring up and the 
 wheat to perish.' Then we shall say, ' We churchmen 
 shall have power enough when we know how to use 
 it. But may God give us reformation first ; legislative 
 functions, if we require them, afterwards. May He 
 leave us not to the miserable delusion that we can set 
 other men right by any processes which shall not 
 strike first at their sins in ourselves, or that these can 
 be reached till we submit them to God's discipline, till 
 we believe that it is His will to set us and all men 
 right, if we do not fancy that we can be right without 
 Him/ 
 
 And so we are brought back in this case also to the 
 potter's house. But we must learn there that other 
 fearful lesson which Jeremiah learnt, and which is as 
 true for us as it was for the house of Israel. If God's 
 promise, that His Son's kingdom shall have no end, 
 means that all the races which He has invited to 
 become portions of that kingdom, shall always continue 
 to be portions of it, how should Jerusalem, Constanti- 
 nople, Alexandria, have fallen under the power of the 
 Crescent ? Are not these cities proofs that the clay is
 
 424 HOPE FOB NATIONS. [SKEM 
 
 marred in the new, as it was in the old time, when it re- 
 sists the will of the Artificer ? Why should Romanists 
 or Protestants think that the law will be violated in 
 their case ? What is there in the clay of Italy, Ger- 
 many, France, England, to give it a special exemption 
 from the sentence upon that which is profitable for 
 nothing ? Let us not be high-minded, but fear. It is 
 written, " If He spared not the natural branches, take 
 heed lest He spare not thee." But it is written also, 
 that " the casting away of them was the riches of the 
 world." It is written further that " all Israel shall be 
 saved." Even after the clay in human eyes has been 
 utterly marred, we know that the Potter still looks after 
 it, still seeks to bring the true form out of it. No one 
 word of his can fall to the ground. Surely these 
 words cannot, which are sealed with the blood of the 
 Son of God : " He willeth that all men should be 
 saved and come to the knowledge of the truth." 
 
 We know, that whatever happens to one generation 
 or another, the mountain of the Lord's house shall be 
 established above the hills, and that all the nations 
 shall flow unto it. We know that the regenerating 
 Spirit of Him who has ascended on high that He 
 might fill all things, shall cast out all evil spirits, and 
 shall claim human clay and all natural things for Him- 
 self. We know that God has said, He will write upon 
 human hearts His own name and the name of the new 
 Jerusalem, His holy city. And since the glory of the 
 universe implies the blessedness of the individuals who 
 compose it, since our belief in the immortality of God's 
 kingdom does not interfere with the belief in a personal 
 immortality, but sustains and ratifies it, we are sure 
 that the vision in the potter's house will be fulfilled in
 
 ixiii.] HOPES FOR HUMAN CLAY. 425 
 
 another very literal and blessed manner. He who 
 has given each of us a tenement of clay, may subject 
 it to much hard discipline, may suffer it at last to be 
 quite marred and to return to its kindred earth again. 
 " But if the Spirit of Him who raised up Christ from 
 the dead dwell in us, He will also quicken our mortal 
 bodies/' Only that which hinders the shining forth 
 of the spiritual body in the human form will perish. 
 The body of humiliation will be made like to Christ's 
 glorious body by that power whereby He is able to 
 subdue all things to Himself.
 
 SERMON XXIV. 
 
 THE NEW COVENANT. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, Whitsunday. May 30, 1852. ) 
 
 Behold ; the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new cove- 
 nant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah : not 
 according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in 
 the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the 
 land of Egypt ; which my covenant they brake, although I was 
 a husband to them, saith the Lord ; but this shall be the cove- 
 nant that I will make with the house of Israel : After those 
 days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, 
 and write it in their hearts ; and will be their God, and they 
 shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man 
 his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know ye the 
 Lord : for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto 
 the greatest of them, saith the Lord : for I will forgive their 
 iniquity, aud I will remember their sin no more. JEKEMIAH 
 xxxi. 31-34. 
 
 THE later chapters of Jeremiah, which do not follow 
 each other in chronological order, and in which there 
 are many repetitions, connect his personal history 
 with the reigns of Jehoiakim and Zedekiah, and 
 with the anarchy which followed the murder of 
 Nebuchadnezzar's officer Gedaliah. 
 
 The following passage from the twenty-second 
 chapter refers to Josiah and his three successors. 
 " Weep ye not for the dead/' says the prophet, "neither
 
 SERM. xxiv.] THE FOUR KINGS. 427 
 
 bemoan him : but weep sore for him that goeth away, 
 for he shall return no more, nor see his native country/' 
 He who was not to return is called in the next verse 
 Shallum, but it seems clear that he is the Jehoahaz of 
 the Book of Kings, and that the place, to which he 
 was led captive and where he was to die, was the 
 capital of Pharaoh. The following passage, beginning 
 at the thirteenth verse, refers to Jehoiakim. He is 
 contrasted with his father, " who judged the cause of the 
 poor and the needy/' and so proved that he knew the 
 Lord : whereas the son " was building his house by 
 unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong : he was 
 using his neighbour's services without wages and giving 
 him not for his work : he was ceiling his house with 
 cedar, and painting it with vermilion : his eyes and 
 his heart were not but for his covetousness, and for 
 to shed innocent blood, and for oppression, and for 
 violence, to do it." He was imitating, it would appear, 
 the tastes and habits of the monarch by whose favour 
 he reigned. The taxes, which he was obliged to levy 
 upon his people for the service of the foreigner, were 
 made more intolerable by his own self-indulgence and 
 luxury. There was in him that stupid security which 
 may so often be seen in men who have already suffered 
 the deepest disgraces, and who are on the edge of utter 
 downfall. Therefore he is told that " they shall not 
 lament for him saying, 'Ah, my brother' or ' Ah, lord/ 
 or 'Ah, his glory;' that he shall be buried with the 
 burial of an ass, drawn forth and cast beyond the 
 gates of Jerusalem." The more terrible judgment 
 which is to follow upon the young king and the 
 queen-mother, as well as the whole land, is announced 
 in the following verses. "As I live, saith the Lord,
 
 428 NEBUCHADREZZAR'S MISSION. [SERM. 
 
 though Coniah the son of Jehoiakim king of Judah. 
 were the signet upon my right hand, yet would I 
 pluck thee thence. And I will give thee into the 
 hand of them that seek thy life, and into the hand of 
 them whose face thou fearest, even into the hand of 
 Nebuchadrezzar king of Babylon, and into the hand 
 of the Chaldeans. And I will cast thee out, and thy 
 mother that bare thee, into another country, where ye 
 were not born ; and there shall ye die/' 
 
 In Jeremiah's time, as in the time of the earlier pro- 
 phets, the judgment upon Judaea was really a judgment 
 upon all the nations. Egypt, the land of the Philistines, 
 the kings of Tyrus, the kings of Sidon, the kings of 
 Arabia, the kings of the mingled people that dwelt in 
 the desert, were all forced to drink of a wine-cup of 
 fury which had been mingled for them. It was a time 
 of far-reaching destruction and desolation. The great 
 conqueror, the destroyer of boundaries, had gone forth; 
 God had given the inhabitants of the earth into his 
 hands for a certain season ; no strength or policy would 
 avert or delay the sentence. The prophet's message 
 was a very comprehensive one, but its force was not 
 to be lost in its generality. He was to tell " all the 
 cities of Judah who came to worship in the Lord's 
 house, diminishing not a word, 'Thus saith the Lord, 
 If ye will not hearken unto me, to walk in my law 
 which I have set before you, I will make this house 
 like Shiloh, and will make this city a curse to all the 
 nations of the earth/ " The priests and the prophets 
 insisted that the foreteller of evil should be put to 
 death ; the princes and the people said, " He is not 
 worthy to die, he hath spoken to us in the Name of 
 the Lord/' The elders of the land alleged the conduct
 
 xxiv.] JEREMIAH'S EOLL. 429 
 
 of Hezekiah to Micah in his defence. But it is evident 
 that the priestly influence would have prevailed with 
 Jehoiakim in his case, as it did in that of another 
 prophet who is referred to in the same place, if a 
 powerful courtier, Ahikam the son of Shaphan, had 
 not protected him. 
 
 He seems to have shut up Jeremiah for the same 
 reason as that which led the Elector of Saxony to shut 
 up Luther after the Diet of Worms. In the thirty- 
 sixth chapter he says to Baruch (the time is assigned 
 to the fourth year of Jehoiakim), that " he cannot go 
 into the house of the Lord," and therefore that Baruch 
 must read a roll which he had written, in the ears of 
 the people, in the Lord's house, upon the fasting-day. 
 There was no doubt a great assembly gathered from all 
 the cities of Judah. They were told of woes which 
 would surely come upon Jerusalem and upon the whole 
 land. Michaiah the son of Gemariah heard the words 
 of the roll. He informed the princes; they sent for 
 Baruch. He read it in their ears. They were afraid 
 both one and the other ; they said, " We will surely 
 tell the king all these words." The roll was brought 
 before Jehoiakim as he was sitting in the winter-house 
 with a fire on the hearth burning before him ; he cut 
 it and cast it into the fire till it was consumed. 
 Jeremiah was bidden to signify to Jehoiakim by the 
 mouth of Baruch, that the roll was burnt, but that the 
 thing written in the roll could not be burnt. " The 
 king of Babylon would certainly come and destroy the 
 land, and would cause to cease from it man and beast." 
 That which Jeremiah had been told when he was 
 but a child, that he was to pull down and destroy, was 
 beginning to be fulfilled. Not only his own people in
 
 430 JEREMIAH PULLING DOWN. [SEEM. 
 
 Anathoth, but the kings and priests in Jerusalem, 
 regarded him as a dangerous disturber. He was 
 robbing other kingdoms as well as his own of peace 
 and security. He could not pretend that his words did 
 not unsettle the minds of people as well as rulers. He 
 could not even say that the words were nothing except 
 so far as they pointed to certain events which would 
 either correspond with them or confute them. They 
 were more than this. They went down to the roots 
 and causes of these events ; they traced them to 
 principles in the hearts of kings, priests, prophets, 
 and people. Was not this pulling up and plucking 
 down ? Was it wonderful that Jehoiakim should burn 
 the roll, and desire to kill him who had dictated it ? 
 
 But it had also been told Jeremiah, that he was to 
 plant and to build. In the twenty-ninth chapter of 
 the prophecy, we hear of a letter which the prophet 
 sent to those whom Nebuchadnezzar had carried cap- 
 tive 'after that Zechariah, and the queen, and the 
 eunuchs, and the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, 
 were departed from Jerusalem. 5 Part of this letter 
 contains terrible warnings and denunciations against 
 the prophets who were telling the captives that they 
 should speedily return to their own land ; part of it 
 is full of hope and encouragement. The exiles "are 
 to build houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens 
 and eat the fruit of them, and take wives and beget 
 sons and daughters, and take wives for their sons 
 that they may bear sons and daughters, that they 
 may be increased there and not diminished." For 
 these are to be the seed of a nation. " Behold," saith 
 the Lord, " I will bring again the captivity of Jacob's 
 ents, and have mercy on his dwelling-places. And
 
 xxiv.] JEREMIAH BUILDING AND PLANTING. 431 
 
 the city shall be builded upon her own heap, and the 
 palace shall remain after the manner thereof. And out 
 of them shall proceed thanksgiving and the voice of 
 them that make merry. And I will multiply them, 
 and they shall not be few. I will also glorify them. 
 I will punish all that oppress them. And their nobles 
 shall be of themselves, and their governor shall be of 
 the midst of them. And I will be the God of all the 
 families of Israel, and they shall be my people." 
 
 All Jeremiah's visions respecting these exiles are 
 soothing and cheerful. He sees much evil among 
 them. But he has such bright intimations of what 
 their future shall be, that his sleep is sweet to him. 
 They are the pledge of a better day, which he shall not 
 see, indeed, but which will assuredly come to the land, 
 and which will gladden him though the places which 
 knew him then should know him no more. The case 
 is altogether different when he turned to Jerusalem, 
 where Zedekiah was reigning. The prophet sees two 
 baskets of figs set before the Temple of the Lord, one 
 very good, like those that are first ripe, the other so bad 
 that they cannot be eaten. The first are those 'whom 
 the Lord has sent out of this place into the land of the 
 Chaldeans ; ' the others represent Zedekiah and his 
 princes and the residue of Jerusalem that remain in 
 the land, and them that dwell in the land of Egypt. 
 All that we hear of the later history helps us to under- 
 stand the force and truth of this sign. The reign of 
 Zedekiah presents us with the most vivid picture of a 
 king and people sinking deeper and deeper into an 
 abyss, ever and anon making wild and frantic efforts to 
 rise out of it, imputing their evil to every one but 
 themselves, their struggles for a nominal freedom
 
 432 MESSAGES TO ZEDEKIAH. [SKBM. 
 
 always proving them to be both slaves and tyrants 
 at heart. Zedekiah has revolted from the king of 
 Babylon who has raised him to the throne. Pashur, 
 the son of Immer the priest, has heard that Jeremiah 
 has prophesied against the city. He smites him and 
 puts him in the stocks that were in the high gate of 
 Benjamin, which was by the house of the Lord. When 
 Jeremiah is brought forth he has again to declare that 
 Judah shall be given into the hands of the king of 
 Babylon and be carried captive and be slain by the 
 sword, and that Pashur shall be one of the victims. 
 Shortly after another Pashur is sent by the king to him 
 with a humble message, "Enquire, I pray thee, of the 
 Lord for us, for Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon maketh 
 war against us ; if so be that the Lord will deal with us 
 according to all His -wondrous works/' The Chaldean 
 army actually besieges the city; the proud revolters 
 begin to shew their native cowardice ; those that 
 mocked and persecuted the prophet think that they 
 may bribe him to help them. But the answer is as 
 before, " I will turn back the weapons of war that are 
 in your hands, wherewith ye fight against the king of 
 Babylon and the Chaldeans, which besiege you with- 
 out the walls, and I will assemble them into the midst 
 of this city. And I myself will fight against you with 
 an outstretched arm. And I will smite the inhabitants 
 of this city, both man and beast ; they shall die of a 
 great pestilence. He that abideth in the city shall die 
 by the sword and by the famine and by the pestilence ; 
 but he that goeth out and falleth to the Chaldeans, 
 his life shall be unto him for a prey." At the same 
 time he tells the king how he may prove a better 
 patriot than by fighting with the Chaldeans.
 
 xxiv.] RELEASING THE BONDMAN. 433 
 
 "And touching the house of the king of Judah, say, 
 Hear je the word of the Lord, house of David : thus 
 saith the Lord, Execute judgment in the morning, and 
 deliver him that is spoiled out of the hand of the 
 oppressor, lest my fury go out like fire, and burn that 
 none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings." 
 
 Possibly it was in consequence of this exhortation 
 that an event took place of which we have the following 
 remarkable record : 
 
 King Zedekiah made a covenant with all the people 
 which were at Jerusalem, to proclaim liberty unto 
 them; that every man should let his man-servant, 
 and every man his maid-servant, being an Hebrew or 
 an Hebrewess, go free; that none should serve himself 
 of them, to wit, of a Jew his brother." 
 
 This act of simple obedience to a command, this 
 recognition of Jewish citizenship and brotherhood, was 
 hailed by Jeremiah as the most blessed of all tokens of 
 reformation. But this was the ignominious conclusion : 
 
 "But afterwards they turned, and caused the 
 servants and the handmaids, whom they had let go 
 free, to return, and brought them into subjection for 
 servants and for handmaids." 
 
 And this was the prophet's word respecting it : 
 
 " Thus saith the Lord, the God of Israel : I made a 
 covenant with your fathers in the day that I brought 
 them forth out of the land of Egypt, out of the house 
 of bondmen, saying, At the end of seven years let ye 
 go every man his brother an Hebrew, which hath been 
 sold unto thee ; and, when he had served thee six years, 
 thou shalt let him go free from thee : but your fathers 
 hearkened not unto me, neither inclined their ear. 
 And ye were now turned, and had done right in my 
 
 2 F
 
 434 THE CHALDEANS TO RETURN. [PERM, 
 
 sight, in proclaiming liberty every man to his neigh- 
 bour : and ye had made a covenant before me in the 
 house which is called by my name : but ye turned, and 
 polluted my name, and caused every man his servant, 
 and every man his handmaid, whom he had set at 
 liberty, at their pleasure, to return, and brought them 
 into subjection, to be unto you for servants and for 
 handmaids. Therefore thus saith the Lord, Ye have 
 not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty every 
 one to his brother, and every man to his neighbour : 
 behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to 
 the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine : and I 
 will make you to be removed into all the kingdoms of 
 the earth." 
 
 We are not told the motive of the change, but by 
 comparing other passages in the prophecy with the 
 one in which Jeremiah tells the Jewish masters what 
 ruin they are preparing for themselves, we may form 
 a reasonable conjecture. Pharaoh Nechoh, it appears, 
 resolved upon one more desperate experiment to 
 regain his position. He sent an army to assist 
 Zedekiah against the besiegers. The Chaldeans re- 
 treated. The king and the people were of course 
 elated with joy. There was no longer need to buy 
 God's favour by letting the oppressed go free. The 
 help of Egypt was all-sufficient. But some misgiving, 
 it seems, then led the king to desire Jeremiah's prayers 
 that the deliverance might be complete. The answer 
 is, " Behold, Pharaoh's army shall return to Egypt, to 
 their own land, and the Chaldeans shall come again, 
 and fight against this city and take it and burn it 
 with fire." Then the prophet " goes out of Jerusalem 
 into the land of Benjamin, to separate himself thence
 
 xxiv.] JEREMIAH IN PRISON. 435 
 
 in the midst of the people." The most passionate of 
 patriots is accused of being a traitor. The princes are 
 now as wroth with him as the priests ; he is thrown 
 into a dungeon. The poor feeble king perceives that 
 there is a power and trath in the prophet which he 
 cannot find elsewhere. He sends to the prison to ask 
 if there is any word from the Lord. He is told there 
 is, " for thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the 
 king of Babylon." Thenceforth Zedekiah is inclined 
 to favour him. He is brought into the court of the 
 prison and has food daily furnished to him. But the 
 princes say unto the king, " Let this man be put to 
 death ; for the man seeketh not the welfare of this 
 people, but the hurt." Zedekiah makes the confession 
 so characteristic of such a time, " Behold, he is in your 
 hand; for the king is not he who can do anything 
 against you." He is thrown into a worse dungeon 
 where there was no water but mire : a merciful 
 Ethiopian interferes to save him from death*; the king 
 consults him once more. He is told that the only 
 safety is in surrender to the king of Babylon, else he 
 will be taken and the city will be burnt with fire. 
 The princes and the king are now suspicious of each 
 other : Jeremiah is removed again to the court of the 
 prison, and remains there till Jerusalem is taken. That 
 event occurred in the eleventh year of Zedekiah's 
 reign. Zedekiah escapes by night ; he is bound with 
 chains and his eyes put out : the city is set on fire. 
 
 The events which follow are recorded in the last 
 chapter of the Second Book of Kings. 
 
 (t And as for the people that remained in the land 
 of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had 
 left, even over them he made Gedaliah the son of 
 
 2 F 2
 
 438 ANARCHY. [SERM. 
 
 Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, ruler. And when all 
 the captains of the armies, they and their men, heard 
 that the king of Babylon had made Gedaliah governor, 
 there came to Gedaliah, to Mizpah, even Ishmael the 
 son of Nethaniah, and Johanan the son of Careah, and 
 Seraiah the son of Tanhumeth the Netophathite, and 
 Jaazaniah the son of a Maachathite, they and their 
 men. And Gedaliah sware to them, and to their 
 men, and said unto them, Fear not to be the 
 servants of the Chaldees ; dwell in the land, and serve 
 the king of Babylon, and it shall be well with you. 
 But it came to pass, in the seventh month, that 
 Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, the son of Elishama, 
 of the seed royal, came, and ten men with him, and 
 smote Gedaliah, that he died, and the Jews and the 
 Chaldees that were with him at Mizpah. And all the 
 people, both small and great, and the captains of the 
 armies, arose and came to Egypt ; for they were afraid 
 of the Chajdees." 
 
 Jeremiah lived on in the land to see the misery and 
 anarchy which followed the murder of Gedaliah; to 
 tell the Jews who were flying to Egypt that if they 
 stayed in the land they would be safe, that in Egypt 
 they would meet with destruction, for that Egypt had 
 been given up to the king of Babylon ; finally, to sing 
 the future ruin of Babylon itself, the confusion and 
 breaking in pieces of her idols, the deliverance of those 
 in whose destruction and desolation she had rejoiced. 
 In this prophecy many of the phrases of Isaiah recur. 
 We feel the same assurance when we read each, that 
 the words point to an actual city, to a present op- 
 pressor; and that they point also with imperishable 
 truth to every city in which the Babylonian principle
 
 ixiv.] THE COVENANT. 437 
 
 has become triumphant, to every power which has 
 severed itself from righteousness and has become 
 merely destructive. 
 
 What is the thread which binds together the hopes 
 and the fears of the prophet, his certainty of coming 
 woe, his certainty of ultimate blessing ? A covenant 
 well ordered in all things and sure, a covenant rest- 
 ing on the eternal Name of God, upon His truth and 
 righteousness. This covenant, as we have seen, was no 
 external artificial bond. The words, " I am a husband 
 to you," denote the nature of it. It was not an agree- 
 ment for so much to be given on the part of God if so 
 much was received from man. It was a union of Love; 
 a divine Lord seeking His human bride, binding her to 
 Himself, bidding her trust in Him and depend upon 
 Him for all things. That such a covenant should exist 
 was wonderful ; that it should be broken by the party 
 which had been freely taken into it was more wonderful 
 still. Every sign that was presented to the prophet 
 brought the marvel more strongly before him. The 
 adherence of the heathen to their traditions struck him, 
 we have seen, as affording the strongest contrast to 
 the inconstancy of the Israelite. Another fact, which 
 became known to him in the days of Jehoiakim, illus- 
 trated still more remarkably the subject to his own 
 mind and was made the hint of a discourse to the 
 people. Jonadab the son of Rechab commanded his sons 
 to dwell in tents and take no wine. In vain the prophet 
 set flagons before them ; the precept which had been 
 transmitted to them was too strong and binding for 
 any temptation. It was a silken invisible chain about 
 their necks, the chain of a mere human command ; yet 
 they did not break it. Was it impossible for his
 
 438 THE VIOLATION OF IT. [SKKM. 
 
 countrymen to understand that there was a silken 
 chain too about their necks, a divine command, a 
 divine covenant ? How was it that they were acting 
 every moment as if none such existed ? 
 
 All these instances and reflections which the divine 
 Teacher brought home to the mind of the seer, made 
 him understand more profoundly what the nature of 
 the divine government was and how it was exercised. 
 He perceived more and more that they were indeed 
 the cords of a man by which God was holding the 
 nation and those who composed it to Himself ; that the 
 yoke under which his countrymen were living was an 
 inward spiritual yoke, not a material or merely legal 
 one; and that the penalty of breaking it was the 
 penalty of losing freedom, of being brought under a 
 heavy and intolerable bondage. No previous prophet, 
 I think, had at all entered into this truth to the same 
 degree as Jeremiah ; no one had been led by such a 
 course of individual sufferings to understand in what 
 consists the blessing of obedience, the curse of revolt. 
 And, as we saw in the passage respecting the potter's 
 house, no one had entered so deeply into the truth that 
 God Himself is the reformer, that all real renovation 
 must come from Him. 
 
 Hence the step was not difficult to the discovery, 
 glorious and deep as it is, which my text unfolds. 
 He had heard a lament Eachel, the mother of the 
 Jewish race, weeping for her children, and refusing to 
 be comforted because they were not. He had heard 
 the voice of consolation bidding her refrain from 
 weeping, for that her children should come again to 
 their own border. He had heard that the seed, which 
 was to increase and multiply in the land of strangers,
 
 xxiv.] THE BETTER COVENANT. 489 
 
 was again to possess its own. He had such faith in 
 the promise, that, while he was in the dungeon, he 
 concluded a contract for the purchase of land in 
 Anathoth in the most solemn and legal manner, 
 committing the evidences of the purchase to Baruch 
 that they might be kept against a future day. But 
 what proof was there that the future inhabitants of 
 the land would be more obedient than the former 
 had been ? Would they not be creatures of the same 
 flesh and blood, as prone to unbelief and to idolatry ? 
 If anything depended on the difference of character 
 and constitution in one race or another, if human 
 faith and obedience were the moving and determining 
 causes of the divine mercy, there seemed no hope that 
 the time to come would be better than the time past. 
 But such a shifting sand could never have been the 
 foundation on which man was meant to build. There 
 must be more in the covenant than the mere pledge, " I 
 will be faithful and merciful if you will be obedient/' 
 If that was all the law said, there must be something 
 deeper than law. If this was all that circumcision 
 signified, there must be something mightier than 
 circumcision. " The covenant which I made with your 
 fathers when I took you by the hand to bring you out 
 of Egypt," must give place to another more perfect 
 covenant ; and this must be the tenor of it, "I will 
 write my laws in your hearts, and in your minds will 
 I write them." I will not ask you for obedience, and 
 promise blessings outward or spiritual as the fruits of 
 it. But I will give you power to obey ; I will put that 
 in you which shall be the living source, the perpetual 
 well-spring, of an ever fresh obedience. 
 
 "And they shall teach no more every man his
 
 440 THE SECUBITY OF IT. [SERM- 
 
 brother, and every man his neighbour, saying, ' Know 
 the Lord : ' for all shall know me from the least to the 
 greatest." It shall not be an outward teaching, such 
 as one man imparts in mere phrases and formulas to 
 another. There shall be a more mysterious, more 
 wonderful Teacher, who shall interpret all that is 
 heard from without; who shall Himself be present 
 within you, to bestow each hour new illumination as 
 well as new life. 
 
 "For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will re- 
 member their sin no more." Forgiveness, reconcilia- 
 tion, granted, accomplished, shall be the ground of 
 this covenant. But a forgiveness and reconciliation 
 which, though accomplished, are fresh and vital and 
 germinant for every person who enters into them and 
 claims them. Seeing that the whole covenant stands 
 ultimately upon this assurance, " I will be their God 
 and they shall be my people ; " there shall be a com- 
 munion between me and them, an intercourse which 
 their hardness and forgetful ness may interrupt, but 
 which is really implied in the eternal relation that 
 subsists between us, nay in all the relations which 
 subsists between them as neighbours and brothers of 
 each other. 
 
 Such a covenant Jeremiah saw there must be 
 involved in the law which had been given to his fore- 
 fathers, a covenant certainly existing in the divine 
 mind, though latent and still only dimly seen by the 
 sons of men. To see it at all, to be able to say 
 confidently ' this must be/ to have a divine assurance 
 that what must be, is, and that it will be fully mani- 
 fested ; this was comfort immeasurable, unspeakable, 
 making dungeons tolerable, and the loss of human
 
 ALL THINGS MADE NEW. 441 
 
 friendship a gracious sorrow, the ruin of a city and a 
 land a witness for good, even in proportion to the 
 bitter present misery which it caused. All Jeremiah's 
 dark history becomes bright when this truth dawns 
 upon him, when he is able to dwell in the belief 
 of it. 
 
 And yet, brethren, it did but dawn upon him. 
 And Whitsunday tells us that we are living in the 
 very blaze of it. The new covenant has been pro- 
 claimed. It is that very one, " I will put my laws in 
 your hearts, and in your minds will I write them/' 
 ' My Spirit shall dwell in you to be the source of faith 
 and obedience, to resist the evil which will always be 
 assaulting you, to draw you to the good which is always 
 near you, to bring you out of darkness into God's 
 light, out of selfishness into love, out of division into 
 unity. He is given, that you may not each one be 
 holding out to his neighbour mere hard crusts of 
 doctrine, dry intellectual propositions, but that the 
 humblest peasant, the feeblest child, may have in him 
 that which responds to the highest truth and can 
 embrace it. He is come as a witness and pledge 
 that a reconciliation has been made for the universe ; 
 that man is at peace with God in His Son, who has 
 offered the perfect and well-pleasing sacrifice. He is 
 come to assure us that the Father has made all things 
 new, grounding them on the revelation of His own 
 eternal Name, His own absolute love/ 
 
 This is the covenant into which we are born by our 
 baptism. But oh, brethren, do we believe that it is so? 
 Do we believe that God has said to us, " I will put my 
 laws in your hearts, and in your minds will I write 
 them ; I will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me
 
 44:2 THE SPIRIT OF TEUTH AND POWER. [SERM. 
 
 sons and daughters " ? Do we believe that a peace and 
 forgiveness has been proclaimed to us and to mankind, 
 that we may feed upon the sacrifice in which they are 
 gathered up, that we may have communion with the 
 Love that has bestowed them ? Do we think that 
 there is an unction within us, whereby we and the 
 most miserable people of this land may enter into the 
 meaning of the deepest mysteries, and that we need 
 not merely receive them with our outward ears, but 
 be renewed by them in the very spirit of our minds ? 
 Alas ! brethren, let us confess it, we do not believe 
 this. The divine truth of Whitsuntide is floating away 
 from us. We do not grasp it, we do not live upon it. 
 And therefore we sigh in vain for reformation. For 
 the divine power which is to bring reformation i& 
 hidden from us. 
 
 Like the Jews, we think we are delivered over to 
 the evils which bitter experience shews that we are 
 prone to commit. If it can be proved that our fore- 
 fathers and we have yielded to covetousness, strife, 
 rivalries, our wise men ask triumphantly whether these 
 are not established principles of human nature, and 
 treat the struggle with these as one which only boya 
 or fanatics would engage in. It is in vain to answer 
 that men have struggled with them in all ages, and 
 that, unless some victories had been won over them, 
 Society would have ceased to exist. It is in vain to 
 say that all the improvements, moral, intellectual, 
 physical, of which we boast, have been the consequences 
 of a divinely-formed resolution in the hearts of a few 
 men, generally scorned by their contemporaries, to 
 overcome what had been reckoned inevitable evils,
 
 xxiv.] FAITH IN A PHEASE. 443 
 
 involved in the constitution of things. The ready and 
 decisive reply that all such changes are owing to the 
 "Progress of Civilisation," owing, that is to say, to 
 a certain formula which we do not choose to translate 
 into the facts for which it stands, disposes of all such 
 arguments. No doubt we can reverence those who 
 have fought and fallen in the endeavour to break some 
 chain of custom and to vindicate some eternal law of 
 God, when they are removed to a safe distance. We 
 build the sepulchres of the prophets whom our fathers 
 killed, and say that if we had been in the days of our 
 fathers we would not have partaken of their sins. But 
 unless we fully believe that the Spirit of the Prophets 
 is intended for us and can work in us as He worked 
 in them, unless we believe that He is come to con- 
 vince us of our sins and of a righteousness which is 
 stronger than our sins, and of a judgment which shall 
 put down the one and give the other a complete 
 victory, we had better have left the sepulchres 
 unbuilt : we had better not pretend to honour the 
 memories of men whom, if we had met them face to 
 face, we should certainly have hated. It is a fearful 
 thought that Israel was subjected to a Babylonian 
 captivity of seventy years, and has been subjected to a 
 worse than Babylonian tyranny for eighteen hundred 
 years, because it counted the Covenant of God a dead 
 document instead of a living power. It is a more 
 appalling question, what must be in reserve for those 
 nations which will not have the law of God written in 
 their hearts ; which choose to follow their own lower 
 instincts ; which say to the Holy Spirit, ' Depart 
 from us.'
 
 444 GOD'S COVENANT CANNOT FAIL. [SERM. xxiv. 
 
 But as there was a light in that thick darkness, so 
 there is in this. The covenant of God cannot fail ; the 
 purpose of God must be accomplished. There must 
 come a day when God shall be known as the Father 
 of all the Families of the Earth, and when they wiU 
 not refuse to be His children.
 
 SERMON XXV. 
 
 THE HEAVENS OPENED TO THE EXILE. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, Trinity Sunday. June 6, 1852.) 
 
 Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in 
 the fifth day of the month, as I sat among the captives by the 
 river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions 
 of God. EZEKIEL i. 1. 
 
 THE Book of Lamentations throws much light upon 
 the time to which it refers, and upon the prophetical 
 character. I have no wish to pass it over. But in strict 
 chronology it follows the earlier chapters of Ezekiel, 
 seeing that its subject is the destruction of the city 
 and the temple, to which Ezekiel, as he sat among the 
 captives by the river Chebar, was still looking for- 
 ward. The difference even of a few years, at this critical 
 period of the history, may affect the meaning of a 
 whole book. There are passages in the later chapters 
 of Ezekiel which may illustrate and receive illustration 
 from the Lamentations of Jeremiah. On these grounds 
 I believe I am justified in postponing the consideration 
 of them, even if I had not the additional motive, that 
 there is scarcely a passage in the Old Testament which 
 seems more suitable for a discourse upon Trinity 
 Sunday, than the one I have just read to you.
 
 446 THE CAPTIVE PRIEST. [SKRM. 
 
 Ezekiel was, like Jeremiah, of the priestly order. 
 Since we cannot understand the expression " thirtieth 
 year/' otherwise than as describing his own age, he was 
 probably older than Jeremiah was when the word of 
 the Lord first came to him. But he had not reached 
 the time of life which we commonly connect with our 
 impressions of a prophet, those impressions being 
 perhaps derived from the great painter of the prophets 
 and the sibyls. He had, however, seen and felt what 
 might have made his hair gray even at such an age. He 
 had seen the best king Judaea ever had, dying in the war 
 with Egypt ; his successor a captive there ; Jehoiakim 
 passing from one foreign yoke to another, that was 
 more grievous ; Jeconiah doomed to hopeless servitude 
 in Babylon. He must have mixed with those miserable 
 priests and prophets who rent the heart of Jeremiah. 
 He was himself taken from the services of the temple, 
 with a troop of rich and noble prisoners; he had 
 to sit among them, astonished at their levity and 
 indifference; to watch their alternations of cowardly 
 despondency and idle hope ; to hear the prophets 
 uttering divinations as vain and lying as those which 
 they uttered in prosperity ; to find himself amidst 
 strangers, his own countrymen being scarcely less 
 strangers to all that was occupying him than their 
 oppressors. To be removed from the city which God 
 had chosen as the witness for Himself ; to be in a land 
 full of altars and temples and images, given up to idols 
 and yet triumphant over the earth what did it mean ? 
 who could tell him ? The captives by the river of 
 Chebar could tell him nothing. They might be 
 stupefied by the change; the signification of it was 
 utterly hidden from them.
 
 axv.] THE WHIELWTND AND FIRE. 447 
 
 It was while he sat among these captives that ha 
 saw visions of God. The words seem only to imply 
 that he was dwelling ordinarily with them ; we are not 
 prevented from believing that he was alone, out of the 
 din and clatter of human tongues, when he saw the 
 <c whirlwind coming out of the north, a great cloud, and 
 a fire infolding itself, and a brightness about it, and out 
 of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the 
 midst of the fire/' Retirement was not impossible 
 even for a captive ; we need not doubt that Bzekiel 
 availed himself of so great a privilege. But we ought 
 to recollect, the words force that thought upon us, 
 that Ezekiel was not in circumstances favourable to 
 contemplation, that he was not assisted by familiar 
 objects, that his mind had not been kept quiet and calm 
 from disturbing influences. The heavens were not 
 opened to an abstracted philosopher or devotee, any 
 more than to a man in the midst of the comforts of a 
 home, reposing in an undisputed faith ; but to an exile 
 drawn by force, not choice, out of his land, full of the 
 darkest thoughts about the past and the future, tempted 
 by everything he heard and saw, to doubt whether 
 there was any reality in the things which he could not 
 see and hear. 
 
 The question naturally suggests itself to a person 
 who reads this opening chapter of Ezekiel and then the 
 after parts of the book, what have they to do with each 
 other ? Why should it be necessary that a man who 
 had to announce the moral maxims which form so con- 
 spicuous a part of this prophecy, should first begin with 
 seeing the likeness of four living creatures, and wheels 
 within wheels, and a chariot lifted from the earth, and 
 rings so high that they were dreadful, and a firmament
 
 448 HOW THEY BOEE ON EZEKIEL'S WORK. [SERM. 
 
 over the head, and a throne with the likeness of a man ? 
 How should this be a preparation for telling the watch- 
 men of Israel, that, if they did not warn the sinner of 
 the evil of his ways, his blood would be required at their 
 hands ? How was it a preparation for the argument 
 which proved that a son was not to die for the iniquity 
 of his father, that the proverb, "if the fathers have 
 eaten sour grapes, the children's teeth are set on edge," 
 was a lying proverb ? How was it a preparation for 
 the personal sorrows which the prophet was to bear ? 
 We might have expected, it may be said, some high 
 and mystical imaginations to have mixed with the 
 simple precepts ; we may not wonder at those difficult 
 passages respecting a more august temple than the 
 one Nebuzaradan set on fire, which occur at the end 
 of the prophecy. But why should such a vision as this 
 be the initiation of a seer who was to concern himself 
 with the coarsest evils and miseries of the actual world 
 as much as any of his predecessors ? 
 
 If you reflect, brethren, on the position and duties 
 o a Jewish prophet as they have come out before us 
 in former lectures, you will not be at a loss for the 
 resolution of this difficulty. We are wont to say that 
 the theology of the Jew was simple, that of the heathen 
 world, complex and artificial. We speak rightly. But 
 however intricate the relations of the gods may seem 
 to us in the Greek pantheon, however interminable 
 their offices and attributes in the pantheon of the 
 Hindoo, every one of these divinities has acquired his 
 place and recognition from some natural instinct in the 
 human heart. Priests may have organised the worship, 
 may have made that systematic which would have been 
 incoherent. But some sensual perception, some move-
 
 xiv.] IS MONOTHEISM SIMPLE? 419 
 
 ment of a man's nature towards an object which inspired 
 him with terror or hope, some tender association or 
 local sympathy, the struggle of some inward conception 
 to find a suitable expression for itself, may be traced 
 through every variation of a people's worship, may be 
 discovered in the production of every fresh idol. If, 
 therefore, by simple we mean easy, natural, that which 
 men would adopt if left to themselves, we are bound 
 to change our mode of speaking, and to say that 
 polytheism is more simple than the belief of a One living 
 God. We revolt at such a conclusion, we cannot help 
 revolting at it, but that revolting is a proof that 
 the word ' simple ' is not synonymous with the words 
 1 obvious ' or f natural/ that the most obvious views of 
 the Godhead may be the most coarse and sensual and 
 false. 
 
 Are we to conclude, then, that a belief in the divine 
 Unity is the result of a series of experiments which 
 show how a number of different forms may be expressed 
 under one general name ? Are we to say that, when 
 nations have acquired greater powers of abstraction, 
 they arrive at this belief ? Reason will tell us, ex- 
 perience will tell us, if we do not listen to reason, that 
 a god who is abstracted from a multitude of gods, is not 
 a living being at all ; but a mere caput mortuum. Dear 
 and venerable traditions, whispers of the conscience, 
 longings of the heart, prevent men from saying, ' it 
 is nothing/ They invest it with the old name, they 
 try to look upon it as the highest concentration of the 
 life which they see moving through all things. But 
 gradually as the intellect becomes bolder and the 
 affections and fears which have sustained it are dried 
 up, the terrible secret is first whispered, then openly 
 
 2 a
 
 450 THE PROPHET SEES THE UNSEEN. [SKUM. 
 
 proclaimed: 'This abstract divinity is nothing; it 
 is not a substance but a shadow of our minds. We 
 who created it can destroy it/ 
 
 The simplicity of the Jewish prophet arose from 
 this ; that he did not follow his instincts and impulses 
 whithersoever they led him ; that he did not make 
 any effort to reduce the things which he saw under one 
 common name ; that he asked for a substance beneath 
 himself, for a living Being deeper than all the thoughts 
 which were in him, than himself to whom those 
 thoughts belonged, for One who had made him in 
 His own image. He believed that such a Being had 
 revealed Himself to his fathers, was revealing Himself 
 continually. He was about his path and about his bed, 
 spying out all his ways. To know Him was to know 
 Righteousness and Truth; to keep His law, to be 
 conformed to His mind, was to be righteous and true. 
 
 Hence several consequences followed. The first is 
 that he uniformly spoke of seeing God, of having a 
 vision of God ; using this language most carefully 
 when he was protesting with the greatest vehemence 
 against every sensible representation of God. As 
 truly as the summit of any mountain existed though 
 it was lost in mists, so truly did God live though none 
 confessed Him ; as truly as the summit of a mountain 
 discovered itself, the mists gradually rolling away, so 
 truly did God unveil Himself to the man himself, 
 forcing him to recognise His presence and to feel that 
 he stood in the most wonderful relation to Him. This 
 revelation could only be described as the coming forth 
 of a Light ; it was not the light of an outward sun ; it 
 must be the Light of which that which is gathered up 
 in outward suns is the image. It was not a bodily
 
 xxv.] GOD- IN CHALDEA. 451 
 
 eye which received this light ; but it was an eye ; you 
 could give it no other name. God Himself must have 
 opened it that it might behold Him ; in His light it 
 saw light. 
 
 Hence it followed also that the theology of the 
 prophets was the ground of all their human morality. 
 Every perception of what man is and what he ought 
 to do must rest upon some perception of what God is 
 and of what He does. To affirm what image it behoves 
 a man to shew forth without referring to the archetype : 
 to lay down rules how a man should govern himself 
 and others without declaring how God governs, was in 
 their minds a vanity, nay, an impossibility. It seemed 
 to them an utterly vain thing to call upon men to 
 carry out any right conviction or to turn from any evil 
 if they could not say confidently, authoritatively, God 
 Himself is bidding you take this course, is bidding 
 you forsake that. He is ^ear you, urging you, and 
 therefore enabling you, to fulfil His commands, to cast 
 away all fetters which hinder you from fulfilling them. 
 
 These principles are common to all the prophets, and 
 yet I think you will see why they were sure to come 
 forth with a new power and under new aspects in the 
 mind and discourses of Ezekiel. An Israelite in the 
 land of the uncircumcised, a priest banished from the 
 temple, is an object we have not yet been invited to 
 contemplate. At first the sense of loss, if it did not 
 give way to that insensibility, that incapacity of feeling 
 at all, which the best men often experience after 
 some heavy calamity, -must have been unspeakable. 
 Had not God utterly forsaken them ? Could He 
 be in that place? Then out of this loneliness and 
 despondency would come the certain conviction, " He 
 
 2 o 2
 
 452 THE MORAL OF IDOLATROUS SYMBOLS. [SERM. 
 
 must be here." The forms of Nature which have been 
 set up as rivals of Him, do they not testify of Him ? 
 That whirlwind from the North which I hear gathering 
 at a distance, which now approaches me, which seems 
 to encircle me with its gusts and eddies ; that cloud 
 with its fantastic mocking shapes ; that subtle mighty 
 fire with its mysterious circles and involutions, with 
 the beauty and radiance which make one forget for a 
 moment its more terrible ministries ; and then those 
 forms of animal life, the different kinds of living 
 creatures in each of which the Chaldeans have seen 
 some image of divine power, each of which has been to 
 them a consecrated idol, which in our Temple expressed 
 not objects of worship, but the Seraphim and Cherubim 
 who cry Holy, Holy, Holy, to the Lord of the whole 
 earth; what forms and symbols are here, what a 
 world of mysteries I am dwelling in ! But these 
 creatures to which the men about me are bowing 
 down, do they not point upwards to Man himself ? 
 Is there not stamped upon them all a likeness and 
 prophecy of him ? It seems as if his image were 
 continually emerging out of their forms, as if he were 
 the object and pattern after which they were all 
 aspiring. Yet they preserve their distinct natures, 
 their several functions. What unites them together ? 
 How can natures so various, so dissonant, be living 
 portions of the same universe ? I must go deeper still. 
 These creatures, to what do they owe their move- 
 ments, their life ? That eagle has wings which lift him 
 from the earth and sustain him as he rises towards 
 the sun. The Chaldean sees in him the manifestation 
 of the highest, most celestial power. But he looks 
 upon the lion, the ox, and the man, as also manifesta-
 
 ixv.] SPIRITUAL UNITY. 453 
 
 tions of this power. He would clothe them too with 
 wings. He supposes them tied to earth, but with 
 a capacity of ascending above it. And he cannot be 
 wrong. For there is in Man a spirit which gives him 
 wings, which carries him into the highest and most 
 distant worlds. Is he not meant to obey this spirit, 
 to ascend by its power, to exalt all the lower creatures 
 with him ? Is not this the true secret of the order 
 which I discern in the midst of so much disorder? 
 Is there not a spirit which gives all things their dis- 
 tinctions, their places, their kinds; which is the 
 spring of their movements, which binds them together, 
 wheel within wheel, preserving unity amidst infinite 
 diversity ? 
 
 I do not pretend, brethren, to thread the mazes of 
 this wonderful vision. There is much of it in which I 
 cannot the least see my way ; I feel how dim and faint 
 my glimpses are of those portions of it of which I 
 have any apprehension. But I do not think I can be 
 wrong in believing that the prophet, cast into the 
 wide world and feeling himself lost in it, was led by 
 the divine Teacher into a region of thought to which 
 the Israelite had been hitherto comparatively a stranger. 
 was led to see how each part of the universe, which 
 must have often seemed to him a storehouse of divided 
 material idols, was pointing, when seen by the divine 
 Light, to a spiritual unity as its explanation and its 
 centre. 
 
 To a spiritual unity : for whatever different mean- 
 ings the vision may be susceptible of, this is certainly 
 implied in them all, that it is Spirit only which 
 distinguishes and unites, which brings each thing forth 
 in its clearness and fulness, and brings all into har-
 
 454 IS THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY HERE? 
 
 tnony. And that truth, precious as it is, would still 
 be a maimed and imperfect one, a vision of the world, 
 and of man as meant to rise above the world but 
 unable to distinguish himself from it, if the spirit 
 which is in the living creatures, actuating and in- 
 spiring them, lifting up the wheels from the earth, and 
 working in the midst of them, were not acknowledged 
 as a spirit which had come from some higher region. 
 The man who was seen among the animal forms, the 
 man who rose above them, is still not humanity in its 
 highest perfection. Ezekiel saw a throne, and there 
 was a likeness, as of the appearance of a Man, above 
 upon it. There is One human and divine, from whom 
 this spirit has proceeded, in whom it dwells perfectly. 
 Beneath that divine form is a glory, too awful for the 
 prophet's gaze. He falls upon his face and listens 
 while a voice speaks to him. 
 
 " Is it then," some one will ask, " in very deed the 
 mystery of this day which the prophet's vision is 
 bringing before us ? Does not such a notion proceed 
 from the eagerness of the imagination to find analogies 
 where they do not exist, or from our foolish desire to 
 establish a doctrine which is above comprehension, not 
 by a simple appeal to faith, but by hints and allusions 
 drawn from teachers who would have been utterly 
 perplexed by our interpretation of their thoughts and 
 language ? " 
 
 Brethren, let me speak plainly on this point. I 
 do not say that you will find the doctrine which we 
 have been proclaiming to-day in this chapter. I do 
 not believe that you can. I have not the slightest wish 
 to find it there or to put it there. It would be a 
 shock to all my convictions if I thought that Ezekiel
 
 xxv.] THE LORD IS ONE LORD. 455 
 
 was enunciating a dogma when he professed to be 
 recording a vision ; or that the mystery, which, as the 
 Church teaches us by the order of her services, could 
 not be revealed till Christ was glorified and the Spirit 
 given, was already made known to the prophet as he 
 sat among the captives by the river Chebar. I cannot 
 say how much mischief seems to me to be done, when, 
 instead of striving to follow strictly the actual state- 
 ments of the Old Testament writers, we insist upon 
 wringing out of texts or symbols, which we have 
 moulded according to our fancy, the proof of some 
 New Testament revelation. It is not the law and the 
 prophets only which suffer from such violence. The 
 gospels and the apostles suffer much more. The truths 
 which they set forth as living foundations of our 
 existence, social and personal, shrivel into jejune 
 formulas, subjects for controversy and reviling, prized 
 mainly as tests by which other men may be convicted 
 of error. 
 
 But just because this course seems to me so exceed- 
 ingly dangerous, so carefully and religiously to be 
 avoided, I would try to learn from the old prophets 
 what they knew, and how they became possessed of their 
 knowledge. Ezekiel had been taught upon his mother's 
 knees the words, " Hear, Israel, the Lord thy God is 
 one Lord;" he had been trying to fulfil the command- 
 ment which is joined to that great announcement, 
 " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
 and all thy mind, and all thy strength." He had 
 been carried into a land where everything seemed to 
 contradict this faith. What he saw might tempt him 
 to worship many gods. Or it might tempt him to case 
 himself in his Judaical profession, in his Levitical lore.
 
 456 UNITY POSITIVE, NOT NEGATIVE. [SEEM. 
 
 He might say, "I have been trained to a certain 
 worship and I will adhere to it. Let the Babylonians 
 have their gods if they will ; I shall do homage to the 
 One." Such a resolution would have a look of stead- 
 fastness and fidelity. And it had this further advantage. 
 No Babylonian would have interfered with it. The 
 Jew, like every other tributary, was expected in 
 general to follow the traditions of his fathers; they 
 might strike the conquerors as very absurd; but 
 except on special occasions, or when the tyrant was a 
 fanatical devotee, they would be respected as suitable 
 to the person who had inherited them. But Ezekiel 
 cannot follow this course. He cannot live upon a 
 tradition. He cannot find rest in merely thinking of 
 the difference between him and the Chaldeans. He 
 is not faithful to his traditions, unless he believes in a 
 God who is as living for him as for his forefathers. 
 He cannot worship the Lord God of Israel unless he 
 worships Him as the God of the Chaldeans also. It 
 was a grand thing, no doubt, to know that there is One 
 God, a blessing beyond all blessings. But merely to 
 deny that there are many gods, was that a blessing ? 
 Merely to hold a dogma that was contrary to other 
 men's, was that a divine gift ? The Teacher who is 
 near him, who is preparing him for a work, will not 
 let him be content with such a miserable possession. 
 He draws him into the secret of unity. He shews 
 him how all the manifold things which he beholds 
 imply it, demand it, cry out for it. He leads him to 
 a unity which is not a dead negation of plurality. He 
 makes him feel that there is no unity in matter, that 
 we only believe in unity when we believe in a Spirit. 
 He brings him to think of man as the interpreter and
 
 xxv.] STEPS TO THE HIGHEST TRUTH. 457 
 
 ruler of all the things to which he has done homage, 
 as the priest who is intended to present them to the 
 Lord of All, because he is a spiritual being. But 
 Ezekiel perceives that he can only fulfil this kingly and 
 sacerdotal function when he is under the government 
 of a Spirit which is higher than his own. That Spirit 
 must come from a Man, that Man must be the Priest 
 of priests, the King of kings. Even there he cannot 
 stop. There must be a deeper mystery still. There 
 must be One of whose glory this Man is the brightness, 
 of whose person he is the express image. 
 
 So much I believe was revealed to Ezekiel. By 
 slow steps, by painful experiences, he was led into the 
 heart of this mystery. It was his deliverance from 
 idolatry. It was his deliverance from hard, material, 
 negative Judaism. It was the ground of his message 
 to his own people and to all nations. 
 
 I do not believe that this mystery is the mystery of 
 the Trinity ; because Christ says that the time would 
 come when He would tell His disciples plainly of the 
 Father. There is here no utterance of that name. 
 The prophet sank down in awe and wonder at the 
 presence of the Man on the throne. Beyond was fire 
 and the brightness of amber; glorious and transcendent 
 images, no doubt, upon which a man may gaze and in 
 which he may lose himself, but which he is glad to 
 leave for anything that recalls him to a home and 
 to human sympathies. Till a Name expressing the 
 deepest awf ulness in fellowship with such sympathies 
 could be uttered, till the Man on the throne could be 
 declared as the Son, the only begotten of the Father, 
 till that Spirit in which Ezekiel saw the ground of all 
 the unity of human beings and earthly things could
 
 458 HOW WE MAY BE LED INTO IT. [SERM. 
 
 be proclaimed as He in whose unity the Father and 
 the Son dwell for ever, there was still a dark enigma 
 which every new idolatry, every new philosophy, was 
 trying to solve, and by the solution was drawing men 
 further from the eternal Truth and the eternal Love. 
 But though I do not find here the statement and 
 development of that mystery which I regard as the 
 fundamental one of our dispensation, I do think that 
 Ezekiel is one of the greatest guides of mankind into 
 an apprehension of it. I call it the fundamental 
 truth of our dispensation. I mean the truth which 
 lies beneath the unity of the Church and of human 
 society, the truth which reconciles the contradictions 
 of warring philosophical systems, the truth which 
 interprets the different idolatrous faiths of the old and 
 the new world, the truth by virtue of which those who 
 are baptised into the Name of the Father and of the 
 Son and of the Holy Ghost become the heralds of a 
 common life and a divine kingdom to all nations, the 
 truth which sets forth the fall righteousness and love 
 of God, the truth upon which, therefore, the moral 
 condition of man will be found ultimately to depend. 
 But, brethren, I am far indeed from saying that any 
 age of the Christian Church has entered fully into the 
 inheritance which God has given us. There has been 
 a confounding of the Persons and a dividing of the 
 Substance by orthodox men as well as by heretics, 
 perhaps as much by one as the other. There would 
 have been no strifes, and contradictions, and heart- 
 burnings, if it had not been so. And oh, how dare I 
 affirm that we, at this period, are truly and faithfully 
 acknowledging the glory of the eternal Trinity, and 
 in the power of the divine Majesty worshipping the
 
 xxv.] SORROW LEADS TO THE TRINITY. 459 
 
 Unity ? We are doing it perhaps at times. We may 
 long in our inmost hearts to do it continually. But 
 we must, I think, one and all, be conscious of difficulties, 
 far more serious than any that disturb our intellectual 
 apprehension of the doctrine, which interfere with this 
 holy and blessed service. Everything is received 
 according to the character and capacity of the receiver. 
 How should a set of quarrelsome and factious men 
 know anything about the unity of God? 
 
 And therefore Ezekiel's vision contains another 
 lesson, shall I call it a prophecy ? for us. It may 
 be, brethren, that we shall be initiated into the fulness 
 of this truth in the very way in which he was initiated 
 into the part of it which he could know. It may be 
 that only when all the signs of God's presence are 
 withdrawn, only when there are no churches or con- 
 fessions or forms of worship testifying of His Name, 
 only when we are surrounded by idolaters, or when 
 pantheism, the complex or abstract of idolatries, 
 has become the profession of all cultivated men, or 
 when a conscious atheism has taken place of an uncon- 
 scious one among statesmen and among priests, it 
 may be that then only shall we know what a power 
 was lying in the old creed of Christendom to interpret 
 the mysteries of nature as well as those of our own 
 minds and of our human relations. It may be that 
 the physical world, which seems so clear to us, will 
 itself present to us only a mass of confusions and 
 contradictions, and that, in order to recover any dis- 
 tinct apprehension of its laws, we shall have to see 
 how they are connected with a Spirit who is higher 
 than themselves. It may be that through nature we 
 shall be led, not as our fathers of the last century
 
 460 SOREOW LEADS TO THE TEIXITY. [SERM. ixv. 
 
 fancied that they were led, up to nature's God, who 
 proved to be only a great Demiurgus, a being apart 
 from all human sympathies, but to the Man in the 
 midst of the throne, who, when we come to Him 
 weary and heavy-laden, to seek that lowliness of heart 
 which we have not in ourselves, will teach us of the 
 Father. And so we may become little children again, 
 and recover the joy which our Pagan forefathers felt 
 when they were first told of One who so loved the 
 world that He gave His only-begotten Son for it, 
 of a Son who died for them, of a Spirit who guideth 
 into all truth. 
 
 The analogy of history, still more, I think, the 
 signs of this time, suggest these reflections to us. 
 And though there is bitterness in them, there is also 
 consolation. But we need not wait, brethren, till the 
 lesson comes to us in this form. If we do, there is 
 fear that we shall never learn it. Now, while Trinity 
 Sundays, and Eucharists, and the birth of every child 
 into the fold of Christ speaks of this mystery, now 
 we may ask that, through whatever symbols of nature 
 or art, through whatever divine ordinances, the sense 
 and dream of it are brought to our hearts, it may not 
 be a dream or an imagination but a reality there j one 
 to which we may turn in hours of solitude and dark- 
 ness, one into which we shall enter most when we are 
 most emptied of ourselves, when we have confessed how 
 our vanity and lusts and strifes have hidden it from us 
 and have taken from us, along with it, the conscious- 
 ness of our humblest duties and the power of fulfilling 
 them.
 
 SERMON XXVI. 
 
 THE VALLEY OP DRY BONES. 
 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 1st Sunday after Trinity. June 13, 1852.) 
 
 The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit 
 of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was 
 full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about. And 
 behold there were very many in the open valley, and lo, they 
 were very dry. And Ho said unto me, " Son of Man, can these 
 bones live ?" And I answered, "0 Lord God, Thou knowest." 
 EZEKIEL xxxvii. 1-3. 
 
 WE are naturally curious to know whether two contem- 
 porary prophets ever conversed with each other. In 
 Micah we found such evident indications of sympathy 
 with the mind of Isaiah as warranted the supposition 
 that he was his pupil. I cannot trace any signs of a 
 similar relation, or indeed of any personal relation, 
 between Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Though they were 
 passing through the same crisis; though they had 
 both to witness the evils which were destroying their 
 nation; both to share its miseries; though the false 
 prophets were the common enemies of both ; yet their 
 circumstances, their character, and their work were 
 entirely distinct, in some points even contrasted. 
 Their very differences, however, shew us that they 
 were both alike prophets and priests.
 
 462 THE BOOK OF LAMENTATIONS. [SERM. 
 
 The Book of Lamentations exhibits the spirit of the 
 individual man Jeremiah more transparently than hia 
 longer book, which is so mixed up with historical de- 
 tails, with anticipations of a ruin not yet accomplished, 
 with hopes, however faint and soon dispelled, of a 
 national repentance. Most of those whom the prophet 
 had denounced were banished or dead. Men could 
 talk no more about the temple of the Lord, could boast 
 no more that the word of the Lord was with them ; the 
 vessel which the potter was shaping had been broken 
 in pieces. The sadness of the prophet, which had 
 been checked sometimes by indignation, sometimes by 
 the consciousness of a word which must still be spoken, 
 of a work which must be done, became complete and 
 absorbing. Heretofore his intense sympathy with his 
 country might seem to be qualified by his lively appre- 
 hension of its crimes ; now both feelings were blended 
 into one. When he looked upon the desolation of the 
 city there sat upon his soul a weight of sorrow and 
 evil, as if he were representing his whole people, as if 
 there was no wrong which they had committed, no 
 evil habit which they had contracted, which did not 
 cling to him, for which he was not responsible. And 
 this was no imaginary fictitious state of mind into 
 which he had worked himself. God had made him 
 inwardly conscious of the very corruption which had 
 destroyed the land. If he had made any fight against 
 them j if they did not actually overpower him and 
 enslave him, this was God's work and not his, the pro- 
 mise of the covenant made with his fathers, which 
 was as good for everyone as for himself, was fulfilled 
 to him. And now he was realising the full effect of 
 this discipline. The third chapter of the Lamentations,
 
 xxvi.J HE IS THE PRIEST STILL. 463 
 
 beginning, " I am the man that hath seen affliction by 
 the rod of His wrath," contains the climax of his 
 experience. In the memorable passages which follow, 
 the history of a life is gathered up. "I said, My 
 strength and my hope is perished from the Lord; 
 remembering mine affliction and my misery, the 
 wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in 
 remembrance. This I recall to mind, therefore have I 
 hope. It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not con- 
 sumed. They are new every morning; great is thy 
 faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul ; 
 therefore I will hope in Him. The Lord is good unto 
 them that wait for Him. It is good that a man should 
 both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the 
 Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in 
 his youth. He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, 
 because he hath borne it upon him. He putteth his 
 mouth in the dust if so be there may be hope. He 
 giveth his cheek to him that siniteth him, he is filled 
 full with reproach. The Lord will not cast off for 
 ever ; but though he cause grief, yet will He have com- 
 passion according to the multitude of His mercies. 
 For He doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the 
 children of men." 
 
 Anything more individual than these utterances it is 
 impossible to conceive; and yet it is just by these that 
 one understands the sacerdotal work to which Jeremiah 
 was called. There was no longer any temple. The. 
 priests as well as the princes had been for the most 
 part carried away by Nebuchadnezzar. But there was 
 a man walking about in the deserted city to which 
 the twelve tribes had come up in the midst of the 
 ruins of the holy place into which the sons of Aaron.
 
 464 THE PRIESTLY OFFICE EXPLAINED. [SERM. 
 
 had gone with the memorial of their names on their 
 breastplates, who really entered into the meaning of 
 that function, who really bore the iniquities of the 
 children of Israel before the Lord ; one to whom it 
 was given to translate the ceremonies and services of 
 the divine house into life and reality. He had been 
 taught more perfectly, perhaps, than any one who had 
 served in the temple, what was implied in its worship 
 and sacrifices. He felt the burden to which those 
 sacrifices pointed, the burden of individual and national 
 sins. Yet, with that burden resting upon him, he could 
 enter into the presence of the Holy One of Israel. He 
 was sure there was a deliverance for his people as well 
 as for himself ; that there could not be one for him if 
 there was not also one for them. Thus when part of 
 his work was over, when he had nothing more to say 
 in the ears of kings or priests or people, this office, 
 which had been so closely connected with his pro- 
 phetical office, and which, if it had depended upon 
 outward conditions, must have been more entirely at 
 an end than that, still remained in all its original 
 power. And the words of the prophet remain to 
 explain to all generations the spiritual character and 
 acts of the priest. 
 
 The office of the priest must have seemed to be 
 more utterly extinct for Ezekiel than even for Jeremiah. 
 He was forcibly removed from all the associations of 
 the temple while it was yet standing. When he was 
 called to be a prophet to the captives by the river 
 Chebar, he might have supposed that the earlier 
 designation which belonged to him as one of the 
 Levitical family, had been extinguished in the later 
 one. Yet we have seen how he was instructed, at the
 
 xxvi.] THE SON OF MAN. 4,65 
 
 very commencement of his work as a prophet, that the 
 glory of Him who filled the temple was surrounding 
 him in Mesopotamia as it surrounded him when he 
 went up to present the morning or the evening sacrifice 
 in Jerusalem . Such a vision was given him of that glory 
 as he had never beheld in the holy place. He found 
 that the earth, that common, profane, Babylonian 
 earth upon which he dwelt, was filled with it. All 
 the powers of nature, the forms of animals, man as the 
 highest of the animals, the motions and order of the 
 outward world and of human society, were pointing 
 towards it. And the central object, the highest object 
 which he could behold, though there was an ineffable 
 brightness beyond, was a Man upon a throne, One 
 who could command him, in whose Name he was to go 
 forth, whose words he was to speak. 
 
 This was no isolated revelation or dream. The very 
 name which the prophet thenceforth bore, the name 
 by which he was to know himself, depended upon it. 
 " Son of Man, stand upon thy feet and I will speak 
 unto thee," were the first words which he heard after 
 he fell upon his face. That great title is bestowed 
 upon him through all the time in which he was 
 prophesying. It was in many ways more suitable to 
 him than to those who had gone before him. There 
 was now no Hezekiah or Josiah to represent, in some 
 measure consciously to represent, the divine king. 
 The witnesses for a kingdom seemed to be at an end. 
 Nebuchadnezzar was the lord of the earth. At such a 
 time the natural position of the Jewish seer became a 
 human position. The Israelite's glory was to be a 
 ' Son of Man/ 
 
 Yet he was not absolved from any of the obli- 
 
 2 H
 
 466 EZEKIEL'S TASKS. [SEEM. 
 
 gations of the older prophets ; he was not to expect a 
 more willing or attentive audience among captives 
 than they had found at home ; briers, thorns would be 
 with him ; he must dwell among scorpions. Lamenta- 
 tions and mourning and woe filled his roll as much as 
 that which Baruch wrote out for Jeremiah. And he 
 must eat this roll ; it must become a part of his very 
 soul ; its words must come forth living and burning- 
 out of himself. 
 
 He must understand, besides, all the fearful respon- 
 sibilities of the prophet. He was to speak whether the 
 men about him would hear or whether they would 
 forbear. There were times when his tongue would 
 cleave to the roof of his mouth, when he should be dumb 
 and should not be to them a reprover. But when God 
 opened his lips, the blood of those to whom he was 
 sent was upon him ; it would be required at his hands 
 if they died in their iniquity and he had not warned 
 them. He must submit to do all symbolical acts, 
 however strange and fantastical they might seem in 
 themselves, which might bring the feeling of coming 
 judgment home to a sense-bound people. He must 
 act a mimic siege, he must eat defiled bread ; he must 
 cut off his hair and weigh it in balances, if so the 
 people could be made to understand, in spite of their 
 false prophets who spoke of coming peace and enacted 
 their signs, which of course involved no discomfort or 
 humiliation to themselves, that the city would really 
 be destroyed and the sanctuary laid waste. He was to 
 persuade his brother- captives that they were a remnant 
 in which the nation still lived, a stock out of which it 
 should hereafter grow and flourish, even though they 
 were most rebellious, dreaming of good things which
 
 xxvi.] THE IDOLS OF ISEAEL. 467 
 
 would never come, not waiting for that good which 
 God had designed for them. There was to be the 
 same end in all the punishments which were coming 
 upon the land and in all its deliverances. God was 
 saying in all, ' I AM THE LORD/ 
 
 This sentence recurs again and again in the pro- 
 phecies of Ezekiel. It is the thought of his mind, the 
 one which gives all the sublimity and all the practical 
 worth to his discourses, that the knowledge of God 
 is the supreme good of man, and that the desolation of 
 his countrymen has come from their not liking to retain 
 it. He is transported in spirit to the Temple. There 
 the same vision of the glory of God which he had 
 seen by the river returns to him. The light of it 
 shews him, portrayed upon the wall of the Temple 
 round about, the abominable beasts and creeping 
 things, and the idols of the House of Israel ; what the 
 Ancients of the House of Israel did in the dark, every 
 one in the chambers of his imagery ; how the women 
 were weeping for Thammuz ; how the men were wor- 
 shipping the sun towards the east. Whether such 
 abominations as these were actually to be seen in the 
 Temple, or whether the prophet's eye opened by the 
 divine spirit saw that they were possessing the hearts 
 of those who seemed to others, perhaps to themselves, 
 to be worshipping the God of their fathers, it is clear 
 that the mind of Ezekiel was led back to the place in 
 which he had ministered, that he might be taught how 
 little the sacred building could preserve the truth which 
 was enshrined in it. 
 
 What Ezekiel has seen in the Temple enables him 
 to answer the Elders of Israel when they come to con- 
 sult him in his own house. Just what was going on 
 
 2 H 2
 
 468 GOD ANSWERS ACCORDING TO THEM. [SERM. 
 
 among those who worshipped in Jerusalem, was going 
 on in the hearts of those who sought his oracles. 
 They were setting up idols there. They wanted to 
 know what God would do with them or against them ; 
 they did not want to know Him. And therefore 
 Ezekiel announces to them a great and eternal moral 
 law, one of the most varied application; God will 
 answer you according to your idols." The truth which 
 is presented to you, will be coloured, distorted, inverted, 
 by the eye which receives it. The covetousness which 
 you are cherishing will make the best and divinest 
 word you hear, a minister of covetousness. Your pride 
 and your lust will make it a minister of lust and pride. 
 No bolder or more awful paradox was ever enunciated 
 than this, nor one which the conscience of every one 
 will more surely verify. And there was this special 
 proof of courage in making such an announcement, 
 that it must have destroyed Ezekiel's reputation as a 
 prophet. The Elders came in terror, feeling that they 
 wanted guidance and expecting some ready-made 
 answer, such as the regular traders in prophecy could 
 always furnish. The truly inspired man answers, ' I 
 can tell you nothing, nothing at least that will not 
 deceive you and become a lie in your minds. For you 
 bring lies with you, and except they be extirpated, 
 they must convert whatever is added to them from 
 without, to their own quality/ 
 
 Ezekiel himself illustrates in another case this 
 great principle. No commandment had established 
 itself more completely by the experience of the people 
 to whom it was addressed, than the second. The 
 idolatries of the land had accumulated with each 
 generation. Each had cause to complain of the last as
 
 xxvi.] THE WAYS OF GOD EQUAL. 469 
 
 bequeathing it a stock of corrupt habits and traditions ; 
 the sins of the fathers had been visited upon the 
 children. These were facts not to be gainsayed. The 
 captives had leisure to reflect upon them. It might 
 have been a most profound and profitable reflection. 
 
 The use they made of it was to prove they were 
 under a necessary law of degeneracy. How could they 
 help themselves ? The fathers had eaten sour grapes, 
 and their teeth were set on edge. Who dared dispute 
 it ? There was God's own word for it. Had he not 
 told them the plan and method of His own govern- 
 ment ? Such language addressed to one of the favourite 
 preachers or prophets of the people, would have silenced 
 him altogether. He would have said, c It is a mystery, 
 no doubt; we must take the words of the command- 
 ment though we cannot understand them. God is a 
 Sovereign ; He can do what He likes. If it pleases 
 Him that each generation should be more corrupt than 
 the last, we must submit and not dispute His will. 
 Others there would be who would complain boldly and 
 with good reason of a will that compelled to evil, but 
 yet would lazily submit to it, supposing it to be inevit- 
 able, though feeling the absurdity of calling it divine. 
 Ezekiel boldly stands forth to dispute and deny the 
 whole principle. He does not dispute or deny the 
 second commandment, that was probably the text of 
 his discourse. But he will not let the second com- 
 mandment or any other words in the world be pleaded 
 against the character of God. Righteousness and 
 equity he maintains to be the foundation of the divine 
 character and of the divine acts. He will tolerate 
 no resolution of them into a heathenish notion of 
 sovereignty or self-will. " The ways of God are equal,"
 
 470 EZEKIEL'S LIFE A PARABLE. [SEEM- 
 
 he says, " and your ways are unequal." The sins of 
 the father only descend upon the son, they are only 
 punished in the son, when the son accepts them, enter- 
 tains them, makes them his own. At any time he 
 may turn round and repudiate them and cleave to the 
 God who doth not will the death of the sinner, but 
 desires that he should return and live. The doctrine 
 of this celebrated chapter is grounded on the doctrine 
 of the second commandment and of the whole law, 
 that a man is righteous so long as he cleaves to the 
 righteous God who has made a covenant with him, 
 unrighteous when he forsakes that covenant and acts 
 independently. Therefore the notion of any per- 
 petuity in righteousness, or in evil, is equally cut 
 off. Every man has the capacity of righteousness, 
 the capacity of evil. Let him be ever so righteous, 
 he must become evil the moment he ceases to trust 
 in God and begins to trust in himself. Let him be 
 ever so evil, he must become righteous the moment 
 he begins to trust in God and ceases to trust in 
 liirnself. 
 
 The enunciation of laws or principles seems more 
 especially to belong to Ezekiel, as the experience of 
 personal evil and the sympathy with national sorrow 
 belong more to the tender and womanly nature of 
 Jeremiah. Nevertheless, Ezekiel was to be a priest in 
 this sense also, as well as in that higher sense of 
 beholding the glory of God and proclaiming His Name. 
 Suffering was not the destination of one prophet ; it 
 was the badge of all the tribe. Ezekiel's life was to 
 be a continual parable, illustrative of the life of the 
 nation. A man scrupulously careful of the law, was 
 to violate the precepts of it respecting food, and to eat
 
 THE BROKEN LIMBS. 471 
 
 what was loathsome. A man sensitive probably as to 
 his reputation, and with that kind of lofty imagination 
 which makes attention to details and all petty acts 
 unspeakably painful, must submit, for the sake of his 
 countrymen, to such as seemed most ignominious to 
 himself and perplexing to them. Finally, the desire 
 of his eyes must be taken from him with a stroke, and 
 he must not mourn or weep. Even at such a time he 
 must be a sign to the people, though by doing so he 
 should seem to refuse the sympathy that he most 
 wants, and should only lead the captives to say, " Wilt 
 thou not tell us what these things are to us that thou 
 doest so ? " 
 
 Apart from these sufferings which concerned him 
 individually and domestically, the vision of the desola- 
 tion of Israel became every day more overwhelming to 
 him. Nor was it only the desolation of Israel. He 
 who was called 'Son of Man/ was not likely to speak 
 less of Egypt and Tyrus and the land in which he was 
 himself dwelling, than those older prophets who had 
 so many more reasons for regarding Judgea as the 
 one garden of the Lord. The arms of Nebuchad- 
 nezzar had been turning the earth upside down and 
 making it waste. Everything must have seemed to 
 him disjointed, incoherent, withered. Could it ever 
 be renovated ? Was it possible even for that country 
 which God had blessed above all others and man had 
 cursed above all others, to breathe and live again ? 
 
 This was the question which was proposed to the 
 prophet on that day when the hand of the Lord was 
 upon him, and he was earned into the valley which 
 was full of bones. The vision, clear as it is in itself, 
 must not be read apart from the context of the
 
 472 THE MOVEMENT OF THE BONES. [SKRM. 
 
 prophecy. You should remember where Ezekiel was 
 dwelling ; by what kind of people he was surrounded ; 
 what was the condition of his own land ; what had 
 come and was coming upon all lands ; or you will not 
 understand the picture which now rose up before him. 
 You should think, too, of the man himself, of the heat 
 of his spirit, of the words which he had uttered in vain, 
 of the acts which had only made the captives stare 
 vacantly, of the desolation of his house and his heart. 
 You should think of those other visions he had of the 
 ascending scale of creatures, of the mysterious order 
 of the universe, of the glory of God, before you place 
 yourself beside him in the valley, and walk with him 
 round about it, and look at the different bones, and 
 see how each separately, how altogether, they expound 
 to him the condition of the house of Israel. It was 
 dead, that body from which he had believed that life 
 was to go forth to quicken the universe. It had none 
 of the beauty of a corpse in which there is still form, 
 on which the spirit has left its impression. There had 
 been a time of gradual decay, a time when the pulses 
 of the nation beat feebly and faintly, but when they 
 might ^still be felt ; a time after that when you knew 
 it had ceased to breathe, but when you could still 
 speak of it as entire. But another stage had come, 
 the stage of utter dissolution, when each limb looked 
 as if it had nothing to do with any other, when you 
 could scarcely force yourself to believe that they had 
 ever been joined together. Can these bones live ? 
 what a thought to come into the mind of any man 
 gazing on such a scene ! It could not have come from 
 himself, certainly, nor from any of these relics. God 
 must have sent it to him ; He must have led him to
 
 xxvi.] THE VISION IN OUR DAT. 473 
 
 dream that such a resurrection was possible. And 
 now the process of it is also revealed to him. The 
 prophet is commanded to speak. His speech seems 
 a mere sound in the air. But there is a noise and a 
 shaking; then a frightful movement of the bones 
 towards each other, each claiming its fellow to which 
 it had once belonged. This strange effort at a union 
 of dead things betokens a power that has not yet 
 declared itself. And soon the sinews and the flesh 
 come up upon them. They have acquired a form, 
 though they have no life. " Then said He unto me, 
 * Prophesy unto the wind ; Thus saith the Lord God : 
 come from the four winds, breath, and breathe upon 
 these slain that they may live/ So I prophesied as 
 He commanded. And the breath came into them, and 
 they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding 
 great army." 
 
 " Doth he not speak parables ? " was the phrase by 
 which the Jews of the captivity expressed their dislike 
 and contempt for the troublesome and mystical prophet 
 who was among them. " Doth he not speak parables V 
 is a question which men, looking round with weary 
 hearts upon the condition of Christ's Church in various 
 periods of its existence, have asked themselves, with a 
 very different intention and spirit, when they have 
 read this vision of the valley of dry bones. " Is not 
 this written," they have said, " for the ages to come ? 
 Is not this one of the parables concerning the kingdom 
 of God ? " Yes, brethren, if we will first read it 
 fairly and honestly, as describing what Ezekiel says it 
 described to him, if we will not search for a distant 
 application till we have acknowledged the immediate 
 one, we shall find that here, as everywhere, Ezekiel
 
 4,74 HOW DARK IT IS. [SEBM. 
 
 is exhibiting facts which belong to other times as 
 well as his own, and laws and methods of a divine 
 government which belong to all times as well as his 
 own. 
 
 And that I may not waste your time in enumerating 
 different crises of history in which the facts may be 
 discerned, and by which the law and the method may 
 be tested, I say at once, they are all for us ; the vision 
 and the interpretation are of this day. Do you not 
 hear men on all sides of you crying, " The Church 
 which we read of in books exists only in them. Chris- 
 tendom consists of Romanists, Greeks, Protestants, 
 divided from each other, disputing about questions to 
 which nineteen-twentieths of those who belong to their 
 communions are indifferent. And meantime what is 
 becoming of the countries in which these different con- 
 fessions are established ? What populations are grow- 
 ing up in them ? Does the present generation believe 
 that which its fathers believed ? Will the next gene- 
 ration believe anything ? " Brethren, you hear such 
 words as these spoken. I do not mean to inquire how 
 much there is of truth in them, how much of exaggera- 
 tion, what evidences there are on the other side which 
 have been overlooked; what signs of life there are 
 anywhere in the midst of apparent death. But this I 
 must say ; Christians in general are far too eager to 
 urge special exceptions when they hear these charges 
 preferred ; far too ready to make out a case for them- 
 selves while they admit their application to others ; far 
 too ready to think that the cause of God is interested 
 in the suppression of facts. The prophets should have 
 taught us a different lesson. They should have led us 
 to feel that it was a solemn duty, not to conceal, but
 
 xxvi.] THE BONES MAY BECOME MORE DRY. 475 
 
 to bring forward all the evidence which proves, not 
 that one country is better than another, or one portion 
 of the Church better than another, but that there is a 
 principle of decay, a tendency to apostacy in all, and 
 that no comfort can come from merely balancing 
 symptoms of good here against symptoms of evil there, 
 no comfort from considering whether we are a little less 
 contentious, a little less idolatrous than our neighbours. 
 Alas, for this church, or for any church, if its existence 
 now, if its prospects for the future, are to be deter- 
 mined by such calculations as these ! No, brethren, 
 our hope has a deeper foundation. It is this; that 
 when the bones have become most dry, when they are 
 lying most scattered and separate from each other, 
 there is still a word going forth, if not through the lips 
 of any prophet on this earth, then through the lips of 
 those who have left it, yet not proceeding from them, 
 but from Him who liveth for ever and ever, the voice 
 which says, " These bones shall rise." It is this; that 
 every shaking among the bones, everything which 
 seems at first a sign of terror, men leaving the 
 churches in which they have been born, forsaking all 
 the affections and sympathies and traditions of their 
 childhood, infidel questionings, doubts whether the 
 world is left to itself or whether it is governed by an 
 evil spirit, are themselves not indeed signs of life, 
 but at least movements in the midst of death which 
 are better than the silence of the charnel-house, which 
 foretell the approach of that which they cannot pro- 
 duce. It is this ; that all struggles after union, though 
 they may be of the most abortive kind, though they 
 may produce fresh sects and fresh divisions, though 
 they must do so as long as they rest on the notion
 
 476 BUT THEY SHALL LIVE. [SERM. 
 
 that unity is something visible and material, yet indi- 
 cate a deep and divine necessity which men could not 
 be conscious of in their dreams if they were not begin- 
 ning to awake. It is this ; that there are other visions 
 true for us, as they were for Ezekiel, besides the vision 
 of dry bones. The name of a Father has not ceased to 
 be a true name because baptised men do not own them- 
 selves as His children. The name of the Son has not 
 ceased to be atrue name because men are setting up some 
 earthly ruler in place of Him, or are thinking that they 
 can realise a human fellowship without confessing a Man 
 on the throne above the firmament. The name of the 
 Spirit has not ceased to be a true name because we 
 are thinking that we can form combinations and sects 
 and churches without His quickening presence, because 
 we deny that He is really in the midst of us. It is 
 this; that when all earthly priests have been banished 
 or have lost their faith, though there should be none 
 to mourn over the ruins of Jerusalem, or to feel its 
 sins as his own, yet that there is a High Priest, the 
 great Sin-Bearer, ever presenting his perfect and 
 accepted sacrifice within the veil, a High Priest not of 
 a nation, but of humanity. It is this ; that though 
 all earthly temples, in which God has been pleased 
 to dwell, should become desecrated and abominable, 
 though all foul worship should go on in the midst of 
 them, and though what is portrayed on their walls 
 should too faithfully represent what is passing in the 
 more secret chambers of imagery, though at last the 
 shrines that have been supposed to contain the 
 mystery which they set forth should be utterly de- 
 stroyed, and a voice should be heard out of the midst of
 
 xxvi.] THE SIGN OF THE TEMPLE OF GOD. 477 
 
 them, saying, "Let us depart/' yet that this will not 
 be the sign that the Church of God has perished, only 
 the sign that the temple of God has been opened in 
 Heaven, and that from thence must come forth the 
 glory that is to fill the whole earth.
 
 SERMON XXVII. 
 
 THE NEW TEMPLE. 
 (Lincoln's Inn, 2nd Sunday after Trinity. Jwne 20, 1852.) 
 
 Thon son of man, shew the house to the house of Israel, that they 
 may be ashamed of their iniquities : and let them measure the 
 pattern. And if they be ashamed of all that they have done, 
 shew them the form of the house, and the fashion thereof, and 
 the goings out thereof, and the comings in thereof, and all the 
 forms thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and all the laws 
 thereof : and write it in their sight, that they may keep the 
 whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and do them. 
 EZEKIEL xliii. 10, 11. 
 
 THE later visions in the book of Ezekiel relate to a 
 Temple, the form and proportions of which are 
 very minutely described. What is this Temple ? The 
 first obvious suggestion is that Ezekiel was looking 
 forward to the times of Ezra ; that this temple is an 
 anticipation of that of which Zerubbabel brought forth 
 the headstone. But the building which rises before 
 the eyes of the seer covers an area which the second 
 Temple never can have occupied. The scale of it 
 appears to exceed that of Solomon's, which struck the 
 old man, who had seen it or heard of it from his father, 
 as so much grander than its successor. In Ezekiel's 
 vision, moreover, there is a distinct allusion to that
 
 SKKM. jumi.] THEORIES RESPECTING THE TEMPLE. 479 
 
 appearance of the glory of the Lord which belonged, 
 the Jews say, exclusively to the elder building. 
 Christian writers have availed themselves of these 
 circumstances to decide peremptorily that the vision is 
 of a spiritual, not an earthly Temple. The difficulties 
 in the way of such an opinion are very great. Accurate 
 admeasurements in feet and cubits seem as if they must 
 relate to a visible, not to an invisible fabric. There are 
 still two possible opinions. One is popular among 
 many of our countrymen. It is that a Temple exactly 
 answering to Ezekiel's description will appear hereafter 
 in Jerusalem. The other you will at once identify as 
 foreign. It is that of a critic of great learning and 
 acuteness, often of much sympathy with the earnest 
 patriotism of the prophets. He thinks that Ezekiel 
 carried with him into Chaldea the habits, prejudices, 
 and formality of the priestly order to which he be- 
 longed. Therefore, though he had high moral purposes 
 and divine instincts, he could not but regard the 
 reappearance of a Temple like that which Nebuzaradan 
 had destroyed, only more magnificent, as the consum- 
 mation of an Israelite's dreams and hopes. The critic 
 connects this explanation of the later chapters of the 
 book with a theory respecting the whole of it. Ezekiel 
 is, in his judgment, more of an artist than of a prophet. 
 The elder prophets, he thinks, delivered their dis- 
 courses before the people; the son of Buzi, for the 
 most part, composed his in his chamber. The book 
 therefore, he supposes, while it wants freshness, has a 
 unity of purpose which we do not find elsewhere. The 
 Temple, in which the early years of the seer were 
 passed, gives it a beginning, a middle, and an end. 
 I shall not seek to get rid of this last explanation by
 
 480 EZEKIEL'S PECULIARITIES. [SERM. 
 
 calling it the irreverent offspring of a modern or a 
 foreign school. The criticism, which was fashionable 
 among the most approved interpreters of our Church in 
 the last century, leaves me no excuse for such language. 
 They seem to have thought that, not one, but, all 
 the prophets were busy, in the most solemn moments 
 of their own lives and of their country's history, 
 in selecting ingenious and striking epithets and in 
 enveloping their thoughts with a grotesque oriental 
 imagery. I believe the more recent commentator would 
 shrinkfrom such language. He would admitthatthe pro- 
 phets were, one and all, deep-minded reasonable men; 
 and that is one step towards the belief that they were 
 really inspired by God. Nor would it hinder any one, 
 I should think, in his progress towards that conviction, 
 to suppose that, as each prophet exhibits a different 
 character, temperament, and style, the signs of a 
 distinct work ; so the one who was least called forth by 
 sudden emergencies, who was not in the midst of the 
 fears and hopes of a siege or of an invasion, should 
 have contemplated events less as detached, more in a 
 series, than his predecessors. Least of all would it 
 detract from the probability of a divine education, to 
 suppose that the holy function of the priest had given 
 a colour, as I maintained last week that it did, to all 
 Ezekiel's thoughts, and that in it we may discover the 
 key to their order and connection. 
 
 But on the other hand, I think, every thoughtful 
 reader, whatever his notions about Inspiration may be, 
 must admit that if there was anything in Ezekiel's 
 zircumstaiices, or in the constitution of his mind, which 
 disposed him to look upon the world as a student looks 
 out upon it from his closet, no one had that tendency
 
 xxvii.] NOT A STUDENT OR RECLUSE. 481 
 
 more repeatedly and painfully counteracted. Potty 
 trials and the most serious trials, the eating of loath- 
 some food, the death of his wife on the day on which 
 he had spoken to the people, served alike to rob him of 
 any lofty conceits, to bring him down to the level of 
 the most unhappy of those with whom he was asso- 
 ciated, to teach him that outward events were linked 
 and fastened to the inmost fibres of his being. If the 
 captivity withdrew him from some of those political 
 relations in which he would have been involved at 
 Jerusalem, it brought him into closer and more per- 
 sonal contact with the heartlessness and indifference, as 
 well as with the secret idolatries, of his countrymen. 
 His removal from the Temple and the temple-worship 
 threw him, as I endeavoured to shew you, more as aa 
 outcast upon the wide and profane world, and compelled 
 him to ask whether he was away from God, because he 
 was away from the place that directly testified of Him. 
 Instead of being more surrounded with the means and 
 appliances which tempt a man into artificial faith, he 
 was stripped more bare of them than any prophet had 
 ever been. Whatever value he might have set upon 
 the Temple in other days, whatever he might have set 
 upon it then, he, more than any other man, had to learn 
 that, if he had no better resting-place for his spirit 
 than that, it must be dreary and homeless. 
 
 His earliest visions had taught him, that not only the 
 Cherubim in the temple of Solomon, but that all Baby- 
 lonian symbols, had a meaning ; that they betokened a 
 relation between the lower creatures and man, between 
 man and God ; that the most terrific powers of nature 
 spoke of government and order and harmony. The 
 later vision of the valley of the dry bones had taught
 
 482 NOT THE SLAVE OF CASTE FEELINGS. [SER*. 
 
 him that no change in the outward condition of his 
 countrymen could lift them from their degradation or 
 make them a nation again, till a quickening and uniting 
 spirit entered into them. That vision had also taught 
 him that the spirit does not breathe upon the separate 
 bones for the sake of raising them to a separate life ; 
 that when they stand up it must be as one body, as a 
 great army, instinct with the same purpose, directed 
 by the same head. If Ezekiel came into Mesopotamia 
 with the prejudices of a caste about him, surely there 
 never were lessons so divinely contrived as these to 
 break down such prejudices. Whatever of formality, 
 whatever of exclusiveness, clung to him in virtue of his 
 birth or his profession, must have sustained shocks 
 which the ridicule and unbelief _of all the heathens round 
 about could not have caused. He must have felt that 
 God Himself was leading him through the strangest 
 paths in the most unfathomable depths, to feel after 
 Him and find Him. 
 
 But then the question recurs ; why is it that the 
 prophet, having in the commencement of his work 
 been led into such awful visions of God, not as he stood 
 in the holy place, but as he dwelt by the river of Chebar, 
 why is it that when he had had such tremendous 
 visions of the corrupt and abominable worship which 
 went on in the Temple while it was yet standing, such 
 damning proofs that it had no charm to expel any 
 horrible idolatry or moral infamy, why is it that his 
 latest and most brilliant hopes refer, as it would seem 
 they do, to the reappearance of some fabric with material 
 gates and walls, and that he should look in such a 
 fabric for some conspicuous manifestation of the divine 
 glory ? We cannot honestly shrink from this question.
 
 xxvii.] HE NECESSARILY EXPECTED A TEMPLE. 483 
 
 In striving to answer it for myself, I have found help 
 from all those different and apparently contradictory 
 suggestions of which I spoke. I do not believe that 
 it is necessary to discard any of them ; perhaps we 
 may find some principle which reconciles them. 
 
 It would be inconsistent with the character of all the 
 Jewish prophecies which we have considered, certainly 
 not least inconsistent with the prophecies of Ezekiel, to 
 suppose that he did not look forward to a reconstruction 
 of Jewish society after a definite and comparatively 
 short term of bondage. Unpromising as the elements 
 around him were, dry as were the bones which lay 
 scattered in the valley, he still believed that out of 
 these a nation was to be formed, not a new nation, but 
 one in which would survive the blessing of Abraham, 
 the law of Moses, the covenant with David. To 
 suppose the nation appearing again without a temple 
 for its centre, would have been difficult to him before, 
 was actually impossible to him now. While he served 
 daily in the courts of the Lord's house, he may never 
 have known or deeply reflected what its relation to 
 the Commonwealth was. He went through his duties, 
 he experienced the blessing of them ; he probably 
 contemplated the removal of the building as a perfectly 
 incredible event. But the general law will have been 
 good in his case. Till the gift was gone, its meaning 
 will in great part have been hidden. When Ezekiel 
 left the Temple, or when it was burnt, he will have 
 known that that collection of goodly stones expressed 
 the presence of a one living Being; that it denoted the 
 unity of the tribes, that it spoke of a bond of fellowship 
 for all nations, that it declared justice and order to 
 be the foundation of all society. These discoveries, 
 
 2 i 2
 
 484 WHY IT IS DESCRIBED SO MINUTELY. [SKRM. 
 
 dawning upon him by degrees, not looking at all like 
 discoveries, but as undoubted commonplaces which he 
 had admitted always, will have compelled him to feel 
 that, if his land should be again what God affirmed it 
 was to be, the mountain of the Lord's house must be 
 again the citadel of its strength, the common object of 
 all eyes and hearts. 
 
 For a prophet to have these convictions in his mind, 
 and not to expect an actual building to appear on an 
 actual hill, would have been strange and contradictory. 
 And as he was dealing with men who had often very 
 lively hopes that they should recover their lands and 
 their houses, who were told by their prophets that 
 the captivity would terminate almost immediately, but 
 who understood very little what was implied in the 
 dissolution of a nation's existence, what was necessary 
 to the restoration of it, the prophet had need to be 
 very definite in his announcements respecting this new 
 building. The people must understand clearly that 
 when he spoke of a temple, he meant a temple, that 
 and nothing else. Their minds were gross and material, 
 but they were also loose and vague. They had a strong 
 sense of what it was to be deprived of their oliveyards 
 and their vineyards; the deprivation of freedom and 
 of worship was altogether visionary and fantastic. It 
 was unspeakably valuable that they should hear of 
 " a man having a measuring-reed in his hand, of six 
 cubits long by the cubit and a hand-breadth ; of there 
 being chambers of the gate eastward, three on this 
 side and three on that; of the three being of one 
 measure ; of the posts having one measure on this side 
 and on that." Apart from all significance that might 
 attach to the forms of the building, this precision itself
 
 xxvu.] SOLOMON'S TEMPLE HIS LESSON-BOOK. 485 
 
 was an education for them. It gave them a sense of 
 reality which they could not otherwise have had. The 
 thing was actually to be. It was not a shadow or 
 dream of an inventor of parables. It was to have a 
 shape j ordinary earthly measures could be applied 
 to it. 
 
 But where did the prophet get these measures ? 
 To what did they correspond ? There cannot be the 
 slightest doubt, I conceive, that the general form and 
 construction of the building, the different parts of 
 which it was to consist, the cherubim and palm-trees 
 which were to adorn it, were suggested to him by that 
 which he had actually seen ; that the house which had 
 been dear to him above all others, in which he had 
 grown up, in which he had presented the sacrifice, was 
 the hint and type to him of any new one which might 
 be raised up in its place. It would be quite contrary to 
 the analogy of prophecy to think otherwise. Only the 
 enchanter or magician pretends to behold in the future 
 that which has nothing answering to it in the present 
 or the past. The true prophet affects no such gift, 
 rather, vehemently disclaims it. He is a witness for 
 Him who is and was and is to come. If he taught 
 that the future were to be unlike the past, that there 
 was no common root out of which they both grew, 
 he would be faithless to his vocation, he would be 
 forgetting the permanent and eternal Being. Solomon's 
 Temple had been Ezekiel's primer or first lesson-book : 
 he was not to forget the learning which he had received 
 from it, when other learning was added to it. 
 
 Neither was he to forget that other learning. Since 
 he had been brought to the. river of Chebar, he had 
 been instructed in the witness which God had borne of
 
 486 HIS DOES NOT ANSWER TO ZERUBBABEL'S. [SEEM. 
 
 Himself in the outward world, even in the forms which, 
 had been turned to idolatrous uses. He had seen how 
 near the false lies to the true, what need there is that 
 the truth should be recognised in its length and breadth 
 that the falsehood may be cast out, what need there is 
 that even the outward expressions of a truth should be 
 recognised in order that they may not be made into 
 instruments of division, that they may not be turned 
 against Him who has created them ; but may be the 
 manifestation of some aspect of His own nature. What, 
 therefore, we discern in Ezekiel's vision of a temple, 
 however imperfectly we may be able to follow out its 
 different details, is the anticipation of one which should 
 express, far more completely and expansively than the 
 Temple of Solomon had done, all which that Temple 
 had been designed to express; which should declare 
 in the fullest sense the divine unity upon which 
 Ezekiel had been led to meditate, which should 
 embody the union and reconciliation of the tribea 
 broken by the revolt of Israel and the pride of Judah, 
 and which should be at the same time what Solomon 
 had certainly once supposed that his might be, a 
 house of worship for all nations, a gathering up of that 
 which was dispersed and fragmentary in their different 
 national forms and symbols. 
 
 Now, it is quite evident that the second temple, 
 which was built by Zerubbabel, did not correspond to 
 this idea. There were good reasons why it should not, 
 reasons which, on some future occasion, I may have to 
 consider at large. I speak now only of the fact. It 
 was not a house even for the twelve tribes, still less 
 was it a house for all nations. The Jews, on their 
 return to the land of their fathers, .found themselves
 
 KXVII.] THE SPIRITUAL AND THE EARTHLY. 487 
 
 obliged to be more exclusive than their fathers had 
 ever been. Genealogies were studied for the very 
 purpose of resisting the attempts of any settlers of 
 doubtful blood to work with them. Those priests who 
 had married foreign women were even forced to dismiss 
 their wives. A temple which was suitable to a people 
 that began its new existence with these acts might 
 realise the promise made to Ezekiel, that the dry bones 
 should become a body again ; it could not resemble the 
 framework which he had seen in his vision. If the 
 Temples had exactly answered to each other, one of 
 them must have been false to the principle which it 
 sought to embody. 
 
 In using this language, I have anticipated what I 
 have to say to those who maintain that Ezekiel is 
 giving us the pattern of a temple made of living stones, 
 not of stones hewn out of an earthly quarry. Let those 
 who adopt this phraseology be sure first that they 
 understand themselves ; then there is a hope that they 
 will bring others to a good understanding with them. 
 By a spiritual temple, they do not, I trust, mean an 
 unsubstantial temple, one built of clouds and mists, 
 one erected by the eye which sees it. They believe, 
 doubtless, the spiritual temple to be a spiritual society, 
 possessing a real unity inhabited by the divine 
 Presence, resting on the divine Name. Well, I do not 
 doubt that Ezekiel saw more or less clearly the pattern 
 of such a society as this ; I do not doubt that he was 
 instructed to present this pattern in earthly forms. 
 But we must remember, first, not to confound the 
 pattern with the earthly forms which set it forth; 
 secondly, we must assure ourselves that whatever is 
 spiritual and substantial will seek to find some ex-
 
 488 EZEKIEL A TRUE PRIEST. [SEEM. 
 
 pression for itself, to make the things of earth into 
 mirrors which may reflect at least a portion of its glory. 
 It is not a proof that Ezekiel carried about with him 
 the narrowness and formality of a priest, that he longed 
 to see an outward temple, like the one in which he had 
 ministered, but larger, freer, nobler. It is not a proof 
 that he carried about with him the narrowness and 
 formality of a priest, that he believed there would be 
 such a building, and that he was able to study and 
 represent its parts and proportions. It is a proof that 
 he had received the true education of a priest, that the 
 law of his fathers had not been a dead letter to him, 
 that he had entered into the purpose of God when he 
 said, " In this place will I dwell, for I have a delight 
 therein." It is a proof that he had got beyond the 
 walls, and entered into that which eye hath not seen, 
 nor ear heard, nor the heart conceived, that he supposed 
 the hard and stubborn materials which earth supplies, 
 may discourse of " Him who dwelleth not in temples 
 made with hands, neither is worshipped by men's hands 
 as though He needed anything/' 
 
 I believe that all the prophet's previous visions 
 would have been maimed and comparatively unreal, if 
 they had wanted this climax. And I say so for this 
 reason. The once wealthy captives by the river Chebar 
 were desiring to restore a society in which they should 
 have the full swing of their tastes and appetites, and 
 plenty of slaves to minister to them. And the false 
 priests and the false prophets were ready enough to 
 encourage this opinion. They would have the fat of 
 their sacrifices, they would have their obedient troop 
 of female devotees to help them to hunt souls. All 
 should come back again just as it was before; the same
 
 xxvii.] THE SOCIAL LAW OF THE TEMPLE. 489 
 
 vanity, insolence, falsehood, devilry. That would be 
 their mode of reviving a divine society. But Ezekiel 
 tells them it shall not be so at all. " Thus saith the 
 Lord God " (these words occur in the very midst of the 
 ordinances respecting the new building), <f the prince 
 shall not take of the people's inheritance by possession, 
 to tl rust them out of their possession. But he shall 
 give his sons inheritance out of his own possession, that 
 my people be not scattered every one from his posses- 
 sion." Here was a great moral and political law which 
 was a necessary and natural corollary from the doctrine 
 that the Temple was to be the building which denoted 
 the restoration of the national society. This is a law 
 which those who merely talk of a spiritual temple 
 without believing that that temple is to make its 
 influence felt in this world, would never dream of 
 promulgating. This is a law which it was most strictly 
 in the function of a Jewish prophet to assert, not as 
 proceeding from him, not even as proceeding from 
 Moses, but as coming from the mouth of the Lord. 
 
 This last remark may enable us to understand the 
 words of my text. " Thou Son of Man, shew the house 
 to the House of Israel, that they may be ashamed of 
 their iniquities ; and let them measure the pattern. 
 And if they be ashamed of all their iniquities, shew 
 them the form of the house." I cannot wish for a 
 better commentary than this upon the question we 
 have just been considering, nor a more complete answer 
 to the question which remains to be considered. The 
 Israelites of the captivity might see the pattern when 
 they had repented of their iniquities ; till then it was 
 impossible. The idea of a spiritual society could not 
 unfold itself to them while they were living in a
 
 490 THE CALL TO REPENTANCE. [SEKJI. 
 
 heartless, divided, self-righteous state. They must be 
 humbled before they could feel the possibility of such 
 a society ; still more before they could confess it to be 
 real. The hindrance to the discernment of it was not 
 .an intellectual one ; it was not that they wanted the 
 intuition and the foresight of the prophet; it was 
 wholly moral. It was their baseness and selfishness 
 which made their eyes dim that they could not see, 
 and their ears heavy that they could not hear. It 
 was so then; it was so in every generation afterwards. 
 " Repent/' said John the Baptist, "for the Kingdom 
 of Heaven is at hand." The pattern of the house is 
 about to be presented to you. The spiritual society, 
 of which your Temple contained the imperfect out- 
 ward embodiment, is going to be manifested. The 
 Head of it is among you, but you cannot see it, you 
 cannot see Him. Repent, turn round to God, that He 
 may remove the film from your eyes, and enable you 
 to receive the revelation which He is making to you. 
 The same language goes through the Gospels. "Except 
 ye are converted and become as little children," said 
 our Lord to His disciples, " ye cannot enter into the 
 Kingdom of Heaven." " Except a man be born of 
 water and of the Spirit, he cannot see the Kingdom of 
 God," He said to the ruler of the Jews. " Repent," 
 said St. Peter on the day of Pentecost, "and be bap- 
 tised, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. 
 For the promise is to you and to your children and to 
 as many as the Lord your God shall call." All these 
 words stand in direct connection with the discovery 
 or manifestation of a divine and spiritual communion. 
 All the blindness which is ascribed to the Jewish 
 nation is mainly this, that they would not accept it
 
 xxvn.J A RESTORED TEMPLE. 491 
 
 as the manifestation of a kingdom for human beings, 
 of a society grounded upon the Name of the Son of 
 God and the Son of Man ; that they would have only 
 a Jewish society. And that Jewish society proved 
 itself not to be Jewish, but a miserable collection of 
 sects, hating each other a,nd contrary to all men, not 
 claiming to be children of God, and therefore not able 
 to assert their title as children of Abraham; essentially 
 inhuman, and therefore necessarily given up to the 
 worship of afalsegod, of Mammon instead of Jehovah. 
 Ezekiel was to shew his countrymen the form of 
 the house, when a confession of their iniquities should 
 enable them to discern the pattern after which it was 
 to be built. The law must hold good for all times to 
 come. There may be such a house yet built in Jeru- 
 salem. God grant that there may ! But it must be 
 built by a people who are capable of giving the out- 
 ward expression to an inward truth which is possessing 
 them; who have humbled themselves in dust and 
 ashes before God for their selfishness, their exclusive- 
 ness, their worship of gold ; who have confessed the 
 Cross to be the highest manifestation of the wisdom 
 and power of God; who have rejoiced in that mani- 
 festation because it is universal, because the Christ 
 hath said, "I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto 
 Me;" who have perceived that the Divine Unity is not 
 a narrow selfish individuality, but the unity of a Father 
 with a Son in one Spirit. Jews possessed with these 
 convictions may be destined, in some very wonderful 
 manner, to instruct all nations in them, not by letters 
 only and speech, but by polity and art, by a restored 
 city of which the Son of David is the acknowledged 
 King, by a restored temple which He will again claim
 
 492 APPLICATION TO CHRISTENDOM. [SEEM. 
 
 as His Father's house, and will not suffer to be a house 
 of merchandise. 
 
 But these considerations, brethren, must have respect 
 to all nations as well as to this one ; they bear upon the 
 whole history of Christendom. Some time after the 
 Gospel of a Kingdom of Heaven had been preached in 
 all parts of the Roman Empire, and the old Temple 
 that stood on the hill over Jerusalem had perished, 
 there began to be a feeling that every portion of human 
 life, the forms of society, the roughest stone, the richest 
 marble, as well as the thoughts and feelings which had 
 fashioned them into shape and symmetry, must be 
 devoted to the expression of that truth which had come 
 to restore and regenerate the universe. The task was 
 commenced and went on bravely. The old temples 
 that had been constructed for the service of divided and 
 local gods, were pressed into the service of the One God. 
 Every form and symbol, it was rightly believed, which 
 belonged to the old world, might be claimed as the 
 spoil and the heritage of that which had succeeded it. 
 The sense of the infinite and unfathomable which such 
 edifices could scarcely awaken, found out a new kind of 
 temple in which the worshipper could lose himself, and 
 confess a presence real, personal, incomprehensible. 
 But one and another form, that which delighted the 
 Southern worshipper, that which kindled without satis- 
 fying the Northern, could as little resist the idolatrous 
 tendencies of the heart as Solomon's Temple had done. 
 All have been degraded into means of feeding the 
 sensual and earth-born tastes which they boasted that 
 they were able to subdue or to sanctify. Then the notion 
 grew up that there was something close and stifling 
 in the atmosphere of such temples ; that art was a
 
 TXVII.] OPPOSITE VIEWS OF SENSIBLE FOEMS. 493 
 
 dangerous ally of devotion ; that the most homely 
 building was the one which He who promised to dwell 
 with the humble and contrite was the most likely to 
 inhabit ; that the upright heart and pure is, after all, 
 the only true temple. Promising words ! pointing to 
 high truths, just as the tower or steeple pointed to 
 them ; but just as little able as they were to reach the 
 truths or to preserve them. Hardness, exclusiveness, 
 self-conceit, self-worship in a thousand forms, it was 
 found, could hide itself in language which seemed to 
 the utterers of it the protest against everypossible false- 
 hood, the sure protection of simplicity and humility. 
 And the principle which was so loudly proclaimed was 
 not carried out. Heaven was to be divorced from earth. 
 But the worst habits of earth, the habits of the money- 
 changer, introduced themselves into the sanctuary. 
 Religious men, as if to revenge that invasion, pre- 
 tended to make capture of Science and Art, and to 
 force them into the service of Christianity. In fact, 
 they only made both dishonest. There was no divorce ; 
 there could be none ; only earth could become fantastical 
 and Heaven material, in the struggle to effect one. 
 The experience of such consequences from the Puritan 
 doctrine and practice has produced, in our day, a 
 vehement reaction in favour of all sensuous helps to 
 devotion. It has been resisted as vehemently. Was 
 not the movement justifiable, when it seemed as if 
 God's beautiful universe were to be given up to the 
 devil as his rightful possession ? Was not the opposi- 
 tion to it justifiable, when the plea put forth for build- 
 ings, pictures, music, was that the heart and spirit of 
 human beings cannot converse with the invisibk 
 except through the visible ?
 
 494 DANGERS OF BOTH. [SEEK. 
 
 Each doctrine is equally unscriptural, equally sub- 
 versive of Christ's redemption, equally fatal, as the 
 experience of three centuries has proved, to inward 
 morality as well as to the morality of common life. 
 Each shews that the eyes of the members of the 
 Christian Church whether they are dazzled with the 
 splendour of an external hierarchy, or have become 
 dim from poring over mere letters, or are blinded by 
 introversion have lost the capacity of beholding that 
 heavenly pattern, which every building on this earth 
 must strive, in its measure and according to its pur- 
 pose, to embody. While that is hidden from us, we 
 may talk of the symbols and styles of architecture, we 
 may mimic our fathers, we may try to invent some- 
 thing of our own ; the new as little as the old will 
 express the communion of spiritual creatures with 
 their Father and with each other. The remedy in 
 this case, as in all cases, lies not in new theories or 
 more acute criticism, in greater servility to old models, 
 or a more scornful independence of them, but in an 
 earnest repentance. When we are ashamed of our 
 strifes, of our indifference, of our vainglory, of our 
 money-worship, when we have asked God to put these 
 away from us, to give us true hearts, and to write His 
 name and the name of the Holy City upon us ; we 
 shall understand how our fathers saw some letters of 
 that name in every part of the universe ; we shall 
 admire the diligence and delight with which they 
 strove to decipher the hieroglyphics ; we shall study 
 their methods and profit by their discoveries. But we 
 shall believe, not because of their word, but because 
 we have seen for ourselves ; because we have the 
 Kingdom of God within us ; because we have Christ
 
 xvu.] CONCLUSION. 495 
 
 Himself to interpret the parables of it Christ Him- 
 self to give us the power of proclaiming it to all nations, 
 that they may walk in the Light of it. Then we shall 
 find that the brass, the stone, the iron, and the gold, 
 are stubborn materials only because we have allowed 
 them to be tyrannical masters ; that we can subdue 
 the powers and properties of nature when we claim 
 them for Him who gave Himself up to be the lowest 
 of all ; and who is therefore exalted above all. 
 
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 THEOLOGICAL CATALOGUE 15 
 
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