was not thine, and which only for a few hours was with thee) And should not I have mercy on that great city, Nineveh, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons, who can not discern between their right hand and left hand (innocent as the gourd itself!), and also much cattle (poor dumb ones)!" And there, to the imagination, still sits the stunned and downcast prophet, the great city in sight, and shining in the sunthe low of hundreds of cattle in his ears-the bitter wind in his eyes and in his hair-disappointment and chagrin in his heart-and, hanging over his naked head, the fragments of the withered plant. Who would care to go and to sit down along with him?

And yet not a few have gone, and sat beside Jonah under that shade of tattered fire! The fierce, hopeless infidel, who would like Cain kill his brother, because he can not comprehend his God; the dogmatist, who has learned his "lesson of despair" so thoroughly, that the ease with which he recites it seems a voucher for its truth; the gloomy Christian, who lingers many a needless hour around the skirts of Sinai, instead of seeing its summits sinking afar off in the distance; the victim of vanity and disappointment, who has confounded his voice and identified its rejection, with the voice and the rejection of God; the misanthrope, who says, "Would that all men were liars ;" and the fanatic, who grieves that the heavens do not respond to his vindictive feelings, and leave him and his party standing alone in the solitude which the race has left; such, and others, have partaken of the momentary madness, and shared in the dreary shelter of the prophet.

He, we trust, arose from under the gourd, and humbled, melted, instructed, resumed the grand functions of his office. It is of comparatively little moment whether he did or not, as the principles inscribed on his prophecy remain in any case the same. These are, first, to fly from duty is to fly to danger; secondly, deliverance from danger often conducts to new and tenfold perils, and involves tenfold responsibilities; thirdly, a duty delayed is a duty doubled; fourthly, the one voice of an

earnest man is a match for millions; fifthly, an error in the truest prophet can degrade his character, and cast a shade of doubt upon his name; and sixthly, God would rather lower the good report of any of his messengers, than endanger one syllable of his own recorded name, "The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and slow to anger."

AMOS.

This prophet lived nearly 800 years before Christ. While employed as an herdsman, he was summoned to lift up his voice against Israel. Driven from Bethel, by the calumnies of the idolatrous priest Amaziah, he fled to Tekoah, a small town ten miles south of Jerusalem; and afterward, we hear of him no

more.

As Burns among the poets, is Amos among the prophets. Few, indeed, of that company could be called cultured; but Amos was especially destitute of training. He comes straight from the cattle-stall and the solitary pasture. A strong bull of Bashan, he leaps in, "two years before the earthquake," and bellows out, "The Lord will roar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem." He turns his first fury upon the neighboring idolatrous nations; and short, deep, decisive, are the crashes of his thunder against Damascus, Gaza, Tyrus, Edom, Ammon, and Moab. His burdens are only words; but they are words of doom. A nation falls in every sentence. "I will send a fire into the house of Hazael-a fire on the wall of Gaza-a fire on the palaces of Tyrus-a fire upon Teman-a fire in the wall of Rabbah." And having flung those forked flashes at the neighboring nations, he pours out on Judah and Israel his full and overflowing ire. Israel, at the time of Amos, had partially recovered its ancient possessions and grandeur, and more than its ancient pride, injustice, and luxury. It required to be startled from its selfish dream, by the rude cries of this holy herdsman, whose utterances are abrupt, unvaried, and laconic, as midnight alarms of fire. Ceremony there is none with Amos. Nor, like

some of his brethren, does he ever indulge in long and swelling passages, whether of allegory or description. His prophecy is principally composed of short threatenings, short prayers, sudden exclamations, and, above all, startling questions. "Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel.” "Woe unto you who desire the day of the Lord! that day is darkness and not light." "I hate and despise your feast-days." "Take away from me the noise of your songs." "In all vineyards shall be wailing, for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord." But interrogation is his power. He is like a stranger from the country asking his way through a city. But his questions are rather those of indignation than of surprise. Thus he sounds on his wild uneven path:-"Can two walk together except they be agreed?" "Shall there be evil in the city, and the Lord hath not done it?" "The lion hath roared, who will not fear?" "The Lord hath spoken, who can but prophesy?" "Shall horses run upon the rock?" "Are ye not as the children of Ethiopia unto me, Ò children of Israel, saith the Lord God?"

The imagery of Amos is generally pastoral, and comes in, like a cool breeze from Bashan, to temper the ardor of his prophetic vein. The bird, the lion from whose mouth the shepherd rescues two legs or the piece of an ear, the bear meeting the man who has escaped the lion, the kine of Bashan, the vineyards where he had often gathered fruit, the seven stars and Orion which he had often watched from his midnight fields, the plowman overtaking the reaper, and the gatherer of grapes, the sower of seed-proclaim his original habits and associations. Two of the principal types employed are selected from the scenery of the country--the grasshoppers, in the 7th, and the basket of summer-fruit, in the 8th chapter. In like manner, the future prosperity of Israel is represented by a rural image. "I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof, and they shall make gardens, and eat the fruit of them."

There are besides, in Amos, certain brief and bold sublimities, which class his genius with that of the best of the lesser pro

phets. Such, in the 9th chapter, is the vision of the Lord standing upon the altar, and proclaiming the inextricable dilemmas into which Israel's crimes had led them. In all Scripture occur no more powerful antitheses than the following :—“ He that fleeth of them shall not flee away; he that escapeth of them shall not escape (into safety). If they dig down into Sheol, thence shall mine hand take them. If they climb up into heaven, then shall I bring them down. If they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search for, and thence will I take them out. And if they hide themselves from mine eyes, in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them. If they go into captivity before their enemies, there will I command the sword, and it shall slay them, and I will set mine eyes upon them for evil, and not for good." How the divine omnipresence here rolls itself around the victims of the divine anger! In the 139th Psalm, the poet wishes to escape from the Spirit of God, as from a thought too strange and overwhelming for him; but here, Israel would seek escape from him, as he might from the center of a forest of fire, but is doomed forever to seek it in vain. An historian has given an animated description of the impossibility of escape which beset the steps of the fugitive from the power of the Roman Emperor. If he crossed the Alps, that power was before him; if he crossed the ocean, it was waiting for him on the shore; and the tropic or the frigid zone was equally unable to hide him from its Briarean grasp. Still, there remained for him an avenue of deliverance. He might plunge into the sea, or turn his sword against his own bowels, or pledge his oppressor in poison. But for the object of the just vengeance of Jehovah, there lay no such way of escape; he could not thus set his foe at defiance. The sea would say, “It is not in me;" Sheol (or Hades) would re-echo the cry; if he dropped into the arms of death, they would but hand him into those of Death's King; and if he sought to mount to heaven, this were to flee into the metropolis of his foe. Other worlds were barred against him; or even were their barriers broken,

this were only to take down the palisades which blocked the way of his perdition. The Universe was transfigured into a menacing shape, fronting the criminal with a face of fire, and. stretching out on all sides its myriad starry hands, to arrest his retreat, or to shed down dismay upon his guilty soul.

Thus, too, we may, in perfect harmony with the spirit of Amos, adumbrate not only the idea of God's personal presence, but of the presence of his laws. These, as well as his eye, never slumber, and never sleep: they flame on, like chariot lamps, through the thickest darkness; they people the remotest solitudes, and the heather bloom which drops there, and the little stream which gurgles-the one drops, and the other gurgles to their severe melody. The thought of this banishes solitude from the creation. "How can I be alone, when the Father is with me," and when all the principles which regulate suns, are here on this quaking bog, this peak of snow, this crag of ocean? Nay, these omnipresent laws, in their moral form, are found in far drearier and darker places than the dens of serpents or of lions. They exist in evil hearts, in polluted consciences, in the abodes of uttermost infamy. Innocent as the water and the bread which are there, pure as the light which shines there, yet terrible as the conscience which often there awakens, do the laws of God's moral government there stand, and exercise a real, a felt, though a disputed, sovereignty -the dawning of their full and final power. "Whither can men go from their presence?" It is not the spirit of earthly law which a great writer has so powerfully painted; it is the spirit of universal righteousness which invisibly thus hovers, and quells even those who doubt or disbelieve the righteous One. "Ascend we heaven, they are there," for it is these which constitute our entire knowledge of the stars; these bind all worlds into one; and he who has adequately ascertained the laws of his own fire, has only to blow its flame broader, to decipher the laws of the "burning, fiery furnace" of the midnight heavens. Ye silent, steadfast, perpetual principles, so slow, yet swift-so stern, yet merciful-so low, yet so loud in tone--so un