Now the Lord will betake himself to poetry. To what else could he betake himself? He is all sublimity; his tears are jewels; his words are eternities; his glance is the glory that lights up the universe-"I will be as the dew unto Israel." It would seem as if the Lord had something to make up to the sinner. This is the view which he always takes of the case of repentance; no sooner does the prodigal return than he seems to say, What can I do for him? Bring forth the best robe, the ring, the fatted calf, and instrument of music: let it be heard in vibrant sound or in tender winsomeness of tone for my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found. "I will be as the dew unto Israel," a great beauty, but nothing to carry in the way of burdensomeness. What flower ever said, O thou Maker of flowers, this dewdrop is too heavy a load for my poor strength to carry? An infinite jewellery, but quite unburdensome, without one touch of oppression. "He shall grow as the lily,”—an image referring to the pureness of God himself. The lily was a flower of dazzling whiteness, the very sum nation of all colour, caught in a velocity which reconciled and united the colours in one brilliant white. But the lily may be cut down: does the figure terminate with frailty and evanescence? No; for the Lord says, "and cast forth his roots as Lebanon." The roots shall be as long as the branches. The Chinese proverb is, that when a tree has been blown down it shows that the branches have been longer than the roots. This is not the case with those who really live and move and have their being in God. Measure the branch, that is the length of the root; measure the root, that is the length of the branch; to get at the branch you must get at the root. Blessed be God, the figure was never amended but by him who originated it; said he, "I am the Vine, ye are the branches: as the branch cannot bear fruit in itself, no more can ye, except ye abide in me." So that we are no longer either branch or root independently, but we are a branch in a living Vine, and if we have aught of root that root is hidden in the infinity and sovereignty of God.

"I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as Lebanon" (vers. 5, 6).

And so the wind around him shall be odoriferous. Let your light

so shine before men, that they may know your Father; let your fragrance be as the odour of many choice spices that men may know ye belong to the garden of the Lord. Do not have a limited piety. All the little flowers in the well-concealed garden are struggling to get out. Some men-how dare they live?—wall their gardens round, and there is not a violet in the estate that is not trying to escape; the little thing is saying, I can't get over that wall, but I can send a kiss over it to some little child that may happen to be chalking the wall on the other side. Children

will chalk walls as long as there are walls to be chalked. And every little rose is saying, This is too small a place for me; I can't get out, but I will breathe a benediction, and perhaps some poor o'er-laboured wight, some burden-carrying old woman, may get a waft of the fragrance, and know that there is a garden on this side the wall. The Church is to be fragrant; the Church is to make itself known. There is no violence here, but the tender violence of love, the aggression of a pity that would save the world.

Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols?" (ver. 8.) Ephraim has seen his folly; Ephraim has sounded the depths of superstition; Ephraim does not give up his idols without a reason. He says, I have tried you, and you are vain; I have leaned upon you, and you are broken staves; I have consulted you, and you had no answer; I have looked to you, but you never turned a kind eye upon me. The great apostle says, "Little children, keep yourselves from idols"; the old Scotch version says, "Wee bairns, keep yourselves frae dolls": the meaning is the same. I like the quaintness of the Scotch version. There is a caressing tenderness in that gruff old tone; listen to it; it is the kind of tone that grows upon the heart; at first it is very singular, and not wholly desirable, but there is in it a latent music; if you say the words over and over again, you will come to like them. The time 13 on the surface; open it, and you find eternity.

JOEL.

[NOTE.-"We have no account in the Bible of the personal history of Joel, nor does tradition give much light in relation to him. He was the son of Pethuel (Joel i. 1), and, it is said, of the tribe of Reuben. It is inferred from his writings that he lived in Judah, probably not later than the reign of Uzziah, which extended from 810 B.c. to 758 B.C.; for when he mentions the enemies of his country, he names the Phoenicians, Philistines, Idumeans, and Egyptians (chap. iii. 4-19), but makes no reference to the Assyrians and Babylonians, which he probably would have done had those two empires been already formidable to the Jews. The whole book indicates, moreover, that the prophet lived at a time when the people of Judah had not fallen into that extreme depravity which, in later times, drew down upon them such heavy chastisements. Uzziah had indeed begun to lift up his heart (2 Chron. xxvi. 16); but the evil seems as yet rather a subject of prophecy than of history, though given in historical form. He was contemporary with Hosea and Amos; and as they addressed Israel, so he addressed Judah. His style is remarkably clear and elegant; obscure only towards the close, where its beauties are shaded by allusions to events not yet accomplished. The double destruction foretold in chaps. i., ii., xi., the first by the locusts, the second by the enemies of whom they were harbingers, is painted in terms that are reciprocally metaphorical, and admirably adapted to the twofold character of the description. Joel was held in great reverence by the ancient Jews, and is quoted by both Peter and Paul (Acts ii., Rom. x. 13).”— ANGUS'S Bible Handbook.]

Chapter i.

PROPHET OF JUDGMENT.

OEL wrote his prophecy eight hundred years before Jesus Christ came into the world. It is a prophecy of judgment. If we liken ourselves to travellers through this Bible land we shall feel that we have come suddenly upon a volcano. "Joel" is a word which means, The Lord is God; "Pethuel" is a word which means, Persuaded of God. Names were characters in the olden time; now they are mere lines in a directory. directory. Men were souls in Bible times; to-day they are "hands." We know

nothing of Joel.

He comes as suddenly and tearingly into the
His father's name is given, but there was

history as did Elijah.

It is

no need to give it, for nobody ever heard of it; it is an unknown name, and therefore it stands for nothing in the history. well for a man now and then to come who has no father, no mother, no ancestry, no relations that can be traced in so many genealogical lines; a man who stands out in his own personality, and is all or is nothing according to what he himself can be and say and do. Such a man is Joel; he has lips of fire, he has jaws of iron, he has a throat of brass; a fearless, resolute, denunciatory man, with a gift of righteous damnation.

"The word of the Lord that came to Joel" (ver. 1).

man.

Not the word that came to Hosea or to Amos, but the word that came to Joel,-intimating that there is a word that comes to every "The gospel according to Matthew,"-not the gospel according to John. Matthew could not write with John's pen; John probably scarcely had patience to read what Matthew had written. They were men of a different spiritual genius, their gifts were contrastive; yet each man told what he saw of the Life, the Truth, the Way. It was the gospel according to- then must be filled in all that is personal, temperamental, educational, experimental, so that every man shall tell his own tale, preach his own gospel. The apostle was not ashamed to say "my gospel,”-old, yet new; coming from eternity, yet accepting the accent of individuality. Each man has his own view of God, his own kingdom of heaven, his own way of telling what God has done for him; and the mischief is that we expect every man to speak in the same tone, to deliver the same words, and to subject himself to the same literary yoke or spiritual discipline. The Bible sets itself against all this monotony. Every man must speak the word that God has given to him through the instrumentality of his own characteristics. But we have judges who say they know what they hear. They are not judges of themselves. We cannot hear all the truth until we have heard all the truth-speakers; we cannot know man until we know humanity; we must know the all before we can know the part. So the Bible is not to be read in patches and portions, but is to be read in its entirety, until part allies itself to part, and strain

follows strain, the whole constituting one massive structure, or, changing the figure, one noble song.

A man cannot say what word has to come to him. A man cannot be both the message carrier and the message originator. We are errand-runners; we have to receive our message and repeat it; we have not first to create it, then to modify it, then to deliver it. The prophets assumed the position of being instruments, mediums for communications which the Lord wished to make with his children near and far, and with the world at large and through all time. Many of the prophets could not have chosen to say what they did; their message burned their lips, their tongues were scorched with the hard hot words the Lord gave them to utter; but they could not forbear, they must be faithful; every word that was told them in secret they had to proclaim on the housetop of history. A man cannot say he will sing his gospel; the Lord has only sent a certain number of singers, and we cannot increase the multitude. No man can say, I will go forth and thunder the word of the Lord in the ear of the age; the Lord hath not given his thunder to that tongue; it was meant to speak peacefully, soothingly, kindly, and when it tries to thunder creation would smile at the feebleness of the effort and the palpableness of the irony. So we have in the Bible all kinds of ministry. There are thunders and judgments in the book, and there are voices like lutes; there are whispers which you can only hear when you incline your ear with all the intensity of attention. There are words that roll down the mountains like splintered rocks, granites that have been ripped in two by the lightning; and there are words that fall from another mountain as flowers, beatitudes, tender speeches: "Ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire; ye are come unto Mount Zion," the green mount, the pastoral hill, where God's beauty smiles in God's own sunlight. But do not let one prophet criticise another, and declare that he is not in the prophetic office, because he does not speak in this man's tone. Criticism is folly and injustice when it would make all men talk alike and be alike; let the Lord have some space in his own universe, let him have some rights in his own household. We have no voice in our own official election.