righteousness. Yet to what will covetousness not drive a man? It will take away his sleep; it will make him jealous; it will fill him with rapacity. He must have something more, and yet another, and beyond; much will have more, and more most, and most all; and thus the infinite aggravation goes on. What if the Lord should stand up in the presence of his prophet, and say there can be no judgment upon this, short of the judgment of fire? Take the case of Moab-the Lord "will send a fire upon Moab," "because he burned the bones of the king of Edom into lime." Edom had his rights; though Edom has been pronounced upon thus severely, yet even Edom was not divested of rights; and because Moab desecrated the tombs, or sought to turn the bones of the king of Edom into an element of profit and personal pecuniary advantage, the Lord will burn him. For the scheme of time is not a scheme of chance. There is righteousness at the heart of things; there is a throne above the stars. Thus in judgment we get comfort; thus in the terribleness of the divine wrath we see the vindication of divine and human rights.

Hear the instance of Judah-"because they have despised the law of the Lord, and have not kept his commandments. . . therefore there shall be fire sent upon them." Hear the case of Israel—“ because they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes." They turned the Lord's people into profit, they made chattels of them. They did not see the image and likeness of God on the very poorest human face; and so for a . pair of sandals they would sell the poor, for a handful of silver the righteous might go into captivity. Nay more, "they pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor." Various interpretations of these mysterious words have been given. The one I adopt is that which fixes the meaning as: So covetous are they, that when the poor man has put ashes on the top of his head in sign of mourning, these people want to get those ashes into their own hands, that they may sell them for profit! This is the way of avarice. Is it right to punish such men? Do not fix your attention on the fire and the brimstone and the roaring out of the God of Zion, but fix your attention upon the object which the divine judgment has in view. What were the circum

stances with which God had to deal ? Look at the corruption, and then look at the judgment, and what if, after all, it be found that such judgment under such circumstances is but an act of mercy? These sins can never be got out of the world but by one process. Judgment can never destroy them. The Lord has shown that the sword has no power whatever in bringing things into moral relation, and setting up the sphere and kingdom of spiritual righteousness. Put up thy sword into its sheaf; that piece of iron can do nothing in the way of propagating truth and divine righteousness. Nay, the Lord has proved by his providence that judgment can do nothing towards the conversion of the world. Men may be desolated and sore afraid; they may be swallowed up with water; they may be burned with fire and brimstone as Sodom and Gomorrah, and yet their sin will assert itself, because selfishness is deeper at present than spirituality. All this must give place to a grand spiritual ministry. The conversion of the world is the work of God the Holy Ghost, and God the Holy Ghost does not take of his own, but of the things of Christ-he takes Gethsemane with its sweat of blood; Calvary with its cry of agony; the resurrection with its signals of triumph and victory; the intercession of the risen Priest, as an assurance that the vilest sinner may return from the uttermost places of the earth. It is along this line that the world has to be bettered, reformed, regenerated, sanctified. For Christianity is not a reformation, it is a regeneration; it is not a new cloak, it is a new character. Therefore let us maintain the testimony of the Cross; let us be faithful to those profound evangelical truths and doctrines which take the largest, grandest view of history and of futurity. The work is holy, it is the Lord's work, and the Lord will conduct it in his own way and in his own time; and let us say to him, Lord, the harvest is thine; find the labourers where thou wilt. Lord, here am I, send me; or if some other man will serve thy purpose better, send him, and keep me at home. The Lord choose his own instruments, his own reapers, his own orators and ministers; only dwell in them, qualify them by continual fellowship with God, and make them mighty, not after the withering power of man, but after the power of an endless life; may there in the simplest of them be a mystery which means God's autograph, God's endorsement.

Chapter iii.

THE ACCUSING WORD.

Tis difficult to give attention to accusing words. They do

the speaker and the hearer together in mutually affectionate fellowship. We cry for sweet words, consolatory promises, tender expressions, and we are willing to pay men a price for telling lies that will for the moment soothe the pain that nothing but spiritual surgery can extirpate. It is a charge against the pulpit, the prophetic office, the whole ministerial function, that it will cry, Peace, peace, where there is no peace; that it will daub the wall with untempered mortar; that it will prophesy smooth things if it may but be allowed to sit down at the festival of wealth, and enjoy the banquet of mammon. Now and again it does us good to hear the voice of judgment, the tone of rebuke, the criticism of righteousness. When a man comes and offers us this advantage, we may say, "Physician, heal thyself "; but when any authority that assumes to be divine undertakes to deal with our infirmity, with our iniquity, with our selfishness, it will be wise on our part to hear how far that authority can vindicate its own divinity. It is the glory of the Bible that it never accuses man without disclosing the reason for the accusation. God does not thunder against man because he delights to show his Omnipotence, or exercise the prerogative of deity; he never simply confounds the intelligence of men; he comes before his creatures with reasons; explicitly does he state the bases on which he proceeds in his strange work of judgment, and he first secures the consent of the conscience before he lays his lash on the back of our iniquities. It is not a pleasant vocation to be summoned from the plough and from the fruit-house in order to denounce the sins of the age. The prophets were not called to easy positions; they were without salary, without

official status granted by kings and councillors; they were the offscouring of the earth, they were the sensationalists of their day; there was no name too humiliating to be withheld from them by tongues gifted with the genius of malevolent misrepresentation. All this is forgotten; all this is lost in our idolatry of respectability. The Jonahs that raved in the streets of the city were accounted mad, and mad they will always be counted; the men who utter things we do not understand, and do not tax our moral attention, and do not make our home-life uncomfortable, and do not tear to pieces our personal complacency, are men who will be allowed to eat the fat things of prosperity, and lie down on the velvet couch of popularity. Amos was the sensation of his day. He laid about him like one infested with a spirit that could not be quelled. He raved, he shouted, he thundered, he foamed at the mouth; when men passed him they were glad to escape from the influence of a fanatic. Yet this is the man who is worshipped to-day as an ancient prophet, and whose words are quoted as the basis of discourses which utterly fail to catch the inflation and holy madness of his enthusiasm. The Church loves to have it so. The Church can devour any amount of selfcomplacency; to be pricked, to be irritated, to feel the flagellating lash upon the conscience, is not the trick of the Church to-day, is not the luxury of modern piety. Therefore we have distributed our workers; we have built places in which sensationalists may cry themselves to peace, and we have assigned them positions in their own journalism in which they may utter their maledictions and their benedictions where we do not come under the influence of either. The Church could not to-day receive an Amos; the ancient prophets could have no place in the modern sanctuary. It is a lie to think that that which was once sensational has ceased to be sensational. If Christ's was not sensational preaching, then the fourfold account of his ministry is a fourfold misrepresentation. When a man's congregation will arise and thrust him out of the synagogue, and take him to a hill in order to cast him headlong down in order that he may be killed— when that experience is described as other than sensational, the church has added to the iniquity of indifference the immorality of not understanding the language in which its own Gospel is declared. To-day no minister is cast down from the top of

a hill; to-day ministers are applauded in proportion to their ability to bewilder the people, and to so affect their imagination with cloudy presences and rhetorical spectres as to turn their attention wholly and absolutely away from the monitions and claims of conscience.

Now the Lord puts into the mouth of the prophet Amos a style of utterance which never occurred to the unconscious ploughman. The farm servant whom we have just described begins to speak parables in enigmas. In short, hurrying questions, like messages delivered in whispers, the prophet sets forth parable after parable. Not one of the parables is elaborated; therefore they have been supposed to be mere inquiries. Thus we do injustice to the Word of God. The word "mere," as a term excluding the universe, as applied to any one text, is a piece of practical blasphemy. No one can tell how much there is

They are the great interpreters

in any single line of God's book. who find everything in one word, who find the universe in the word God, who find infinity and eternity in the same verbal sanctuary; and they mistake the prophecies who imagine that with lexicon and with history they can tell where prophecy begins and ends. Prophecy begins in eternity and ends in eternity; and they are not expositors of the word, but robbers of the treasury of Christ, who limit the range of any single spiritual implication of Holy Writ. There has come into the later pulpit instruction of young students a fallacy, a most mischievous sophism, which is depriving the ministry of some of its noblest attributes, and robbing it of some of its larger possibilities of usefulness. The fallacy is that men can read into the Bible something that is not in it. That is only possible when the something read into it is either, first, iniquitous, or, secondly, is wanting in magnanimity. Whoever reads into the Bible anything that patronises shortcoming of a moral kind is not an expositor, but a debaser of Holy Scripture ; and whosoever reads into the Bible anything that is exclusive, sectarian, bigoted, and to the disadvantage of the millions of the ages, is not an expositor, he is a liar. Whoever finds in prophetic words, or apostolic reasonings and benedictions, new and higher heavens, broader and brighter skies, poesies too large and tender for human words, is not reading something into