thousand times multiplied, he can destroy us, throw us into the sea, that we may be swallowed up as stones. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Then the Lord applies history, and says, "Thou also." That is the voice of all history. God never does anything that is complete in itself, final in its processes; whatever he does refers to the next century, the next city, the next man. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Who died there? The richest man in the world-thou also shalt die. What, did that black shadow called the funeral pass through all these terraces of flowers, parterres of choice plants? Did that blighting shadow fall upon the blooming beauty of the full summer day? Yes-thou also shalt be carried to thy last resting-place. Has pride been rebuked? Has vanity been snubbed; has self-trust been defeated and overwhelmed? Yes-"Thou also." These are the lessons of history. They thought to build out God with clay; they had walls that they erected against him, and he said they should be eaten up as by a cankerworm. How contemptuous can God be! He said that in their pride and haughtiness they should be as the "first-ripe figs," so that if a man should shake the tree the figs would fall into his mouth. He needs no ladder to climb, he needs no elaborate machinery by which to get at the fruit; if he will put his hand upon the bark and shake it, the figs will fall down upon the ground. So easily does God hold us in the grip of his almightiness; so that he shakes down tower and temple and town and mountain; so that he dries up seas and rivers and turbulent streams; he sends a blight upon the brain, and the wise man who was all genius yesterday is asking a child to take him home; the man who yesterday commanded listening senates or directed great enterprises, or was the envy, the joy, and the pride of all who knew him, so stalwart in mind, so capable in action, so hospitable in the entertainment of all weakness,-he does not know his own child. There is but a step between thee and death. Oh, proud man, thou art but a proud fool. Pride and progress can never go together. Pride and education are sworn enemies. Self-trust and reality of character can never cohere. We live our greatest life in our humility, in our reverence, in our aspiration. Why fight against this God? If the cities have outwitted him, where are they? You should be able to find them. Where is old Babylon? Where the mocking, mighty, pompous, overbearing Rome? Where are those cities that have threatened God and lived? You ought to be able to find them if they have been victorious. Now we are called upon to acquaint ourselves, and be at peace with him; we are called into harmony, and the way by which this harmony is attained is one way and only one, and unchangeable and complete, and that is the way we call the Gospel of Christ, the doctrine of the Cross, the doctrine of atonement, the doctrine of something being done for man that man could never do for himself, and which he lays hold of by the energy called faith. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved. You may reform the city, but you cannot regenerate it. That is a divine act, and if the city is ever to become a sanctuary of progress, education, liberty, and independence, it must be wrought out by spiritual methods; our life must come from the quarter called true religion,-not conventional religion, not ecclesiastical religion, but the Cross, the mighty power of love, the mighty power of sacrifice. I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; and when all our reformers and ameliorators and improvers and decorators have done their utmost, they have only painted the devil, they have not destroyed him; they have hidden momentarily his innate and everlasting hideousness under a coating of foolish ornamentation. We can only do this work by going right back to Jesus Christ, and living as he lived. Let us try that method. HABAKKUK. [NOTE.—“Of the facts of the prophet's life we have no certain information, and with regard to the period of his prophecy there is great division of opinion. The Rabbinical tradition that Habakkuk was the son of the Shunammite woman whom Elisha restored to life is repeated by Abarbanel in his commentary, and has no other foundation than a fanciful etymology of the prophet's name, based on the expression in 2 Kings iv. 16. Equally unfounded is the tradition that he was the sentinel set by Isaiah to watch for the destruction of Babylon (comp. Isa. xxi. 16 with Hab. ii. 1). In the title of the history of Bel and the Dragon, as found in the LXX. version in Origen's Tetrapla, the author is called 'Habakkuk, the son of Joshua, of the tribe of Levi.' Some have supposed this apocryphal writer to be identical with the prophet (Jerome prooem. in Dan.). The psalm in Chap. iii. and its title are thought to favour the opinion that Habakkuk was a Levite. . . . It was during his residence in Judæa that he is said to have carried food to Daniel in the den of lions at Babylon. This legend is given in the history of Bel and the Dragon, and is repeated by Eusebius, Bar Hebræus, and Eutychius. It is quoted from Joseph ben Gorion (B. J. xi. 3) by Abarbanel (Comm. on Hab.), and seriously refuted by him on chronological grounds. The scene of the event was shown to mediæval travellers on the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem (Early Travels in Palestine, p. 29). Habakkuk is said to have been buried at Keilah in the tribe of Judah, eight miles east of Eleutheropolis (Eusebius, Onomasticon). Rabbinical tradition places his tomb at Chukkok, of the tribe of Naphthali, now called Jakuk. In the days of Zebenus, bishop of Eleutheropolis, according to Nicephorus (H. E. xii. 48) and Sozomen (H. E. vii. 28), the remains of the prophets Habakkuk and Micah were discovered at Keilah.”—SMITH'S Dictionary of the Bible.] Chapter i. THE BURDEN OF HABAKKUK. "The burden which Habakkuk the prophet did see" (ver. 1). HIS is the way of the Bible. It is the way of personal TH Habakkuk has not come to comment upon himself, but to tell us what he himself "did see." If prophets and preachers and teachers would do this the world would soon be religiously . awakened. What are we apt to do? To deal in photographs. Here is a photograph of what our fathers believed three hundred years ago. What have I to do with that? I look at it, form an opinion about it, and ask about the life of this day. You do not like your own old photographs. You were pleased with them at the time when they were taken, and you generously gave some of them away to your friends, and now you scarcely identify them, and you beg your friends to allow you to replace them with something better. Yet you have photographed the creed of three hundred years ago, and you worship it like a fetish. Why do you not tell us what you have seen, what you feel? We do not want the photograph of the man as he was when he was a child, we want him to-day, his own personality, to stand before us and talk to us the language of the day, and delight us with the recital of his immediate consciousness of God and experience of life. This is the genius of the Bible. We do not find that the men rise up with great anxiety to conform themselves to lines which somebody else laid down a thousand years before; the prophets, man after man, come forward and say, "I saw." Very good; what did you see? Write the biography of your soul; tell us what happened between you and God when you were locked up together in confiding conference. That will do us good. Your ink will be blood; we have had pale ink enough, we now want the vermilion of the heart. But if you do not happen to conform to the testimony which somebody else has borne? So much the better. God is not the God of monotony. testimony should be unique? God be thanked. one man is so much like another that we cannot tell which is which. We want uniqueness of religious testimony, poignancy of religious emphasis; we want men who believe something, and who state it, and explain it, and who are prepared to drop it immediately that the true revelation comes to claim the occupancy of the mind and heart. We carry our religion like a load. It does not grow in us, it is not part of ourselves. When we want to know what it is we go to the library. Any religion that is kept on the bookshelves can be stolen. Lay up for yourselves faith where thieves cannot break through nor steal. Have an experience of your own; compare it with the experience of others, either for its confirmation or its expansion, or for its But if your At present possible adaptation to best uses. Prophet after prophet has come before us in this PEOPLE'S BIBLE, and each man has come to tell us not what some other man saw, but what he himself beheld and handled of the word of life. Habakkuk conducts a kind of dialogue, and if the paradox may be allowed it seems to be a dialogue mainly on his own side. To call it a monologue would be hardly correct. He talks to God; he has it out with God; he plies God with sharp questions. He will have practical matters attended to; he says, Lord, this is evil; how did it come to be in thy universe, thou fair One, whose face is beauty, whose voice is music? He could not write a long prophecy in that strain. Jesus Christ could not be a minister more than three years; Habakkuk can only write his three chapters. He was no magician in the elaboration of sentences; every sentence in Habakkuk was itself a Bible. There is no such book in all the canon as Habakkuk. The very word means strong embrace. He gets hold of God, and throws him in the gracious wrestle. He will not let God go. On the one side he represents pessimism or despair as it never was represented before, and on the other he rises to heights of faith which even David did not attain with all his music. We shall find sentences in Habakkuk that leave all the prophets and minstrels of the Old Testament far away down in the clouds, whilst Habakkuk himself is up beyond the cloud-line, revelling in morning light. He begins with the dark outlook :-"O Lord, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear? even cry unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!" He apparently forgot that other men had been crying. When a man is praying he must pray all out of his own heart; if he adopt the words of others he must so adopt them as to make them part of himself. We are afraid of egotism; the prophets were not; we are little men, they were great men. "O Lord, how long shall I cry?"-not how long shall Moses and all the great prophets of after ages cry, but how long shall I be kept praying when I might receive an answer instantaneously? Why delay the reply? I have cried until my eyes are tears, and my voice is but a hoarse whisper; I can hardly cry any |