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on the hill, or whether he is in the shadow which he considers good, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, my eye is fixed upon him; he does not escape criticism; God's mind is watching judicially everything that the sinner is doing, "Thou God seest me"-not in the sense of thou protectest me, and thou knowest me; but in a critical sense-thou dost penetrate my reins and my heart, my thought and my unconfessed purpose, and it is not in man to find an inviolable solitude.

"They will not frame their doings to turn unto their God: for the spirit of whoredoms is in the midst of them" (v., ver. 4).

They cannot set up any framework of God; they are poor moral carpenters: their fingers lose all skill when they seek to put up something that shall have the appearance at least of morality and goodness. They no sooner set up one side of the edifice than the other falls down, and the framework will not hold together, because the spirit is wrong. Away with your mechanical morality; away with your frameworks of honour and social security, even of education when it is meant as a substitute for moral earnestness and purity. It is the spirit that must be renewed; we do not want a framework, but a genius of heart, an atmosphere of soul, a new manhood-" Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." Make the tree good, and the fruit will be good. Do not trouble yourselves about the framework. You are not carpenters, you are men; you are not mechanics, you are souls. Do not trifle with the tragedy of life.

PRAYER.

ALMIGHTY GOD, we need thy sweet Word evermore. It is not enough to live to-day; we must never cease to live. This is the mystery of life; with all its pain and shadow, its weakness and disappointment, still it clings to itself, it lingers and yearns after immortality. Thy commandment is exceeding broad, but so is thy promise: thy mercy endureth for ever. This is our joy; into this holy place we come from time to time to renew our life, to sing our hymn of praise and thanks, and to take again into the world redoubled and ennobled strength. Thou hast been our God; thou wilt not forsake us; thou wast our father's God, and thou didst never exclude the children from thine overflowing and redundant blessing. When didst thou speak alone to those who were living? Thou didst speak beyond them, to all the ages that should come. Why should the Lord speak twice? Doth not his breath fill infinity? Is not the look of his love the look of eternity? We bless thee, therefore, for thy Word once spoken, once delivered unto the saints, once made clear to the hungry, yearning, agonised heart of man. It is enough, it is finished; the river of God is full of water. Pity us in all our littleness; have mercy upon us in all the aggravation of our sin. We thought of sin like an infinite cloud until we saw the Cross; then understood we the Word. Where sin abounded grace hath much more abounded; heaven is broader than perdition; God is mightier than all his enemies; the throne of the Lord covereth all space and all duration. If we have rendered any service to thee, the praise be thine; if aught has been done to make thy kingdom appear in its truest beauty, the vision was from heaven. We praise thee, therefore, with undivided tribute and eulogy for all thy tender grace, for all thy lovingkindness. Bind us up in the bundle of life; see to it that no man pluck us out of thine hand. May we never perish in sight of land, but be brought safely home, quite home, right into the innermost place of home; there not to change, but to continue and heighten our Christian song. Amen.

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Chapter v. 6–15.

DIVINE WITHDRAWAL.

"They shall go with their flocks and with their herds to seek the Lord; but they shall not find him; he hath withdrawn himself from them" (ver. 6). ITHDRAWN" is a word that may well chill our heart. It would be enough to express intolerable displeasure if it stood just as it stands in this verse; but a larger meaning belongs to the word. "Withdrawn" is in some senses a negative

relation, but it was a distinctly positive and may we add repelling action which the Lord meant to convey by the use of this term. All words were originally pictures, and the real dictionary when it appears will be pictorial. The Lord in this instance frees himself from them. That is the literal and broader meaning of the prophecy. He releases himself, he detaches himself, he shakes off an encumbrance, a nuisance, a claim that is without righteousness. This may be taken again in two senses. The people are going with flocks and herds as if bent on sacrificial purpose; they will give the Lord any quantity of blood-hot, reeking blood; but the Lord says, I will have no more of your sacrifices; they are an abomination to me; I hate all the programme of ritual and ceremony and attitude, if it fail to express a hunger and a reverence of the heart and mind. So the Lord is seen here in the act of taking up all these flocks and herds, and all these unwilling priests, and freeing himself from them, throwing them away, as men pass out from their custody things that are offensive, worthless, and corrupting. Or it may mean that the Lord shakes himself clear of the clutch of hands that hath no heart in them; he will walk alone. He will not give up his shepherdliness, though he have no flock to follow him. Every woman is mother, every man is father, and a man is not the less father that all his children are twice dead, and are as plants plucked up by the roots, and cast out to the burning. The shepherdliness is not determined by the number of sheep following or going before; shepherdliness is a quality, a disposition, an inspiration, an eternal solicitude. If need be God will continue his shepherdliness though every sheep go astray, and every lamb should die. the disastrous possibility! Men may be left without God; the Almighty and All-merciful may have retired, gone away, away into the shade, the darkness of night; he may have enshrouded himself in a pavilion of thick darkness, where our poor prayers are lost on the outside. To this dreadful issue may things come. Variously hath the Lord punished the Church, and punished the lands where his altars ought to have been higher than the forest trees. "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread [the meanest of all famines], nor a thirst for water [a mere lip fire], but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord," a thirst that cannot be quenched

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by all the springs and fountains of the world. And in this chapter the same process of punishment is continued, and is most remarkable for the variety of its application.

There is a touch of satire in the suggestion that follows.

After all this want of fealty and love on the part of the people, the Lord says, "Now shall a month devour them with their portions." The Lord will show, as it were, a visible diminution of the time of the wicked man; that time shall be a month long; the moon shall proclaim this gospel of dissolution. See how the moon waxes, wanes; it is the little month coming up with a kind of buoyancy as if it would last a year, and then suddenly falling back and quietly dying among the clouds. The Lord says, Watch the moon; O thou proud, bloated, blustering Church, watch the moon, that is thy picture: a time of waxing to be followed by a time of waning; a month shall eat thee, a handful of days shall devour thee in forgetfulness. The satire of God is keen, subtle, penetrating; if ever it appeared to be other, it is because the Lord must adopt language which the people whom he seeks to chastise can understand. Wonderful is the visible ministry of God if we had eyes to see it. "Day unto day" speaks of brevity. Whoever imagined that the sunny dawn would die? The dawn is an assured triumph: see how it comes! It comes with the quietness of strength. Weakness may be impetuous, violent, demonstrative, but omnipotence is, by the very necessity of its qualities, calm. The earth stands still because it flies so fast. So strength, because of its completeness, is easy, composed, tranquil. The dawn makes no noise as it rolls back the darkness. The dawn can never die: see how it fills the heavens, how it almost speaks in trumpet tones of triumph that cannot be baffled, enthusiasm that seems to mean benediction, everlasting and immeasurable. This proceeds up to mid-day; then afterwards there is a westering process, and the dawn, caught at the other end of heaven, dies. "And night unto night showeth knowledge"; and even the year, days and nights put together, has its youth, blustering, audacious, defiant; quite a little series of explosions of wind, and deluges of rain, and storms of snow; and then it is summer, and then it is quiet autumn, and autumn, like all the others, lies down and dies. Why not open our eyes to

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THE PEOPLE'S BIBLE.

[Hosea v. 6-15.

behold the wondrous lessons that God is writing visibly for us? There are a thousand lessons without voice or sound or sign, which only the soul can read and understand in absolute silence and secrecy. There are also lessons broad as heaven, and bright as the sun, which men might read, and out of which they might make an introductory Bible.

Now the Lord will proceed to tell the offending people what to do:-"Blow ye the cornet in Gibeah." The cornet was always used to give the signal of alarm. It was an instrument of horn; when the strong blower blew his blast through that horn, it meant that the enemy was at the gate; men were called upon to arise, put on their armour, stand erect, watch. "And the trumpet in Ramah." The trumpet was used as a signal for calling to worship; in the midst of the alarm there shall still be a place left for the adoration of God, for the exercise of those religious impulses and aspirations which make us men. Gibeah and Ramah were the weak points; through them the enemy would appear. The enemy already held Israel in savage grip, and through Gibeah and Ramah the enemy would seek the neck of Judah. What is to be done? Sound the cornet, blow the trumpet; be alarmed, and yet not irreligiously; be awakened, roused, but not so as to forget that God reigns and rules, and that the mightiest weapon is not formed of steel. Who can run his impious fingers over the sword of God's lightning? Alarm should never disable the religious faculty; panic should never be greater than the power of prayer; yea, rather when there is panic that can be vindicated by reason, there should be religiousness that can be justified by all that makes us what we are in the sight of God-rational, intelligent, responsible, immortal. We must go to the prophets if we would find what God can do in the way of punishment; there would seem to be no tongue equal to the explanation of chastisement and penalty equal to the Hebrew tongue. It was a tongue that could round a prayer into noblest majesty better than any other, and when it came to deal with penalty, chastisement, the vindication of the divine righteous. ness, it became an instrument of tremendous power.

"Ephraim shall be desolate in the day of rebuke” (ver. 9).—

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