breath in the midst thereof." But he can not tarry longer pouring forth such preliminary drops, for the Lord himself is about to speak, in the full accents of his ire, and to come in all the majesty of his justice.

How solemn the stillness of the expectation produced by the closing words of the second chapter, "But Jehovah is in his holy temple. Be silent before him all the earth." As in summer the still red evening in the west predicts the burning morrow, do those sublimely simple, and terribly tame words, announce that the ode, on its wide wings of shadowy fire, is at hand.

Amid the scenery of Sinai, there was heard at the crisis of the terror, a trumpet waxing gradually very loud, giving a martial tone to the tumult, drawing its vague awfulness into a point of war, and proclaiming the presence of the Lord of Hosts. Could we conceive that trumpet to have been uttering words, descriptive of the scene around, they had been the words of Habakkuk's song. "God came from Teman, the Holy One from Paran; his glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise."

But the description is not of Sinai alone, nor, indeed, of any single scene. It is a picture of the divine progress or pilgrimage throughout the Jewish economy, formed by combining all the grand symbols of his power and presence into one tumult of glory. It were difficult for a thunder-storm to march calmly and regularly. There must be ragged edges in the darkness, and wild flashes and fluctuations in the light; and so with Habakkuk's song. Its brightness is as the sun's; but there is a hiding or vail over its might. Its figures totter in sympathy with the trembling mountains it describes. Its language bows before its thoughts, like the everlasting mountains below the footsteps of Jehovah.

Where begins this procession? In the wilderness of Paran. There, where still rise the three tower-like summits of Mount Paran, which, when gilded by the evening or morning sun, look like "horns of glory," the great pilgrim begins his progress.

How is he attired? It is in garment woven of the "marvelous light and the thick darkness." Rays, as of the morning sun, shoot out from his hand. These are at once the horns and the hidings of his power. Like a dark raven, flies before him the plague. Wherever his feet rest, flashes of fire (or birds of prey!) arise. He stands, and the earth moves. He looks through the clouds which vail him, and the nations are scattered. As he advances, the mountains bow. Paran begins the homage; Sinai succeeds; the giants of Seir, and Moab, and Bashan fall prostrate-till every ridge and every summit has felt the awe of his presence. On still he goes, and lo! how the tents of Cushan are uncovered, undone, removed, and their wandering inhabitants vanish away; and how the curtains of the land of Midian do tremble, as he passes by. But have even the waters perceived him? Is he angry at the rivers? Has he breathed on them too? Yea, verily; and Jordan stands aside to let him through dryshod into Canaan's land. And once entered there, the hills imitate the terror of their eastern brethren, and fall a trembling; and the deeps of Galilee's sea and the Mediterranean utter their voice; and the heights, from Olivet to Lebanon, lift up their hands in wonder; and, as his arrows fly abroad, and his spear glitters, the sun stands still over Gibeon, and the moon over the valley of Ajalon. Nor does the Awful Pilgrim repose till he has trampled on the nations of Canaan as he had on the mountains of the east, and till over their bruised heads and weltering carcasses he has brought aid to his people and šalvation to his anointed.

This analysis, after all, fails to convey the rapid accumulation of metaphor, the heaving struggle of words, the boldness of spirit, and the crowded splendors of this matchless picture. Indeed, almost all the brighter and bolder images of Old Testament poetry are to be found massed up in this single strain. Chronology, geography, everything, must yield to the purpose of the poet; which is, in every possible way, to do justice to his theme, in piling glory on glory around the march of God. Thus he dares to remove the Red Sea itself, and throw it into the

path between Paran and Palestine, that the Deity may pass more triumphantly on.

Yet the modesty is not inferior to the boldness of the song. Habakkuk had begun intending to describe a future coming of God, and, to fire himself for the effort, had called up the glories of the past. But after describing these, he stops short, allowing us only to infer from the former what the future must be. Exhausted and reeling under the perception of that overpowering picture, he dares not image to himself the tremendous secrets of the future. He says only, "Though my country should come to utter desolation, the vines give no fruit, the fields yield no bread, the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stall, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, nay, exult in the God of my salvation. He will make me to leap as the hart, even though my feet, like God's own, should leap on naked crags, and tread on high places, though they should be those of scathed and sterile desolation."

Beautiful the spirit of Habakkuk, and expressing in another form the grand conclusion of Job, and of all earnest and reconciled spirits. A God so great must be good; and he who hath done things in the past so mighty and terrible, yet in their effect so gracious, may be well expected, and expected with exultation, to pursue his own path, however inscrutable, to the ultimate good of his world and Church, and often to " express his answer to our prayers," as in the days of old, by works as "fearful" as magnificent.

OBADIAH.

There are no less than twelve persons of this name mentioned in Scripture. The most distinguished of them is the Obadiah who saved a hundred of God's prophets, by hiding them in a cave, during a time of scarcity and persecution. Some suppose that he was the prophet before us, although others deem him to have flourished at a much later date-at the same period with Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

He seems to have prophesied in the short interval between the destruction of Jerusalem and that of Edom. His prophecy, which is but a fragment, consists principally of predictions of the judgments impending over Edom, and of the restoration and prosperity of the Jews. There are remarkable coincidences between Obadiah and the 49th chapter of Jeremiah.

A single chapter, which, like this of Obadiah, has survived ages, empires, and religions, must be strongly stamped either with peculiarity or with power. It must have some inextinguishable principle of vitality. Apart from its inspiration, it survives, as the most memorable rebuke to fraternal hardness of heart. It is a brand on the brow of that second Cain, Esau. Hear its words, stern in truth, yet plaintive in feeling, “For slaughter, and for oppression of thy brother Jacob, shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off forever. In the day when thou stoodest on the other side, in the day when strangers carried away captive his forces, and when foreigners entered his gates, and when they cast lots on Jerusalem, thou also wast as one of them. But thou shouldest not have so looked on the day of thy brother, on the day when he became a stranger, nor have rejoiced over the sons of Judah in the day when they were destroyed, nor have magnified thy words in the day of distress. Thou shouldest not have entered into the gate of my people in the day of their calamity, nor have so looked on his affliction in the day of his calamity, nor have put forth thine hand on his substance in the day of his calamity, nor have stood in the cross way to cut off those of his that escaped, nor have delivered up those of his that remained, in the day of distress." "Verily, O Esau, thou wert guilty concerning thy brother, when thou sawest the anguish of his soul, and when, perhaps, like Joseph, he besought thee, and thou wouldst not hear." And at thy Philistine forehead was Obadiah commissioned to aim one smooth sling-stone, which, having prostrated thee, has been preserved for us, in God's word, as a monument of thy fratricidal folly. This is that little book of Obadiah.

HAGGAI.

Between Obadiah and Haggai, many important events had occurred in the history of God's people. The city Jerusalem had been captured, the Temple sacked, and the brave but illfated inhabitants been carried captive to Babylon. There they had groaned and wept bitterly under their bondage, and one song of their captive genius, of unequaled pathos, has come down to us, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" How, indeed, sing it, save as we may conceive the fiends singing in hell the songs of heaven, the words the same, the melodies the same, but woe for the accompaniments and for the hearts? How sing here the songs of Judah's vintage, and Judah's ingathering, and Judah's marriage-feasts? Surely it is the most delicate and infernal of insults for a spoiler to demand mirth instead of labor, a song instead of patient sorrow! We, they reply, can sing at your bidding no songs of Zion, but we can testify our love to her by our tears. And, trickling through the hand of the taskmaster, and running down three thousand years, has one of these tears come to us, and we call it the 137th Psalm.

From this state of degradation and woe, Judah had been raised. She had been brought back in circumstances mournfully different, indeed, from the high day when, coming out of Egypt, she turned, and encamping between Pihahiroth and the sea, felt that the extremity of the danger was the first edge of the rising deliverance, and when she went forth by her armies with a mighty power and a stretched-out arm. Now she must kneel, and have the bandage of her slavery taken off by human hands, and be led tamely out into her own land, under the banners of a stranger. Even after she had reached and com