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which speak anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill; because there is no other god that can deliver after this sort" (Dan. iii. 28, 29). Third, There was in store for the great heathen head of the world of his time a much higher faith still in Jehovah, which he made the subject of a solemn proclamation, "to all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth," of "the signs and wonders that the high God had wrought toward him.” Daniel narrates the whole proclamation in his fourth chapter. It was the narrative of a warning vision vouchsafed to the prosperous king, not to forget "that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will," or for his compelled instruction in that truth, he would be driven from men, and they would give him his dwelling among the beasts of the field, and make him eat grass as oxen for a destined time; and of the execution, after twelve months, of the unheeded warning, in an hour when he was proudly surveying his capital from the heights of his palace. A voice came from heaven repeating the doom; and madness, and all the threatened degradation, came in the same hour, till seven years passed over him. The proclamation was made when he was restored to reason and manhood again. "At the end of the days, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up mine eyes unto heaven, and mine understanding returned unto me, and I blessed the Most High, and I praised and honoured Him that liveth for ever and ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom from generation to generation. And all the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing: and He doeth according to His will in the army of heaven and the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay His hand, or say to Him, What doest thou?" "Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and his ways judgment: and those that walk in pride He is able to abase" (Dan. iv. 34, 35, 37). These three declarations of Nebuchadnezzar's thoughts of Israel's Jehovah are of peculiar value in the subject of this chapter, as they bear the form of copies of authentic proclamations by the king. The strange period of Babylonian history

to which Daniel's fourth chapter belongs, is referred to in the inscriptions of Nebuchadnezzar's reign recently discovered, in a manner largely instructive as to the impression made on the public mind. The sole record is a confession, unique in Assyrian inscriptions; which are all of the successes and magnificence of the proud praisers of themselves, so well exemplified in Dan. iv. 30-never of their failures or reverses-a confession of a period in which "Nebuchadnezzar did not build high places of power, nor lay up treasures, nor lay out in Babylon buildings for the honour of himself or his kingdom. His kingdom did not rejoice his heart. He did not sing the praises of Merodach, his god, the joy of his heart, nor furnish his altar with victims, nor clear out the canals." The Chaldean historians speak of him as having been visited with a divine afflatus, under which he foretold the destruction of Babylon by the Medes and Persians, and then disappeared for ever. It is the only case of prophecy being attributed by them to any of their monarchs (Rawlinson's Bampton Lectures, 1859). To the important history of Nebuchadnezzar's education into so much of true faith, are to be added the proclamations of Darius the Mede, of his son-in-law and successor the great Cyrus, and of Darius Hystaspis, and Artaxerxes, and the remarkable intromissions with Jewish affairs which fell to the lot of Ahasuerus, the famous Xerxes of Grecian history. The contact of these later Asiatic dominant powers of the world with the possessors of revelation, and the thoughts of the true God which they attained to in consequence, are preserved to us in the books of Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah; in which the narrative brings down the notice of God's special religious providence within 450 years of the end of Israel's custodiership of the oracles. To what thoughts did those leaders of the Gentile world of their time attain? What thoughts of Him did they, the practically absolute rulers of the ruling kingdom on the earth in their days, circulate by proclamation in the nations under their sway? Darius the Mede proclaims his faith in David's God, that "He is the living God, and steadfast for ever, and His kingdom that which shall not be destroyed, and His dominion shall be even unto the end. He delivereth and rescueth, He

Europe at the time of the second exodus.

worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth" (Dan. vi. 26, 27). The decree of Cyrus, the king promised by Isaiah by name, whose "spirit the Lord stirred up," falls little behind the faith which an Israelite could have professed. He calls Him "Jehovah, the God of Israel, He is the God;" and his decree is to restore the worship of Jehovah in Jerusalem at the cost of him, the Persian king, who held himself His servant for this end. "The Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth; and he hath charged me to build him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah" (Ezra i. 2). The decrees of Darius the second and Artaxerxes (Ezra vi. 7) contain language which would be marvellous, did it not come after that of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus, but which extends their cases into an historical system of God's providence calling in the heathen world of that age, though He called so much in vain. 9. These remarkable records of Mesopotamian history bring us to a new phase in the world's history—the rise of European civilisation. The Homeric period of Greece was the golden age of Israel, the reign of Solomon. The Persian reigns now noticed lay side by side in time with the rising civilisation and power of the Greek communities. The decree of Cyrus (B.C. 560), ordaining the second exodus of Israel from a land of bondage into the land promised to Abraham's seed, was issued at the period which, Dean Stanley felicitously observes, marks the end of the ancient world, the beginning of the classical age, the close of the primal system of monarchy, the beginning of the new form of political civilisation, when Greece and Rome appear first in authentic history; Pisistratus at Athens, Croesus at Sardis, advancing to important political life; Rome in its infancy under the Tarquins. Xenophon and the ten thousand were a chronological tie, whatever more they may have been, between the half-sacred Cyrus, the divinely-raised chief mind of the last ancient monarchy, and the tribes of Greek seekers after wisdom. Cyrus was himself nearer the position of a monarch of later times, than that of the old Pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzars; speaking a language not of the old world, but of Greece-the world-wide language to be; head of the Persian people, a race as intolerant of idolatry as Israel had to be;

successors.

less Asiatic than European in blood, being of the Aryan division-the children not of Shem but of Japheth-the blood of the future empires of Greece and Rome, and their Western He was a fitting monarch for the new exodus of Israel-a willing Pharaoh now-the servant of Jehovah, to send His missionary people out into a new world of human history, into which they went out under a leadership new in name to Hebrew history, but in official character the type of the religious teachers of future European centuries, “Ezra a scribe of the law of the God of heaven."

of Hebrew

The Sep

tuagint.

10. We cannot, in the later times of Jewish national exist- Last Jewish age. ence, point out the combination of occasional revelation of Circulation Himself by God coming in aid of self-education in true faith, books. of which Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar were so eminent examples. We have no sacred history of the last age of the Jewish Church. We know that the Jewish books got widely abroad, and we can in profane history trace, as much as we could have done in the profane history of earlier times, the world's self-education going on. The Macedonian monarchy, which would fain have served itself heir to the universal monarchy of its predecessors, was made heir to the same instructive contact with the religious light of the world. The Maccabeean history is the history of a very close and impressive contact, whatever its religious result may have been. The Egyptian part of the dispersion under the scribes produced the publication of the Hebrew Scriptures in the universal language of the first age of European learning-the Septuagint, the Bible of the Gentiles.

of the

Two world, That instruction

systematic

of the

11. What effect may have accompanied these extensions Education of the opportunity of faith beyond the bounds of the people heathen chosen to be the keepers of the oracles, we cannot say. points, however, deserve, or rather demand, notice. 1st, degree of education of the heathen world to the true faith was ruling Systematic. It is traceable over the whole time of Israel's existence (see, for example, Jer. xl. 2, 3). We have noticed but the prominent records of it. Nothing is clearer than that the chosen people were not, as the later Jews obstinately determined to think, chosen to the exclusion of other peoples from

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nation.

God's saving regard, but with a view to their being gathered in. The whole spirit of Jehovah's language as to the designed work of Israel to "the stranger within their gates," and "the nations on their borders," and the proclamations of His being and will which the nations were to read in Israel's fortunes; the close intercommunion, impossible to be barren of religious results, which is indicated by the presence of Philistines, Hittites, Edomites-the formally-accursed nations-as members of the royal household; the distinct extension latterly of the mission of the prophets of Israel to neighbouring and distant heathen peoples;-these are features of the divinely-ruled history of Israel which give a comprehensiveness to our range of sight when we look back to see what the field of the world had always been which God's revealed grace recognised. It is a comprehensive view, which it is freedom, to escape into, from the confined horizon within which the Jews of the age of "the traditions of their fathers," the fulness of times of darkness, determinedly shut themselves-not without much influence towards the same confinement of Christian thought, which has in so many things taken its impressions of true Hebrew theology and ecclesiology from that deteriorated phase of Judaism. The history of God's dealings with the peoples in contact with His "raised-up" people, from the time of Abraham's Pharaoh to that of Artaxerxes, exhibits an education of them to true faith which, though a contrast in extent to the education Israel received, was the same in kind. They had given to them a history of His dealings with them, and also direct revelations of His being and His will, whereon to think, and so impress themselves with the truth.

2d, It was always the Ruling People of the time that was in this degree enlightened in the truth. To instruct the terribly absolute monarchs of Egypt, Chaldæa, and Babylon, and the politically universal monarchs of Persia, and to cause them to issue their grand proclamations respecting the being and worship of the God of Israel, was really to influence the mass of their subjects in a degree which the most absolute monarchies of modern times do not know. And each of those great monarchies was in fact the world for the time, as Western powers

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