or seeming reversal, of those processes. In the early ages of old, and at some critical epochs, to subserve great, enduring, world-wide purposes of His love and will, He has put His hidden workings forth before all eyes, plain to be seen. Things that are always going forward in the secret spiritual world, He has brought out of darkness and concealment into broad daylight, and pointing to them has said: "Come and see the works of God;" so it is seen that "the Lord that dwelleth on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. ."* Principles of His government start into life, embodying themselves in present, objective, visible facts. The ideal takes a form to itself, it is disclosed in the practical and real. God will have His Church always know it by faith, not by sight; but at some epochs the world also shall know it by sight, which is its only way of knowing that He means it when He says it: it is no figure of speech when He says it. Though thou passest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee: for I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine. That is, as some people would put it, in a philosophical way; the ideal and the historical meet in the same event. Thus it is seen that in the world of nature and the world of grace alike, one God works, one King rules; all filling and all pervading, all sustaining and all harmonizing.

The king is startled and astonied. The bow of his proud will has been strung to its utmost tension, and the sudden and violent recoil follows; from the high pinnacle of self-elation, on which the tempter had placed him, the same pinnacle on which he in vain. attempted to place the Lord Jesus Christ at His * Psalm xciii. 4.

entrance on His ministry, is he now hurled down ignominiously and disastrously. Yet here, as all along, the conduct of Nebuchadnezzar is in marked contrast with that of Pharaoh. If the power of God was shown in Pharaoh, His grace seems to have been signally shown in Nebuchadnezzar. When confession comes from his lips, it is not wrung from a rebellious, reluctant, and still unbroken spirit. There is a frank cheerfulness and forwardness about his confession. However humilating it may be, he owns himself wrong. The head of gold is laid in the dust; the stone cut out without hands has smitten and broken it; it is as if the image was levelled even with the ground, and in Dura's plain the cross was exalted! And why do I say the cross? Because I believe in type and figure the cross was there; and not in type and figure, but in plain, evident, actual truth, He that hung there, that was lifted up there, was present in the furnace, the Head, suffering with the members, was seen to be where unseen He always is,—walking in the flames with His faithful three, ay, with His faithful one, if one there be alone, unsolaced, unbefriended; He walks with them, and that which would be a glowing consuming heat becomes a gladdening and quickening light, full of blessing, restorative, not destructive. Oh, no; not destructive. He that can turn the corrupt mass of our poor fallen nature by His quickening touch, so as it shall be living and lifegiving, can make that which is but fuel for the flame, in its own nature, to be proof against that flame, to be armed with a new and heavenly might of resistance; the glow from within shall be more than a match for the glowing heat from without; the forces shall counterbalance each other. Thou shalt pass through unscathed,

unsinged Sevenfold the heat of the furnace, sevenfold the grace of thy God!

"Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonied, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said to his counsellors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire?" and he said, "Behold, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire." Thus was all Nebuchadnezzar's arithmetic confounded, the three had become four. We cannot attempt to explain precisely in what sense Nebuchadnezzar used those words, The form of the fourth is like the Son of God. We need not suppose he knew all, or nearly all, that the words are instinctively felt to mean by many Christian souls; and it is my strong impression that Keble's lines state the very truth, when they would have us believe that the Lord Jesus was there indeed: "The Saviour walking with His faithful three."

It is true that in the 28th verse Nebuchadnezzar repeats what he had said in an altered form: "Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent His angel, and delivered His servants that trusted in Him."* But we know that Angel, or Messenger, is more than once (as in Hosea xii. and Malachi ii.) used as a special title of the Lord Jesus in His mediatorial work which He fulfils between the heavenly Father and His brethren, the members of His body. He is called so especially in the only other parallel case, in which fire burns but does not consume: "There appeared unto him the Angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush, saying, I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And thus moreover was the

* Dan. iii. 28.

+ Acts vii. 30, 32.

promise most literally and exactly fulfilled: "When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burnt ; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee."*

And surely it was most natural and reasonable that, in such a crisis, the Angel of the covenant should appear, He that is the yea and amen of all the promises. Never since the grinding, crushing tyranny of the Pharaohs, and the attempted annihilation and extirpation of the Hebrew race, had the covenant promises seemed so near extinction as now; never so much ground for saying, "Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath He in anger shut up His tender mercies ?" Is His promise come utterly to an end for evermore. And this being so, what was in itself a likelier thing, what more fully charged with encouragement to the Church of Christ, through all the ages, through its water-floods, its successive fire-ordeals, than that He should appear to fan that last surviving spark of truth and faith; to show to all, that however small and despicable that spark might seem, it was hidden in the hollow of His hand; it was fed from an inexhaustible source of light; "there was one behind the wall that poured oil into the flame"?

The instinctive feeling of the Church of Christ, as far back as Irenæus, found in that fourth one the Son of God Himself. When speaking of the credibility of the resurrection, he says: "If in the case of three youths, that hand of God which was present with them wrought such unlooked-for things, and things in nature impossible, what is there so strange in supposing that, in the case of transfigured saints, some * Isa. xliii. 2. † Psalm lxxvii. 9, 8.

wholly unlooked-for results have been effected by Him that is the Son of God ministering to the will of God and our Father? Neither shall the nature of any of the things done, nor yet the weakness of the flesh, prevail to be stronger than the council of the Godhead."

And again he says, "The Word of God showed forth the lustre and glory of the Father. The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him,' but not in one figure or one character, but according to the exigencies and fitnesses of times; at one time to the youths in the furnace; at another, as the stone cut out without hands, will He smite the kingdoms of this world, and Himself fill the whole earth."

Again, the same was seen to Daniel appearing as "the Son of man in the clouds of heaven, drawing near to the Ancient of days, and receiving from Him sovereignty and glory."

And not only in His Church's behalf was it likely He should appear thus; but seeing that He was the very truth itself, the pattern of truth, the measure and standard of it, the witness of it, might it be justly said to Him at that moment, "It is time for Thee, Lord, to work: for they have made void Thy law."*

As we have already said, the great immutable principles of morals, the very highest and eternal truths, were at stake, in a very memorable way, before the world. There was the fire, and there was those three young men's conviction of duty. And Nebuchadnezzar thought that conviction of duty could be burnt, and conscience could be burnt, and love of

* Psalm cxix. 126.