compelling in His name the respect of their heathen conquerors, and, on the other hand, enabled to see that all the nations of the earth were in God's hand, and that He had a work for each of them to do in His own due time. Then in the later chapters of Isaiah, the greatest and loftiest part of all Old Testament prophecy, we see the renewal of better times; and the hope of the return from captivity broadens out into a vision of new glory for Israel, spreading light over the whole world. And lastly, in Haggai and Zechariah, and a little later in Malachi, we are brought among the returning Jews themselves, the rebuilding of the ruined temple, and at last the fresh growth of sins which called for God to come down as a consuming fire to purify His people from their dross. They are bidden to remember the Law of Moses the first prophet, and are told that Elijah the fearless prophet of Israel shall come once more to prepare the way of the Lord, and so with a mingled voice of prophets early and late, and a renewal of the Law itself, the Old Testament ends.

Thus far it might seem as if the great promises of God to Israel had closed in failure. But deep in the heart of prophecy a new thought had meanwhile long been growing. The hopes of deliverance by degrees came together into the hope of a deliverer, a true conqueror and king whom God should send. Then when it became clearer that the people was its own worst enemy, and that deliverance from locusts, and plagues, and earthquakes, and foreign armies, was of little avail while sin had the mastery, it was seen likewise that the deliverer must be one who suffered

with his people, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, who felt the people's sins as his own, and bore on his own shoulders the iniquity of all. How that expectation was fulfilled, we shall hear on Good Friday.

But again, it was mixed with brighter hopes than Israel had known before. In the terrible captivity Israel had seemed to go down into death; and the return from captivity was like a return out of death, a life restored to dry bones, which hinted an assurance that after all death need not be the last thing, but that life might come once again where death had seemed to prevail. How that expectation was fulfilled, we shall hear on Easter Day.

The opposite feelings of passionate grief and exulting hope, which strive for the mastery in Old Testament prophecy, meet together in the coming week, which is filled with the Saviour's sorrows and ends on the eve of His joyful resurrection. But remember, brethren, to us God has given not a prophecy only but a gospel. He has not merely taught us to ask and to hope. He has given, and He has fulfilled. Our faith is that Christ has died, and Christ has risen.

XX

THE BIBLE. (VIII.) JOB, PSALMS, PROVERBS,

ECCLESIASTES

"WHEN he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder; then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out. And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding."-Job

xxviii. 26-28.

ON the last Sunday before Easter we entered on the second half of the Old Testament, that part of it which deals chiefly with the words of God, which words of God are also the words of men; as the earlier part described the acts of God, the ways in which His Providence ordered the doings of men. We took first the books of the prophets, and I tried to show you how needful it is in reading their prophecies to remember that they were first spoken in the midst of stirring times, of which we have a short account chiefly in the books of Kings and Chronicles. A prophet, we saw, is a man who speaks to other men in God's name and on God's behalf. But he is prepared for his office by entering more

strongly and deeply than other men into all that is going on around him. Whatever he speaks is coloured by the events, the thoughts, and the feelings of his own time, which take hold on his own heart. And again whatever he speaks is meant to tell upon his own people and his own time: when he warns or rebukes or encourages or inspires, it is of them and their needs that he is thinking. Yet his words have an abiding life in them, which makes them fit and profitable to be spoken to us, because the Spirit of God Himself is in them. This influence from above shows itself not merely in the way in which all the prophets insist on right and wrong, good and evil, as the one great distinction without which our life goes off into hopeless confusion and misery. It shows itself still more in the way in which they stand, as it were, on watchtowers, gazing far backward and far forward, teaching us to judge the little things close at hand by the light of God's great purposes, and never to allow the trifles of to-day, which look to us important now only because they are under our eyes, to make us forget the great eternal world to which we belong all the time. Lastly, the prophets lead us to see God and His kingdom in the future. By teaching us to fear and to hope, but above all to hope, beckoning us to look onward to the days which are still far before us, they lead our thoughts likewise to the heaven above us and to God the King of heaven. And again, by fixing our minds on Him and the treasures of wisdom and goodness which are hid in His counsels, they invite us to look beyond the little round of present things and

admit the coming ages among our beliefs and our desires.

These are some of the benefits which we may receive, if we will, more or less from all the prophets. They have likewise, as I told you, their different lessons, changing with the times for which they spoke and with the events of their own lives. The ups and downs of fortune which befel the Jewish people under its kings, then the carrying away into a strange land, and then the return of part of the people back to their own land, give rise to different bursts of prophecy. One particular thread of prophecy I noticed as having special interest for us by the way in which it prepares us for the New Testament. The hopes for the people take shape by degrees as hopes of a coming Deliverer. This expected Deliverer, who at last was known as the Christ or the Messiah, i.e. the Anointed One, was known better and better as time went on. In the sufferings of the captivity the prophets found out under the Spirit's teaching that He too must be a sufferer, one who shared all His people's sorrows and felt the burden of their sins as His own. But they were further taught to look beyond the time of suffering to the time of glory. The return of the people from the dust of captivity became an assurance that life is possible after death as well as before it. Thus those expectations were planted in the hearts of men which were fulfilled on the first Easter morning, when the true King of the Jews and of all mankind, who had passed through suffering and death down into the grave, rose once more from the dead, and