be,' saith the Lord."

In these parables the prophet pictures the long suffering mercy of God. Twice has he, in pity, withheld his judgment.

In the third vision he sees the execution of divine justice. This is the vision of the plumbline: "Behold, the Lord stood beside a wall made by a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand."

And He declares, "I will set a plumbline in the midst of my people Israel: I will not again pass them by anymore."

This vision must be considered in connection with those that precede it. They represent him as slow to wrath. This teaches that he will by no means clear the guilty. Since Israel has disregarded his patient and repeated offer of mercy, he must deal with them as their sins deserve. The plumbline of strict justice will be applied, and punishment will be meted out according to it; and this punishment is announced in specific terms. The house of Jereboam shall fall by the sword, and the nation shall be destroyed.

The vision of the summer fruit adds another thought to the thought of certainty of punishment, that is, that it was immanent,-near at hand. The nation is ripe for destruction. "The end is come upon my people Israel. I will not again pass by them anymore."

As proof and illustration of this ripeness the prophet cites the specific sins which were notorious and inexcusable. "Here this, O ye that swallow up the needy and cause the poor of the land to fail." Who deliberately "buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of shoes." "Shall not the land tremble for this and everyone mourn that dwelleth therein."

Then again the prophet describes in fearful vividness the sudden and terrible calamity that should fall upon the land. It should come suddenly as the darkening of the sun at noonday. "In the midst of feasting, they should be caused to mourn, as the mourning for an only son."

The worst of it should be the utter lack of spiritual wisdom. "A famine, not of bread nor a thirst for water, but of the hearing of the words of the Lord." Their case is the hopeless wandering of the blind who cannot find the way. "They shall fall and never rise again."

The last vision is a terrible picture of the destruction of the nation in the ruin of the altar. The altar was the symbol of their covenant with God. The destruction of the altar signified the dissolution of that covenant. It is the formal rejection and disowning of the people and the withdrawal of God's protecting care, a fearful outpouring of justice long withheld in mercy. The storm breaks and the avenging forces of the moral universe pursue the workers of iniquity.

There is no escape from the consequences of sin, when once the hand of mercy is withdrawn.

The relentless principles of justice are represented as pursuing the fugitives to the remotest limits of the universe. The picture is one of the most terrible ever drawn by the imagination of man. "Though they dig into Sheol, thence shall my hand take them; and though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down. And though they hide in the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence; and though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent and he shall bite them."

Thus did Amos exhaust the resources of spoken thought to proclaim the everlasting truths of God's abhorrence of sin, of cruelty, dishonesty, falsehood and all manner of unrighteous

ness.

Little is said here of religious defection. It is recognized as the source of evil doing, but the judgments are pronounced against the offences-against the great moral obligations which are known and acknowledged of all men.

Every word of this great book is as true and pertinent today as when they first were spoken.

It is an unfading picture of the moral order of the world, an order as old as the constitution of the universe, as immutable as God himself.

The book does not close with this fearsome picture of eternal justice.

The dark sky is illuminated by the sunshine of God's gracious purpose.

The everlasting covenant abides and the purpose of redemption is not thwarted by the failure or apostacy of any generation.

The justice of God is never set aside, but his mercy endureth forever, and He shall not fail nor be discouraged, till he have established righteousness upon the earth.

So the prophecy closes with the comforting assurance, "In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and I will raise up its ruins and I will build it as in the day of old."

CHAPTER XVII

OBADIAH

HE Book of Obadiah is the shortest of all the books of the Old Testament, and the least attractive.

It consists of one brief message, announcing the doom of Edom. This is given in the first four verses, and the rest of the chapter is the prophet's comment on the destruction which he foresaw.

The malignant cruelty of Edom in the day of Judah's misfortune, and her shameful rejoicing over her neighbor's distress, no doubt merited the resentment which the Jews felt against her.

The fact that the nation was supposed to be descended from Esau, and was thus the twin-brother to Israel, had, in earlier times, been recognized as the basis of a certain degree of sympathy between them; and in fact, the laws of Israel did make a distinction between Edom and other heathen nations; e. g., "Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, he is thy brother." Deut. XXIII:7.

But, on the other hand, what they had in common served to intensify their sense of that antipathy which existed between their national ideals.

Israel was above all else a religious nation,-not always highly moral, never living up to his ideals, but always possessed of a strong passion for the ideal, abounding in hopes and fertile in visions. Edom, like Esau their father, was a "profane person." "Essentially irreligious, living for food and spoil and vengeance, with no national conscience or ideals," so Dr. George Adam Smith describes them, and adds, "It is therefore no mere passion for revenge which inspires these few hot verses of Obadiah

no doubt there is exultation in the news he hears; but beneath such savage tempers, there beats a heart that beats for the highest things, and now, in its martyrdom, sees them baffled and mocked by a people without vision and without feeling.

Justice and mercy and truth; the education of humanity in the law of God, the establishment of his will upon earth-these things, it is true, are not mentioned in the Book of Obadiah, but it is for sake of some dim instinct of them that its wrath is poured upon foes whose treachery and malice seek to make them impossible by destroying the one nation on earth who then believed in them and lived for them.

Consider the situation. It was the darkest hour of Israel's history. City and Temple had fallen; the people had been carried away. Up over the empty land the waves of mocking heathen had flowed; there was none to beat them back.

A Jew who had lived through these things, who had seen the day of Jerusalem's fall, and passed from her ruins under the mocking of her foes, dared to cry back unto the large mouths they made: "Our day is not spent; we shall return for the things we live for; the land shall yet be ours, and the kingdom our God's.' Brave hot heart. It shall be as thou sayest."

The case of Obadiah could hardly ask a more eloquent advocate; and even if the "hot heart" seems somewhat lacking in the spirit of forgiveness that we hear in the words that were spoken on the cross, "Father, forgive them," we remember that it is God's love for man that constrains him to destroy them that destroy the earth; and, after all, there is no substitute for justice.

HAGGAI

Haggai is the prophet of the practical. He was the first of those who prophesied after the return of the Jews from Babylon to Jerusalem, They were a feeble folk, beset by difficulties,