them.

His miracles of healing were not the mere expression of a Divine benevolence. He accomplished all His cures on earth by deepest personal sympathy with the sufferer. He wept when He raised Lazarus from the dead; He sighed and looked up to heaven when He cured the deaf and dumb man. Virtue went out of Him when He healed the woman with the issue of blood. It is said significantly, when He restored many people, that He Himself bore their sicknesses and carried their sorrows. In order to acquire the power of healing, He hungered, thirsted, was weary. The Roman scourge wounded Him; the crown of thorns pierced His brow; the cross lifted His sufferings to the highest pitch of endurance. The cross was the healing tree which Jesus cast into the bitter Marah of all our sicknesses and diseases. And this bitter tree of suffering and death, put into the bitterest human trouble, cures it. It makes a medicine of nature's gall as a skilful physician uses the poisons of earth to cure its diseases.

We can see a deep-lying, far-reaching significance in the fact that the principle of mutual similarity between remedy and disease formed the basis of ancient medical practice, and is fast becoming the basis of our modern therapeutics. That principle is engraved on the very forefront of our salvation. It is shadowed forth in type and symbol and prophecy. The brazen serpent was lifted up to heal those who were bitten by the fiery serpents as a prophetic symbol that the Son of Man would be lifted up on the cross to heal the sinful souls and bodies of men. And just as you bruise the aromatic leaf or the bitter root or bark in which hidden medicinal virtue lies, in order to obtain these healing powers, so it pleased the Lord to bruise His own Son, that healing virtue might flow from Him to us. And just as medical men have produced an attenuated virus of some deadly epidemic capable of producing a milder disease, and securing immunity from it by passing it through the system of animals, so our Lord, by being made sin for us has redeemed us from its curse, and by His stripes we are healed.

In these two great facts, then, that God has given His own Son as the Healer of the world, and has provided the means of healing from the foundation of the world, we have a guarantee that He will heal our Marah of trouble or disease, whatever it may be, if we seek His help. The individuality of human beings makes ordinary medicine always more or less empirical and tentative. When every organism is a separate problem, and no two constitutions are absolutely alike, it follows that the treatment of disease must necessarily be very uncertain. But the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin; and His salvation is the only universal panacea suited to all, sufficient for all, and available to all.

But not only does Jesus heal us individually; He bestows upon us "gifts of healing." Just as He bestows His own healing power upon some unconscious herb or mineral whose medicinal properties we use for the cure of our diseases, so He bestows upon ourselves, in the conscious exercise of them, His own healing power in enabling us to heal others. The gifts of healing which the early Christians enjoyed are perpetuated,

not in a miraculous, but in a natural form; not in faith cures practised by ignorant and credulous pietists, but in the more real and satisfactory cures of science; in wonders of healing effected in our hospitals, which a quarter of a century ago would have been deemed impossible; in the more accurate knowledge acquired by both methods of study, and in the tender ministries of the more favored classes to the poor helpless victims of disease. And just as Christ Himself did not win His triumphs over disease and death by the mere exercise of a nominal faith costing Him nothing, so we cannot triumph over our modern diseases by spells of faith, expecting to win, by a mere presumptuous effort, costing us nothing, what usually requires years of thought and hard labor and sympathy to acquire. If, like Moses, in the application of the desert tree to the bitter Marah, we regard the operation of God's hand in the use of the healing means, we are exercising faith while we are taking advantage of the resources which science has placed in our power; and we have a far greater assurance that by the use of such means our faith will effect a cure, than if we presumptuously and lazily depended upon our faith alone.

It is to our Christian religion that we owe our care for the sick and the disabled. It is the cross of Christ that has taught us to sweeten the bitter Marah of disease. In the natural world the creature that is hurt is set upon by its fellows and is done to death or devoured, as it leaves the unheeding herd and seeks the loneliest spot to die. In the human world, where the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, those who are worsted and wounded in the struggle of life are left to perish with little sympathy. And there is a hard philosophy among us which asserts that efforts to remove sickness and disease are hindering the operation of a beneficent law which weeds out the sickly specimens of the human race that the fittest may survive. But we have not so learned Christ. He manifested a special concern for the weak and the wretched. To His heart the very presence of trouble was a dumb appeal for help. sick, the desolate, the outcast-these ever found in Him a He brought in the law of grace, the higher law of love, by which the strong are selected, not to extinguish the weak, but to help the bruised reeds of humanity to flourish again. And He has given to us the greatest and sweetest motive of all, in laying Himself alongside of our humanity, afflicted in all our afflictions, identifying Himself so closely with the case of the most abject sufferer, that what we do for that sufferer we do for Him. "I was sick, and ye visited Me."

The poor, the tender Healer.

II. TYRE: A LESSON IN PROPHECY.

BY PROFESSOR E. D. MORRIS, D.D., CINCINNATI, ().

In reading the scant records of the most ancient civilizations, the eye naturally lingers on the interesting page which tells the story of Phoenicia. That story carries us back, not merely to the time when Joshua led the conquering hosts of Israel into the Promised Land, but even to the remoter age, when Abraham came from Haran to plant the seeds of a new nationality in Canaan. Tradition, indeed, leads us backward nearly to the Flood, affirming that Sidon, the primitive capital of Phoenicia, was built by the son of Canaan, who was the grandson of Noah, the second father of mankind. However this may be, we have historic warrant for believing that at the time when Abraham migrated into Palestine, that little strip of territory lying to the north, between the ranges of Lebanon and the Mediterranean, was the home and seat of a vigorous and powerful nation; and that at the date of the invasion of Joshua the city of Tyre, sometimes called the daughter or successor of Sidon, was the centre of an active and fruitful civilization nowhere surpassed among men. From that early era onward to the age of Solomon, the Phoenician empire thus centred is known to have increased steadily in almost every element of greatness and influence. Its geographic position of necessity made it the chief point of connection, commercially and otherwise, between the Eastern and the Western world. That position also constrained it to become a manufacturing and maritime rather than an agricultural State. Under such conditions it rose from century to century to a higher point of culture, wealth, and influence than it was possible for either the nomadic peoples of Central Asia or the secluded States of Southern Europe to attain. Its commerce far surpassed that of any contemporaneous power, extending to India on the east, and to Spain, and possibly Gaul and Britain, on the west. Its manufactures of glass, of purple cloths, and other articles both

useful and elegant, commanded the patronage of the known world. There is ground for believing that its political institutions were framed upon loftier models than those of any other nationality, the Hebrew excepted. It became the prolific mother of numerous colonies in the East, in Cyprus and Sicily, and along both the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean as far as Carthage and Tarshish. In literature, in art, and other kindred elements of a high civilization, it attained like eminence, and gained for itself a commanding influence among the peoples and nations of that early day.

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Of this Phoenician empire the city of Tyre was for many centuries the chief seat. It had been planted by a colony from the older Sidon, at a peculiarly favorable point on the Mediterranean coast several centuries before the invasion of Joshua. At the time of that invasion it was, as the sacred records tell us, a strong city;" a city so populous, so full of resources, so fortified and capable of resistance that the son of Nun probably deemed it wiser to make a treaty with it than to attempt its subjugation. Five centuries later, when David and Solomon were reigning in Jerusalem, Tyre had quite supplanted the older Sidon, and had become the chief manufacturing and commercial metropolis of Western Asia. Sacred and profane history agree in their glowing descriptions of her wealth, her grandeur, her widespread connections and influence. To her came caravans, not merely from all portions of Syria, but even from those distant plains along the Tigris and the Euphrates, pouring into her coffers the products and luxuries of the Orient. Her ships not only coasted both northward and southward along the Mediterranean, but sailed far out upon the eastern coast-line of the Atlantic, bringing into her treasury from both Europe and Africa whatever it was possible in those days to make an article of commercial exchange. Her factories and workshops supplied her with varied domestic products wherewith to repay both the East and the West for the wealth they poured into her lap. Her splendid harbor, her docks and warehouses, her palaces and temples, both in the insular city and along the mainland, her beautiful suburbs extending, as we have reason to believe, for many miles along the southward shore, were unequalled by those of any contemporaneous city-at least in Western Asia. So for centuries Tyre continued to increase in affluence, in grandeur, and in power, until at length the day of retribution and disaster came. Nebuchadnezzar first, then Alexander, then other hostile powers, became the instruments in the hand of God to overthrow her greatness, and to bring on that remarkable historic decline which we see in the nearly complete obliteration of the city on the mainland, and in the comparatively insignificant Arab town that now occupies what was once the island. Like Babylon, and Tadmos, and Thebes, and Ephesus, the strong city of Joshua and of the age of Solomon, has now become a ruin—a ruin never to be rebuilt, and a painful illustration, even on natural grounds, of the transitoriness and the perishable quality of all that is human.

These brief references may serve to introduce the main topic of this paper," Tyre as a Lesson in i'rophecy." The student of the Old Testament is constantly surprised to find such abundant references to this great city in the prophetical writings, and especially to note the numerous and specific predictions concerning it in Holy Writ. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah, speaking by Divine direction, have placed such predictions on record, and with a fulness and emphasis which hardly have a parallel in the prophetic declarations respecting any other city or people, except Jerusalem and the chosen Hebrew race. And these predictions are of such character, are so direct and circumstantial and decisive in what they affirm, that the entire problem of what is called predictive prophecy in the Old Testament might safely be left to stand or fall by the specific test which they afford.

*

The substance of these predictions, publicly recorded long before the dates of their fulfilment, and while this grand, luxurious city was still at the height of its fame and influence, was this: That Tyre, though then flourishing and glorious and apparently impregnable, would in an appointed time be assailed and overthrown by a Chaldean of her army; that many inhabitants would flee westward to the colonies she had planted in Africa and Spain; that those who remained would under Chaldean rule raise the fallen city again to even more than its former importance; that after a fixed period another military power should lay siege to her and obtain a decisive triumph over her, scattering her population to the four winds, and prostrating her grandeur to the very dust; that from this second blow she should in due time in some degree recover and become in form a Christian city, making her wealth and influence tributary to the advancement of that kingdom of grace of which only the prophetic announcements then existed; but that, finally, even this partial prosperity would be swept away, and the city as a city should perish for all time, her foundations torn up, her walls levelled to the earth, even the soil beneath being swept away as by wind and wave; and the rocks on which she was so securely planted becoming barren places whereon the Arab fisher might dry his nets. So remarkable a series of predictions can hardly be found elsewhere in the Old Testament; they have their closest counterpart only in those solemn prophecies wherein our Lord foretells the doom of a greater city-the Jerusalem whom He would have gathered unto Himself, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if only she had seen with the eye of faith the things that belonged to her peace.

The verification of these prophecies began with the siege and capture of Tyre by Nebuchadnezzar, 573 B. C. A century and a half earlier Assyria

* The five prophets are named in their historic order, according to the received chronology, and the particular references are as follows: Amos 1:9-10; Isaiah 23, especially verses 15-18; Jer. 25:22, 27:3; Ezek., chapters 26, 27, and 28 entire, and 29:18; Zech. 9: 2-4. See also prophecies in which Tyre and Sidon are associated in a common condemnation, Jer. 47: 4; Joel 3 : 4-8, and others. Note also the instructive allusions in Ps. 45: 12, 83: 7, and 87 : 4; indicating the close relations between Tyre and Israel. See for further historic reference, 1 Kings 7: 13-14, 9: 11-14; Ezra 3:7; Neh. 13: 16; Hosea 9 : 13, and the impressive allusion of Christ, Matt. 11: 21-22.