grace changes the critic into the penitent. "Except a man be converted, and become as a little child, he cannot see the kingdom of God."

Is it not a sublime sight to behold this Son of the Most High, come to shine with saving light from heaven, yet meeting only denial from blind souls-kept at bay and set at naught by men whom, in their superior conceit, no tenderness on His part can soften, nor dignity overawe, yet able to retreat for strength in upon that innermost sacred consciousness of His essential oneness with the Father and His abiding fellowship in the Father's love? Like one who leans his back amidst all odds against some primeval rock, so does He abide in the power of His conscious divinity. From that nothing shakes Him. Believed or denied, His witness to Himself standeth fast. "I know whence I came. I know whither I am going. I know that I am not alone. Here am I, and the Father who sent Me." J. OSWALD DYKES.

HOSEA.

IN my desire to cover the whole field of inquiry, I may explain that I cannot attend to form and polish and that sort of thing. I propose to strike various notes of thought and feeling that seem to me most interesting in our subject of study. I shall, first of all, make sure that you and I are thinking in the same way about the Hebrew prophets, when we talk about them.

A Hebrew prophet was not a sort of extraordinary magical oracle that was always telling people in a mystically wise kind of way little things that were going to happen, or predicting big things that were going to occur. The supreme end of a Hebrew prophet's action in predicting events was not so much to prove himself correct in having foreseen,

but rather to influence the people, to divert them from evil ways, to bring them back to the paths of goodness. And so there are a great many prophecies of coming evil in the Old Testament that have never been fulfilled, e.g. the prophecy of Jonah as to the destruction of Nineveh, because the people repented. There is a school of interpreters who think that a great deal of prophecy about the Holy Land and with reference to the Jews after the flesh still awaits fulfilment. These good people imagine that the inspiration of the Bible requires that every earthly prediction should have literal, earthly fulfilment. Their concern is, I think, quite unnecessary. A great many things that particular prophets expected to come to pass never did come to pass. Jonah cried, "In forty days Nineveh is to be destroyed,' and was very much disgusted because it did not happen. Isaiah said to Hezekiah, "You have got to make your will, to set your house in order"; and yet God revokes that. There you have two concrete examples. The Divine purpose of the prophet's mission in the life and history of Israel was not to astonish people by anticipating the future : the reason of his existence was rather, as God's servant, to exert a practical, moral, religious influence on the people of his own time and his own generation.

I will add one other thing on this point. Undoubtedly those Hebrew prophets had a supernatural, Divine enlightenment given to them. With all my heart and soul I believe in the core and kernel of those great doctrines of supernatural revelation and supernatural inspiration; but, remember, God's supernatural is always natural, through and through. God did not use the prophets like speaking trumpets. He conveyed His inspirations-His Divine intuition and anticipation of what was going to happen, His own hidden mind and will, the secret energies working beneath history-He conveyed these, not merely through their vocal organs to their fellows, but through their minds,

through their own thinking, reasoning, struggling, in faith, hope, and endeavour, to see and to know God; i.e. through mind and heart and spirit, as well as through voice.

Therefore, in the whole calling of the prophets, and in the entire method through which they reached their knowledge and delivered it to the people, you must not think of them as being quite apart from us. Why, we have experience of the same kind in the work of conscience. We teach our children that conscience is the voice of God: and would to heaven we felt what we teach! It is teaching, if we do it. God speaks to you and to me as directly and as supernaturally as He spoke to those Old Testament prophets.

First, you have the real personal action of God in inspiring the prophets, and revealing His mind and will to them; and, secondly, you have it in their declaring and realizing that they received that Divine enlightenment, that supernatural enlightenment, in the most ordinary, simple, human, and natural ways and processes. In those facts you have a gain to evangelical truth; and there you and I may find lessons, examples, and inspirations for ourselves.

To get to know an Old Testament prophet, we want to find out what he was in his own day; what he said to his own people, what they understood him to say, what effect that had upon them; what aims and purposes he set before himself, as he spoke in public and forced his way into the councils of kings, and addressed great mob-meetings of his fellow subjects in the streets of Samaria or Jerusalem. What was the man actually, practically, driving at? what was he seeking to accomplish in his own age and among his own people?

Our subject is the prophet Hosea. I must show you the background against which stands out his figure, full of pathos and beauty, religious value and worth. Therefore I must sketch to you the region of the kingdom of Samaria :

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the Northern kingdom, usually called the kingdom of Israel, in distinction from the kingdom of Judah. Palestine is a lofty tableland of broken hill-ridges, lying along the eastern end of the Mediterranean; away to the north are deserts, with fertile districts lying between, once occupied by various races, such as the Syrians and the Hittites. Away beyond, in the fertile valley of the Euphrates, lay the Assyrian empire; and away to the west and south the mighty Egyptian empire, in the rich plain made by another great river, the Nile. In the time of Hosea these were the two worldpowers, the mighty empires, that controlled the Eastern and Western hemispheres.

Palestine lay like a bridge on the highway between those two great empires. Let me point out the political position occupied by it. It was, practically, precisely in the same unhappy position that Afghanistan holds in regard to India and the Russian advance through Central Asia. Those two empires, Assyria and Egypt, hate each other, and are conpeting with each other for the control of the world—for the mastery of the great highways of commerce, for the wealth of human industry. They must approach each other along that highway, in the midst of which lies Palestine.

You see therefore, that that little country, lying between these two empires, was exposed to the threatening danger of advance from opposite sides. Moreover, it became the very focus of plots on the part of those two contending powers; and just as in Afghanistan, so, constantly, it happened in Northern Israel, that you had two pretenders to the throne, one actually in power and the other his rival. The one in power holds his throne backed up by Assyria, while his rival is put up and supported by the great empire of Egypt. The consequence was ceaseless faction-fights and constant revolutions in the government in that Northern kingdom, very much the spectacle we lately witnessed in Afghanistan.

Going back to the period of the Judges, you remember how the confederated tribes-the Jewish tribes-took possession of Canaan, driving out, partially, the old inhabitants. One particular weakness that arose out of their tolerating the continued existence of the Canaanitish towns and colonies in their own land was this: The wedge of the Canaanitish towns ran right across the middle of the country possessed by the twelve tribes; between the ten Northern tribes and the two Southern ones, Benjamin and Judah. Moreover there was a natural break in the country, caused by specially wide valleys and passes. During the period of the Judges, power, authority, and dignity mostly lay to the north; Ephraim was the commanding tribe. One of the kings that came after the troubled reign of Saul, king of all the twelve tribes, was a man of the people-king David, whose dynasty was permanently established on the original Hebrew throne. During David's strong rule, the whole of the kingdom was held together, but not without difficulty. There were symptoms of revolt. During Solomon's reign, the unity of the kingdom was also maintained. But when his son Rehoboam was made king, insubordination broke out. There were two main causes, one civil and the other religious. First of all, Solomon had made great modifications in the local, communal method of government. He attempted to abolish the whole of the tribal districts, to form his kingdom into provinces, and to establish a government ruled by governors appointed by himself. It was a proper stroke of imperial policy. But it excited enmities; it had a tendency to centralization, and also to further reduce the power, influence, and dignity of the Northern tribes. Solomon likewise erected at Jerusalem a magnificent temple. Those were the two causes-religious and civil jealousies.

You remember the deputation that waited on king