till it became intolerable. He looked to bloodshed and anarchy growing until they were insupportable. He looked to the utter dissolution of the nation's state. He looked to foreign conquest. He looked to exile in alien lands. He looked to natural processes of suffering and misery to produce a moral and a religious reform. Do you know that is God's universal way ? If you will read the world's history, you will find that famines, the growth of intolerable poverty in towns, the insupportableness of life among the peasantry, have been God's educative influences for waking the nations up to their proper career, moral, philanthropic, religious. Hosea and Amos teach men to see in Assyria the mere tool in the hand of a just and an avenging God. Why, even the very ruin of the nation drives men not to despair, but to reverence of God. The mere awful fear of recognition of God as the God of retribution is not enough. There needs to come this second experience; when a long-continued, wilful, obdurate sinner has had the resistance of his pride broken down, there come to him regrets, strange pathetic visions of what he might have been, sudden perceptions of a Divine hand that reached out to him all along that pathway of folly, which, if he had only taken hold of it, must have lifted him up to honourable and noble achievements. He suddenly says: "This hand that strikes me with retributive ruin is the hand of One. who loves me." All the past is filled with God, and then the present. Thus God in punishing is loving stillpunishing therefore, not as vengeance, punishing as chastisement, punishing as educative discipline, punishing for restoration. Oh, the grandeur of that conception! A God that punishes His own loved child for sin must be such a holy God; who, when He strikes, hurts His own heart more than He hurts His own child; who does it to bring that child back to Himself and goodness. Oh the love of the punishing, recovering God! Hosea's God is a God of holy love. Now come back to Hosea's key-thought and image. God's relation to Israel is that of a husband to wife; not of master to purchased slave and harlot, but of husband to wife, bent on being wedded to His spouse in righteousness, in purity, in lovingkindness, in mercy, in virtue, in holiness. That conception of marriage so tender, so grieved, so forgiv ing, so clinging, how came Hosea to have that wondrous thought about God? It was something new. You find nothing like it in the Bible, before Hosea. That was the new revelation, the supernatural revelation to Hosea. How did God give it to him? Speak it to him mechanically? Ah, no! Divine revelations must be writ, not in type like printer's; it must be writ into the very sinew and web of the human heart and spirit, into a man's life. It is by experience God teaches man, by making man in His own image. Then a man sees and knows the image of God. Go back to that story of Hosea's. As it is often told in a superficial, blundering way, it is something so paralysing that the majority of commentators have said it is mere allegory, and that Hosea only did it in symbolical action. The thing would be revolting in fact; it would be equally revolting in symbol or allegory. Moreover, how could it ever have an edifying effect upon a people ruined by sensuality and lust? It is a story of how God taught Hosea to understand God's heart, and so it was no allegory, no symbolical representation. It was a real experience. But comprehend what it was. For one thing, the very power of it depends on this, that Hosea's relation to the one unfaithful to him had at its very core and heart an exquisitely noble, genuine, true, human love. Hosea, a man of lofty character, grieved, broken-hearted for the sin of his own time, prayed to God, struggling to know God's will, and in the providence of God is led to fall into a pure, sworn, noble love. He dreams of a bright, happy home with a woman to whom his heart goes out, whom he counts true, pure, and good, and lovely in return. He loves her, has children by her, learns to know what sweet human love is. Then a terrible disaster comes upon him: she proves unfaithful, and Hosea comprehends that this guilt that has struck his heart in his own house is but a bit of the great pervading pollution of his time. It is that degraded religion, that unfaithfulness to God, that declension of all purity in the land that has broken into his own family circle and has cut his heart till it bleeds. Oh, how the prophet's soul flamed with an unfelt-before indignation against the evils of his time, when, in God's providence, he felt them in the tenderest fibres of his being! That was the beginning of God's revelation to Hosea, but not the end of it. Hosea was told how Israel had been unfaithful to God, and that made him comprehend God's loathing of Israel's sin. The fierce anger blazed out against her who had injured him; then in the desolation of his home after she had fled from him, the relentings, the agony, the old memories, the dreams that would come up, for the past could be recalled-in all that passing through Hosea's heart, he felt the echoes of the great heart of God; and then a thing almost beyond human nature happened to him. His heart grew so tender and so pitiful, that when he heard that his unfaithful spouse had been cast off by her paramour, had sunk into wretched poverty, had become a slave despised and ground down, the old love waked up within him; and he conceived a heroic deed of loyalty, forgiveness, and reclamation, almost supernatural, to go and love again, to buy her back out of her degradation and misery, which had made her repentant; not at once to restore the old ties that might not be-but with infinite, wise lovingness to give her a chance to prove that she had returned to purity, to penitence, to affection. W. G. 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