When the great New Testament Preacher of repentance was asked by the multitudes what they should do, he said, "He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none." When asked by the publicans he said, "Extort no more than that which is appointed you." When asked by the soldiers, he said, "Do violence to no man, neither exact anything wrongfully; and be content with your wages." The doing of such things is true repentance; and when nations so repent, God also will turn from his fierce anger and repent of the evil which he said he would do.

Nineveh's escape from impending calamity is no exception to the law that suffering follows sin. "And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, which he said he would do unto them; and he did it not." evil way, he did it not.

Because they turned from their Had they not turned, he would have done it. It is spoken of as his doing because all laws are expressions of his will and everything comes to pass according to his word. God does not personally do things with his hands like a man. His laws are not so bungling as that. They execute themselves.

Jonah came from God to warn the Ninevites that forty days more of such living would bring them to destruction. They believed God, turned from their evil way, and escaped destruction. They retreated from the fire and were not burned. As a physician says to his patient who loves high living, “If you continue to indulge as you are now doing, in forty days you will be a dead man," so God said to the Ninevites, "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown." A city threatened with famine, or pestilence, or invasion, might be similarly warned. God's judgments, that is, God's declarations concerning righteous and unrighteous living, are abroad in the earth. They are declared to us by prophets and righteous men; by all

observers who see clearly, and think truly, and speak honestly the things that belong to a nation's prosperity and peace.

Two lessons may be learned from this passage. First, God is always personally close to man. Men have failed to find God not because he is so far but because he is so near. They have ascended up into heaven and gone down into hell, but they have not looked earnestly into what is common and daily. A revelation that is not with signs and wonders is considered no revelation at all. Cities are overwhelmed before our eyes or a plague affects the whole land, and we say it is natural law. We have not learned that "Thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off." It is God's hand that is upon us.

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Speak to him thou, for he hears, and spirit

With spirit can meet;

Closer is he than breathing, and nearer

Than hands and feet."

And, second, natural laws are but modes of divine action. No doubt we live under a reign of law, but we need not on that account accept the carpenter theory of creation, which Carlyle treated with such noble scorn, and believe that God made the universe like a clock, wound it up and left it to tick by itself, till it runs down, concerning himself no more with it. God is in all his laws. At last God and law are one. "All's law and all's love." Scientific men, finding out the laws of sickness and health, pointing out the fact that "foul drains, foul air, foul water, foul bodies are breeding dens of disease,” are making known to us the laws of God, and are, if we only knew it, God's prophets warning us that when a nation will not turn from such evil ways it will be overthrown.

They are telling us that back of all shapes and forces, behind all the facts and powers of nature, there is a nameless, imponderable force, unknown to them, inscrutable to them, always at work and wholly irresistible.

Shall we heed the message, and recognize this power as the power of One, whom by searching we can not find out; of One who said in our dear human speech, "Lo, I am with you alway"? And who also said, "The men of Nineveh shall stand up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, a greater than Jonah is here."

Edward B. Mason.

ISRAEL OFTEN REPROVED.

AMOS 4: 4-13.

"Come to Bethel, and transgress," etc.

THIS entire prophecy is one of denunciation. Only once or twice is there even hinted the possibility of better things, and only at the very close, like a gleam of sunset glory at the end of a day of gloom, is the full promise given of a restoration of Israel to goodness and to glory. The prophecies against the six enemies of the chosen people and against Judah, with which the book begins, are only preparatory to the full description of the sin of Israel and the punishment which is to come upon its people. Israel, so far as it is like the nations that know not God, is exposed to the same judgments as they. And every nation, so far as it is like the Israel against which God spoke through his servant Amos, is addressed in the same way.

I. The prophecy is addressed to those who abuse their privileges.

Israel was the chosen people, having the oracles of God. They knew the spiritual being and holy character of Jehovah. They had entered into covenant with him. They had been taught both how to worship him and how to please him in their lives. They lived in all the light there was in their day, and with the paths more carefully marked out, because the fullest light was not yet come. And yet they did not walk as children of the light.

They sinned even in their worship. The shrines at

Bethel and at Gilgal were the centers of a mingled idolatry and Jehovah-worship. The more they went through the forms of worship there, the more they sinned. Though they brought sacrifices every morning and tithed their increase or possessions every three days, though they offered not only unleavened bread but the leavened also, though they encouraged one another to multiply their free-will offerings; however much they might increase their devotion to such religious forms as pleased them, all this was only the increase of their sin according to the taunting exhortation of the prophet.

Mere religiousness never will save a people or a person. External forms grow more rigid when the life has gone out of them, and so announce the loss. The substitution of services which we enjoy for such as please God are worse than vain. To worship the Lord and serve our own gods is the height of impiety. The calf-worship was worse than Baal-worship, because it was a more conscious defiance of Jehovah.

Israel was a prospered people. These days of Jeroboam II were at the very summit of its prosperity. The northern kingdom extended to the limits reached under Solomon. Damascus was taken; Moab was reconquered; Israel was powerful and rich. But Israel, instead of making of this richness a very garden of the Lord, suffered all the weeds to grow out of it which so easily find root in such a soil. The sins which mark prosperity are the sins of the prosperous classes. Those who were high in position and rich in possessions in Israel were indulgent toward themselves and oppressive toward the poor. The denunciation of these sins marks the whole book of Amos. It was this condition which called the shepherd from Tekoa to the royal sanctuary at the height of Israel's prosperity to denounce their sin and to announce their coming judgment.