century and leave the city and the law to take care of themselves.

Character is a key to facts; and it was not in Nehemiah's character to live and desert the two great works of his life for fifty years or so.

When, after two centuries of small events, small men, and no history, big events and the big men they generate came again to Judea and raised history from the dead, we find the stamp of Nehemiah and his pupils marked on the Jewish mind so plainly that the story of the Maccabees seems but a natural sequence of Nehemiah's chronicle.

Nehemiah fought tooth and nail for all the law of Moses, and especially the Sabbath day. Nehemiah tore the holy seed out of the embraces of the heathen, and ended the moral influences of idolatry.

This was sure to drive the idolater, sooner or later, from the bloodless weapons that alone can conquer the mind, to persecution and brute force; and accordingly, in the next Hebrew record, behold those weapons levelled against constant souls, and the sword of heroic Judas.

Nehemiah, then, is not what hasty judges have called him, one of the lesser lights." He is a gigantic figure that stalked across the page of history luminous, then glided into the dark abyss of time, but scattered sparks of historic light, and left, not one, but two immortal works behind him.

As to the character of his piety, he relies on God, seeks His glory, and is unceasing in good works for his nation. But then, he despised lucre, and sought not the praise of men for those works.

It is no small matter to look to God alone, with much light or little. He lived under a covenant of works, and thought accordingly; yet methinks he needed but a word or two from Christ's own lips to be a Christian saint.

V

JONAH

JONAH, the son of Amittai, figures amongst the prophetical writers, but he was not one; he was only a seer, like Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, the prophet that came out of Judah, and many others. Like them, his inspiration was occasional, but taught him something of the mind of God (Jonah iv. 1).

His other predictions are lost for want of a chronicler, but a master-hand has recorded his great prophecy and the strange events that preceded and followed it. This little Hebrew

seer suddenly received a grand and startling commissionto go to the banks of the Tigris and threaten the oldest, largest, and wickedest city in the world with speedy destruction for its sins. That still, small voice, which no mortal had ever defied, thrilled Jonah's ear. "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before Me."

Here was an honour for a petty seer. His betters would have received it with pious exultation. Samuel, or Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, John the Baptist, or Paul, would have risen like lions, and gone forth with strong faith and pious pride to thunder against great Nineveh. But this strange man received the order silently, and silently evaded it. He did not hang his head and object like poor crushed Moses, when the hot patriotism of his youth had been cooled into apathy by exile, family ties, and forty years' intercourse with Midianitish bullocks. Jonah received the Divine command, quietly turned his back upon it and on Nineveh, fled to the seaport Joppa, and sailed in a ship for distant Tarshish.

So imperfect was his inspiration at this time that he thought the hand of the God that he served could not reach him on a foreign sea.

They got into blue water, and such was his confidence that he told the ship's company he was flying from the tutelary God of Palestine. His hearers, no more enlightened than himself, received his communication with no misgivings.

But presently a mighty tempest from the Lord fell upon the sea, and the ship was in mortal danger. The mariners were terrified, and cried every man to his God, and, not trusting too much to that, threw the cargo overboard. But there was one man who did not share their apprehensions. He went quietly to sleep, and neither the roaring sea, the whistling wind, nor the poor, creaking, labouring ship disturbed him. And of all the people whose lives were in such peril, who was this one calm sleeper?

It was Jonah.

But the shipmaster came to him, and shook him, and insisted on his calling on his God. But lo! the peril increased, and from the suddenness and violence of the storm, they began to suspect the anger of the gods against some person in that doomed vessel. So they cast lots to learn

who was the culprit, and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they questioned him as to his country and occupation, hoping, somehow or other, to gather how he had offended heaven.

Then Jonah, who now realised his folly and the narrow views he had taken of Him who is omnipresent and almighty, replied, "I am an Hebrew; and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who hath made the sea and the dry land."

Then the quaking mariners remembered he had told them he was flying from his God: and now behold that God, by his own confession, was not a local divinity, but the creator of sea and land.

Connecting this new revelation with the sudden tempest and their increasing peril, the men were in mortal fear, and put a terrible question to Jonah: "What shall we do to you to save our own lives?"

Then Jonah, faulty as his character was, shone out like the sun. No shirking; no craven subterfuges. He looked them in the face and said:

"What you must do is, lay hold on me, and cast me into the sea, so shall the sea be calm to you; for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.'

Thus did Jonah show himself a prophet and a man. Though terror-stricken, murderous eyes glared on him, and the fearful sea yawned and raged for him, he was so true and so just that he delivered his own doom unflinchingly.

Nobility begets nobility; and the partners of his peril could not bear to sacrifice a man in whom they saw no evil, but, on the contrary, justice, heroism, and self-sacrifice. The poor, honest fellows said, Anything but that,” and chose rather to be wrecked on shore. Their ship, after all, was but a galley lightened of its cargo, so they got out their long oars and made a gallant effort to row their trireme ashore, and there leave her bones, but save their own lives and that self-sacrificing hero. This was not to be. Sixty hands labouring at those oars could not prevail against the one hand that hurled the raging sea at that labouring galley and drove her from the land.

Then these doomed men resigned themselves to the will of Jonah's God. They cried to Him most pathetically, "We beseech Thee, O Lord, we beseech Thee, let us not perish for this man's life.' And on the other hand, they begged that if Jonah was innocent his blood might not be laid on them, since they had done all they could to learn

the Divine will. And when they had so prayed, they took up Jonah and cast him into the sea.

No doubt, as that pale but unflinching face went down without a cry or murmur, they looked on awhile with horror and misgiving; but not for long; the sea subsided as if by magic. The waves were calmed, the wind abated, the vessel was saved. The rescued mariners worshipped the God of Jonah.

To his late companions Jonah was lost for ever. But God chastises His rebellious servants-not destroys them. Some monster of the deep was sent to that ship's side, and swallowed up Jonah as he sank.

It was a terrible punishment. Think of it! For all these things are skimmed so superficially that they never really come home to the mind, least of all to the mind that is bent on preaching doctrines and not on comprehending facts. The man found himself in a place cold as death and dark as pitch; no room to move hand or foot. After the first shock of utter amazement, the sliminess, the smell, the water rushing through the fish's gills, must have told him where he was. Oh, then conceive his horror! So he was not to die in the sea and there an end; but to lie in the belly of a great fish till he rotted away; or to be brought up within range of the creature's teeth and gnawed away piecemeal and digested in fragments.

Take my word for it, the poor wretch passed many hours of agony, expecting a slow death of torment, and would have given the world to be vomited into the raging sea and perish by drowning—a mild and common death.

But as the hours rolled on and death came no nearer, he began to hope a little, and to repent more and more. The man was soon crushed into that state of self-abasement and penitence, out of which a forgiving God often raises His faulty servants to great honour and happiness. prayed to God out of the fish's belly, and said:

He

"I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord, and He heard me out of the belly of hell cried I, and Thou heardest my voice. For Thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me. Then I said,

I am cast out of Thy sight; yet I will look again toward Thy holy temple. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were

wrapped about my head. I went down to the bottoms of the mountains; the earth with her bars was about me for ever: yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption, 0 Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord : and my prayer came in unto Thee, into Thine holy temple. I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving: I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is of the Lord. And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.”

Who was now the happiest man in all the world? Why, this forgiven sinner; this punished, humbled, rewarded rebel.

To him life was ten times sweeter; the sunshine, the shelly beach, the purple sea, with its myriad dimples and prismatic hues, ten times more lovely than to other men.

Lazarus was happy, returning from the grave to his beloved Master, and his darling sisters that wept on his neck for joy.

Happy was the widow's only son, whom the Master, mighty yet tender, delivered with His own hand from his coffin to his bereaved mother, wild with amazement and maternal love. But both these men came back from the neutral state of mere unconsciousness to daylight and the joys of life.

Not so Jonah. He had been buried alive, and came back from the sickening horror of a living tomb, from a darkness and a death that he felt, to the warm bright sunshine, the glittering sand painted with radiant shells, the purple sea smiling myriad dimples and rainbowed with prismatic hues.

Whilst he gazed at these things with a rapture they had never yet created in him, and poured out his soul in gratitude, there came to him once more the still, small voice of his Master, clear, silvery, dispassionate, and divinely beautiful.

"Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.

Jonah now obeyed with alacrity and went to Nineveh, strong in his Divine commission.

Nineveh having perished about two centuries before Herodotus visited the Tigris, we have no better authority as to its size and population than the words of the Book of Jonah. We may, however, rely on the universal tradition that it was a city of vast size and magnificence, and three days' journey in circuit by Jewish computation, or 480 Greek stadia, which two measurements agree, being sixty English miles.