Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God" (Micah vi. 6-8). Palestine. propaga truth. 6. In the times of the settlement in Canaan, the reasonings Israel in of the Gibeonites early introduced them into the sanctuary of Observathe truth (Josh. ix.) Rahab's observation of the fortunes of the tion and new people had earlier saved her and her father's house (Josh. tion of the ii.) The Midianite soldier's interpretation of his comrade's dream on the night of Gideon's onslaught (Judg. vii. 14), and the deliberations of the Philistine lords and priests after the fall of their god Dagon (1 Sam. vi. 1-6), were examples of compelled acknowledgment of Jehovah, however little it resulted in religious reception of the truth at the time. The battles of Saul and of David in the beginning of the monarchy, and the intercourse of David the fugitive, and afterwards of David the king, with surrounding peoples, must have called forth much of self-educating thought, the seeds of true thought concerning Jehovah. In the periods embraced by the reigns of David and Solomon, the kingdom became an empire of the rank of the great eastern monarchies, as wide in its dominion as the variable Assyrian empires; and Solomon's understanding of the design of Israel's position among the nations is clearly expressed in his great religious prayer (2 Chron. vi. 32). "The stranger coming from a far country for Thy name's sake" expresses exactly the education of the world to faith. The extent to which the Hebrew king contemplated that education follows in his prayer, "that all people of the earth may know Thy name, and fear Thee as doth Thy people Israel" (ver. 33). Glimpses of how, in those two reigns, the light may have shot out among the darkened races, are afforded in the names of some of David's, the religious king's, fastest friendsUriah the Hittite, Ittai of Gath, and Hiram, king of Tyre. We can hardly conceive a believer of David's whole-heartedness not seeking to instruct in the truth the members of his bodyguard, the Philistine Cherethites. A suggestive fact of the same period is the residence of the ark in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite, and the Lord blessing the house of the alien because of it (1 Chron. xiii. 14). Heathen embassies seem to have attended the grand procession of the ark to the city of David (Ps. xlvii., lxviii.) The Arabian, or possibly Abyssinian, queen, attracted in her own person to Jerusalem by the fame of Solomon, and "all the earth seeking to him to hear his wisdom which God put in his heart" (1 Kings x. 24), give a high idea of the influence that must have been exercised in his reign by Hebrew affairs upon the thoughts of neighbouring peoples, with so many of whom he came to form those close connections which in turn ruined his own religious fidelity. A wide interchange of thought did evidently take place; the human philosophy, the "wisdom" of the Syrians, the Egyptians, and the Idumæan "children of the East," flowing into Israel, and "the exceeding much wisdom and understanding and largeness of heart God gave to Solomon" (1 Kings iv. 29-34) flowing out. The brilliant intercourse of high thought is commemorated in the names of the most famous contemporaries with whose wisdom Solomon's "excelling" wisdom was compared, "Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, and Chalcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol," and Hiram, king of Tyre, whose interchange of questions, the form of philosophical discussion at the time, with Solomon, is noticed by the historians of his own country. The exercise of mutual influence between Israel and "the nations" we find repeated in later reigns continually. The process becomes perpetual of wide presentation of the light to those peoples who were in contact with the keepers of the oracles, though the reverse influence of idolatry, finding many in Israel to relish its corruptions, was too often a result of the intercourse. The Syrian Benhadad and Hazael, and the Jewish king Ahaz, are examples of both effects of the intercourse. Jehu, the appointed destroyer of Ahab's Baal-worship in Israel, is among the kings, his conflict with whom Sennacherib, the great Assyrian monarch, engraved in his inscriptions. An unavoidably impressive contact into which the same Assyrian king came with Hezekiah, the brightest witness to divine truth of all the kings of Judah, is narrated in the sacred history, and is suggestively omitted in any of the proud narratives of Sennacherib's own monuments yet discovered. The rising subordinate kingdom of Babylon, soon to become supreme under Nebuchadnezzar, seems to have sought the friendship of that Jewish king (2 Kings xx. 12). Jehu's near successor, the second Jeroboam, stretched the northern kingdom into an empire recalling the days of Solomon's wide dominion. Breaking the power of Benhadad's kingdom, he established Israel as the conterminous neighbour of the Mesopotamian power. The contact of the Hebrew kingdoms, occasional or frequent, with their most powerful neighbour, was soon to become the interfusion of the holy people among the nations of that mighty empire; and by the captivities, Babylon, thenceforth for a century the dominant power of the world, became as it were the publishing house of the divine truth uttered by the prophets of the captive people. In itself and in its relations to the outer world, that all-influential state became, as it has been called, a second Palestine; as did Lower Egypt from the same age, till it became the residence of a Jewish hierarchy and the place of a religious capital, and at last the fountain from which the Greek language carried Hebrew theology over the civilised world. missions to 7. Besides these large secular causes of religious influence, Prophetic there was added in the prophetic period, extending in rough heathens. outline from Rehoboam to Ezra, much of direct revelation of the truth to "the nations" extraneous to Abraham's seed. The prophetic institution has been noticed, as bringing a grand development of spiritual truth, rising above all positive appointments, filling with spirit, or superseding or rebuking, the formal ceremonies and priestly or kingly instruments of Jehovah's religious guidance of His own people. A kindred development of the influence of national contact, as has just been observed, took place in the same period, and an expansion too of the mission of the prophets beyond the boundaries of the sacred people. Elijah's range of prophetic travel embraced the east of the Jordan, the mountains of Moab, the southern desert, and the western state of Tyre and Sidon. It was there, indeed, into the very home of the idolatry of which he was the ordained enemy in Israel, unto a widow of Zarephath The cap tivities. Education though there were many widows in Israel, as the Lord bade 8. The imperial plain of Mesopotamia, the field of so much of the ancient world's history, which was the scene of the of Mesopo- earliest of God's grand instructive lessons after the Flood, universal making men or peoples of the earth know His all-ruling posi- tamian tion, was the scene during the long captivity of a series of im- monarchs. pressively notable approaches of providence and revelation to the great heads of the heathen world. Daniel's record of Nebuchadnezzar is essentially a record of this education of the outer world of heathenism to the knowledge of the true God. Three occasions or stages of progressive compelled feeling of the truth of God are noted: First, We find, in the beginning of the great king's reign, Daniel interpreting to him a dream, in which "the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter" (Dan. ii. 45); telling him what the vision was that had gone from him, and declaring to him the grand revelation which the image of gold, and silver, and brass, and iron, and clay, and its destruction by the stone cut without hands, was meant to give of the coming dominions of the earth. How extremely instructive as to our present point of consideration is this record of the revelation of a future, no more Israelite but mundane-one announcing the connection in which the dominion of the fulness of times should come in the line of earthly dominions; and of that revelation being made, not to an Israelite, but, appropriately, to a Gentile monarch, the head of the first of the succession of "kingdoms,” the end of which was to be the kingdom filling the whole earth.” The contemporary faith impressed on that head of the heathen world by the interpreted vision, his grand compelled acknowledgment of the true God, we have in Dan. ii. 47: "The king answered unto Daniel, and said, Of a truth it is, that your God is a God of gods, and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing thou couldest reveal this secret." Second, After the deliverance from the fiery furnace of the three Hebrew youths whom the monarch had been tricked into commanding to be thrown into it for refusing to be idolaters, we read the much advanced thought: "Nebuchadnezzar spake, and said, Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, who hath sent His angel, and delivered His servants that trusted in Him, and have changed the king's word, and yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god except their own God. Therefore I make a decree, That every people, nation, and language, |