bidden likewise to pray. Then, still in faith, the men, thinking that the storm must be sent as a judgment on some sinner among them, cast lots, and again, as with Achan and with Saul, God's hand guided the lot. And then Jonah confessed, and the men stood aghast that he who believed his God to be the Lord of sea and land should think to flee from Him. He had told them the storm came for his sake, and that they would be safe if they threw him overboard, but they were very unwilling; they toiled long with the waves, and when at last they were driven by their own extreme danger to cast him forth, they entreated the Lord, the God of Jonah, not to treat them as guilty of his death, as if they had murdered him. He was thrown out into the foaming Mediterranean waves, and there was a great calm! Then the awe-struck sailors owned the power of Jehovah by offering sacrifice, from the animals in store for the voyage, and by making vows—namely, promises of offerings or observances in token of gratitude.

Our Blessed Lord Himself has told us that Jonah, though a faulty man, was His type-a prophecy in action, as the other prophets were in word. Here first, then, do we see Him willingly giving Himself to be cast, for the sake of those with Him, alone into the great abyss of death and the grave, and thus did He win safety for all in His ship, the Church.

O faithless! know ye not of old

How in the western bay,

When dark and vast the billows rolled,
A prophet slumbering lay?

The surges smote the keel as fast

As thunderbolts from heaven :
Himself into the wave he cast,

And hope and life were given.

Behold, a Mightier far is here,
Nor will He spare to leap,

For the soul's sake He loves so dear,
Into a wilder deep.

LESSON LVIII.

JONAH IN THE WHALE'S BELLY.

B.C. 790.-JONAH i. 17; ii.

Now the LORD had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Then Jonah prayed unto the LORD his God out of the fish's belly,

And said,

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, O LORD my God.
When my soul fainted within me I remembered the LORD:

And my prayer came in unto thee, into thine holy temple.
They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.

But 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.

COMMENT.-It is best at once to mention that those who are slow of heart to believe, make more difficulty about accepting this history than any other in the Bible. But in treating of it we must remember that our Lord Himself, the God who made heaven and earth, confirmed the truth of the history of Jonah in these words (Matt. xii. 40):—“ For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly, so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." These are in two Gospels, those of St. Luke and St. Matthew; and our Lord a second time mentioned the prophet. So, if even half-believers, or persons who will not accept what they will not understand, or even people of

careless tongue, make anything like a mock at this history, we must withhold ourselves from joining them, by thinking that our Saviour Himself has referred to it as a truth, and thus that scoffing at this wonder is scoffing at Him.

We cannot tell how it was possible, any more than we can tell how the ass was made to speak to Balaam. It is quite certain that enormous fish of the shark kind, called nequins, quite large enough to swallow a man, have been caught in the Mediterranean Sea, and bones of a still larger sort have been found on the coasts of Malta. One of these was found, when cut open, to have in its stomach the body of a man with his clothes on. Their mouths are quite large enough. The difficulty is, not in the fact of the fish devouring him, but in his living within the creature. This is the miracle; but, "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" were God's own words to Sarai; and there was no greater wonder in a man living inside a fish than in the dividing of the Red Sea or the Jordan. Observe, too, that the hand of God is traced throughout. It is almost as if the fish had been created on purpose. The Lord prepared a great fish; and, again, the Lord spake unto the fish. It was a miracle, and God worked it. All we have to do is to believe in it, not to trouble ourselves as to how it was done.

There is reason to think the Phoenician sailors remembered the story and told it in Greece, for the Greeks had a legend of a poet named Arion, who was about to be robbed and murdered by the crew of the ship he was in. He begged to sing one last song, and his music brought the dolphins around-music-loving fish. He leapt on the back of one, and it bore him safely to the shore. Now, as we have seen, the prophets were the Hebrew poets, and Jonah did actually compose a psalm of thanksgiving, a good deal like the 69th Psalm, when he found himself saved from the agony of drowning, which he so perfectly paints; and within this living grave, Zebulunite though he is, he still remembers Solomon's prayer, and looks towards the holy Temple-whither, indeed, faithful Israelites still resorted, though the robber-priests at Bethel lay in wait to cut them off. He has learnt now that those who go after lying vanities -empty, false fancies of their own or others-forsake their only hope of mercy; but he, when restored, will pay his sacrifice and vows to Him who alone gives salvation !

And so Jonah, hidden within the whale for three days, was the sign beforehand of the Saviour who should till the third day be hidden in the heart of the earth-imprisoned within the grave, yet living-"free among the dead,” as had already been written. And as Jonah stood alive upon the shore to be the saving of a mighty city, so should the Christ stand as He that is "alive, and was dead, and is alive for evermore," on the shore of eternal life, where there is no more sea, able to save to the uttermost those who come to Him.

LESSON LIX.

JONAH PREACHING AT NINEVEH.

ABOUT B.C. 790.-JONAH iii.

And the word of the LORD came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.

So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the LORD. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.

For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes.

And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything: let them not feed, nor drink water :

But let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands.

Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from his fierce anger, that we perish not?

And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.

COMMENT.-The command came again, and Jonah, having been chastened by his wondrous punishment, obeyed at once.

It was

a long journey, over the Eastern desert, across the Euphrates, through the fertile, well-watered garden land of Mesopotamia, even

to Nineveh, on the Tigris, the exceeding great city of three days' journey—that is, the circuit of the walls was sixty miles. Heathen writers have spoken of its wonderful walls-huge ramparts of earth, faced with brick; though, when the Greeks began to write, Nineveh was only a tradition. We know the most of that huge city and her kings from the records that they themselves caused to be made on bricks, tiles, and cylinders moulded in clay, then engraved in clear arrow-headed characters, and baked. Buried in mounds amid the ruins of the city and her palaces, lay these records till this nineteenth century, when they have been brought to light and decyphered, explaining most wonderfully the allusions in Holy Scripture. Each king seems to have built a palace for himself, and on his death it was shut up and forsaken. The gateways were guarded by colossal statues, a dream of the Cherubim themselves, for they had the countenance of a man, the body sometimes of a lion, sometimes of an ox, and the wings of an eagle—most majestic figures; and all round the courts was sculptured the history and exploits of the king, as he took cities, received captives, or hunted lions, creatures who are depicted struggling with their death-wound, while the king calmly enjoys their agony. Go to the British Museum, and there you can look on perhaps the very bulls that Jonah beheld, when in his rough prophet's garment he passed through the wealthy streets of Nineveh, among the houses richly adorned with coloured tiles, and cried aloud, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed."

The Ninevites were not an unbelieving people. They were stern, fierce, violent, and luxurious, but they had faith in the Divine powers; their inscriptions ascribe their victories to their gods, and they seemed to have believed in one chief God of heaven and earth, who is depicted as the Genius protecting their kings, —a half-length figure, with uplifted hand, in the midst of a winged circle, the emblem of eternity and protection. When they heard this dreadful doom pronounced upon them by the Hebrew prophet, belonging to a nation whom all the earth knew to have a terrible and mighty God—a prophet, too, whose own story was a miraclethey were sore afraid. The King himself, probably a man of gentler temper than his predecessor, since no conquests of his are recorded, put forth a proclamation that a national fast should be kept. Each