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THEY WERE TIED TO NAMES.

[Serm. attention of the Rabbis, would be the topographical, or merely incidental, part. I do not see that it was any disparagement to their wisdom, that they recognized a divine order and contrivance even in such circumstances as these. Places sometimes serve very remarkably to connect together different periods in the life of an individual man. A house or field which belonged to the associations of the child becomes quite unexpectedly identified with the history of his later years. Old men long to lay their bones where they played as boys. Devout men welcome such coincidences and recurrences as proofs that they are under a divine education. Why should the like be wanting in a national story? Why should they not be noted in a book which traces all the parts of it as the fulfilment of a divine purpose? We do not complain of the Jewish doctors because they had skill in detecting such indications in their Scriptures, but because they could detect no others. Micah saw that honor had been put and would be put on Bethlehem to humble the pride of Jerusalem The scribes, full of the pride of their city, full of personal pride, could read the name of the village; the moral of it was utterly lost upon them. And therefore when He who was born at Bethlehem appeared before them as the man of Nazareth, Micah's sentence, which might have enabled them to understand that part of Christ's humiliation also, became a stumbling block to them. 'Search and look,' they said, 'for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.' The signs and tokens of the Divine Man were nothing; the place was everything. And the last words were utterly forgotten. They thought of One who was to come as their Ruler and Prince. They did not think of One whose goings forth had been of old, from Everlasting. They wanted a stronger Herod,

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a native Augustus: they did not want God manifest in the flesh.

And, dear brethren, it will not avail us much to believe that a child has been born at Bethlehem 1850 years ago, or even to believe that He will come again in the glory of His Father and of the holy Angels. Unless we confess Him as our Ruler and Shepherd now, our thoughts of His past humiliation and of His future greatness will alike deceive us. Our pride will not give way before the dim recollection of what He was, our hopes will not be kindled by the vague dream of what He may be. To know that He Is and that He is with us as He was with our forefathers, and as He has promised to be with our children's children, this is the strength and consolation that we need; this only can enable us to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. His going forth was of old from Everlasting; therefore may we bring Him our gold and frankincense and myrrh, as those did who kneeled before the cradle in the manger; therefore may we hope to be like Him, when we shall see Him as He is, in that Kingdom which shall have no end.

SERMON XX.

THE EVIL CITY SAVED AND DESTROYED.

LINCOLN'S INN, 2ND SUNDAY AFTER EASTER.-APRIL 25, 1852.

NAHUM, I. 1.

The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.

THERE are two prophetical books in the Old Testament which have no direct reference to the chosen people, those of Jonah and of Nahum. Both of them are concerned with the fate of Nineveh. I alluded to Jonah when I was speaking of Jeroboam II., in whose reign he is said to have lived. But I merely alluded to him because I was then occupied with the history of the ten tribes, upon which the Book of Jonah throws no light, and because that book, though it records a passage in the life of an old prophet, does not profess to have been written by him. It may have been put together, as eminent critics think it was, in a time much later than that of Jeroboam. I now propose to speak of these prophets. The city of which they both speak was the capital of the empire which has been brought so frequently before us by Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah. Jonah and Nahum, though they contemplate this empire in different periods, both see it not triumphant but tottering. They present it therefore to us in a new point of view, and

Serm. XX.] THE UNSCRIPTURAL LOVE OF MARVELS. 343

they illustrate the office of the Jewish prophet the more strikingly for their apparent neglect of Jewish affairs.

The book of Jonah, the son of Amittai, has seemed to some so curiously contrived to explain that office and the office of the Jewish people, that they have fancied it contains a parable instead of a history. Several circumstances have tended to strengthen them in this opinion. I have admitted that it differs from the other books with which it is associated in that it appears to be a narrative written by a third party, rather than a discourse proceeding from the person whose name it bears. Moreover there is one event related (very briefly) in that narrative, which has drawn away the minds of readers, especially trivial and superficial readers, from the other parts of it. The passion for mere wonderment is in general so little gratified by the sacred records, so much less than by almost any books ancient or modern that one can read,—the divine element in these books is so closely associated with common earthly life, its miracles are such assertions of eternal laws, and such protests against the irregular acts of the magician and the enchanter, that those, who in their hearts prefer an oriental, classical, or middle-age legend to their plain statements of facts or profound revelations of principles, eagerly seize upon every Biblical story which has obviously a rare and exceptional character. The enemies of the Scriptures of course readily gratify their propensity, allowing them to maintain, and vigorously supporting the opinion, that these are the standards by which we are to judge the book; that throughout it is in contradiction to human experience, not the discovery of something which lies deeper than human experience. Accordingly the words, "The Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah: and Jonah was in

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FACTS AND MORALS.

[Serm. the belly of the fish three days and three nights," have given occasion to a series of refinements, speculations, explanations, arguments, respecting the nature and possibility of the incident, which it is wearisome and humiliating to read or to think of. One who considers how great and wonderful a thing a preservation from the deep is, who believes that the Lord is the author of every such preservation, who feels at the same time that he does not understand and is never likely to understand the method of this particular preservation, dwells on that which must at all events be the essence of the story, and leaves its accidents as he finds. them. To the mere hunter for rarities and curiosities, the accident is every thing, the essence nothing. He pores over the whale, he forgets God. To the mere critic the appearance of such a prodigy is decisive as to the character of the whole story. It must be merely composed, he concludes, for the sake of a moral; it either is not meant to describe what actually occurred, or the narrator was deceived by a loose tradition of it which had come down from a distant age.

Now assuredly if a holy man of some later time were led to meditate upon a story which had been preserved respecting some venerable seer and to put it forth for the benefit of his contemporaries, there is no doubt that the truth which he saw in it would be more important in his eyes than the man who was the subject of it or than any good or ill fortune which befel him. He would not have been a holy or inspired man if he had not cared more to understand the principles of God's government, and to make them known, than to hear or tell any new thing. But a fact may embody a divine meaning at least as well as a fiction. The self-will and transgression of an actual individual may be the most complete of all parables to illustrate the self-will and trans