Most just was the application of this passage by an apostolic pastor to the harsh Calvinists of the last century'Get ye from under your parched gourd of "reprobation: " 'let not your eye be evil because God is good: nor fret, ' like Jonah, because the Father of mercies extends His com'passion even to all the humbled heathen of the great city ' of Nineveh." And not to Calvinists only, but to all who would sacrifice the cause of humanity to some professional or theological difficulty is the startling truth addressed, 'Doest thou well to be angry? God repented of the evil that 'He had said that He would do unto them, and He did it not.' The foredoomed destruction of the wicked, the logical consistency of the Prophet's teaching, must go for nothing before the justice and the great kindness' of God-before the claims even of the unconscious heathen children, of the repentant heathen king. Nineveh shall be spared, although the Prophet has declared that in forty days it shall be overthrown.2

In the scorching blast that beat upon the head of Jonah, when he fainted and wished himself to die,' and with a sharp cry repeated, in the pangs of his own destitution, what he had before murmured only as a theological difficulty, the sacred narrative leaves him. In the popular traditions of East and West, Jonah's name alone has survived the Lesser Prophets of the Jewish Church. It still lives, not only in many a Mussulman tomb along the coasts and hills of Syria, but in the thoughts and devotions of Christendom. The marvellous escape from the deep, through a single passing allusion in the Gospel history, was made an emblem of the deliverance of Christ Himself from the jaws of death and the

Fletcher of Madeley (Essay on Truth) in Sermons, ii. 552.

2 How difficult it was even in the Jewish Church to understand that a

prediction could be frustrated, appears

from the consequences drawn in Tobit, xiv. 4-8, from Jonah's warning. On the other hand, for the true character of Prophetic teaching, on which it is founded, see Lectures XX., XL.

grave. The great Christian doctrine of the boundless power of human repentance received its chief illustration from the repentance of the Ninevites at the preaching of Jonah. There is hardly any figure from the Old Testament which the early Christians in the Catacombs so often took as their consolation in persecution as the deliverance of Jonah on the seashore, and his naked form stretched out in the burning sun beneath the sheltering gourd. But these all conspire with the story itself in proclaiming that still wider lesson of which I have spoken. It is the rare protest of theology against the excess of theology-it is the faithful delineation, through all its various states, of the dark, sinister, selfish side of even great religious teachers. It is the grand Biblical appeal to the common instincts of humanity, and to the universal love of God, against the narrow dogmatism of sectarian polemics. There has never been a generation' which has not needed the majestic revelation of sternness and charity, each bestowed where most deserved and where least expected, in the sign of the Prophet Jonah.'

1 Matt. xii. 40. The difficulty of this verse is well known. It neither agrees with the context (which speaks not of the deliverance, but of the preaching, of Jonah), nor with the facts of the case as recorded in the two (not three) days and nights of the Entombment, nor with the cor

responding passage of Luke (xi. 30). But, even if (like Acts i. 18, 19, and Matt. xxiii. 35) it is a later addition, it is an interpretation of unquestionable antiquity, and widely diffused throughout the early Church.

32.

2 Matt. xvi. 4, xii. 41; Luke xi. 30,

358

LECTURE XXXIV.

THE FALL OF SAMARIA.

THE external glory of Israel was raised to its highest pitch by Jeroboam the Second; but its internal condition already indicated its approaching dissolution. On that condition a sudden light is thrown from a new quarter. We have at last reached the point where the Prophetical spirit began to express itself, not only in action and speech, but in writing. It was in the kingdom of Judah that this development took place in its greatest force; but it took its rise in the kingdom of Israel, in which, so long as it lasted, the Prophets found their chief home and their chief mission. Amos and Hosea, both belong, by birth or by their sphere of action, to the northern kingdom. Some few glimpses, too, into the state of Israel are afforded by the great Isaiah, now just appearing as a young man in the neighbouring kingdom of Judah.

It is from these several prophetic documents that we arrive at a knowledge of the state of society in Israel, such as we have not obtained of any period since the time of David. Their whole tone is so true to nature, so descriptive of the sins of actual States and Churches, that when the preacher, who of all perhaps in modern times has most nearly resembled an ancient Prophet, wished to denounce the sins of Florence, he used the Prophets of this period as his textbook. Savonarola's sermons on Amos are almost like Amos

himself come to life again.

The foreign civilisation of the house of Omri-the long

state of

depravation of the public worship from the time of Jeroboam Moral the First had produced their natural effect amongst the Samaria. higher classes of society. One of the most widely-spread vices was drunkenness in its most revolting forms. Wine and new wine take away the heart.'1 In the day of our King the princes have made him sick with skins of wine.'2 This was the canker in the beauty of the most glorious scene in Palestine-the luxuriant vale of Shechem, and the green hill of Samaria.3 The gross intoxication of the Israelite nobles and priests almost resembles that which unhappily prevailed amongst the English aristocracy and clergy in the last century. It extended even to the most sacred functionaries: 'They ' have erred through wine, and through strong drink are gone 'out of the way; the priest and the prophet have erred 'through strong drink, they are swallowed up by wine, they ' are out of the way through strong drink; they err in vision, 'they stumble in giving judgment; for all tables are full of ' vomit and filthiness, so that there is no place clean.' the monastic Nazarites were either required or forced against their vow to drink the forbidden wine." Great ladies, who are compared to the fat cows or heifers of Bashan, that feed on the rich mountains of Samaria, say to their lords, Bring, ' and let us drink.' Out of this terrible vice sprang a brood of other yet more desolating sins-licentiousness in all its forms; oppression of the poor; self-indulgent luxury; robbery and murder. To the eye of the Prophet' these it was, and nothing else, which he saw, wherever he looked, whatever he heard, swearing, lying, killing, stealing, adultery,' one stream of blood meeting another, 'till they joined in one ' wide inundation.'s Many of the details are preserved to us.

Even

' Hosea iv. 13, vii. 4; Amos ii. 7.

• Ibid. iv. 1, 2 (Pusey).

Innocent debtors were bought and sold as slaves, even for the sake of possessing a pair of costly sandals. The very dust which they threw on their heads as a sign of mourning was grudged to them. The large cloaks which were their only wrappers were used for the couches of the hard-hearted 1 creditors. Strict as was still the profession of religion-holy days, offerings, tithes, sabbaths faithfully observed,2—Priests, Prophets, Nazarites highly honoured 3 - sacred ephod and image duly reverenced-yet even in the very Temple of Bethel the luxurious listless revelry was carried on; pilgrims coming to the sacred places at Mizpeh and Gilead beyond the Jordan, or to Tabor and Shechem, in the heart of the kingdom, were attacked by bands of robbers, often headed by the Priests themselves. Even the Jewish' craft, as we deem it in modern times, appeared in the readiness with which religious festivals were pressed into the service of hard bargains. The calf was still worshipped, as the sign of the True God,' at Dan and Bethel, but the darker idolatries of Phoenicia, authorised there also under Ahab, had been never entirely uprooted. The Temple of Ashtaroth still remained in Samaria.8 Baal was a familiar name throughout the country. Licentious rites were practised in the groves and on the hill-tops. 10 The ancient sanctuary of Gilgal was at once a seat of constant pilgrimage, surrounded by altars, and yet also a centre of wide-spread heathen abominations."1

As the rise of the house of Jehu had been ushered in by Prophetic voices, so was its doom. As in the struggles of the earlier Jeroboam, so in the splendour of the second Jeroboam, a Prophet from Judah came to denounce the crimes of Israel.

1 Amos ii. 6, 7, viii. 5, 6 (Pusey).

2 Hosea ii. 11, viii. 13; Amos v. 4,

v. 21-23.

3 Amos ii. 11.

• Hosea iii. 4 (Ewald).

5 Amos ii. 8.

Hosea v. 1, vi. 8, 9.

Hosea viii. 5, 6, x. 5, xi. 1. 82 Kings xiii. 6.

Hosea ii. 8-17, xi. 2.

10 Ibid. iv. 13.

Ibid. iv. 15, ix. 15,.xii. 11;

Amos iv. 4.