ing by him. This is our strength to bear, to hopethe Lord is with us. All that we can see may be dark enough and sad enough; the Holy Ghost would lift us to share the hope and the joy of Christ. We must climb, we must soar on the wings of faith, and command the horizon of a wider world. There is light all round, light above. As we rise we see that the darkness is of the earth, of the moment, the daylight is eternal. We must stand with Christ. "For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross, and despised the shame." In the strength of that joy He bears the burden of the world, He upbears it with strong, conquering, redeeming hand. He sees gleams of light upon it which are hidden from our feeble vision; He sees an end beyond it, whose glorious beauty fills the whole sphere with splendour and joy. If we share the sadness of Christ, we must share His gladness ; and believe that every day, every moment, Calvary is bearing, not here only, but in the universe, immeasurably blessed and glorious fruit.

Here is our stay, here is our inspiration, when we long for wings to bear us to the realms where rest is untroubled, and the sunlight is eternal. God standing by us, "God with us," here in the strain and the darkness; lifting the burden of the care for our own future and the world's, which else would crush us, and laying it on His own Almighty heart.

XV.

FAINT, YET PURSUING.

"Faint, yet pursuing them.”—Judges viii. 4.

THE wars of which so much of the Old Testament history is a record, are charged with moral difficulties to the Christian apologist who holds himself bound to maintain that the captains and seers of Israel always interpreted rightly the Divine commandments, and had the explicit warrant of Jehovah for every terrible deed of blood which the narrative declares that they were bidden to do. They furnish a ready and ample storehouse of objection to the unbeliever, who professes to recoil from the records of slaughter and devastation which stain the sacred page; while many a pious student of the Bible, touched by the soft spirit of our modern civilisation, shudders a little as he hurries by these dark passages of his sacred books. That there are dark passages, some of them very dark, may be freely confessed; but perhaps, some shades of the darkness are specially due to the tone of our somewhat sickly and effeminate times. To men who lived in more stormy ages, the difficulties which oppress us hardly presented themselves. It is remarkable that the generation of Englishmen

which made the noblest and purest attempt to order the life of a State after the Divine commandment, which is recorded in the world's history, found something in these old books which was in tune with their endeavours and aspirations; something which I think that we, with our modern shivering at the sight of blood, mostly miss.

But these wars of Israel seem to me on the whole, to offer the grandest witness which I find in history, that the "God of heaven" is not as a rule on the side of the “big battalions"; that in fact there is no rule about it as regards bigness, God being always and everywhere on the side of integrity, purity, righteousness, and truth. This assurance has been borne in upon men in all ages by many an impressive lesson. The big battalions at Thermopyla and Marathon, at Granson, Morat, and the great Armada fight, were shattered against the rock of superior moral manhood, the freeman's resolution to defend all that makes a freeman's life worth the living, or, losing it, to die. But this seems to me to be the one constant, emphatic testimony of Jewish military history, from the day when Abraham with his three hundred chased the Mesopotamian kings, to the last triumph of the nation under the glorious conduct of Judas Maccabæus.

It was freedom, truth, patriotism, and the love of God, which constantly shattered the big battalions in those wars. The race was not to the swift, nor the spoil to the strong. Again and again the armies of the powerful states around them, broke

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against the rock of Jewish heroism, and were scattered like foam. It was but a little place, that land of promise; and yet, so long as their faith was firm, that small but disciplined and gallant nation held their mountain citadel secure against every foe. The great Nile plain on the one hand, the great Mesopotamian plain on the other, nursed vast herds of men, who suffered themselves to be driven like herds, at the will of the despots who claimed the right to lord it over the world. The brute mass and force of these huge empires hung like a perpetual menace around Jerusalem. But the Jews sang their glorious Psalms, which must have rolled grandly through the field of battle, and while they believed in them they held their freedom against the world. The whole history of their wars, alike of their victories and their reverses, seems to me charged with the assertion, that it is in the might of God's hand, and in the purpose of God's heart, to make the masters of the big battalions understand, that there is that which in the long run conquers more surely and reigns more mightily than brute mass and force-Righteousness and Truth.

I am not saying that the discernment of this in the providential conduct of human affairs, is at all times easy; nor dare we say that the method of the Divine hand, is at all times square with our measures of righteousness and truth. "God's ways are not as our ways, and God's thoughts are not as our thoughts." They proceed upon deeper and truer insight, and aim, by far-reaching methods, at far-off

results. To comprehend God's ways we must simply know all things, and command the horizon of eternity.

It is just impossible for us to interpret, with even plausible truth, all the ways of God in the guidance and government of men, by any rules which we can formulate. Clouds and darkness are round about Him." The entire key to His plans is not entrusted to us. As we know Him more perfectly we understand better His dispensations. But enough shines out, not from His word only, but from history, patent to every believing eye, to justify our confidence that "justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne." There is a stream of things without question, outside of us, "not ourselves," which "makes for righteousness," and which sustains and bears onward right-doers. These Jews, when their eye was clear and their faith was firm, struck in with its current, and it bore them again and again, in spite of enormous disparities of force, to victory. The apostle of the light and sweetness of intellectual culture, knows nothing more about this stream or tendency than that it is "not ourselves." We think that we have ample warrant for believing, that it is the pressure of the hand of the living God.

And I am free to confess, that it seems specially hard to discern the working of this law in the days in which we live, and under the conditions of our modern life. The tendency of our times is to vast aggregations, and to high organisation in all the departments of public life. All things run naturally