are such third-rate blessings that God bestows them indiscriminately on the evil and the good. But noble resolves and high purposes-" courtliness and the desire of (true) fame, and love of truth, and all that makes a man ''-these He reserves for His children. Solomon's riches and glory proved his ruin; the revelations he received were the true source of his greatness. 2. In warnvng Solomon. The very kindest thing a friend can do for us is to admonish us when we are going wrong. "Thou mayest be sure that he that will in private tell thee of thy faults is thy friend, for be adventureth thy dislike and doth hazard thy hatred'' (Sir W. Raleigh). God showed this proof of love to Solomon. In the night watches, in the darkness and silence, away from the glamour and flattery of the court, the Divine voice was heard in his secret soul. And the plalinness of the warning was a part of its mercifulness. The trumpet gave no nncertain sound (vers. 5-8). God set before him that day "life and good, death and evil" (Deut. xxx. 15). By one to whom such wisdom had been vouch- safed, warnings should have been unneeded. But they were needed-and they were mercifully granted. The good Shepherd goes" o'er moor a.nd fell, o'er crag and torrent " to bring back the straying sheep. II. The SEVERITY OF GoD is exhibited- I. In the pwnishment denownced agalinst Israel. "Cut off;" "cast out of my sight; " "a proverb and a byword; " "shall be astonished and shall hiss "-these are its terms. But observe: (1) None of these things needed to have befallen them. God had no 'pleasure in the death or dispersion of His elect people. It was their own fault if they were cut off. (2) These things were denounced in kindness to stay them in their sin and so to prevent their dispersion. These were the sanctions of that dispensation. "The law is not made for a righteous man, but," &c. (1 Tim. i. 9). (3) There was no disproportion or undue rigour in these penalties. What seems to us severity is really exact justice, or rather mercy, to the world. As Israel had been favoured above all peoples, so, in strict equity, should it be punished above all. "The glory, and the adoption, and the covenants," &c. (Rom. ix. 4), could not appertain to them without bringing with them "many stripes " for the disobedient. Those exalted to beo.ven shall be brought down to bell (Matt. xi. 23). It was necessary for our admonition that the chosen people should not afford the world the spectacle of a nation sinning unpunished (1 Cor. x. 11). 2. In the punishment inflicted,, For how literally have these words been fulfilled I What an evidence of the truth of God the history of Israel supplies ! This, at any rate, is no vaticiniwm er,; eventu. "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears'' (Luke iv. 21). 11 A proverb and a byword "-eighteen centuries at least testify to the truth of these words. 11 Cast out of my sight ; " let the horrors of the siege of Jtirusalem (see Jos., B. J. v. eh. x.-xiii., vi. passim. '' Never," he says, "did any other city suffer such miseries") explain to us these words. And there is not a country of Europe, thero is hardly a city, in which the history of the Jew is not traced in blood, written within and without in II mourning and lamentation and woe.'' Claudius expelled them from Rome (Acts xviii. 2) ; our Edward I. drove them out of Guienne and England. "Ivanhoe" gives some idea of their treatment in this country; but a romance could not record a tithe of the horrors of which Clifford's Tower in York or the Jews' house in Lincoln could tell. And yet it is allowed that they have always been treated more tenderly in Englo.nd than in the rest of Europe. But even here, and down to the present day, the word "Jew" is too often a name of ho.ta. In Servia, in Moldavia and Wallachia, they are still the objects of fierce persecution and not always unmerited obloquy. Even the "Anti-Semitic League," now (1880) being organized in Germany, is a part of the II severity" of God, a proof of the "sure word of prophecy.'' In Jerusalem, again, the metropolis of their race, they are nocounted the filth and offscouring of nil things. At the Greek Easter the refro.in is often he!Ll'd in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre," 0 Jews, 0 Jews, your feast is a feast of o.pes." ·what a com• mentnry, too, is the Jew&' "place of wailing" on this scripture I The" holy aud beautiful house" a desolation, the temple precincts trodden under-foot of the GeDtilea I Conqueror nfter oonqueror, pilgrim after pilgrim, has M!kecl the question, 188 TRE FIRST BOOK OF KINGS. [en. IX. 1-9.
''Wherefore hat.Ii the Lord done thus?" &c., while the II ever-extending miles of gravest.ones and the ever-lengthening pavement of tombs and sepulchres " answer "Because they have forsaken the Lord their God," &o. (ver. 9; Jer. xxii. 8, 9). ' " Tribes of the wandering foot e.nd weary breast, When will ye fly away and be e.t rest? The mld dove bath its nest, the fox its cave, Ma.nki.nd their country-Israel but the grave." ApP_lic~-tion. Ro!31. ii ~1. ~n tl:e !,u~tory of the Israelitish nation we may see the pnnc1ple of Gods dealing with mdividual souls (see Keble's Occasional Papers, &c., P~: 435 sqq.) But we may also read in it a warning for the Ch1istian Church (Re-r. ll. 5),