Micah 1, Micah 2

Micah was a villager. There are advantages in village life which are not to be found under metropolitan circumstances. It was no dishonour to be a villager in Bible times. We read of One of whom it is said, "He shall be called a Nazarene." Little or nothing is known about Micah, but his prophecy stands out boldly, written in letters of fire, and surrounded by a very lurid and suggestive atmosphere. There is a great deal of gospel in Micah. How is it that flowers always look the lovelier because they are in unexpected places? When we go into a garden and find flowers we express no surprise; when we find them growing in rocky and stony and uncultivated places, we exclaim, we are filled with wonder, and sometimes our wonder touches the point of delight. We find the gospel of God in Micah; in Micah we find Bethlehem; in Micah we find the whole requirement of God.

Notice that these prophets seldom, if ever, address the poor, the outcast, and the neglected, as the criminals of society. We have nourished ourselves into the pedantry of supposing that if a man has a bad coat he has of necessity a bad character. The Bible never proceeds along these lines. Micah specifies the objects of his prophecy with great definiteness: "Hear, I pray you, O heads of Jacob, and ye princes of the house of Israel." This is in the tone of Jesus Christ. He did not gather around him the halt, the lame, the blind, the poor, the neglected, the homeless, and say, You are the curse of society; you are the criminal classes. I am not aware that any such incident or observation can be found in the whole narrative of the life of Jesus Christ upon the earth. But Jesus Christ never let the respectability of his age alone; he never gave it one moment's rest. He differs from all modern teachers in that he finds the wickedness of society in its high places. He would almost appear to proceed upon the doctrine that the poor cannot do wickedly as compared with the wickedness that can be done by the rich. What stone can a little child throw as compared with the power of a full-grown man? What wickedness can a little child do as compared with the deep-laid, subtly-elaborated villainy of a man who has had much schooling? It is worth while to dwell upon this point, because it strikes at many a sophism—notably at the sophism which we have often endeavoured to expose that men are made by circumstances; that if men were wealthy they would pray; if men had an abundance they would be reverent; if men knew not the pangs of hunger they would be lost in a holy absorption, they would be lost in the praise of God. There can be no greater lie. You have done more evil in the world since you were rich than you ever did when you were poor. When you were poor you sometimes did almost nobly; since you have become encased in luxury you have thought it fashionable and seasonable to doubt, and almost polite to sneer.

All the judgments of the Bible are pronounced upon the educated classes. Nor does the judgment of God rest upon education only; it proceeds to cover the whole religiousness of the epoch. It is the religion that is irreligious; it is the wine of piety that has soured into the vinegar of impiousness. Yet we gather our holy skirts, and speak about "the criminal classes." They are only criminal in the sense in which we condemn them, in the degree in which they have been fools enough to be discovered. Vulgarity has been their ruin; they have come into notoriety, not because of their sin, but because of their clumsiness: if they had served the devil with greater craft they might have spoken of others as the criminal classes. If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! If education has been hired to do bad work, how much bad work it can do! If religion has been bribed into subservience to the black banner of the devil, with what loyalty it can serve that captain! This would give us quite a different estimate of society; this would destroy the whole respectability of the race. Jesus Christ found the throne occupied by the wrong people, and all the magistracies of his time distributed into wrong hands; the head of the house and the prince, the judge, the king, the magistrate, the ruler—these were wrong. Never do we find Jesus surrounded by the East-enders of his day, receiving his condemnation because their poverty is the sign of wickedness. Education may have ruined society. Intelligence may be turned into an instrument of mischief. Is education then wrong? The question itself is frivolous, and ought not to be seriously answered. Is intelligence to be contemned? The same remark applies to that foolish inquiry. We are speaking of perverted education, misused intelligence; of education and intelligence without moral enthusiasm, and moral control, and spiritual purpose, and sanctified motive. Such education can do infinitely more mischief than can be done by blank ignorance. Education knows where the keys are; education knows where the grindstone is on which it can whet its weapons; intelligence means craft, cunning, duplicity, ingenuity in the art of concealment. Wealth can do greater mischief than poverty. This alters the whole complexion of missions and evangelistic agencies and Church arrangements; this reverses the whole picture as seen from the orthodox standpoint. Send your missionaries to the rich! Send your evangelists to pray at the doors of the wealthy, the pampered, the self-indulgent, and the self-damned! Do not make the poor man's poverty a plea for foisting your religion upon him. Lend your tracts to the magistrates, the judges, the princes of the land; they need them.

What, then, of the doctrine that men are made by circumstances? Let this be put down in plain letters, that amongst people who can hardly read and write there are some of the most upright, faithful, honourable souls that ever lived. Let this be said with loudest, most penetrating emphasis, that there are people who have no bank account who would scorn to tell a lie. Has poverty not its own genius, and its own record of heroism, and its own peculiar nobleness? Who shall speak for the dumb, and open his mouth for the afflicted, and plead the cause of those who are thought to be wicked, because they have had no social advantages? Where is there a rich man that is good? Jesus Christ could find none. He said, "How hardly"—that is, with what infinite difficulty—"can a rich man get into the kingdom of heaven." It is not like him, it is not the kind of thing he can appreciate; he has no tables of calculation by which he can add up its value; if he get in at all it will be by infinite squeezing, pressing, straining; he will barely get in because his wealth is an instrument which turns his soul away from the metaphysic which finds in godliness all riches, in high thought and pure honour the very element and alphabet of heaven. Still, let it be said with equal plainness, a man is not good simply because he is poor. There are villains even in poverty. A man is not excellent simply because he has not had a good education. We must be just in the whole compass of this thought. As a man is not necessarily bad because he is educated and intelligent and quick-minded, and of large and penetrating intellectual sagacity, so a man is not necessarily all that he ought to be simply on the ground that he has no monetary resources.

Ponder for a moment the excellence of the religion that dare talk like this. It asks no favours. It does not want to sit down in the pictured room; it wants to get its foot on the threshold, and through an open door to deliver its message. You cannot invite such evangelism to dinner—it never dines. It is in haste—it flies, it thunders, it smites in the face those who uplift themselves in a blasphemous supremacy; it eats its food with gladness, and in the fellowship of the good, but it will have nothing to do with the poisoned wine of bribery. Again we come upon our favourite doctrine that the Bible ought to be the favourite Book of the poor, the neglected, the outcast; the Bible ought to be the people's friend, the people's charter, the very revelation of man and to man, the revelation of man to himself, as well as a revelation of God to man.

Yet the prophet will not have all this evil and shame unduly proclaimed. He is not so far lost to patriotism and to tribal relations as to wish the evil news to be scattered broadcast, that the enemy may revel in it. So he says, "Declare ye it not at Gath." This has become a proverb—"Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph." Do not foolishly trumpet forth all the evil that your friends have done. Yet men love to do this. Let a piece of good news be forthcoming, and it will have to make its own way in the world; it must needs crawl from door to door, and slowly impress itself upon the reluctant ears of those who would gladly turn away from the music of such messages. Let a scandal arise, and the world will know it ere one hour goes its little round. And Christians are errand-bearers in this evil agency. They do it as willingly as the worst men out of hell, only they do it in a different kind of tone; but they do it with ineffable energy, with sleepless industry, with patient detail. Give them a gospel, and it dies in the recesses of their own minds; give them a scandal, and they will not dine until they have told everybody they meet; and they will swallow their feast quickly, that they may get out into the highway to tell that the devil has scored another triumph. Not such was the spirit of this rough villager, yet this sanctified prophet of the Lord. He says, The case is bad; prince and priest and magistrate and ruler have gone wrong, but tell it not in Gath. In the days of Micah Gath was nothing, it had lost its Philistinian primacy; still there was the spirit of the proverb, which means, Tell it not to the enemy, let not the blasphemer hear of this; magnify excellence, but say nothing about defect A prophet actuated by such a spirit ought to be believed. Prophets have a variety of credentials; here is an indirect tribute to the man's own excellence. He knew all, but would not tell it to all the world. Do you know one evil thing you have never told, never whispered, never hinted at? By that sign judge yourselves. Is your heart a grave in which you bury all bad things; or is it a garden in which you cultivate them? By that sign, and not by your blatant orthodoxy, judge your relation to the Cross of Christ. Such was the scathing criticism of the prophet; such is the judgment of Christ upon his Church and upon his nominal followers. He will not allow men to be round about him who take any delight in evil things or in the publication of evil circumstances; he ignores them, he dispenses with their service, and he thrusts them out into the completest darkness—the only atmosphere they are fit for. Let them tell their evil to the heedless darkness; let them emit their poison where no soul can be hurt by its virus. This would alter the Church altogether; this would take away the Church's occupation. There are men who acquire a reputation for themselves by condemning the vice of other people. We must all start again, or we shall make no progress in this divine life, nor shall we promote the best purpose, the holiest intent, of the divine kingdom. Search thyself; be cruel to thine own soul; torture thyself into a higher grade of goodness. The mere persecutor, the hired blocksman and fireman, may be said to be dead. Blessed be God there remains the age of self-martyrdom, there remains the crown due to him who smites himself in the eyes, and bruises himself, that by taking away his worst life he may truly gain his soul.

In the days of Micah there was a species of evil which is not yet extinct. All the evil was not done in public. The prophet therefore proceeds: "Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds! When the morning is light they practise it, because it is in the power of their hand." The condemnation is upon deliberate evil. The evildoers are here in their beds; they are considering at leisure what can be done next. How can it be best attempted, how can it be elaborated to the greatest effect? They slumber over it; having nourished their brain into a higher degree of energy they revert to the subject: How can this policy be best carried out? This is deliberate sin, rolling it under the tongue as a sweet morsel, reverting to it, recalling it, asking for another vision of it. The soul, what a dungeon! The mind, what an abyss of darkness! Soliloquy, how silent! There is sudden evil, and that must always be carefully distinguished from deliberate wickedness. There are bursts of passion, gusts of vehement will, stress brought to bear without notice upon the citadel of the soul. "Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye who are spiritual restore such an one in the spirit of meekness. Consider yourselves, lest ye also be tempted." Distinguish between those who are carried away with a whirlwind, and those who mount the whirlwind deliberately that they may ride forth in that glowing chariot. Hear the words of the fiery apostle: "On some have compassion." Micah is not dealing with this class of men, but with those who have made their bed the sanctuary of the devil; he is dealing with men who say, We will sleep upon this, we will turn it over; we will see what can be done; we will polish and be prepared against the day of assault; we will shut out the world and count our resources; we will settle the whole thing in the privacy of the chamber, and then when the morning light comes we will spring up as naturally as if nothing had been done by way of preparation, and then we will strike with our whole force.

Deliberate sin shall have deliberate judgment. This follows quickly in chapter Micah 2:3 : "Therefore thus saith the Lord; Behold, against this family do I devise an evil." What, are there two devisers? Read Micah 2:1, "Woe to them that devise iniquity"; Micah 2:3, "Thus saith the Lord... do I devise." That is the ghostly aspect of life. There is the tremendous danger. The foolish man locks himself up in the darkness of his own concealment, and lays his plot, and works out with elaborate patience his whole conspiracy against the kingdom of light and honour, truth and beauty; he says, None seeth me; I can do this, and none shall be the wiser for my doing it; I will spring forth in the fulness of my preparation when nobody is aware that I have been laying this train of powder. A man once talked thus: "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years: take thine ease, take life quietly, enjoy thyself." And one said to him, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." That was the uncalculated element; that was the detestable ghostliness that haunts us. Even when we are most rationalistic, when we are inebriated with our own philosophy, a sudden touch makes us white, and a whisper drives the blood thickly upon the heart. A man shall rise in all his self-consciousness of power and capacity and ability to do what he pleases, and the wise man shall say to him, Are you aware that you may drop down dead at any moment, such is the condition of your physical system? This factor the man had not taken into account. Always remember that whilst we are devising God also is devising. "He taketh the wise in their own craftiness." And let this reflection make life completer in its repose: "No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper," if so be thy soul be wedded to honour, to duty, to reverence, and to the Cross of Christ. Though men conspire against thee, and have the pit already dug, and have examined it carefully by the concealed candle light, and though they should say, "Now it is in a state of readiness, now let the victim come,"—whilst they are stepping back to make way for the victim they will fall into the pit which they have dug for others. The Lord sitteth in the heavens. He watches all. He brings us into great extremities. He shows us over what a precipice we might have fallen. Then he says, Go home and pray!

Prayer

Almighty God, we have waited for thee more than they that wait for the morning—when shall the morning come and the night be passed for ever? When shall we dwell in light, and see no shadow of death? We bless thee that these questions are not left unanswered; thou hast written the reply in our hearts, thou hast set forth the answer before our eyes in thy Holy Book; thou hast promised that death shall be swallowed up of life, and that all things shall praise thee, and that all voices shall be in thy great choir. We rejoice in the anticipation of the time when the ransomed of the Lord shall return unto Zion, and when sorrow and sighing shall flee away. Thou knowest when the earth has had enough of them; thou wilt not send upon the earth one sorrow too many; thou wilt not tear thy handiwork to pieces, for thine is not wanton strength. Thou lovest to uphold and construct and preserve; thou art God the builder of all things, and to this end all thy providence is ordered. Surely thou wilt put an end to evil, thou wilt tear down the house of iniquity; yea, thou wilt plough up its foundations, and it shall be found no more for ever. Thy face is set against all evil; thou canst not tolerate it; it is the abominable thing which thou dost hate: we leave it with thee; thou wilt scorch it and burn it, and finally annihilate it. But to what good ends wilt thou bring all things that are of the nature of virtue; how thou wilt uplift every holy thought; how thou wilt ennoble every generous impulse. Thou wilt not break the bruised reed, thou wilt not quench the smoking flax; wherever there is a little that is good, a little that is of the true quality of fire, thou wilt preserve it, and defend it, and mightily and triumphantly bring it to completeness of expression. The Lord reigneth; the throne of the Most High is upon the circle of the universe, there is nothing that lies beyond the sceptre of the Almighty. We bless thee for this confidence in thy personality and in thy government, in the tenderness and minuteness of thy providence. We know all this, and believe it right heartily, because we have been at the school of the Cross; there we have seen into God's heart, there we see the sorrow that lies at the heart of all things as a root out of which alone true joy and true music can come. The Cross of Christ explains the throne of God; we tarry there, we wait in holy expectation; we have no fear of armed men, or of subtle enemies, or of mighty temptations whilst we are hidden within the sanctuary of the Cross. Mighty Saviour, mighty in thy weakness, thou wilt not suffer the least of thy children to be plucked out of thy hand. O dying Man, dying God, Saviour of the world, showing us the mystery of blood which is the mystery of life, lead us to see that where sin abounds grace doth much more abound; and in the overabounding of grace may we find our confidence, our pardon, our peace, our security. The Lord deliver us from all notions that are at variance with the purity of his own love; all conceptions that are unworthy of the mystery of sacrifice, and teach us, in all humbleness of mind and self-renunciation, how great is love, how wondrous is the death that is ennobled into sacrifice. Thus and thus, day by day, a little at a time, show us the noonday of thy glory, the full light of which we could not now endure. Amen.

Divine Accusations

Micah 2, Micah 3

"O thou that art named the house of Jacob, is the spirit of the Lord straitened? are these his doings? do not my words do good to him that walketh uprightly?" (Micah 2:7).

This is a yearning expostulation. The Lord is disappointed; his heart is heavy and sore; the prophecy is not according to his own spirit and purpose, and all things are enfeebled, and he himself is humiliated in the presence of the people and of the nations. We should bethink ourselves that it is God we are representing. When the Church is doing nothing God is misrepresented. It is not the Church that takes and terminates all the origin and effect of this miserable failure; the matter does not rest within the four corners of the Church. The Church has undertaken to represent the supernatural, the eternal, the infinite, the very throne and majesty of God; by right therefore of that assumption God has a right to inquire into the spirit and the action of his Church. We have seen how in the ancient time one man said the sanctuary was the king's chapel. The false prophet made the temple of God into private property; he said, "It is the king's chapel," you have no business with it, you ought not to criticise it; you have nothing to do with it, it is private property. And man, in his best moods, with all his purest, noblest instincts, says, No: the temple of God is never private property, the truth of God is never an individual possession; the kingdom of God is God's kingdom, and what is God's kingdom is meant to be the house and the home, the refuge and the sanctuary of the world. So the Lord takes up our reports, and says, You are misrepresenting me; whenever you are reluctant, indifferent, inefficient, self-indulgent, the matter does not begin and end with yourselves. Are these my doings? A thought of this kind gives a new aspect to all Christian endeavour, prayer, enterprise, and sacrifice. The men who are leading the Church have a right to expect great things. The great things are not in the programme of all men; they are content to begin, continue, and close with some measure of propriety; they have lost the thunder because they have lost the lightning. Our business now is to get quietly done, and to assure ourselves that we can get quietly home. The roar of strength, the flash of glory, the curse of righteous denunciation, the fury of a divine enthusiasm, we have labelled sensational, and put away. Let a man examine his ministry by this test, and he will soon conclude his criticism; his face will burn with shame because his soul will be filled with a multitude of reproaches.

The Lord proceeds to inquire: "Do not my words do good to him that walketh uprightly?" You are trying to do the right thing in the wrong way; you are wasting the bread of the kingdom of heaven; you have mistaken the right beginning and the right continuance of all this ministry of revelation. My sun will never do good to a dead creed; every beam of that sun is a sword striking at that poor outcast dead thing. "Do not my words do good?"—to whom? To the man who wants them, longs for them, represents their purpose, walks uprightly. Literally, Do not my words do good to him that is upright? You must not only have right food, you must have the right appetite and the right digestion. God's revelation is lost upon the man who cares nothing for it. It is within the power of the eyelid to shut out the midday. If we had been upright we had been fat of soul, strong of mind, chivalrous and noble of heart, because we should have advanced according to our own quality; being godlike we should have become godlier, we should have been perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. The Bible has nothing to say to the froward soul. The revelation of God never talks to the critic. Intellect, unless a servant, has no business with things spiritual, supernatural, ineffable. Let every man then test himself by this one standard. The word of the Lord is meant to do good to the upright. Not necessarily to the personally perfect. There are no such people, except in their own estimation, and therefore there are none perfect at all. What is it to be upright then? To be sincere, to mean to be right. There is a middle line in every man's thought and life and purpose. Do not judge him by the higher line or by the lower level; you will find the average thought and tendency and pressure—judge by that. When a man says, I want to be right, though I am falling seven times a day,—he is right. Take heart; you are looking at your sins, and saying you are a bad man; possibly not: there may be a thousand sins in your hand, and yet you may be a good man. Not if you love them, delight in them, give them hearty welcome day by day; but if you accept them as for the time being incidental to the bold, noble, strenuous struggle after the right, you are right, and your prayers shall win their way through all that black cloud of iniquity, and strike the eternal throne, prevalently, triumphantly. The Lord loves prayers that are battle-worn. There must be something pathetic to that great gentle Priest of ours, eternal Intercessor, when he takes up our prayers like bruised birds that have struck their wings against a thousand obstacles, but still have gone on and up, and are seeking rest in his intercession. Your bruised prayers are better than your cold ones, without scratch or flaw upon their finery of eloquence. God be merciful to me a sinner! is a prayer that will work its way right up, though the whole firmament be darkened with diabolic spirits and ministration. "Do not my words do good to him that walketh uprightly?"—and to walk uprightly is not to walk pedantically, ostentatiously, and perfectly in the estimation of the world; but to walk uprightly is to have the stress of the soul in the right direction. O poor soul, thou art punctured and speared and bayoneted and bruised, but thou art still soul, fire, a flash eternal, unquenchable! Cheer thee; thy Saviour waits for thy latest prayer; it may be thy poorest in words, but thy strongest and best in intent and unction.

The entreaty proceeds to take upon itself the form of an accusation,—

"Even of late my people is risen up as an enemy" (Micah 2:8).

We might pass by that word as vague. In reality it is most definite. "Even of late": literally, Even yesterday, so late as yesterday, we fought the Lord. Do not let us suppose that the Lord is charging upon us some sin done in some withered Eden. The account is written with ink that is not yet dry. It is a new charge, it is the most recent of accusations; there need be no falling back upon failing memory, saying, Forty years ago, fifty years since, I am charged with having done a deed that is even now ripening into retribution; my memory fails me: half a century is a long time to hold in one's mind. Do not talk so: never mind the deeds of half a century; last night you struck at the eternal throne like a rebel—Even yesterday my people is risen up as an enemy. The Lord is not talking about some billows that rose a hundred years ago and foamed and swelled and roared and died; he is speaking about a great black wave that threw its iniquity on the shore yesternight. We cannot escape God. It is the last thought that was against him. We can dispute any charge that is half a century old, but when the accusation is new as yesterday, yea, recent as the morning, who can answer it? Nor let us think that God finds all his rebels somewhere else than within our own hearts, and souls, and houses, and businesses. What an interesting question this would be, though not to some minds, Is one man any better than another? We can imagine with what redundance of self-congratulation some men would answer an inquiry almost impertinent; but when the smile of such dying radiance has gone, we simply repeat the inquiry, Is one man better than another? Is John any better than Iscariot? We are better in so many different ways, and it as the peculiarity of the way that often determines our estimate. The drunkard has no friends, yet he may be a better man than the Pharisee. The thief caught by the constabulary hand is driven off into prison, and properly; but the bigger thief that puts his felonious hand into the souls of men goes to the sanctuary and repeats his worthless prayer. Who is it, then, that is really the upright man, the true man, and the good man? The man who earnestly wants to be good—even if he were found helplessly drunk in the public thoroughfare, he must not be condemned on that account alone; examine into the case, discover how it came to be, and, O thou dainty Pharisee, he may be a better man than thou art. What does his soul say? what does his heart want? what is the average line in the man's thought and purpose? Blessed be God, we are not to judge, but we cannot keep our clever ingenuity from the throne of judgment, and we delight to add some increment to our virtue by condemning the vice of better men. Jesus Christ never found any respectable people who were really good. He distrusted them. If he dined with them it was that he might have a larger opportunity for rebuking them. Yet there must be no licence given. When we are seeking to institute a proper standard and measure of consolation and encouragement, there must be no sanction given to wantonness in the interpretation of the divine law, or the uses of the divine liberty.

Now the Lord passes to retribution, and he utters words which have often been misquoted, and which have been turned into a proverb for the signification of anything but the original truth,—

"Arise ye, and depart: for this is not your rest" (Micah 2:10).

We have been taught that this world is not our resting-place, but rather a place of momentary halting, a place of probation, a school for the acquisition of elementary knowledge, the beginning of things, and that he is wrong who settles down here as if he had obtained a permanent refuge and an abiding home. All that is quite true; it is a lovely and a rational sentiment; that, however, is not the truth of this text. The Lord is punishing his people; he says, You have given no rest to others, you shall have no rest yourselves. We have seen that whilst men were lying in their beds devising iniquity, the Lord says, "I devise" (Micah 2:3). Bring that thought to bear upon the passage immediately before us, and the paraphrase would be this: You have given no rest to men, women, or children; what you have sown you shall reap. You have been unkind to others, and now you shall experience unkindness yourselves; you have been too pleased to drive men out into the wilderness, now you shall find your dwelling in sandy and stony places: "Be not deceived, God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." A man must reap the harvest of his own seedtime. You cannot pray yourselves out of it. Do not pray to Nature. She has no answers, she has a great deaf ear; she will listen to you as long as you care to talk with appearance of being deeply interested in your speech, but in reality she does not hear a word of it; she is ruthless, relentless, a Shylock that cannot be shaken off by subtlety or casuistry of interpretation of law. You killed, you shall be slain; you were pitiless, you shall be unpitied; you played the tyrant when you could, a foot shall be set on your own neck. Now talk to Nature; soothe her, pet her, coax her, bribe her, tell her all the nonsense that is in your heart, and still when you have ended she lifts her gleaming sword, and strikes for man and God. There may be temporary appearances to the contrary; the appearances, however, are but temporary. We do not take in field enough in judging God; it is not what he does to-day or tomorrow, in this decade or in that; he has no time. The river has no drops. You may have disturbed the river and broken it into drops, but the river is a unit; eternity rolls on, though now and again it has been shattered into the foam of so-called time. God will judge thee, thou whited sepulchre! It is delightful to the moral sense to find through the whole of the Old Testament the spirit of retribution going forward, saying, As I have done unto others, so the Lord hath done unto me; I cut off the thumbs and the great toes of seventy kings, and now my own must be cut off. God is just. Do not say he has forgotten yesterday; it is alway present to his mind.

Now the Lord passes from the people as a whole to the prophets:—

"Thus saith the Lord concerning the prophets that make my people err, that bite with their teeth, and cry, Peace; and he that putteth not into their mouths, they even prepare war against him. Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine; and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them. Then shall the seers be ashamed, and the diviners confounded: yea, they shall all cover their lips; for there is no answer of God" (Micah 3:5-7).

The biting here in the original is the biting of a serpent. The deterioration here indicated is the fall from a prophet to a viper. Such falls are possible, such apostasies are indeed the miracles of human story; but there they are, real, simple, indisputable, too obvious and too humiliating facts. The biting of a perverted man is the worst kind of biting. We say there is no zealot so mad as a pervert. There is no religion so tremendous as irreligiousness. It is this sour wine that becomes poison. Keep away from men who have been good, and have lost their religious and spiritual savour. They will cry anything that you want them to cry. In this instance the prophets cried, "Peace," and if men did not praise them, they prepared war against the men who were hostile; if men did not give to them, men had to reckon for war. There is no man so bad as the fallen prophet. We are not speaking now of the temporary falls which seem to be incident to development of character honestly conducted, but to the men whose soul is turned away from love of truth and love of light. What is to be the consequence? The same law of retribution prevails:—

"Therefore night shall be unto you, that ye shall not have a vision; and it shall be dark unto you, that ye shall not divine; and the sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them" (Micah 3:6).

So outer darkness is not a discovery of the New Testament. The unprofitable servant is there doomed to outer darkness, where shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth; but here we have the same darkness—the darkness is of old; there is no new midnight. God will visit the prophet with darkness. When a genius is conscious that he has lost his inspiration there is no man so unhappy. The average ordinary man, whose life is a daily but not despicable commonplace, is not conscious of great losses, he never had great riches; but given a man once possessed with genius, and give him to feel that the angel is beyond him, outside of him, lifting glittering wings in eternal flight, and the moment of such consciousness is hell. The Lord sends night upon the prophets, and a prophet without light is in perdition; a prophet without his mantle is naked, not in body, but in soul.

What shall become of these prophets? "They shall cover their lips." The action is that of a leper. The leper was commanded to cover his lips and to cry, Unclean, unclean! The Lord's charge is: The lip has lied, cover it; the lip of the prophet has been prostituted to falsehood—cover it, conceal it. See, the prophets that ought to have led the age are like lepers with bent heads, calling, Unclean, unclean! God will not have any bad service. He will not allow men to come in with genius to assist in the interpretation of his kingdom if genius be not sustained by honest goodness; not by that perfection which is the worst kind of imperfection, but by that perfectness of wish which is the guarantee of attainment. A man in London said that he himself was so good, so full of the Holy Spirit, that he did not believe that even God himself could increase the blessing. I no sooner heard it than I said, That's a bad man, whoever he is. I did not know the man, but I said a man who can talk so is a bad man; and alas! that poor wretch was soon revealed. Do not let us aim at that kind of perfection. The more perfect we are the more modest we shall be, the more silent about ourselves. The more perfect a man is in the sight of God the more he feels any blemish or speck or flaw, and things he would not have seen aforetime now constitute his agony.

The Lord's accusation ends with this awful word, namely:—

"They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity" (Micah 3:10).

The Lord will not have a Zion so built. The meaning is that these men have gone forth to war and to bloodshed and desolation and so-called conquest, and then have baptised all their iniquity with the name of God, and have brought their spoils, and laid them up in Zion, and the Lord will not have them. Or the meaning is that men have been extortionate—they have oppressed the poor; they have overreached the weak; and they have given a tenth of their profits to the building of the walls of Jerusalem. The Lord will not accept such offerings. Are there men who have served the devil with both hands earnestly, and have grown fat and bloated in his service, and do they atone for all by a cheque of a thousand pounds to God's temple! Burn it! Yet there is a vulgarity that feeds its piety by writing enormous cheques. The larger the cheque the better, if it be given with an honest hand; then every coin of gold is worth ten times its nominal amount, then every copper piece is gold, because of the touch of honesty and the pain of sacrifice; but if a man shall eat and drink, and fill his house with devils, and become tired, sated, and shall seek to pay off the Lord's sword, he will soon be made to feel what a fool he is. The Lord will have none of him. The walls of the sanctuary must be built with honest stone and laid with honest hands, then God will take care of it; but if even Zion be built with blood it shall be burned with fire. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God; yet the most joyous and glorious thing if our hearts be filled with a sincere desire to know his will and do it.

Prayer

Unto thee, O Lord, is our prayer directed; hear thou in heaven thy dwelling-place, and when thou nearest, Lord, forgive. It is a prayer from the heart which thou thyself hast given us to pray. We pray to know thee more clearly, to follow thee more steadfastly, to serve thee more obediently. This is the Lord's prayer; this is no prayer of our own selfishness; this also cometh forth from the Lord of hosts, bearing upon its every letter the sign that God did teach it to our hearts. We pray this prayer, as all others, that are true and honest, at the Cross, the great altar, the blessed mercy-seat; there prayer is its own answer, prayer is turned into praise; the intercession of Christ magnifies our requests, and assures their fulfilment, according to the wisdom and tenderness of God. If we ask aught amiss thou dost not call it prayer, and thou wilt not answer our ignorance; if we ask aught aright it is of thy teaching; if we ask it at the Cross we have it whilst we are yet pleading for it. This is the mystery of thy love; this is the wonder and the miracle of prayer. Lord, hear us when we ask to be forgiven: the load of yesterday is too heavy for our strength, the shadow of our iniquity plunges us into sevenfold night; but where sin abounds, doth not grace much more abound? Can any black billows of iniquity overtop the Cross? Doth it not rise high above all oceans of wickedness? Is it not a sign that the mercy of the Lord endureth for ever? Truly men have wandered far from thee, but thou canst find them in their lost estate, and bring them back with rejoicing. This is the purpose of the Gospel, this is the one object of the Son of God—he came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance; they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. He came to seek and to save the lost; Lord, he came therefore to seek and to save us. All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way; there is none righteous, no, not one. Thou hast come after us, thou Son of man, thou Son of God; seek us until thou dost find us, and restore us to the household we have left Be with us all the day; give insight, strength, wisdom, force of character; give us sensitiveness, that we may feel the life that is round about us. Create within us Christly sympathies, that we may answer all the need and distress that mark the days through which we pass, and give us the living, holy, eternal Spirit, that our bodies may become his temples, and our minds his dwelling-place. These are great requests, but they touch not the boundlessness of thy love; in so far as they are pure and wise thou wilt give us the answer ere we say Amen,