be pulled up out of their land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God." Amos ix: 14, 15.

In the experience of every child of God there are apt to come times when faith has grown weak, and the heart has become habitually sad; when a determined darkness seems to cling to the spot once sunny with hope. The believer at such times wonders whether God has not forgotten him; he struggles with doubts and fears, and in the more depressed moods he tries to persuade himself the Lord does not care for him any more. Now there came just such a time with the children of promise, when the great majority despairfully said, "Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost : we are cut off for our parts." Ezek. xxxvii; 11. Ezekiel's two fold vision seems to have been framed to meet and remove just such a state of despondency. The prophet sees a valley of dry bones; next the perfected forms of men clothed with flesh, displacing the scattered bones; then at last a living. army, exceeding great, standing on their feet and filling the valley. A heaven-sent interpretation explains the vision.

These are the bones of the whole house of Israel-very, very dry; next are viewed the company of the risen saints brought up in the resurrection morning out of their graves; finally a crowning blessing, the outpoured and welcomed and appropriated Spirit, giving contrast of millennial life to the desolate picture of the past; a future in which not only persons are beheld as trophies from the grave, but persons ready armed for effective service, an army filled and fired with the Spirit of service to God. Following close after this vision of the valley of dry bones in the same thirty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel, is the vision of the rods; one for the two tribes which made the southern kingdom of Judah, and the other for the ten tribes which revolted under Rehoboam and organized the northern kingdom of Israel. The two rods become one in the hand of Ezekiel. This is explained to mean a prefigurement of the return of the scattered Jews from all lands into one land as one people, under one Ruler. It unveils to the seed of Abraham a future in which they reoccupy the land Jehovah covenanted to give to them.

Here they are cleansed unto God; accept David their Prince, rejected through centuries; here they dwell in righteousness and peace, rear their children to observe the same statutes they themselves

reverence and obey, and so their children, and then theirs, from generation to generation. The earlier portion of the chapter emphasizes the resurrection of the pious dead of Israel, the later portion, their occupancy of Canaan under Messiah the Prince, enjoying oneness and prosperity.

Why does the prophet employ such vivid imagery? It is the climax and crown of his abiding thought. In the previous chapter he strives to picture the same period flourishing under its new conditions. He sees not alone Jerusalem thronged, but even the waste cities, here and there, throughout the desolate land, he beholds crowded as the capital was wont to be during one of her great feasts in Israel's palmy days. He describes this state of things and makes a passing note of its effect on the heathen who surround them and who witness a change that at last comes to a people whose fortunes in all lands and times, from the days of Nebuchadnezzar, were knit with their own.

The children of the promise, recipient of the Spirit, can give weighty attestation to the wisdom of heeding Jehovah's threatened calamities, for the fiery sentences of infracted law have been written in the chapters of their own dispersion and oppression.

The glory of

God's grace could not be set forth by any more ardent apostles for their own marvelous recovery translates its surprise. Judah and Benjamin would stand in the presence of the spoil their lion might had taken. Issachar would rise up strong to bear away the booty laid upon his patient shoulder. Not a square mile in Palestine but in this time is a sermon spoken to the heart of trust and love and set home by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. Israel, with the vail removed, is blest to hear the original dwellers rehearse the story of what God did for them in their day. The music of varied life experiences intermingles; "I lived here; I walked up and down here; I am the Jeremiah who wept; I am the Shumanite's son, a gift in answer to prayer, once and twice and thrice; I am the Elijah who bowed myself yonder on Carmel till the heavens bowed, and here along this valley, before the chariot of Ahab, ahead of the hurrying rain floods I ran to the entering in of Jezreel; Jacob says, This is the Bethel, where I beheld the ladder all crowded with shining ones, and Joseph says, This is the field near to Dothan where I wandered, when my brethern

whom I sought, left me to perish and then lifted me from the pit and sold me into Egypt.

In this very Joppa, Peter says, on the house-top of one Simon, a tanner, it was that I prayed, and out of heaven the answer came, and kept coming, and still comes. "There shall come people, and the inhabitants of many cities: And the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, Let us go speedily to pray before the Lord, and to seek the Lord of hosts; I will go also. Yea, many people and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of Hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the Lord. Thus saith the Lord of Hosts; In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you." Zech. viii: 20-23.

The number ten, in Scripture symbolism, is applied to set forth the nations of the world as discriminated from the "little flock;" the ten toes, the ten horns. And so at last, the outside Gentile nations unite to accord to the Jew a primal place; and to understand how Paul could say that the gospel of Christ was the power of God unto salvation, "to the Jew first." Rom. i: 16.

"I will direct their work in truth, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. And their seed shall be known among the Gentiles, and their offspring among the people: all that see them shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed." Isa. lxi: 8, 9.

Indeed, so helpful was the divine dealing with the children of Abraham, so stored with heart comfortings were Jehovah's purpose and plan of appliance for His covenant people, that the entire company of the redeemed unite to prize inexpressibly the mirror it supplies in which to see the face of the Father; and to say of the seed of Abraham with instinctive readiness, with no least thought of jealousy or envy, but with a feeling of gratitude for quickened worship, "Lo, this is our God," and They are the seed which the

Lord hath blessed."

CHAPTER XI.

THE LAW MAGNIFIED.

MONG the unfallen each attribute of Diety has always enjoyed a full forth shining without eclipse or refraction. Penitent sinners, however, have bestowed an engrossing regard upon the mercy that could stoop to spare the guilty ever since the first transgression took away from the race of Adam their shelter. Forgiveness freely offered to those who had forfeited every favor, when duly weighed and measured was somewhat to excite the utmost rational surprise in the reflecting and to stir responsive love in the grateful.

Responsive love was in order with a quality and a constancy worthy the appeal made by Infinite Pity to hearts that deserved no good thing. It was fitting that on every occasion and with force and feeling the subjects of redeeming grace should laud the love that saves. The crafty adversary who was always watching his chance, saw that. he could make use of the divine mercy in a manner so as to abuse it. By masking under the guise of superior piety Satan sought, and by insensible gradations succeeded, in turning to an amazing degree, the love of God for the sinner, into a license by the sinner to commit wholesale evil with impunity. In eyeing compassion the restraints of law were relaxed. Those who insisted upon the authority of law and urged the righteousness and sureness of its penal sanctions, were nevertheless alarmed, now and then at the issues of self examination and humiliated at the disclosure of the degree of their own apathy at inexcusable disobedience. Since attention was turned so absorbingly upon the divine forbearance, it was not strange that the claims of divine justice, should have been too dimly seen and too feebly urged by the professed friends and servants of the Lawgiver.

If justice was denied to justice by its own champion advocates because of an atmosphere in which self and sin were too dominant,

to what extent might not those be expected to go who had openly cast off restraint, who did not stop to debate with conscience, and who were not "plagued like other men?" Of how many could it have been said, "God was not in all their thoughts." Uncounted numbers swarmed on every hand, types of whom Malachi knew in his day, and whose portraits he so faithfully drew, who were habitually saying, "Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delighteth in them; or Where is the God of judgment?" Mal. ii: 17. For this state of things, with its needed uplift of law, the Millennium, at the end of Gentile times, was waiting with its counteractions and restorations.

What is law? Blackstone says Law is a rule of action. Another might term it a method of force; and still another might define it to be, that constant form in which force finds habitual expression. It is the form in which will makes itself manifest. Divine law is the method in which the will of Almightiness finds expression. The discovery of a universal law is the recognition of a mode of Divine acting. Omnipotence is inseparable from Omniscience, from Supreme Wisdom, Infinite Love, and Absolute Holiness; where one of these attributes is, all the rest are. When the creature is able to detect one of the attributes of Deity within the sphere of law he can say, "Lo! here is my God;" and know that His personality in the unity of His perfections is present, for what we are accustomed to call law is only another way of saying, "Here is proof of the presence of the God of the Universe, and this mode of His acting is a specimen of Deity's doings."

If it be claimed that the actings of evil are the exhibitions of force, and since they occur under the administration of a Universal Governor are, therefore, to be classed among universal laws; it may be replied that such actings are certainly permitted, and to the extent of such permission must help to modify and perfect our conceptions of Deity. It should be noted, however, that permission of evil during a transient period, under abiding denunciations, is something aside from a divine endorsement of the evil.

The law of sin and death is to be understood in a relative and punitive sense, and accrues from what is abiding brought to bear upon what is temporary and conditioned, for although the permission of