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XIX.]

MICAH'S WORDS IN AFTER DAYS.

me."

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His anger

God of my salvation. My God will hear me. against others ends in a confession of his own evil. "I will bear the indignation of the Lord, because I have sinned against Him, until He plead my cause, and execute judgment for me." And then comes a vision of blessedness for his land as well as for himself. "Who is a God like unto Thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not His anger for ever, because He delighteth in mercy.

He will turn again, He will have compassion upon us; He will subdue our iniquities. Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which Thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old.”

There are two comments upon Micah, one in the Old, one in the New Testament, which throw, I think, great light upon this book and upon the nature of prophecy, and contain much instruction for ourselves. We are told in the twenty-sixth chapter of Jeremiah that the priests and the prophets spoke unto the princes and unto all the people of Jerusalem, saying, 'This man Jeremiah is worthy to die, for he hath prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.' ears.' Jeremiah told them that he was in their hands, but if they put him to death they would bring innocent blood upon themselves and upon the city. "Then rose up certain of the elders of the land, and spake to all the assembly of the people, saying, "Micah the Morasthite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah, and spake to all the people of Judah, saying, 'Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, Zion shall be ploughed like a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high-places of a forest.' Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death? Did he

340

INFERENCE OF THE SCRIBES.

[SERM. not fear the Lord and beseech the Lord, and the Lord repented of the evil which he had pronounced against them? Thus might we procure great evil against our souls." Now it should be remembered that Micah's prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, was not fulfilled as he perhaps expected it to be in his own day. There was therefore a pretext for saying he was a false prophet like those whom he had denounced. But the wisest of the elders of the people of Judah felt that this was not the test of truth and falsehood. Micah had spoken right; he had declared that certain effects must follow from certain causes. Where there was pride, oppression, hypocrisy, there would be judgments, there would at last be utter destruction. Sennacherib besieged Jerusalem, Hezekiah humbled himself; the city and temple were preserved. But the words lived on,-established, not belied, by that apparent confutation of them. The conscience of the people in Jeremiah's day recognized them as addressed to themselves; their literal accomplishment to that generation stamped them as sure decrees for Jerusalem and for every other city of the earth in all generations to come.

The passage in the New Testament is this. "When Herod had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, "In Bethlehem of Judæa. For thus it is written by the prophet: 'And thou, Bethlehem in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor that shall rule my people Israel."" There are those who would discredit this passage of St. Matthew's Gospel, because they say it was so likely that this prophecy should have been thought to be applicable after the event, so un

XIX.]

THEY WERE TIED TO NAMES.

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likely that it should have suggested itself to any as determining such an event. I apprehend, from all we know of the Jewish mind either before or since that time, it was exceedingly likely that all passages of this kind would be noted in connexion with the coming of the expected king, and that precisely the part of them, which would fix the attention of the Rabbis, would be the topographical, or merely incidental part. I do not see that it was any disparagement to their wisdom, that they recognized a divine order and contrivance even in such circumstances as these. Places sometimes serve very remarkably to connect together different periods in the life of an individual man. A house or field which belonged to the associations of the child becomes quite unexpectedly identified with the history of his later years. Old men long to lay their bones where they played as boys. Devout men welcome such coincidences and recurrences as proofs that they are under a divine education. Why should the like be wanting in a national story? Why should they not be noted in a book which traces all the parts of it as the fulfilment of a divine purpose? We do not complain of the Jewish doctors because they had skill in detecting such indications in their Scriptures, but because they could detect no others. Micah saw that honour had been put and would be put on Bethlehem to humble the pride of Jerusalem. The scribes, full of the pride of their city, full of personal pride, could read the name of the village; the moral of it was utterly lost upon them. And therefore when He who was born at Bethlehem appeared before them as the man of Nazareth, Micah's sentence, which might have enabled them to understand that part of Christ's humiliation also, became a stumblingblock to them. 'Search and look,' they said,

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THE TRUTH BENEATH THE NAMES.

'for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet.' The signs and tokens of the Divine Man were nothing; the place was everything. And the last words were utterly forgotten. They thought of One who was to come as their Ruler and Prince. They did not think of One whose goings forth had been of old, from Everlasting. They wanted a stronger Herod, a native Augustus: they did not want God manifest in the flesh.

And, dear brethren, it will not avail us much to believe that a child has been born at Bethlehem 1850 years ago, or even to believe that He will come again in the glory of His Father and of the holy Angels. Unless we confess Him as our Ruler and Shepherd now, our thoughts of His past humiliation and of His future greatness will alike deceive us. Our pride will not give way before the dim recollection of what He was, our hopes will not be kindled by the vague dream of what He may be. To know that He Is, and that He is with us as He was with our forefathers, and as He has promised to be with our children's children, this is the strength and consolation that we need; this only can enable us to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God. His going forth was of old from Everlasting; therefore may we bring Him our gold and frankincense and myrrh, as those did who kneeled before the cradle in the manger; therefore may we hope to be like Him, when we shall see Him as He is, in that Kingdom which shall have no end.

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SERMON XX.

THE EVIL CITY SAVED AND DESTROYED.

(Lincoln's Inn, 2nd Sunday after Easter.-April 25, 1852.)

NAHUM I. 1.

The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite.

THERE are two prophetical books in the Old Testament which have no direct reference to the chosen people, those of Jonah and of Nahum. Both of them are concerned with the fate of Nineveh. I alluded to Jonah when I was speaking of Jeroboam II., in whose reign he is said to have lived. But I merely alluded to him because I was then occupied with the history of the ten tribes, upon which the book of Jonah throws no light, and because that book, though it records a passage in the life of an old prophet, does not profess to have been written by him. It may have been put together, as eminent critics think it was, in a time much later than that of Jeroboam. I now propose to speak of these prophets. The city of which they both speak was the capital of the empire which has been brought so frequently before us by Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah. Jonah and Nahum, though they contemplate this empire in different periods, both see it not triumphant but totter

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