"Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before Me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord, and went down to Joppa; and he found a ship going to Tarshish so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken."-JONAH i. 1-4.

LESSONS ON JONAH.

FIRST LESSON.

HAVE told you before, my young friends, that we meet too seldom, and spend too short a time together, to be able to study the whole Bible. We must, therefore, choose some chapters or some books out of it; and I want to explain these to you so clearly as to help you to understand even those parts of the Bible which we cannot read together.

I hope you remember distinctly what we read in Genesis about the creation of man, about the fall, about the promise of redemption, and about the first effects of that redemption as seen in the salvation of Abel. You know that men became more and more wicked, until they were destroyed by the flood; and that God, not wishing to cut off the whole human race, saved Noah from the waters, with his wife and

his three sons, who divided the world between them,

and re-peopled it.

After that time God did not punish the whole guilty earth again, but He allowed the nations to continue in their evil ways, and He chose out for Himself a people to whom He gave His laws. This people were no better in themselves than any other people; but God blessed them, taught them by His prophets, chastened them for their good, selected His most honoured servants from them, and finally permitted that the Saviour should be born among them.

The whole of the Old Testament is intended to give us the history of this people. The world had existed (or at least had been inhabited) twenty centuries before the time of Abraham. Twenty more centuries passed between Abraham's days and the birth of Jesus, thus making in all forty centuries, or four thousand years. The first nine chapters of Genesis tell us about the first twenty centuries, and all the rest of the Old Testament contains the history of the second twenty centuries.

You know that Abraham was chosen to be the father of the nation which God intended to bless; and you know also that his family became a great people, that they went down into Egypt, and lived there more than two hundred years, and that when they came out of that country under the guidance of

Moses, they numbered many thousand souls. You will remember, too, that after some ages had passed they separated themselves into two kingdoms, one being called Israel, the other Judah.

In order to preserve or rekindle true religion in both these kingdoms, God sent forth prophets-mer who, speaking in His name and by His Spirit, preached that the inhabitants must repent, and turn to Him, and be converted. And this Jonah, whose history you have begun to read to-day, was one of the prophets raised up by God in the kingdom of Israel.

Perhaps you will ask me why I have chosen this book, which is so very short. So I must tell you that my first reason for choosing it was just because it is so short that we shall be able to study the whole of it; and my second reason was, that it stands first among the prophets in the order of time; that is to say, Jonah is the most ancient of the prophets who have written in the Bible; and so, if we were to arrange the books according to their dates, his would stand at the head.

We shall have to make acquaintance with Jonah and with all that concerns him-the times in which he lived, the places where he preached-to enable us to understand aright the details of his conduct and of God's dealings with him. Now, I am going to ex

plain each part of our lesson to you, as I am accus. tomed to do. I shall begin with the title,

"The Book of the Prophet Jonah."

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The name Jonah means a dove." Proper names in the mother tongues, such as Hebrew and German, almost always have some signification. Adam, as you are aware, means earth; Eve, living; Jesus, Saviour; Emmanuel, God with us; Noah, rest; Abel, vanity; Mary, exalted; Susanna, a lily; Tamar, a palm-tree; Elizabeth, oath of God; and so on. The meaning of names is sometimes, though not always, of importance; but be this as it may, this is the title of the prophet, and it is well just to notice it.

A prophet is not merely a man who delivers predictions and foretells future events, though certainly no one can do this without being a prophet; but a man can be a prophet without making predictions. A prophet is a man who speaks by the Spirit of God; the truths he utters, at least on certain occasions, are not his own, but the Lord's: he is God's mouth. Thus we find it said in the Bible, that "those things which God before had spoken by the mouth of all His prophets He hath so fulfilled." We can preach the truth without being prophets, as I am doing to

1 Acts iii. 18.