analogies which may meet us in any life, however common and poor it may seem to us. Sooner or later there comes to every man a time when he has to choose whether he will claim his position as a child of God, and cast in his lot with God's servants, or 'be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter,' living for the world, for fame, and popularity and applause. Then, when that choice has been made, there may be, there often are, periods of delay and waiting. The man does not see how to do the work on which his heart is fixed. He makes, perhaps, hasty attempts, blunders, mistakes; and they lead to no results, and he retires baffled and perplexed. He needs the discipline of patience. Solitude, weariness, seclusion, these are the education by which he is to be formed and fashioned. At last the work comes. He is sustained in it, and through it. Fresh energies and powers are given him. It may be a very small thing in men's eyes, something which no historian chronicles, which has for its scene no wider stage than a man's own dwelling, or a man's own heart; but in the strength of his faith he wrestles against. the Pharaoh who would keep him in bondage, and overcomes him, and goes forth victorious, and the work to which he has set his hand prospers. But then for him too there may be disappointments. The good work in a household, in a parish, in a

church, in a nation, may be marred by petty jealousies, human infirmities, rebellion, wilfulness. Those from whom he hoped much turn against him and thwart him. The age even of the truest servant of God is not always untroubled. Not always does he see the work of his hand prosper. If it be so, brethren; if the trials of Moses are our trials, then let the faith of Moses be ours also. More clear and full for us is the vision of 'the recompense of the reward.' If he endured as seeing Him who is invisible, how much more should we endure, who have seen the fuller revelation of His presence in the only-begotten Son! Not standing in the cleft of the rock, as for a moment's glance at a brightness terrible and ineffable; but evermore may we look upon that presence of the Son of Man which remains with us, and with His Church. There we see all that man can see of the glory, all the goodness of the Eternal Father. The name of the Lord God is as of old, the same yesterday, to-day, for ever; abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and sin;' but in the name of Jesus Christ there abides that which other names revealed step by step, and part by part. Let us also endure. Let us also learn patience, hope, meekness, and the recompense of reward,' the fruit of peace, the crown of righteousness shall come.

X.

THE THEOLOGY OF THE BOOK OF

PROVERBS.

'When he gave to the sea his decree, that the waters should not pass his commandment: when he appointed the foundations of the earth : then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.”—PROV. VIII. 29, 30.

THER

HERE is a manifest and striking contrast in this part of the teaching of the Book of Proverbs to all that goes before or follows it. Elsewhere we meet with fatherly counsels, maxims of prudence, an almost worldly-wise sagacity, sharp satiric sketches of human weaknesses, but now, 'that strain we hear is of a higher mood.' The words rise above the prose-level of the other parts of the book into the noblest poetry. The morality which has been looked on hitherto from its human side culminates in the highest truths, in the highest mysteries of theology.

The mere fact of this union of two elements in the same book is significant enough. It bore its witness of old time against the notion that there could be a true human morality which did not

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rest upon a theology, for the truth that man's thoughts of his relations to his brother man will se depend upon his thoughts of the relation in which he stands to God. It told men that they needed in the commonest concerns of life-their buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage-a wisdom essentially the same, as calm, and passionless, and loving, as that which guides the stars in their courses, and preserves the ancient Heavens from wrong,' and lays the strong foundations of the earth. It teaches us that those Proverbs of the wise do not contain merely, as some have thought, an old-world wisdom, maxims merely prudential, almost selfish in their views of life, but are, in their range of thought and their grasp of truth, exceeding broad. The one great educational book of the Old Testament retains its value in education now. For us who, in our corporate life, pursue a wisdom wide and varied as was that of the teacher who wrote much, and has stamped his name upon the whole of it; who profess to connect that wisdom with a true theology; who trust that out of that union there will spring a knowledge free from pride and a faith emancipated from fear it will, I believe, be well to trace the steps by which the teacher was led upwards to that supernal height. We may well ask what, for him, was the meaning of this vision of a Wisdom, the

first-born of every creature, whom the Lord possessed in the beginning of His way, before His works of old; what light that vision threw upon the mysteries of his own life and upon the problems of the universe; what light it receives from the fuller revelation of the Divine Word, which kings and prophets and sages desired to see, and saw not?

The first step in the progress of the teacher was not that of solitude and seclusion. To whatever cause we may ascribe it, Hebrew philosophy (I use the word in its strict etymological meaning) was preserved from the besetting temptation of the sages of other Eastern nations, that of seeking for truth in separation from their fellow-men, in morbid introspection, in spinning brain-cobwebs out of the tissues of their own thoughts. It may be that there was this special purpose among others, in the wisdom given to the son of David, that there might remain to all time a true pattern and ideal as of a man who loved wisdom with all his soul, and yet bore all the burden of kingly rule; who spake of all trees, from the cedar on Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall, and yet, so long as he was true to himself, never suffered that study of nature to divert him from sympathy with his fellow-men; who wrote 'songs a thousand and five,' and yet lived in no poet's land of dreams, but in the statesman's and the ruler's world of commerce and