196

JUDAH AND ISRAEL.

[Serm. the first appearance of this great empire in connexion with the Palestine people, is a sure witness of all that is to follow. The king becomes at once the tributary; he trusts to Assyria to keep him on the throne; he incurs the hatred of his most powerful subjects to obtain this protection. His son reigns for two years, "Then Pekah the son of Remaliah a captain of his, smote him in Samaria in the palace of the king's house with fifty men of the Gileadites, and he killed him and reigned in his room." Possibly the Assyrian tendencies of Menahem and his son were the cause of this insurrection; Pekah may have been the head of a national or of an Egyptian party. He had certainly ambitious projects, for he conspired with Rezin the king of Syria against Jerusalem and its king with the deliberate purpose of overthrowing the house of David.

The kings of that house after Joash, viz., Amaziah, Uzziah, and Jotham, are all spoken of with respect; "they did that which was right in the sight of the Lord," but Amaziah vain-gloriously "defied the king of Israel to look him in the face, and Judah was put to the worst before Israel, and Jehoash took Amaziah king of Judah, and came to Jerusalem, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and took all the gold and silver, and all the vessels that were found in the House of the Lord, and the treasures of the king's house, and hostages, and returned to Samaria." This was the greatest humiliation which Judah had suffered, just at a time when it probably hoped to conquer the tribes that inflicted it. In Amaziah's reign and in that of his son and grandson we are told that the high-places were not taken away, that the people did sacrifice and burnt incense in them. There must have been therefore a continual growth of superstition and idolatrous worship during the period be

XII.]

TIGLATH PILESER.

197

fore the reign of Ahaz. All the open and latent corruptions and unbelief of the people, embodied themselves in this king. His predecessors had not tried to extirpate the evil, though they were personally pure from it. "He walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea and made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen whom the Lord cast out before the children of Israel. And he sacrificed and burnt incense on the high places and on the hills, and under every green tree." One can understand how such a man would feel and act when he heard that two neighbouring kings were conspiring against him. The heart of him and of his people, we are told, was moved by the news of it, as the trees are moved by the wind. He could think only of the immediate danger, and how to avert that. "So he sent messengers to Tiglath Pileser king of Assyria, saying, 'I am thy servant and thy son. Come up and save me out of the hand of the king of Syria and out of the hand of the king of Israel which rise up against me. And the king of Assyria hearkened unto him; for he went up against Damascus and took it, and carried the people of it captive to Kir, and slew Rezin.'-2 Kings, c. xvi., v. 7. We are told before, c. xv., v. 29, that "he took Ijon, and Kedesh, and Hazor, and Gilead, and Galilee, all the land of Napthali, and carried them captive to Assyria."

By far the most profound commentary upon these records, as they bear upon Judah, upon Israel, upon the surrounding nations, upon the Asiatic Monarchies, upon the future condition of God's kingdom and of mankind, is to be found in the prophecies of Isaiah, which I propose hereafter to consider. But there is an earlier prophet who is the proper preparation for Isaiah; a prophet from whom one learns

198

HOSEA BORN IN THE NORTH.

[Serm. more perhaps than from any other, the intensely individual and intensely national character of that work to which prophets were called; the actual meaning of the divine covenant; the state and the sins of a people living under one; the reason and method of the divine punishments; the ground upon which a seer, crushed under the sense of his nation's sins, could hope for its restoration.

Those who have studied the words of Hosea the son of Beeri most carefully, are convinced that the greater part of his life must have been passed in the kingdom of Israel. He speaks, they say, of its hills and valleys, of its villages and fenced cities, in a way which shews that he had been brought up among them; that they had worked themselves into his heart, as only that scenery can, which is dear from the associations of childhood and home. He dwells upon the special corruptions of the ten tribes, of their kings and priests, like one who was in direct contact with them; who knew what was going on in the land, and had looked into the inmost heart of it. On the other hand it is observed that when he turns to Judah he exhibits the sympathy and affection of a child of Abraham; but still of a comparative stranger. He has at first well-grounded hopes of it, such as he could not cherish for his own soil; but as time advances, and his knowledge becomes greater, these hopes are united with the saddest forebodings. One sister he finds is scarcely less treacherous than the other, nay, the treachery of Judah if less flagrant seems to him more deep; there is a falsehood in both which terrible fires must burn out. These remarks are of great use, because they show how real the diction of every true prophet is; how directly it is drawn from actual nature: how much of what we call oriental extravagance and hyperbole is supplied by our

XII.]

HIS LIFE A PARABLE.

199

own loose and careless mode of reading. It saves us trouble to bestow some general names of this kind, upon epithets and descriptions which may indicate the clearest perception of external objects, and are expressions of the most living inward convictions.

We do not however want arguments of this kind to prove that Hosea, at all events, was busy with facts and not with fictions. He had to understand the principles of his country's history by most fearful passages in his own. Because the land had committed great adulteries, departing from the Lord, he must marry an adulteress, he must experience again and again her infidelities; she was to bear children, whose names would denote her shame; for whom he must feel a father's yearnings, yet whom he could not dare to call his. The wife was at length to desert him for her lovers. He was again to redeem her; to endure the intolerable anguish of love struggling with indignation and disgust; to exhibit his love in the true and only possible form of restraint and punishment; to see through that punishment glimpses of hope; faint flickering tokens of reformation, in themselves quite unsatisfactory, yet testifying that there is a power in love which may triumph at last over the most obstinate resistance. A fearful education for a man to pass through, fearful beyond any racks and dungeons by which saints in later days have been trained to faith and patience; yet it must have brought Hosea into depths of insight and wisdom which all times may discern and profit by. His words may have been imperfectly understood, a number of his allusions may baffle even learned interpreters; but the most simple have obtained from him hints of truths, which every day's experience of themselves and of the world have made

200

THE CENTRAL THOUGHT.

[Serm.

more precious; and which, they believe, the ages to come will not exhaust but develope. For there is, I conceive, in every prophecy, and in every book which God has intended for the instruction of men, a leading thought which forces itself upon the mind of a serious reader—though he is a mere wayfarer-almost without his knowing it; and this thought becomes a part of him, and interprets perplexing facts which cross him in his ordinary path. If you question him as to the way in which he arrived at his knowledge he may be quite unable to answer you; his impression of the surrounding details may be vague and confused to the last degree; nevertheless he has a secret which you must use if you would have a clearer insight respecting those details. Apart from the central truth, to which he is often led by what may truly be called divination, the book is a rhapsody; no geographical, chronological or philological facts-immeasurably valuable as they all are―can make it orderly or reasonable. In Hosea's case the leading thought reveals itself without any divination. He makes known to us at the outset of the book, the fearful discipline which is the key to all the contents of it. The mystery of marriage, the violation of vows, the husband's long suffering, the way in which it works-these are not the ornaments of the book but the subjects of it; they are never absent for a moment from the mind of the writer; they should not be absent from our minds if we would know what lessons he has to teach respecting his own land, or our land, or ourselves. The cardinal doctrine of Hosea's prophecy and of his life, that without which one is as unintelligible as the other, is that man being made in the image of God, all human relationships are images of divine relationships, that through them