Red Sea itself, and throw it into the path between Paran and Palestine, that the Deity may pass more triumphantly

on.

Yet the modesty is not inferior to the boldness of the Habakkuk had begun intending to describe a future coming of God, and, to fire himself for the effort, had called up the glories of the past. But after describing these, he stops short, allowing us only to infer from the former what the future must bc. Exhausted and reeling under the perception of that overpowering picture, he dares not image to himself the tremendous secrets of the future. He He says only, "Though my country should come to utter desolation, the vines give no fruit, the fields yield no bread, the flock be cut off from the fold, and there be no herd in the stall, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, nay, exult in the God of my salvation. He will make me to leap as the hart, even though my feet, like God's own, should leap on naked crags, and tread on high places, though they should be those of scathed and sterile desolation."

Beautiful the spirit of Habakkuk, and expressing in another form the grand conclusion of Job, and of all earnest and reconciled spirits. A God so great must be good; and he who hath done things in the past so mighty and terrible, yet in their effect so gracious, may be well expected, and expected with exultation, to pursue his own path, however inscrutable, to the ultimate good of his world, and Church, and often to "express his answer to our prayers," as in the days of old, by works as "fearful" as magnificent.

OBADIAH.

There are no less than twelve persons of this name mentioned in Scripture. The most distinguished of them is the Obadiah who saved a hundred of God's prophets, by hiding them in a cave, during a time of scarcity and persecution. Some suppose that he was the prophet before us, although others deem him to have flourished at a much later date-at the same period with Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

He seems to have prophesied in the short interval between the destruction of Jerusalem and that of Edom. His prophecy, which is but a fragment, consists principally of predictions of the judgments impending over Edom, and of the

restoration and prosperity of the Jews. There are remarkable coincidences between Obadiah and the 49th chapter of Jeremiah.

A single chapter, which, like this of Obadiah, has survived ages, empires, and religions, must be strongly stamped either with peculiarity or with power. It must have some inextinguishable principle of vitality. Apart from its inspiration, it survives, as the most memorable rebuke to fraternal hardness of heart. It is a brand on the brow of that second Cain, Esau. Hear its words, stern in truth, yet plaintive in feeling, "For slaughter, and for oppression of thy brother Jacob, shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever. In the day when thou stoodest on the other side, in the day when strangers carried away captive his forces, and when foreigners entered his gates, and when they cast lots on Jerusalem, thou also wast as one of them. But thou shouldest not have so looked on the day of thy brother, on the day when he became a stranger, nor have rejoiced over the sons of Judah in the day when they were destroyed, nor have magnified thy words in the day of distress. Thou shouldest not have entered into the gate of my people in the day of their calamity, nor have so looked on his affliction in the day of his calamity, nor have put forth thine hand on his substance in the day of his calamity, nor have stood in the cross way to cut off those of his that escaped, nor have delivered up those of his that remained, in the day of distress." "Verily, O Esau, thou wert guilty concerning thy brother, when thou sawest the anguish of his soul, and when, perhaps, like Joseph, he besought thee, and thou wouldst not hear.". And at thy Philistine forehead was Obadiah commissioned to aim one smooth sling-stone, which, having prostrated thee, has been preserved for us, in God's word, as a monument of thy fratricidal folly. This is that little book of Obadiah.

HAGGAI.

Between Obadiah and Haggai, many important events had occurred in the history of God's people. The city of Jerusalem had been captured, the Temple sacked, and the brave but ill-fated inhabitants had been carried captive to Babylon. There they had groaned and wept bitterly under their bondage, and one song of their captive genius, of une

qualled pathos, has come down to us. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remem bered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" How, indeed, sing it, save as we may conceive the fiends singing in hell the songs of heaven, the words the same, the melodies the same, but woe for the accompaniments and for the hearts? How sing here the songs of Judah's vintage, and Julah's ingathering, and Judah's marriage feasts? Surely, it is the most delicate and infernal of insults for a spoiler to demand mirth instead of labor, a song instead of patient sorrow! We, they reply, can sing at your bidding no songs of Zion, but we can testify our love to her by our tears. And, trickling through the hand of the taskmaster, and running down three thousand years, has one of these tears come to us, and we call it the 137th Psalm.

From this state of degradation and woe, Judah had been raised. She had been brought back in circumstances mournfully different, indeed, from the high day when, coming out of Egypt, she turned, and encamping between Pihahiroth and the sea, felt that the extremity of the danger was the first edge of the rising deliverance, and when she went forth by her armies with a mighty power and a stretched out arm. Now she must kneel, and have the bandage of her slavery taken off by human hands, and be led tamely out into her own land, under the banners of a stranger. Even after she had reached and commenced the operation of building the Temple, numerous difficulties, arising partly from the opposition of surrounding tribes, and partly from the indifference of the people themselves, were presented. For fourteen or fifteen years the enterprise was abandoned, and it is on an unfinished Temple that we see Haggai first appearing to stir up his slothful, and to comfort his desponding, countrymen.

We know only of this prophet, that he was born during the captivity; that he had returned with Zerubbabel, and flourished under the reign of Darius Hystaspes.

The right of Haggai to the title poet has been denied, on account of his comparatively tame and prosaic style; but we must remember the distinction we have indicated between

poetic statement and poetic song. He has little of the latter, but much of the former. There is nothing in the Hebrew tongue calculated more to rouse the blood, than these simple words of his "Who is there left among you that saw this house in its former glory? And what do ye see it now? Is it not as nothing? Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith Jehovah. And be strong, O Joshua, son of Josedech, the high priest. And be strong, O all ye people of the land, saith Jehovah. And work, for I am with you, saith Jehovah, Lord of Hosts. For thus saith Johovah of Hosts, yet once more, it is a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth, and the sea and the dry land, and I will shake all nations, and the desire of all nations will come, and I will fill this house with glory, saith Jehovah of Hosts. The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, saith Jehovah, God of Hosts. Greater shall be the glory of this latter house than of the former, saith Jehovah, God of Hosts. And in this place will I give peace, saith Jehovah, God of Hosts." This, if prose, is the prose of a pyramid, or an Olympus, compared with the flowery exuberance of Enna or Tempe. It is the bareness of grandeur. It is one of the moors of heaven.

The building of the second Temple had been resigned in despair, partly because it was impossible to supply some of the principal ornaments of the ancient edifice, such as the Urim and Thummim, the ark containing the two tables of the law, the pot of manna, Aaron's rod that budded, and the cloud, or Schekinah, that covered the mercy-seat, and was the symbol of the divine glory. It became then the part of Haggai, in his work of encouragement and revival, to point out the advent of one object to the new Temple, which should supply the lack of all. This was to be the living cloud-the personal Schekinah-the Christ promised to the fathers. And he, when he came, was not only to glorify the mercyseat, and brighten the turban of the high priest as he went in to pray, but to pour a radiance over the whole world, of which he had been the desire Did the Temple shake when the cloud of glory entered it in Solomon's day? The Earth was to respond to the vibration, when the Son of Man came to his Father's house. "Tidings of the new Schekinah" may, therefore, be the proper title for Haggai's prophecy; and while the old men wept when they contrasted the present with the former Temple, he rejoiced, because he saw in the absence of

those external glories, in the setting of those elder stars, the approaching presence of a spiritual splendor-the rising of the last great luminary of the Church.

It was not needful that the herald of an event (comparatively) so near should be dressed in all the insignia of his office. These had been necessary once to attract attention, and secure respect, but now the forerunner was merely, like Elijah, "to gird up his loins, and run before" the chariot which was at hand. And thus we account for the comparative bareness of style appertaining to the prophet Haggai. His associate in office was

ZECHARIAH.

"In

He was the "Son of Barachiah, the son of Iddo." Ezra," says Dr. Eadie, "he is styled simply the son of iddo, most probably because his father, Barachiah, had died in early manhood, and his genealogy, in accordance with Jewish custom, is traced at once to his grandfather, Iddo, who would be better known. He appears to have been a descendant of Levi, and thus entitled to exercise the priestly, as he did the prophetic, office. He entered upon his prophetic duties in the 8th month of the second year of Darius, about 520, A.C. Jewish tradition relates that the prophet died in his native country, after "a life prolonged to many days," and was buried by the side of Haggai, his associate.

The object of Zechariah is precisely that of Haggai"writ large." It is to rouse an indolent, to encourage a desponding, and to abash a backsliding people. This he does, if not with greater energy, yet by bolder types, and through the force of broader glimpses into the future, than his coadjutor.

In all prophetical Scripture, we find lofty symbols rushing down, as if impatient of their elevation, into warm practical application, like high white clouds dissolving in rain. This we noticed in Ezekiel. But in Zechariah it is more remarkable. The red horses, the four horns, the stone with seven eyes, the candlestick of gold, the olive-trees, the flying roll, the ephah and the talent of lead, the four chariots from between the two mountains, the staves Beauty and Bands, the cup of trembling, the burdensome stone, aud the fountain of purification, are not mere brilliant dreams, " for ever