IN NEED OF GLASSES

DISTORTED VISION

"The prophet is a fool, the man that hath the spirit is mad, for the abundance of thine iniquity, and because the enmity is great."—Hosea 9:7

            The chapter in its completeness is again a description of calamities which were to overtake Israel because of its pollution. There are five distinct notes sounded as to these calamities; five elements, shall I say, in the overwhelming calamity that was falling upon the nation that had mislaid its God. The first was the death of joy; the second, actual exile from their own land; the third, the loss of spiritual discernment; the fourth, a falling birth-rate; and the last, actual casting out.

            The text that I have chosen has to do with the central one of these five, namely, the loss of spiritual discernment, and very briefly, by way of introduction to our meditation, I think it is necessary and fair that we refer to the fact that there is admittedly on the part of scholars some obscurity in the text. By that I mean, there are differences of opinion as to what was the simple meaning of the prophet when he uttered the words: "The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad." Was he then referring to false prophets?

            That is the opinion of Pusey and of George Adam Smith. Or was the prophet describing a false estimate of the prophets held by the people? That is the opinion of Cheyne and Bullinger.

My own conviction is that Cheyne and Bullinger are right. The prophet Hosea was not here referring to false prophets: "The prophet is a fool, and the man of the spirit is mad." The word "prophet" might have been used for the false prophets. It constantly was so used; but the phrase, "the man of the spirit," was never used for a false prophet. Hosea is rather declaring the false estimate of the prophet and the man of the spirit which characterized the age that he addressed, and the people to whom his messages were being delivered. This was what men were saying. "The prophet is a fool, and the man of the spirit is mad." Therefore, immediately continuing, he gives the reason for the opinion: "For the abundance of thine iniquity, and because the enmity is great."

            Thus, in the text, we are brought face to face with a false conception and the reason for it. The false conception of the prophetic word, and of spiritual life. "The prophet is a fool." So they were saying. "The man of the spirit is mad." So they were saying. Yes, said Hosea, that is your view, and the reason that you hold that view is to be found in the abundance of your iniquities, and the greatness of your hatred. You have no discernment.

            Now, leaving all the local color, we find great principles flash out upon the page, and I invite you to consider these; first of all this conception of the prophet and the man of the spirit, and then the reason for such conception; and so finally the delusion of those who hold it.

            Centuries have run their course since the times of Hosea, and the conditions of life today are, in a thousand and one details, entirely different from the conditions of life then; but human nature is exactly the same. In the profound and elemental things of human life there is no change. We change the manner of our dress. If you deny that, all you have to do is to get down the family album, and look at your grand­mother's picture! But you are just the same sort of woman your grandmother was. The elemental things of human nature abide the same through the running centuries. Mothers had broken hearts millenniums ago, as today. Youth was exactly what it is; is exactly what it was. I do not believe the degeneracy of youth today is any greater than in the days of my boyhood and youth. Today it may be more violent in expression; but then it was more deceitful. Men are still saying, and perhaps with a new insistence and a greater arrogance than they did, the same things; shall I put it thus? There is a recurrence of this conception of the prophet and the man of the spirit ­"The prophet is a fool, and the man of the spirit is mad."

            Let us consider this false conception. "The prophet is a fool." The word there translated fool (evil) is a somewhat rare one in the Old Testament Scriptures. As a matter of fact it only occurs twenty-five times. There is another word, also rendered "fool" in our versions. For instance, "The fool hath said in his heart." That is not the same word, and the idea is not the same. In the statement, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God," the word for fool (nabal) has a moral element. The reference is to one degenerate morally. Such is not the thought of the text. I have said it occurs twenty-five times. It is found only in the Wisdom literature, the poetry, and the prophetic books. It occurs twice in the Book of Job; only once in the one hundred and fifty Psalms; Isaiah, contemporary with Hosea, uses it twice, and Hosea only once; and eighteen times in the Book of Proverbs.

            What, then, is the meaning of this word? It means simply absurd, or, as we should say, silly—when speak­ing in contempt. The prophet is just silly; daft; inane. The word does not mark immorality in any sense. It marks inanity. The prophet is conceived of as just a fool, to be dismissed as unworthy of attention; beneath contempt.

            And "The man of the spirit." Our rendering gives it, "The man that hath the spirit"; but the blunter reading is, "The man of the spirit." He is the spiritual man. What is the matter with him? He is "mad"; and here the simple meaning is, he is "raving." The man of the spirit, the man of emotion, the man of force in utterance, the man who is swept by a conviction until he breaks through all con­ventionalities, is just raging or raving.

            That was the conception that these people had of Hosea and of Isaiah and of Micah, and of all others who were uttering to them the words of God, and who, swept by their own message, consumed by it as by a fire, violated the conventionalities, broke through the barriers of supposed accuracy and decency and orderliness, and flamed in fire and fury against them.

            Let us linger for a moment to remember the per­sistence of this conception. I have referred to Isaiah. In chapter twenty-eight of that prophecy we have the account of how he, after a long period of private ministry, which began at the death of Ahaz, broke out into speech in a political situation. The politicians were playing the fool. They were attempting to secure national security by going down to Egypt; and Isaiah broke out upon them: "Woe to the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim, and to the fading flower of his glorious beauty." (Isa. 28:1) Right in the middle of that message we hear these men. They are mocking him; they are taunting him; they are laughing at him. At verse nine we have this inter­polation of the mockery of the politicians, What were they saying? “Whom will he teach knowledge? And whom will he make to understand the message? Them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts? For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, there a little." They are laughing at him, and what did they mean? He is just silly! He is mad! He is a fool! Who does he think is going to listen to him? He has lost his wits!

            Later, in the history of Judah, when Shemaiah the false prophet was denouncing Jeremiah, he spoke of him by the very same term. He said, he is just mad.

            If we leave those old days, and pass into the New Testament, in the tenth chapter of John we find what His enemies said about Jesus. He is mad, or hath a demon. Read again a little farther on. When Paul was talking to Agrippa, suddenly Festus broke in, and said, "Paul, thou art mad; thy much learning is turning thee mad."

            Or we run on down through the ages; the Pope said that Luther ought to be in Bedlam; they charged the Wesleys with madness, drawing from them the retort: "Fools and madmen let us be, Yet is our sure trust in Thee."

            When William Booth broke through the barrier of an ecclesiasticism that was strangling his message, they said, "He is not quite all there"; and I have heard something very like it said about Billy Sunday. So the conception persists: "The prophet is a fool"; "The man of the spirit is mad."

            Think of these to whom I have thus made reference. Think of Isaiah's message. Remember the magnificence of its dialectics; the splendor of its rhetoric; the beauty of its poetry; and its grasp upon the elemental things of human life. And yet they said that he was a fool that he was raving.

            Listen to the cadences of the heart-broken Jeremiah. He was perhaps the most heroic among all the prophets, in that for over forty years he preached, with no report that he could give statistically that would have been accepted by ecclesiastical courts as being worthwhile. Yet he thundered forth persistently the message of God to that nation. Consider the marvel of his teaching; the splendor of his philosophy; but they said, "He is a plain fool, he is silly, he is mad."

Softly now, and reverently. They said our Lord was mad. Think of His teaching. No more need be said.

            They said Paul was mad. I know it has been the fashion in some theological quarters to dismiss him; but he cannot be dismissed until we have accounted for the wonder of his personality and the marvel of his writings, and the fact that he is seen triumphing through the ages as interpreter of Christ and His Church. And what about Martin Luther; and William Booth; and Billy Sunday. Test them by results. And yet of all of them the world said they were mad.

            As I survey the whole array, and others I have not named, I am inclined to get Charles Wesley to help me to express myself, and so I repeat his words: "Fools and madmen let us be, Yet is our sure trust in Thee."

            Nevertheless, that is the attitude of the world towards the prophet. His message is accounted silly; the Word of God, and the prophet's passion of utter­ance, are accounted mere raving. All of which means the loss of spiritual discernment. The people of Hosea's day had come to that condition. They were turning to Assyria; they were going to Egypt; they were consulting wizards; persisting in pollutions; to go back upon our previous consideration, they had mislaid God, forgotten God, and they were turning here and there and everywhere; and when the mes­senger of God spoke, they said: "The prophet is a fool"; and when his passion burned with a flame, when there was fury, they said, "The man of the spirit is raving."

            And so we turn to consider what the prophet said here as to the reason of this false conception, "Because of the abundance of thine iniquity." The Old Version had it, "The multitude of iniquity." The word suggests the piling up of iniquities. What had that to do with the conception? Hosea's contemporary, Isaiah, said: "Your iniquities have separated between

you and your God." (Isa. 59:2) The false conception of the prophet's work, and the false conception of the meaning of the passion of the man of the spirit, were due to blindness with regard to God. This is created by moral declension. That which makes men look upon the messenger of God as a fool, and treat the man of the spirit as mad is sin.

            Consequently, comes the second line of declared reason. Hosea declared that their enmity was great. At the back of the criticism of the prophet and the man of the spirit is hatred. Hatred first of God, and then and therefore, hatred of the messengers of God.

            Think of these people! What had happened? Mark the process. They disobeyed God. What next? They forgot Him in the sense of failing to maintain vital relationship with Him: they mislaid Him, and put Him out of their calculations. With what result? They misinterpreted Him. With what result? They hated Him.

            The Christian apostle, Paul, speaks of the psychic man. Our Versions render the phrase "the natural man." (1 Cor. 2:14) The Greek word there is psychic; and I think it would be a great gain if we so read it. The man who is merely the man of mentality, the man whose mentality is divorced from spirituality; the man who is trying to grasp the operations of the universe, but who fails to realize the spiritual element that pervades the universe. Paul says that man, the merely psychic man, is at enmity against God. Why is it the psychic man is at enmity against God? There is only one reason; he does not know God, and has a false idea of God. His false idea may be due to his own false philosophy. That old German singer, whose hymns John Wesley translated, expressed a great truth in a couplet, when he sang:

"O God, of good the unfathomed sea,

Who would not give his heart to Thee?"

            Why don't men give their hearts to God? Why don't men reckon with God? Why do they hate God? Because they do not know Him. Misapprehension of God is at the root of all hostility to God in the human soul. If I could reveal Him to you, there is neither man nor woman, nor youth, listening to me, who would not be drawn to Him, not one. But the God of our own imagination or interpretation, distant, cruel, vindictive, oftentimes men hate. But that is not God; that is man's vain imagining concerning, Him. This mistaken idea comes of sin, and blindness that has resulted from sin. "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God."

            God disobeyed always becomes God distanced from consciousness; and even when men hold on to some belief in His existence, they are still in revolt, because their conception of Him is false. That is why they call His prophet silly and the man of the spirit mad.

            Let us turn for illustration to a story found in the first Book of the Kings, chapter twenty-two. Ahab was King of Israel, the northern kingdom, and Jehoshaphat King of Judah, the southern kingdom. Ahab an incarnation of wickedness. Jehoshaphat a well-meaning man, without any backbone. These two men were forming an alliance to make themselves safe against the common enemy; and Jehoshaphat went up and had a meeting with Ahab. The religious undercurrent in Jehoshaphat, and perhaps in Ahab too, made them feel it was necessary to get some kind of religious sanction; and Ahab had arranged a wonderful gathering. He got prophets of his own together, and one of them, Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah, arranged a very remarkable display. He put on horns of iron to show how victorious they were going to be. Jehoshaphat, however, was not satisfied; and he had said: "Is there not here a prophet of Jehovah besides?" There was one named Micaiah. Now hear what Ahab said concerning him: "The King of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, there is yet one man by whom we may inquire of Jehovah, Micaiah, the son of Imlah; but I hate him." Care­fully observe that, "I hate him." Why? "For he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil." There was the trouble. The prophet of the Lord will make no terms with sin. This Ahab knew, and so he hated him.

            So it always is. The reason for the false conception is found in the moral wickedness of those who hold the view. The false conception, so begotten, leads to hatred. Your iniquity is great, and your enmity is great.

            Now, in conclusion, consider the delusion revealed. They said "The prophet is a fool." Let us go to that book in which that word is most often used, eighteen times. In it we find two definitions of a fool. The first, "The foolish despise wisdom and instruction"; (Prov. 1:7) and the second, "Fools make a mock at sin." (Prov. 14:9) Thus the delusion is revealed. The prophet is eternally at war with sin, and that attitude is the ultimate in wisdom. Therefore the man, who counts him a fool, is the fool.

            The man of the spirit is mad. What is madness? In experience it is a false view, a lie. Insanity is a false view of life, producing wildness of action and utterance, a pitiable condition. "The man of the spirit is mad," they said. He is mad. He has a false view of life. His utterances are wild and ex­aggerated, because he fails to understand. Festus said, "Paul, thou art beside thyself; thou art mad." (Acts 26:24) What did Paul say? "I am not mad, most excellent Festus; but speak forth words of truth and sober­ness." It was Festus who was mad, whose view of life was wrong. His outburst against Paul was the outburst of insanity.

            What shall we say of these things considered in the light of all human experience? First, we declare the rationality of faith. Unbelief is the most irrational attitude possible to man. The man who attempts to account for the things in the midst of which he lives by the things in the midst of which he lives, is widowed of reason. I use the expression carefully; the rationality of faith. To me it is infinitely more difficult to believe in this world as I see it—I do not mean as man has often spoiled it, but as it is in itself—its mountains and valleys, its oceans and continents, its magnificent splendors, without a God, than with the God of the Bible accounting for it. I cannot believe that the God in Whom I am bound to believe, Who fashioned the daisy and made a man—I care nothing for the moment about the process—is careless about the man, and not interested in him. If I admit God has some care for human life in any way,

            I cannot believe He is careless about the highest thing in human life which is the moral element and capacity. Faith is utterly rational. To try and account for the things that are by the things that are is to work in a vicious circle. It is the man of faith, the man who endures as seeing Him Who is invisible (Heb. 11:27)—mark the contradiction and paradox, and face them —seeing Him Who is invisible, who is the man of rationality. That is the man of reason that is the man of sanity; that is the man who is not mad.

            Again, I learn as I ponder this message in the light of human life, the inevitableness of passion. One is sometimes tempted to wonder whether people within the Christian Church really do believe the things they say they do believe. I have referred to William Booth, the great founder of the Salvation Army. Do you know what made him the flaming prophet? He heard an infidel lecturing, and laughing at Christi­anity. He said: "If I really believed what you Christian people pretend to believe, I would not rest, day nor night, telling men and women about Jesus." William Booth heard it, and it gripped him; and he said, "The man is right." The result was that he did not rest day or night.

            The Christian Church today has largely become‑"faultily flawless, coldly regular, splendidly worthless."

            There is very little madness among us. Look at the young Church; the Church aflame with fire. In its presence the city of Jerusalem said, "These men are drunk." Has anyone ever suggested we were drunk because of our Christianity? If the things we affirm in our creeds are true, we ought to be on fire. The trouble is we are not. They are still saying we are silly, but they do not often say we are mad; and it is because we have lost—well! What have we lost? As God is my witness, I am not arguing for painted fire. It never burns. I am not pleading for a simulated enthusiasm, and never for excitement, which is like the twitching of a galvanized corpse. That is not what I am pleading for. But if we have lost our flame; if we have lost our fire; if we have lost our fury, under certain circumstances, against evil; it is because we have lost our vision of God, and we have lost our sense of the greatness of our evangel.

            May God restore to us the rationality of faith in fervor, and the passion of enthusiasm that drives us out to do the unusual thing, if necessary, if by any means we may make glad our Lord and our Savior.

MANY HAVE MISLAID GOD

GOD MISLAID

"For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and builds palaces; and Judah hath multiplied fortified cities: but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the castles thereof."—Hosea 8:14

            That is the final verse in a chapter which contains a message of judgment, judgment in the sense of punish­ment and calamity about to fall upon the people and all those who live by the flesh saying they are spiritual people. The chapter is dramatic in its method. It opens with two clarion cries and our translators have just a little robbed the passage of its arresting character by the introduction of certain words, in order to pleasant words, and the making of smooth reading and sense. There is something of value in the very method of abruptness and arousal. In our Bibles the first verse reads: "Set the trumpet to thy mouth. As an eagle he cometh against the house of Jehovah, because they have transgressed My covenant, and tres­passed against My law."

            The first word there is the word "set." There is no such word in the Hebrew text. It has been supplied. And again, in the sentence "as an eagle he cometh," the words "he cometh" do not occur in the Hebrew text. They have been supplied. Now, if we are seeking for beauty of literature merely, according to our English standards, all that may be very good; but I am simply drawing attention to the fact that in the Hebrew text there is an abruptness about it. Two trumpet cries sharply follow: the first, "The trumpet to thy mouth"; the second, "As an eagle against the house of Jehovah." The text does not say "Set"; it does not say "He cometh." As a matter of fact, we have not improved it from the literary standpoint by the introduction of these words. The method of the Hebrew suggests two sudden trumpet blasts. The message of the prophet was intended to be one of arousal; and it began with those two clarion cries: "The trumpet to thy mouth," "As an eagle against the house of Jehovah."

            Now I do not know anything experimentally about the playing of a trumpet, but I do know that the Hebrew word here means, The trumpet to the roof of your mouth. Is there some peculiar, wailing sound produced by that action? I don't know; but it is a startling word, "The trumpet to the roof of the mouth. As an eagle against the house of Jehovah." Then the prophet runs on, "Because they have trans­gressed My covenant, and trespassed against My law. They shall cry unto Me, My God, we Israel know Thee. Israel hath cast off that which is good; the enemy shall pursue him"—and so forth.

            The chapter, I repeat, is a chapter of judgment, and if it be carefully examined .it will be found that the prophet gives the reasons for the calamity which he is declaring to be imminent; and it is as though he does so in five blasts upon the trumpet. Or, in other words, he names five causes of the coming judg­ments, and he does so with a crescendo effect as he reveals the failure and the sin of the nation. What are the five charges he makes against them? First, transgression and trespass; second, false kings and princes set up to rule without consulting God ; third, idolatry, the calf of Samaria set up as a center of worship; fourth, the madness of seeking safety in alliance with Assyria; fifth, false altars, and sin as the result of them. That is the entire chapter, until we reach our text.

            Then in the words of the text he summarizes the whole situation. "Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and builds palaces; and Judah hath multiplied fortified cities; I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the castles thereof."

            This, then, is clearly a message of judgment, and in these words we find the prophet's declaration of the all-containing malady, of which all the other things are symptoms.

            What, then, is the malady? That is inclusively stated in the words, "Israel hath forgotten his Maker." America, Europe, and all the rest have also this malady and are witnesses to God’s judgment. Having made this inclusive statement, the prophet describes the resulting activity of the people who have forgotten their Maker. In this charge Judah is implicated as well as Israel. There are two activities described. "Israel (Europe) has built palaces," and "Judah (America) has multiplied fortified cities." The activities which result when the people have forgotten God, are—building palaces, and multiplying fortified cities. The final word is the declaration of judgment, "I will send fire upon the cities . . . and destroy the castles." (Earthquakes, volcanoes, tropical storms, etc.) Let us follow the lines suggested, considering: the All-containing Malady; the Resulting Activity; the Issue.

            The all-containing malady. "Israel hath forgotten his Maker." Everyone knows what it is to forget. But do we? Does this mean that the nation of Israel and of Judah—Hosea speaking specially to Israel, but ever and anon, as we have seen, talking to Judah as implicated in the wrongdoing of Israel, and so including the whole nation—does this mean, I say, that these people had really forgotten God in the usual sense of the word? By no means! Men cannot forget God. They can deny Him, but in so doing they are still remembering Him! Men do not forget God intellectually. This nation certainly had not forgotten God in that first and simple sense of the word. What then is this idea of forgetting God? In order to under­stand the statement, to see the real significance of the word that is employed here, and employed so con­stantly through these Old Testament Scriptures to describe a peril, and to describe an awful possibility, we need to recognize the real meaning of the Hebrew word. Now, shall I very much surprise you if I tell you that the Hebrew word means quite simply to mislay? That is the exact meaning of it. Israel hath mislaid his Maker. You know what it is to mislay something. You have not forgotten it, but you have mislaid it. That is the idea.

            Let us examine this carefully. At first blush such a statement seems to take the sting out of it; but if it be carefully considered it will be found that it puts the sting into it. To understand this, let us turn aside briefly and look for this Hebrew word Shakach in other places in the Literature.

            When this nation was in the making, when it was coming to national constitution and consciousness, the great God-given leader was Moses. After Moses had led this people through that tremendous time of constitution, and had been with them for forty years in their wanderings up and down in the wilderness, he was about to leave them; and taking the Book of Deuteronomy at its face value—and I believe that is the only value—we find in that book his farewell addresses to this very nation.

            In these addresses he constantly warned them against one grave peril. What was it? Forgetting God; and whenever he did so he used this same Hebrew word. In chapter four, and verse nine, we read: "Take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes saw, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life; but make them known unto thy children and thy children's children." (Deut. 4:9)

            That is the meaning of forgetting. Forgetting is personal neglect of the things that are intellectually believed, and failure to make them the central things of family life. Israel had mislaid God in its individual action, in its national outlook, and in its dealing with its children.

Glance on, and in chapter six, verse ten, we read: "And it shall be, when Jehovah thy God shall bring thee into the land which He sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee; great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, and houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and cisterns hewn out, which thou hewedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not, and thou shalt eat and be full ; then beware lest thou forget Jehovah."

            In other words, When you come into a land where you will be prosperous, said Moses, when you are in the midst of easy prosperity, that dire and disastrous peril to national life and individual life; beware lest you mislay God.

            Yet again; in chapter eight, and verses eleven and seventeen, we read: "Beware, lest thou forget Jehovah thy God, in not keeping His commandments, and His ordinances, and His statutes, which I command thee this day;—And lest thou say in thy heart, My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me thy wealth."

            The peril indicated is that of self-satisfaction, which follows when God is mislaid. And yet once more, in chapter nine, verse one, we read: "Hear, O Israel; thou art to pass over Jordan this day."

            Verse four: "Speak not thou in thine heart, after that Jehovah thy God hath thrust them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness Jehovah hath brought me in to possess this land . . . not for thy righteousness, nor for thy uprightness of thy heart, dost thou go in to possess their land."

            Verse seven: "Remember, forget thou not."

            These are but scattered sentences from these fare­well discourses, but they reveal Moses' sense of the danger of the people. He saw this nation, and he saw it down the coming years, and he knew its ultimate peril would be that God should be forgotten. If they could not intellectually forget God, they could put Him out of calculation, they could mislay Him.

            From these four quotations we see personal neglect, neglect within the family to train the child; self-satisfaction that comes from such neglect; and the self-righteousness which issues, the pride that says, we have made ourselves great; and finally that terrible mislaying of God which comes from prosperity, which says because of our righteousness and upright­ness of heart God has blessed us, and has given us these things; and so God is put out of sight, mislaid.

            To return to Hosea. The years had run on, centuries had run on, and everything Moses had warned them against had come to pass; and now this prophet of tears and thunder, as he declared an imminent judgment, said: Here is your malady; accounting for your transgressions and your trespasses, your false kings and your false princes, your calf in Samaria, your alliance with Assyria, the altars you are building, these are all symptoms. The malady is that you have mislaid God, just mislaid Him, till you have become oblivious of Him. That is the peril of a man (Husband, wife, child), the peril of a nation (America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Far East, etc.); mislaying God. They care less what His thoughts and ways are. Malady is the result from God’s love.

            What is the process? How do men come to mislay God? First, they give an intellectual assent to the fact of His existence without seeing to it that their conduct corresponds with their assent. Intellectual orthodoxy will blast a man as surely as heresy will, unless there is the action in life that corresponds with the accurate assent of the mind to His truth. That was the story of this nation; and whenever there is intellectual assent without corresponding action, there is spiritual dullness. God intellectually accepted without response in obedience, fades away from the immediateness of consciousness. He is relegated, it may be, to the temple, and left there; is relegated, it may be, to the Church on Sunday, and is left there, until we get back next Sunday. If that is so, God help us, we are not Christian. God is mislaid; He is lost. That was the trouble with Israel. It is the trouble with humanity, God forgotten in that sense; mislaid, lost as an active power, touching life, con­ditioning it, inspiring it, driving it, building it up. Israel hath forgotten his Maker.

            Well, when that is so, what happens next? Hosea said Israel was building. Now, if we are looking at the Old Version, it says, "temples"; the Revised Version says "palaces." Which is right? They are both right, and they are both wrong. I think either word may be used to convey the sense of the Hebrew word. The word that the prophet made use of literally means "spacious buildings." Today the bigger the home, the better. So big they lose them to the bank in little time. The old translators said, That means temples and some look like temples. The new translators say, it means palaces and some look like palaces. It may mean either; it may mean both. The true idea is that of spaciousness. Whether that spaciousness was for pleasure or for worship matters nothing because they were full of idols down to the garage. The passion of the nation came to be to build big things. Somebody says these prophets are out of date! Think again. The passion for big­ness is a symptom of capacity for the eternal, for God; and when men have mislaid God, then they try and build big things without God. Men are always striving to put back the prison walls, and to build something larger, more spacious. It is manifest absolutely today on the material level, for all material activity is the symptom of mental and spiritual condition. Great buildings are the order of the day in New York, Chicago, London, everywhere. It is unconsciously symptomatic. Oliver Wendell Holmes in that choice little poem of his, "The Chambered Nautilus," described the nautilus building his own house ever larger, ever larger; and as he observed it, he wrote the poem, and said in effect that he had learned the secret of life.

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll I

Leave thy low-vaulted past

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length are free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea."

            That was a great thing. That is humanity's struggle up after the Infinite: "Build thee more stately mansions, O .my soul." I am not going to deal with the poem. I would like to say, in passing, it cannot be done. You cannot build more stately mansions for your soul; and yet the passion is there. It is the passion for the big, the spacious, the infinite, the eternal.

Its expression in the material is tragically futile. Mr. Dooley—one of those magnificent Americans who abound in laughter, and yet are mastered by profound philosophies—wrote an article on machinery. It abounds in merriment, and is full of sanity and sense. At the end of that article he said—I am not quoting the actual words, but the sense of them: We are all busy running round, and building, and putting up, putting up things that are called sky-scrapers by everyone, except the sky! And his last sentence was, "We are still buried by hand."

            What an acid satire is there, biting through the rippling humor. We are building sky-scrapers; we pick up the newspapers and read the descriptions of these vast buildings; we visit them and go up in the latest of them, and still have to look up to the sky. Sky-scrapers, certainly!

And yet the passion for the big in humanity is revealed in the building. The prophet says: You have forgotten, you have mislaid God, and you are putting up spacious buildings, sky-scrapers!

            Then, as to Judah, he said: She has multiplied fortified cities. If building spacious buildings means the quest for spaciousness, what is the meaning of fortified cities? The quest for security, the attempt to secure safety. If the passion for bigness is a symptom of capacity for

God, the passion for safety is a symptom of the sense of peril. Safety first! Have you heard that anywhere? That is what we are all saying. What does America demand? What is Britain seeking? What does France want? What does Italy ask? What do we all want? Security. Security against what? I will tell you. The lack of God, and the things that result from it. This great prophet of Israel under­stood. We have mislaid God, and now we are build­ing sky-scrapers, and engines of war. Humanity forgets God, and then gropes after the spacious, and fights for the secure, and never makes anything so big but that the sky laughs at it; and never secures itself for one five minutes from a possible outbreak of devastation. Our twin-towers are our testimony.

            I said at the beginning that this is a message of judgment, and so it is. We cannot turn it into any­thing else. How does it end? "I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the castles thereof."

            To forsake God is to ensure ruin. A fire, what does that mean? Does that necessarily mean that God was about to rain down material fire? Oh no. Away down in Judah, when Hosea was pro­phesying in the northern kingdom, Isaiah was also prophesying. Let us go back to Isaiah, and listen to something he said one day: "The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling hath seized the godless ones. Who among us can dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?"  (Isa. 33:14)

            Devouring fire, everlasting burnings? What is that?—Hell? Oh no; go on, and hear him as he asks who can dwell in that fire? He answers his question: "He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppres­sion, that shaketh his hands from taking a bribe; that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from looking upon evil; he shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks; his bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure. Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty."

            Who can dwell in fire? (Daniel & friends-those when this earth is burnt up) The pure, those who do not forget God, who live in right relationship with Him. If men do forget Him, then that very Divine presence blasts. The fire that destroys is the fire of the imman­ence of God. We cannot get away from Him. We have mislaid Him. He is at our elbow. We may be oblivious of Him, we may do without Him, but all the while we are living and moving and having our being in Him. In His hand our breath is.

            And according to our relationship to Him, He will bless or blast. If we mislay God, we can run up our sky-scrapers, we can multiply our battleships; but we cannot escape the slowly burning fire, which everywhere is purging out the things effete. We cannot escape God, Who blasts that which forgets Him by attempting to satisfy the inherent passionate craving of human life with palaces and war machinery.

OLE GUY THAT IS REALLY STUPID

UNCONSCIOUS DECADENCE

"Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not."—Hosea 7:9b

            Or, to read that in slightly different form, a more literal rendering of the Hebrew, and I think perhaps a more poetic: "Gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knoweth it not."

            This is without question a terrible chapter. It is a prophetic diagnosis of the national condition. The dark and terribly sinister background of a degenerate and polluted people is of course obvious throughout the book. In this message, however, the prophet deals with it very clearly. He shows that the desire of God is to heal and to restore; but that this desire is constantly frustrated by the pollution of the nation, and its willful ignoring of God. In difficulty politically, and with regard to surrounding peoples, it is running to Assyria and to Egypt for help. I repeat, there is persistent ignoring of God, and all the while its strength is ebbing away. The nation is being destroyed.  Looks everywhere except with Him.

            The verse from which the text is taken repeats the same phrase twice over, "knoweth it not." The statement is first made, "Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not"; and then is repeated pictorially, "Yea, gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knoweth it not."            The tragedy of the situation is revealed in that twice-repeated word, "he knoweth it not . . . he knoweth it not." "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not." It is perhaps the most perilous condition possible.

            The first thing I would like to say in considering the figure employed is that the suggestion it makes is entirely contrary to Nature. Now I ask you, if any of you were unconscious when the gray hairs began to appear! I do not think anyone would claim such ignorance. It is never so in actual experi­ence. We discover the gray hairs, some of us sooner than others, but we discover them! So here is some­thing employed as a figure of speech which is contrary to Nature, and therefore is the more arresting. Men discover them, and they laugh at them, or they try to hide them, or if they are foolishly weak-minded, they pull them out, and if they are utterly stupid they dye them. I said men! The facts as stated may have wider application. I am content to refer to men only!

            "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not." It is not natural, it is not true. If it were ever true in the time of the prophet then mirrors were not plentiful. Mirrors are useful if only that they do help us to discover the gray hairs. And yet the prophet distinctly said of the nation: "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and he knoweth it not." No mirrors in this house.

            And yet, this thing entirely unnatural in the physical, is constantly true in the moral and spiritual realms, and so the figure of the prophet is warranted and indeed most graphic. Signs of decadence, which. are obvious to others, are undiscovered by ourselves; and we go on, and on, and on, the victims of ebbing strength, spiritually and morally becoming degenerate, without knowing it! We are blind to the signs which are self-evident to onlookers. There is no condition more perilous to our highest well-being than this of unconscious decadence. The skillful physician knows how often the cessation of suffering means that mortification has set in, and that in the moral realm may be the meaning of ignorance of gray hairs. Numb to the facts!

            There is one text in the Bible that, as God is my witness, I never read without trembling. It is a text that tells the story of Samson: "He wist not that the Spirit of God had departed from him." A man who had known the power of the Holy Spirit resting upon him, working through him, was going on and on, and the Spirit had left him, and he did not know it. "Gray hairs are here and there upon him, and lie knoweth it not." The signs of moral and spiritual degeneracy are abounding, and they are seen by others, but not by ourselves. I repeat, there is no condition into which a man or a nation can pass more full of peril, more calamitous than that. Moral degeneracy and spiritual failure are cursing them, and all the while they are unconscious of it, going through the same motions, but without vital significance. It may be, to be particular and immediate, they are still going to church every Sunday, saying their prayers every night, making their contribution to the enterprises of God in the world with regularity, and yet all the while suffering from spiritual degeneracy and moral pollution.

            The change is apparent to others, the signs of weakness are obvious, but they do not know it. In considering this matter, let us follow three lines of questioning: What is the cause of this ignorance? What its course? And what its cure?

            First, then, what is the cause of such ignorance? I am not now talking about the disease. I am talking rather and only about the appalling condition of having the disease and not knowing it, of having moral and spiritual declension and being unconscious of it. Why is it that men are ever thus unconscious of that which is obvious to others?

            The first answer to this is that a man who is un­conscious of his own moral degeneracy and spiritual deflection is a man who has lost his vision of the normal. When I use the word "normal" I am using the word on its highest level. I am thinking for the moment not socially, or nationally, but individually. I am thinking of individual lives, according to the Divine standard and pattern, according to the standard, Here, moreover, I am not concerned with standards we have created for ourselves, but with the standards which lie potentially within our personalities, the standards—let it be said bluntly, the standards of God for us.

            If a man is unconscious of failure, it is because he has lost a sense of true standards; the reason is always that he has lost his vision of the true norm, even though he may still talk about the standard. When he speaks of the standard, what he means is not the standard. The trouble with men and women everywhere who have gray hairs upon them in the moral and spiritual realm, and do not know it, is that they have lost the true vision of the norm.

            The normal in man, what is it? First of all, his spiritual nature; second, the fact that holiness is forevermore the condition of beauty and health; and, therefore, that the mental and the physical in human personality are subservient to the spiritual, and only valuable as they are sacramental symbols of that spiritual essence. It will be admitted that men today are not so thinking of human life. And that is the trouble with man today, he is thinking about himself callously. Or to return to the statement already made, men have lost the vision of the normal.

            How do we think about human life? How is it to be interpreted? What is the standard? We lose the sense of the normal in human life when we forget that the utmost fact of personality is neither physical nor psychical, but pneumatic. I do not quite like using that word, because today we have lost its first value. We use it for tires! Pneumatic in the Scriptural sense means spiritual. Moral degeneracy, why? Because man is forgetting the majesty and the dignity of his personality, and that the standard of man's life is never accurate when the spiritual is either neglected or a contradicted quantity in his life. A man may be quite moral according to the standards of life today, and yet in the deepest sense be immoral. We say a man is a decent member of society? But what do we mean by society? Ordinary society, everyday society, intellectual society, aesthetic society, refined society? I am not denying that a man may be decent in those surroundings. But how does he feel when he gets into a prayer meeting? Oh, he says—"I don't go." We know that. But why doesn't he go? Because he feels he would be out of place there.

            Exactly, he has lost the sense of the fact that man at his highest is a man who communes with God; that the ultimate calling of human life is not the function­ing of the fussy days in which we are gathering ducats and dollars; that the ultimate meaning of human life is fulfilled when a man walks and talks with God. If he has lost that, then gray hairs are upon him, and he doesn't know it, because that is not his vision.

            This lost sense of the spiritual nature of man always issues in a lowered conviction concerning holiness, the forgetfulness of the fact that holiness is the condition of beauty; and that there is no beauty in the ultimate meaning of the great and gracious word, except the beauty of holiness, that which results from holiness. It may be objected that this is a very old-fashioned conception of life, indeed Victorian or puritanical. As a matter of fact it is much older than that. It is as old as man is, and older; it is as old as the founda­tion of the universe, as old as the philosophy that realizes that all things proceed from God as well as return to Him. It is lost irrevocably by men who have lost contact with God. When we have lost a sense of the spiritual, and the deep inner conviction that the secret of all beauty is holiness, and that the mental and the physical, sacred things, divinely created things, are, after all, in the last analysis, subservient to the spiritual, we have lost our sense of the normal in human life.

            The vision of the normal declares that the cardinal things of beauty and of splendor in human life are faith and hope and love. Faith, which is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen; faith, that faculty of the human soul that always soars from the rock of reason, but now spreads its pinions and reaches the Infinite, and has fellowship with it. Faith, which grasps the Eternal in its thinking, and then compels conduct to conform to the vision. Faith is never dead. It is always the principle of energy. Nothing was ever done, of human worth, but was done on the basis of faith. Every victory ever won individually or socially resulted from the activity of faith. Every deed is preceded by a dream. When we were young they told us, sometimes, sadly, cynically, we were building castles in the air. Of course we were. Normal human life always begins there. Have you a boy doing it at home? Don't you dare be fool enough to sneer at your boy for building his castle in the air. That is faith. No boy ever built a cottage on the ground but that it had been preceded by a castle in the air. That is faith. It was faith which spanned the rivers and tunneled the mountains; faith did the engineering feats that fill us with wonder as we travel, winding round and round the mountains, or boring through their strongholds. When faith only operates within the limits of the material, and does not go out into the realm where no bridges can be built and no tunnels made, there is an atrophy of personality. Then we have lost our vision of the normal. Where faith is eternally interpreting and making real the things not yet grasped and not yet reached, indefinitely building castles, not in the air, but in the vastness of eternity, and in the ages to come, then life is normal. No achievement within the physical is final or complete. No city of human construction is perfect. The ultimate city must come down out of heaven from God. For the building of that, faith is completely necessary.

            God grant that we may be enabled to see again the norm of human life, the real meaning of being, to catch again the consciousness of the norm in grandeur and splendor, with the spiritual central to every­thing; holiness the condition of beauty; mental and physical powers subject to spiritual aspirations and endeavors. That is faith grasping the infinite, hope aspiring toward realization, and love harmonizing with the pulsing heart of God. If we do not see that vision, then let us look in a mirror, and we shall see the gray hairs.

            This loss of the vision of the normal issues in the setting up of false standards of life. Denying the spiritual there follows the pinnacle of the mental, and the deification of the physical. When these things are so, personality is degenerate; it is working its own destruction.

            Of course the trouble too often is that men are satisfied with comparing themselves with the average man, a terrible thing to do. The average man is the man who does not know, does not see that the Spirit of God has departed. Too many today are like the group in Ephesus who said—as the King James Version renders it—"We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost." Real spiritual depth to their lives.

            Of this condition of unconscious decadence we have another prophetic illustration in Malachi. Seven times over across the page of Malachi it is recorded that the people replied to the prophetic messages by asking the same question, "Wherein?" Here we have the same people later on saying, "Wherein." The prophet said, You have robbed God; and they replied in effect: We do not see we have robbed Him; wherein have we done so? He charged them with blasphemy. They said, Wherein have we blasphemed? That is what the world is saying today to the preacher: What is all this about? Wherein have we failed? What is the matter with us? Why do you preach to us? Why do you do it? Wherein are we wrong? I will tell you what is the matter. Gray hairs are here and there upon men, and they do not know it. Spiritual declension, moral deterioration, lowering of the standards, a loosening of the high standards of beauty and holiness; and men do not see it, do not know it, because they have lost the vision of the true standard, and therefore they have set up false standards. A debased standard issues in a degenerate personality; but men are unconscious of the destructive process.

            Now a second line of consideration is involved, that of the curse of this ignorance. Signs of decadence witness to debility and disease; and they are really beneficent warnings if we did but see them. To return to the realm of Nature. Gray hairs are a beneficent warning. They are at least to remind us that we are to limit our output of energy. Every indication of degeneracy is a warning. It might be possible for a man to grow old without any sign to warn him as to how he should conduct his affairs. That would but hasten the end of everything. The signs are beneficent warnings, but when they are undiscovered, the warning is not known, but the disease is still there, and its operation is progressive, and its ultimate is death.

            Are we conscious that between the today of our experience and the yesterday of it, five, ten years ago, there is a lowering of our moral standards? If we are not, our neighbors are, and our mothers are, our wives are, and our husbands are, and our children are! It is indeed a tragedy if we are blind to it when it is there. The warning is unheeded because the sign is not discovered; but the trouble is there, and the process is going on. Ephraim, not knowing that gray hairs were here and there upon him nationally, was degenerate, and the degeneracy was progressive, and the ultimate must be destruction.

            Gray hair is not a tragedy; but failure to see it is. An unconsciousness which produces carelessness is in itself a catastrophe. Spiritual and moral failure is a tragedy, accentuated a thousand-fold by ignorance of it. Thus we come to our final question. Is there any cure for this ignorance? The answer is involved in the previous considerations. The cure for ignorance is found in the contemplation of the normal. And this is now made possible to us in a Person. How much time do we give to see Jesus clearly for our­selves? I know, and I am not unconscious of the value of it so far as it goes, that we have a general familiarity with Him, that we even give our assent to the great doctrines of the Church concerning Him. But how much time do we give to personally consider Him? There is no correction more quick, and sharp, and powerful to my own spiritual and moral carelessness and blindness than determined consideration of the Normal and the Standard of my human nature, as it is given to me in the Person of Christ. We are headed for His kingdom, not ours. Consideration of Him means the restoration of the vision of the Normal. If we will honestly give ourselves to the business of considering Him, such consideration will bring quick and sharp revelation of the sprinkling of the gray hairs, of the sense of failure in ourselves. It always has been so, and always will be so to the end of the journey. To see the failure is at least to be a long way towards recovery. To know that the Spirit of God has left me at least gives me the opportunity for investigating the reason for His departure, and seeking again to find Him.

            Of course contemplation of the normal must be followed by severe and honest self-examination by that Norm. How often do we examine ourselves? How often do we take time to see how far are we from these standards? Wherein are we coming short? Do not expect any one else to do this for you. They cannot. You could neither for me, nor I for you. We cannot examine each other in the last analysis. But if we will ourselves bring our lives to the test of the revelation that God has given us in the Man of Galilee, and that not merely with regard to the outward conditions of life, but to the inward thinking of life, not merely with regard to the things that are overt and open before the eyes of others, but with regard to those inner and spiritual centers of life, it will be a severe and healthful discipline for us spiritually.

            But again, the vision of the normal and of the actual, by the way of severe self-examination, will reveal the gray hairs, but it will not remove them. If they are there, even though I see the Normal, the sight of the Normal will not remove them. If they are there, even though I am brought to a consciousness of failure, that consciousness is not enough to overtake it and correct it.

            Then what shall we do? We must turn to God. To return to those half humorous things we were saying at the beginning. The gray hairs which pictorially set forth spiritual and moral weakness, degeneracy, deflection; the gray hairs; well, what about them? God does not laugh at them, and God won't help us to hide them, so that they cannot be seen; and God won't pull up symptoms and leave the disease, and God will have no fellowship in the lying work of dyeing them another color. What will He do?

            As we are in the Old Testament we will first consult it for an answer. Listen to this:

"Jehovah, Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; Who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; Who crowneth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy desire with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle."

            Then the gray hairs disappear. That is a psalm.

            Let me turn over to a prophet preaching at the same time Hosea was, namely, Isaiah:

"They that wait for Jehovah shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."

            God alone is able to remove gray hairs from our spiritual and moral nature by taking away the de­structive forces of our strength which are producing the moral degeneracy.

            Let us turn to the New Testament and finish there. What is the cure for gray hairs, moral and spiritual? What is the cure for signs of disease? What is the way by which the evidences of senility morally and spiritually can be banished forever? What is the way?

"Ye must be born again."

            The new life that He gives will remove the disease, and put an end to the signs of weakness. May God arouse us if we are asleep; open our eyes if blind, so that it may not be true of us that the gray hairs are there without our knowing it.

GOD'S DIFFICULTY- HE HATES DIVORCE FOR ONE THING

THE DIFFICULTY OF GOD

"O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? For your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the dew that goeth early away." —Hosea 6:4

            As we take our way through this prophecy we find in it a wonderful revelation of the struggle of God over the soul of a nation as well as the individual. Its messages alternate between the passion of the Divine heart and the perversity of the human will in a corporate sense.

            We were concerned in our previous article with the final verse of the previous chapter. "I will go and return to My place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek My face." That is the ultimate judgment of God upon a sinning people as well as an individual, the with­drawal of Himself, the withdrawal of His presence, that is in the sense of guiding or governing (left up to themselves); the abandonment of the people to their own elections, and their own choices, and their own perversities. But we saw that the solemn word of warning ended with the leaving open of the door. He said, "I will go and return to My place, till"; and the way of return was indicated, "Till they acknowledge their offence, and seek My face"; God was revealed as not willing to abandon, even when He withdrew Himself.

            The chapter from which the text is taken is linked with the preceding one, in the sequence of teaching, for directly the prophet had uttered that solemn word that told of the Divine withdrawal, and ended with the note that indicated the door was still open for the return of His people if they would acknowledge their offence and seek His face, he broke out into what is certainly one of the most tender and beautiful appeals of all the Biblical literature, contained in the first three verses of chapter six, and to which we will return soon. The prophet said to the people, in view of the illuminative word of imminent judg­ment, and of the fact that in uttering it God had indicated His willingness to return, "Come, and let us return unto Jehovah; for He hath torn, and He will heal us." It was a great appeal, thrilling with Messianic promise, the final meaning of which was never found until in the fullness of time the Messiah came, while yet it had an immediate value for those who heard it.

            Then suddenly, breaking in upon that plaintive and beautiful appeal, the voice of God is heard: "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? For your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the dew that goeth early away." It is a strange and startling word, declaring the difficulty of God; "What shall I do? . . . what shall I do?" It also reveals the reason for the difficulty: "Your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the dew that goeth early away."

            Let us consider first the fact as disclosed, the difficulty of God; and that in order that we may ask, Is there any solution? God is seen in difficulty. Is there any way of escape for God from His difficulty?

            God's difficulty is revealed, as I have said, in the question He asks. It is a daring figure of speech which the prophet employed, and of course that means that God employed it through His servant the prophet. I think the more gently we look at it, and the more carefully we consider it, the more startling it will become. I can understand a man saying, what shall I do to be saved? But here is God saying, what shall I do to save him? This is not the cry of the human soul seeking after God. It is the cry of God seeking after the human soul. This is not the picture of a man in difficulty because he cannot find God. It is the picture of God in difficulty because He cannot deal with man. "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee?"

            The same attitude is revealed more than once in the course of these prophetic writings in the Old Testament. The great song of the vineyard in the beginning of chapter five in the prophecy of Isaiah opens; "Let Me sing for My well-beloved a song of My beloved touching His vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard in a very fruitful hill . . . and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes." Then interpreting the parable, God is recorded as saying, "What could have been done more to My vineyard, that I have not done in it?" Said Hosea in the northern kingdom, "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee?" and in the southern kingdom, contemporary with Hosea, Isaiah was saying the same thing. He was declaring that God was faced with difficulty; "What could have been done more to My vineyard, that I have not done?" (He questions Himself for our sake.) And yet another prophet, also exercising his ministry in the same period, Micah, makes God thus speak : "O My people, what have I done unto thee? And wherein have I wearied thee? Testify against Me." In all those messages the attitude of God revealed is very arresting.

            Now bluntly, what does this mean? Wherein lies the Divine difficulty? Why this appeal of God in extremity, and in difficulty, in the presence of a nation, or of a human soul? What does it mean? The answer to that question is clearly given. The reason He gives for His difficulty is not their sin, is not that of their pollution. It is true that the whole prophecy pulsates with the unveiling of their lewdness and whoredom and drunkenness and beastliness; but these are not the things that constitute the difficulty of God. When He speaks of His difficulty He does not say a word about their sin.

            What, then, constitutes His difficulty? Their goodness. That is the trouble. "For your goodness is as a morning cloud, and the dew which goeth early away." Now here we surely discover an element that startles us; God in difficulty in the presence of goodness!

            Mark well the figures of speech. A morning cloud and dew. They are both things of excellence, and things of exquisite beauty. The morning cloud, as the sun is rising, is smitten with beauty; and dew in the beauty of the morning, when every blade of grass is glistening in rainbow loveliness, is equally glorious. The morning cloud is a thing of exquisite beauty, and the dew a thing of infinite tenderness. "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto you? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? For your goodness is as a morning cloud and as the dew."

            But read on, and we have the revealing expression, "which goeth early away." A morning cloud, the dew; both excellent, but fleeting; too feeble to produce a harvest, dissipated by the heat of the sun, before any permanent result can be gained. Goodness fleeting that is what creates God's difficulty. I am quite willing to put this consummately. God's difficulty is not created by vulgar sins; God's difficulty is not created in the human soul by reason of pollution and whoredom and beastliness. With these things God can deal; but God is in great difficulty when goodness is only like the morning cloud, is only like the dew that goes away early.

            What is goodness? In the margin of the King James Version you will notice that it is suggested that instead of the word "goodness" we should read "mercy or kindness"; and the Revisers, English and American, suggest "kindness" "Your kindness is as a morning cloud, and as the dew that goeth early away." But we must examine that a little more closely. The Hebrew word rendered goodness has as its root meaning, the idea of bending the neck; and in use it was constantly employed as referring to the attitude of graciousness, and of goodness in that sense.             Here I think that neither word, goodness nor kindness, catches the real idea of the complaint of God. The word suggests that attitude of life which bends the neck, and I would, while recognizing that the word connotes goodness, and is a revelation of the very essence of kindness, render it thus: "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? For your submission is as a morning cloud." Goodness is right, because all good­ness is the result of submission to God; and kindness is right, because all kindness issues from such sub­mission; but here it is important to get back to the first meaning of the word. It is a revelation of what goodness really is, and so a revelation of the difficulty of God. I am reverently attempting to interpret from the Divine standpoint. God had said, I will withdraw Myself, and go to My place, and leave these people to their own choices and devices and imaginings, till they seek My face. Then God, through the prophet, called them to return. And, suddenly, God said; Yes, but that is indeed the trouble. In their returning there has been no resoluteness, no abiding value.      They have come back so often, but their coming has meant nothing. They have bent the neck sincerely, but all their submission has been fleeting. Now that is the point when God is in difficulty with men. My sins, my sins like mountains rise, but He can deal with them; but my goodness, my submission which ends with admiration, aspiration, intention, and then passes, creates the difficulty of God.

            Do not let us misunderstand this. These things are valuable. They are worth-while things. The attitude, whether we render it kindness or goodness, is rooted in submission, and that is wholly excellent. Sub­mission always begins with admiration of the ideal, and proceeds along the line of aspiration unto realiza­tion. It is in essence, intention to fulfill aspiration, and realize the ideal.

            How often men come there quite sincerely. There was no hypocrisy in that high moment, when seeing the vision of the ideal as revealed in ideal relationship with God, we admired, we aspired, we intended. But if there was no ultimate realization, it was all worth­less. The experience of such an hour may abide with us as something to be trusted in, when the life is not squaring with the experience of the hour. Very many people are living there. There was a moment away in the past, when we admired, when we aspired, when we intended, when we devoted ourselves. Are we living content with the fact that we had such an hour? There is no value in that. Unless the admiration, and aspiration, and intention have produced abiding result, a harvest of fruitfulness, of realization, there is no value in such an experience. So far from being of value, it reacts upon the conscience and deadens it. When men trust in the morning cloud, and the dew that once appeared, God says, What can I do? How am I to reach you behind that? "O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee?" Your attitude does not last very long.

            Let us press that matter home, and ask ourselves why is it that men ever fail in this way? How is it that we have so often had that kind of experience?

            Goodness as here described, and the whole attitude of the life referred to, moves in the realm of feeling. Fleeting goodness, fleeting submission to God, is always the result of superficial feeling. Someone will ask, Is feeling wrong? I reply, not only is it not wrong, it is absolutely necessary. But it is not the ultimate thing; and unless feeling is answered by certain attitudes and activities of personality, it is always fleeting. Feeling has its place. Feeling has its value. Feeling is absolutely necessary. But it is not enough in itself.

            Henry Ward Beecher once said: "Feeling is to action what wind is to the sails of a vessel." That is an arresting and illuminative saying. If there is too little wind, there is no progress. If there is too much wind, there is wreckage. If the vessel is to be pro­pelled, there must be a sufficient amount of wind. If the wind becomes a tornado the vessel is in danger of becoming a wreck. The illustration teaches us that feeling must be in control and reinforced in some way, or else it becomes fleeting. The trouble with many too often is that feeling is not deep enough, and that is why goodness is fleeting. Sometimes, on the other hand, feeling is too much; emotion sweeps a man off his feet, and makes him lose his mental poise. When it does, it destroys the religious instinct and power.

            Now let us remember that feeling always results from the appeal of intellect. I do not need to discuss that metaphysically or psychologically. The fact is self-evident. We never felt anything but as the result of the combination of the emotion with the intellect. Feeling always results from the appeal to the intellect. Goodness came; I saw the ideal; I admired it, I aspired after it; I intended to realize it. Feeling was there, but it was response to revelation, revelation of the beauty of the ideal, revelation of the glory of the ideal.

            Why, then, was it fleeting? Feeling is fleeting when it fails to strike downwards to the facts producing it; and facing those facts, to arrange the life in harmony therewith. A superficial grasp upon the truth concerning God will produce feelings, appro­bation, admiration, aspiration, intention; but unless we then turn round, and facing these facts, seeing their bearing upon life, act accordingly, goodness will be as fleeting as the morning cloud, and as the early dew.

            Goodness, as submission, is response to conviction about God. There is the trouble oftentimes. We do not face the facts until our whole life is rooted in them, and so fail to reach the realm of permanence in our goodness. We often recite the Apostles' Creed, and we mean what we say, but fail to act accordingly. It’s great opening affirmation is a fundamental revela­tion: "I believe in God." We say it, and in the saying are sincere. In the saying of it we are telling the truth. In the saying of it we are giving expression to an intellectual concept and conviction. Moreover, in the saying of it, in the very fact that we do say it, whether we say it alone or in an assembly, there is proof of an emotional activity resulting from an intellectual conviction. We do believe in God, and in the very affirmation of the fact there is a glow and a glory. Then—what then? Having said it we leave the sanctuary, and pass back to the everyday life and the workaday days, and the busy world. Have we faced seriously the thing we affirmed as our creed? Have we considered the meaning of our declaration? Are we now arranging our life in accord with our creed? If not, then our goodness is as the morning cloud, very real, very excellent, touched with rainbow hues of beauty and color and heavenly glory, but quite useless unless we strike downwards to the intellectual concept that produced the goodness of the moment. If we fail there, the goodness, the emotional submission will all evaporate; it will bring forth no results in our life. That is God's difficulty. And that is why it is more difficult to preach the Gospel to a respectable congregation than in a Rescue Mission. The trouble is not with the iniquities of such a con­gregation, but with its shallowness. Thomas Champ­ness once said, "If God made the country, and man-made the city; the devil made the suburbs." From the religious standpoint, there is an element of truth in the statement. God has greater difficulty in dealing with people who know goodness and admire goodness, but whose goodness is fleeting, the goodness of a cloud in the morning, flecked with sunlight; or dew, all to be burnt up and dissipated in the heats of the day, than He has with the man we call down-and-out. "O Ephraim, what shall I do? Judah, what shall I do?"

            But another reason why goodness is fleeting is that feeling admits other motives, fails to concentrate, and admits other appeals before the one is settled. Mixed motives, the divided heart, these are destructive of goodness. The prayer of the Psalmist was, "O Lord, unite my heart to fear Thy name." "One thing I do," (Psa. 86:11) said Paul, "I press toward the mark." (Phil. 3:14) That did not mean for a single moment that Paul only did one thing as to the details of life. Think of what he did, the journeys he took, the letters he wrote, the many and varied interests that crowded upon his life. Yes, but all the duties were unified by the doing of one thing. That is too often the trouble with us. First we do not investigate the thing that produces the passing glow and glory of our submission; and then we allow other motives to come in side by side with it. Those are the reasons why goodness is fleeting.

            Now let us turn to our second question. Is there any solution to this problem? To put it in another way, is there any cure for this fleeting goodness? There is. But it is in man, and not in God. Immedi­ately after the question revealing the difficulties of God we find this statement, "I desire goodness and not sacrifice." We cannot atone for the fleeting nature of our goodness with our gifts. Let us read on: "I desire the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."

            Well then, what is God to do? That is not the question. "What shall I do?" "I desire goodness," "I desire the knowledge of God." God might have said, as indeed He did say, I have made known Myself to you by the prophets, but you will not answer the revelation. I repeat, the solution must be found in man.

            But that is not the final word. To find it we must go back to the appeal at the beginning of the chapter: "Come, and let us return unto Jehovah; for He hath torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up. After two days will He revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live before Him. And let us know, let us follow on to know Jehovah."

Underline the words "let us" in that paragraph. "Let us return, let us know, let us follow on to know." If we obey those injunctions, we solve God's difficulty and satisfy God's heart. "Let us return," and "let us know"; and it is the next thing that is of supreme importance; "let us follow on to know."

            Then underline the words "He will." What do we find? "He will heal," "He will bind up," "He will revive us," "He will raise us up," "He will come unto us as the rain, as the latter rain."

That is what He wants to do. That is what He is waiting to do. I have no language but the human, and there can be no interpretation of God ultimately but in human language. In these words we hear the sob of the heart of God after these people.

            "What shall I do?" What shall Jehovah do? Blast them, damn them, sweep them out? That is not God. And if ever man is blasted ultimately, damned finally, swept down into the darkling void where God is not, it will be by his own choice, and never by the will of the heart of God. "God willeth not the death of a sinner." In these words there is the song, the poem of an infinite compassion, "Ephraim, what shall I do? Judah, what shall I do?" My trouble with you is that your goodness is like a morning cloud, like the dew that vanishes. As though God said, I can deal with your lewdness; I can deal with your beastliness, if you turn back to Me; but I cannot deal with you while you are living in the realm of an fleeting goodness that never strikes its roots, and so produces fruit.

            Where are we living (Our nations)? No, do not ask where I am living, and I will not ask where you are living. You have no right to investigate for me, and I have no right to investigate for you. But let us investigate our own lives in the light of the revelation. I wonder if God is saying of any of us, the trouble with you is that your goodness is like a morning cloud, like the dew that vanishes early. Admiration, aspiration, good intention; but fleeting; and because the things admired are not investigated, and life is not readjusted in harmony with those things desired, there is failure.

            Deepen the wounds Thy hands have made, O God of love, until goodness shall be to us the result of Thy coming, and Thy healing, Thy binding, Thy reviving; the latter rain that produces the harvest. Shall we not deliver God from the difficulty that confronts His love by returning, and knowing, and following on to know through contact with His ears and His book.