Sermons on National Subjects

Now, what is this wonderful charm which made the old Romans and we English great, which is stronger than money, and armies, and trade, and all the things which we can see and handle?

St. Paul tells us in the text: “Let every soul be subject to the higher powers.  For there is no power but of God.  The powers that be are ordained of God.”

To respect the law; to believe that God wills men to live according to law; and that He will teach men right and good laws; that magistrates who enforce the laws are God’s ministers, God’s officers and servants; that to break the laws is to sin against God;—that is the charm which worked such wonders, and will work them to the end of time.

So you see it was a very proper thing for St. Paul, when he wrote to these Romans after they became Christians, to speak to them as he does in this chapter.  They might have fancied, and many did fancy, that because they were Jesus Christ’s servants now, they need not obey their heathen rulers and laws any more.  But St. Paul says: “No; Jesus Christ’s being King of Kings, is only the strongest possible reason for your obeying these heathen rulers.  For if He is King of all the earth, He is King of Rome also, and of all her colonies; and therefore you may be sure that He would not leave these Roman rulers, and laws here if He did not think it right and fitting.  If Jesus Christ is Lord of lords He is Lord of these Roman rulers, and they are His ministers and stewards; and you must obey them, and pay taxes to them for conscience’s sake, as unto the Lord, and not unto man.”

So you see that St. Paul gave these Roman Christians no new commandment on these matters; nothing different from what their old heathen forefathers had believed.  For the law which he mentions in verse 9, “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal,” etc., had been for centuries past part of the old Roman law, as well as of Moses’ law.

Those old heathen Romans believed, and rightly, that all law and order came from the great God of gods, whom they called in their tongue Jupiter, that is, the Heavenly Father.  They believed that He would bless those who kept the laws; who kept their oaths and agreements, and the laws about government, about marriage, about property, about inheritance; and that He would surely punish those who broke the laws, who defrauded their neighbours of their rights, who swore falsely against their neighbour, or broke their agreements, who were unfaithful to their wives and husbands, or in any way offended against justice between man and man.  And they believed too, and rightly, that as long as they kept the laws, and lived justly and orderly by them, the great Heavenly Father would protect and prosper their town of Rome, and make it grow great and powerful, because they were living as He would have men live; not doing each what was right in the sight of his own eyes, but conquering their own selfish wills and private fancies, for the sake of their neighbour’s good, and the good of his country, that they might all help and trust each other, as fellow-citizens of one nation.

Only St. Paul had told them: Your forefathers were right in fancying that law and right came from the great God of gods: but they knew hardly anything, or rather, in time they forgot almost everything, about that Heavenly Father.  In their ignorance they mixed up the belief in the one great almighty and good God, which dwells in the hearts of all men, with filthy fables and superstitions till they came to fancy that there were many gods and not one, and that these many gods were sinful, foul, proud, and cruel, as fallen men.  But you have been brought back to the knowledge of the one true, and righteous, and loving God, which your forefathers lost.  He has revealed and shown Himself, and what He is like, in His Son Jesus Christ.  He is love, and wisdom, and justice, and order itself; and, therefore, you must be sure, even more sure than your old heathen forefathers, that He cares for a nation being at peace and unity within itself, governed by wise laws, doing justice between man and man, and keeping order throughout all its business, that every man may do his work and enjoy his wages without hindrance, or confusion, or fear, or robbery and oppression from those who are stronger than he.

And so St. Paul says to them: “You must believe that power and law come from God, far more firmly and clearly than ever your heathen forefathers did.”

Now that St. Paul was right in this we may see from the Old Testament.  In the first lesson for this afternoon’s service, we read how Jeremiah was sent with the most awful warnings to the king, and the queen, and the crown prince of his country.  And why?  Because they had broken the laws; because, in a word, they had been unfaithful stewards and ministers of the Lord God, who had given them their power and kingdom, and would demand a strict account of all which He had committed to their charge.  But in the same book of the prophet Jeremiah we read more than this; we read exactly what St. Paul says about the heathen Roman governors: for the Lord God, who is the Lord Jesus Christ, sent Jeremiah with a message to all the heathen kings round about, to tell them that He was their Lord and Master, that He had given them their power, heathens as they were, because it seemed fit to Him, and that now, for their sins, He was going to deliver them over into the hand of another heathen, His servant Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon; and that whosoever would not serve Nebuchadnezzar, the Lord God would punish him with sword, and famine, and pestilence till he had consumed them.  And the first four chapters of the book of Daniel, noble and wonderful as they are, seem to me to have been put into the Bible simply to teach us this one thing, that heathen rulers, as well as Christians, are the Lord’s servants, and that their power is ordained by God.  For these chapters are entirely made up of the history, how God, by His prophet Daniel, taught the heathen king Nebuchadnezzar that he was God’s minister and steward.  And the latter part of the book of Daniel is the account of his teaching the same thing to another heathen, Cyrus the great and good king of Persia.  And here St. Paul teaches the Christian Romans just the same thing about their heathen governors and heathen laws, that they are the ministers and the ordinance of God.

Now, our own English forefathers, as I said before, believed this same thing; and if I had time, I could show you, I think, plainly enough from God’s dealings with England, how He has blest and prospered us whensoever we have acted up to it.  But whether we have believed it or not, there is enough in our English laws, and in our English Prayer Book too, to witness for it and remind us of it.

The very title which we give the Queen, “Queen by the grace of God;” the solemn prayers for her when she is crowned and anointed, not in her own palace, or in the House of Parliament, but in the Church of God at Westminster; the prayers which we have just offered up for the Queen, for the government, and for the magistrates—these are all so many signs and tokens to us that they are God’s stewards, called to do God’s work, and that we must pray for God’s grace to help them to fulfil their calling.  And are not those ten commandments which stand in every church, a witness of the same thing?  They are the very root of all law whatsoever.  And more, the solemn oath which a witness takes in the court of justice, what is it but a sign of the same thing, that our forefathers, who appointed these forms, believed that law and justice were holy things, and that he who goes into a court of law goes into the presence of God Himself, and confesses, when he promises to speak the truth, so help him God, that God is the protector and the avenger of law and justice?

But some people, and especially young and light-hearted persons, are ready to say: “Obey the powers that be, whosoever they may be, good or bad, and believe that to break their laws is to sin against God?  We might as well be slaves at once.  A man has a right to his own opinion; and if he does not think a law good, how can he be bound to obey it?”

You will often hear such words as those when you go out into the world, into great towns, where men meet together much.  Let me give you, young people, a little advice about that beforehand; for, fine as it sounds, it is hollow and false at root.

If you wish to be really free, and to do what you like, like what is right; and do that, says St. Paul, and then the law will not interfere with you: “For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.  Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power?  Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good.  But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”  And then he sums up what doing right is, in one short sentence: “Love thy neighbour as thyself; for love is the fulfilling of the law.”  All that the laws want to make you do, is to behave like men who do love their neighbours as themselves, and therefore do them no harm—to behave like men who are ready to give up their own private wills and pleasures, and even their own private property, if wanted, for the good of their neighbours and their country.  Therefore the law calls on you to pay rates and taxes, which are to be spent for the good of the nation at large.  And if you love your neighbour as yourself, and have the good of everyone round you at heart, you will no more grudge paying rates and taxes for their benefit than you will grudge spending money to support and educate your own children.  And so you will be free, free to do what you like, because you like, from the fear and love of God, to do those right things which the law is set to make you do.

But some may say: “That is not what we mean by being free.  We mean having a share in choosing Members of Parliament, and so in making the laws and governing the country.  When people can do that the country is a free country.”

Well, my friends, and it is a strange thing, or rather not a strange thing, if we will but study our Bibles, that a country cannot be free in that way, unless the people of it do really believe that the powers that be are ordained of God.  Instead of that faith making the old Romans slavish, or careless what laws were made, or how they were governed, as some fancy it would make a people, they were as free a people, and freer almost than we English now.  They chose their own magistrates, and they made their own laws, and prospered by so doing.  And why?  Because they believed that laws came from God; and, therefore, they not only obeyed the laws when they were made, but they had heart and spirit to help to make them, because they trusted that The Heavenly Father, who loved justice, would teach them to be just, and that The God who protected laws and punished law-breakers, would put into their minds how to make the laws well; and so they were not afraid to govern themselves, because they believed that God would enable them to govern themselves well, and therefore they were free.  And so far from their having a slavish spirit in them, they were the most bold and independent people of the whole earth.  Their soldiers conquered almost every nation against whom they fought, because they always obeyed their officers dutifully and faithfully, believing that it was their duty to God to obey, and to die, if need was, for their country.  Old history is full of tales, which will never be forgotten, I trust, till the world’s end, of the noble deeds of their men, ay, and even of their women, who counted their own lives worthless in comparison with the good of their country, and died in torments rather than break the laws, or do what they knew would injure the people to whom they belonged.

And so with us English.  For hundreds of years we have been growing more and more free, and more and more well-governed, simply because we have been acting on St. Paul’s doctrine—obeying the powers that be, because they are ordained by God.  It is the Englishman’s respect for law, as a sacred thing, which he dare not break, which has made him, sooner or later, respected and powerful wherever he goes to settle in foreign lands; because foreigners can trust us to be just, and to keep our promises, and to abide by the laws which we have laid down.  It is the English respect for law, as a sacred thing, which has made our armies among the bravest and the most successful on earth; because they know how to obey their officers, and are therefore able to fight and to endure as men should do.  And as long as we hold to that belief we shall prosper at home and abroad, and become more and more free, and more and more strong; because we shall be united, helping each other, trusting each other, knowing what to expect of each other, because we all honour and obey the same laws.

And, on the other hand, have we not close to us, in France, a fearful sign and proof from God that without the fear of God no people can be free?  Three times in the last sixty years have the French risen up against evil rulers, and driven them out.  And have they been the better for it?  They are at this very moment in utter slavery to a ruler more lawless than ever oppressed them before.  And why?  Because they did not believe that law came from God, and that the powers that be are ordained by Him.  Therefore, whenever they were oppressed, they did not try to right themselves by lawful ways, according to the old English God-fearing custom, but to break down the old law by riot and bloodshed, and then to set up new laws of their own.  But those new laws would never stand.  They made them, but they would not obey them when they were made, and they could not make others obey them; because they had no real reverence for law, and did not believe that law came from God, or that His Spirit would give them understanding to make good laws.  They talked loud about the power and rights of the people, and that whatever the people willed was right: but they said nothing about the power and rights of the Lord God; they forgot that it is only what God has willed from everlasting that is right; and so they made laws in the strength of their own hearts, according to what was right in the sight of their own eyes, to please themselves.  How could they respect the laws, when the laws were only copies of their own selfish fancies?  So, because they made them to please themselves, they soon broke them to please themselves.  And so came more lawlessness and riot, and confusion worse confounded, till, of course, the strongest, and cunningest, and most shameless got the upper hand; and they were plunged, poor creatures! into the same pit of misery out of which they had been trying to deliver themselves in their own strength, for a sign and an example that the Lord is King, and not man at all, and that the fear of the Lord is the only beginning of wisdom.

And very much the same sad fate had happened to the Romans a little before St. Paul’s time.  They gave up their ancient respect for law; they broke the laws, and ran into all kinds of violence, and riot, and filthy sin; and therefore God took away their freedom from them, because they were not fit for it, and delivered them over into the hand of one cruel tyrant after another; and perhaps the cruellest of them all was the man who was emperor of Rome in St. Paul’s time.  Therefore it was that St. Paul says to them: Love each other, and obey the laws, “knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep.”

As much as to say: “Your souls have fallen asleep; you have been in a dark night, not seeing that God would avenge you of all these sins of yours; that God’s eye was on them: you have fallen asleep and forgotten your forefathers’ belief, that God loves law, and order, and justice, and will punish those who break through them.  But now the Lord Jesus, the light of the world, is come to awaken you, and to open your eyes to see the truth about this, and to show you that you are in God’s kingdom, and that God commands you to repent, and to obey Him, and do justly and righteously.  Therefore awake out of your sleep; give up the works of darkness, those mean and wicked habits which were contrary to the good old laws of your forefathers, and which you were at heart ashamed of, and tried to hide even while you indulged in them.  Open your eyes, and see that God is near you, your Judge, your King, seeing through and through your souls, keen and sharp to discern the secret thoughts and intents of the heart, so that all things are naked and open in the sight of Him with whom we have to do.”

And so I may say to you, my friends, it is high time for us to awake out of sleep.  The people in England, religious as well as others, have fallen asleep of late years too much about this matter.  They have forgotten that God is King, that magistrates are God’s ministers.  They talk as if laws were meant to be only the device of man’s will, to serve men’s private interests and selfishness; and therefore they have lost very much of their respect for law, and their care to make good laws for the future.  And it is high time for us, while all the nations of Europe are tottering and crumbling round us, to awake out of sleep on this matter.  We must open our eyes and see where we are.  For we are in God’s kingdom.  God’s Bible, God’s churches, God’s commandments, and all the solemn old law forms of England witness to us that God is King, set in the throne which judges right; that order and justice, fellow-feeling and public spirit, are His gifts, His likeness, on which He looks down with loving care and protection; and that if we forget that, and begin to fancy that law stands merely by the will of the many, or by the will of the stronger, or even by the will of the wiser—by any will of man in short; we shall end by neither being able to make just laws any more, nor to obey those which we have, by the blessing of God, already.

XXVIII.

THE EDUCATION OF A HEATHEN

Now I Nebuchadnezzar praise, and extol, and honour the King of heaven, all whose works are truth, and His ways judgment; and those that walk in pride He is able to abase.—Daniel iv. 37.

We read for the first lesson to-day two chapters out of the book of Daniel.  Those who love to study their Bibles, have read often, of course, not only these two chapters, but the whole book.

And I would advise all of you who wish to understand God’s dealings with mankind, to study this book of Daniel, and especially at this present time.

I do not wish you to study it merely on account of those prophecies in it, which many wise and good men think foretell the dates of our Lord’s first and second comings, and of the end of the world.  I am not skilled, my friends, in that kind of wisdom.  I cannot tell you what God will do hereafter.  But I think that the book of Daniel like the other prophets, tells us what God is always doing on earth, and so gives us certain and eternal rules by which we may understand strange and terrible events, wars, distress of nations, the fall of great men, and the suffering of innocent men, when we see them happen, as we may see any day—perhaps very soon indeed.

The great lesson, I think, that this book of Daniel teaches us is, that God is not the Lord of the Jews only, or of Christians only, but of the whole earth; that the heathens are under His moral law and government, as well as we; and that, as St. Peter says, God is no respecter of persons: but in every nation, he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted of him.  For the history of Nebuchadnezzar seems to me to be the history of God’s educating a heathen and an idolater to know Him.  And we must always remember, that as far as we can see, it was because Nebuchadnezzar was faithful to the light which he had, that God gave him more.  Of course he had his sins; the Bible tells us what they were; just the sins which one would expect of a man brought up a heathen and an idolater; of one who was a great conqueror, and had gained many bloody battles, and learned to hold men’s lives very cheap; of one who was an absolute emperor, with no law but his own will, furious at any contradiction; of a man of wonderful power of mind—confident in himself, his own power, his own cunning.  But he seems not to have been a bad man, considering his advantages.  The Bible never speaks harshly of him, though he carried away the Jews captive to Babylon.  In all that fearful war, Nebuchadnezzar was in the right, and the Jews in the wrong; so at least Jeremiah the prophet declared.  Nebuchadnezzar saved and respected Jeremiah; and Daniel seems to have regarded the great conqueror with real respect and affection.  When Daniel says to him, “O king, live for ever,” and tells him that he is the head of gold, and prays that his fearful dream may come true of his enemies and not of him, I cannot believe that the prophet was using mere empty phrases of court-flattery.  He really felt, I doubt not, that Nebuchadnezzar was a great and good king, as kings went then, and his government a gain (as it easily might be) to the nations whom he had conquered, and that it was good that he should reign as long as possible.

And we may well believe Daniel’s interest in this great king, when we consider how teachable Nebuchadnezzar showed himself under God’s education of him, so proving that there was in him the honest and good heart, which, when The Word is sown in it, will bring forth fruit, thirty-fold or a hundred-fold, according to the talents which God has bestowed on each man.

This first lesson we read in the first chapter of Daniel.  He dreamt a dream.  He felt that it was a very wonderful one: but he forgot what it was.  None of the magicians of Babylon could tell him.  A young Jew, named Daniel, told him the dream and its meaning, and declared at the same time that he had found it out by no wisdom of his own, but God had revealed it to him.  Nebuchadnezzar learned his lesson, and confessed Daniel’s God to be a God of gods and a Lord of kings, and a revealer of secrets, seeing that Daniel could reveal that secret; and forthwith, like a wise prince, advanced Daniel and his companions to places of the highest authority and trust.

But Nebuchadnezzar required another lesson.  He had learned that the God of the Jews was wiser than all the planets and heavenly lords and gods whom the Babylonian magicians consulted; he had not learned that that same God of the Jews was the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth.  He had learned that the God of heaven favoured him, and had helped him toward his power and glory; but he thought that for that very reason the power and glory were his own—that he had a right over the souls and consciences of his subjects, and might make them worship what he liked, and how he liked.

Three Jews, whom he had set over the affairs of Babylon, refused to worship the golden image which he had set up, and were cast into a fiery furnace, and forthwith miraculously delivered, and beheld by Nebuchadnezzar walking unhurt and loose in the midst of the furnace, and with them a fourth, whose form was like the form of the Son of God.

So Nebuchadnezzar was taught that this God of the Jews was the Lord of men’s souls and consciences; that they were to obey God rather than man.  So he was taught that the God of the Jews was no mere star or heavenly influence who could help men’s fortunes, or bestow on them a certain fixed destiny; but a living person, the Lord and Master of the fire, and of all the powers of the earth, who could change and stop those powers at His will, to deliver those who trusted in Him and obeyed Him.

And this lesson, too, Nebuchadnezzar learned.  He confessed his mistake upon the spot, just in the way in which we should have expected a great Eastern king to do, though not in the most enlightened or merciful way.  He “blessed the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who hath sent His angel, and delivered His servants who trusted in Him.  Therefore I make a decree, that every people, nation, and language, which speak anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort.”

But there was still one deep mistake lying in the great king’s heart which required to be rooted out.  He had learnt that Jehovah, the God of the Jews, was a revealer of secrets, a master of the fire, a deliverer of those who trusted in Him, a living personal Lord, wise, just, and faithful, very different from any of his star gods or idols.  But he looked upon Jehovah only as the God of the Jews, as Daniel’s God.  He had not yet learnt that God was his God as well as Daniel’s; that Jehovah was very near his heart and mind, and had been near him all his life; that from Jehovah came all his wisdom, his strength of mind, his success, and all which made him differ, not only from his fellow-men, but from the beast; that Jehovah, in a word, was the light and the life of the world, who fills all things and by whom all things consist, deserted by whose inward light, even for a moment, man becomes as one of the beasts which perish.  In his own eyes Nebuchadnezzar was still the great self-dependent, self-sufficing conqueror, wiser and stronger than all the men around him.  He thought, most probably, that on account of his wisdom, and courage, and royalty of soul, the God of heaven had become fond of him and favoured him.  In short, he was swollen with pride.

God sent him again a strange dream, which made him troubled and afraid.  He told it to his old counsellor Daniel; and Daniel, at the danger of his life, interpreted it for him; and a very awful meaning it had.  A fearful and shameful downfall was to come upon the king; no less than the loss of his reason, and with it, of his throne.  But whether this came to pass or not, depended, like all God’s everlasting promises and threats, on Nebuchadnezzar’s own behaviour.  If he repented, and broke off his sins by righteousness, and his iniquities by showing mercy to the poor, there was good reason to hope that so his tranquillity might be lengthened.

But the lesson was too hard for the proud conqueror; he did not take the warning.  He could not believe that the Most High ruled in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.  He still fancied that he, and such as he, were the lords of the world, and took from others by their own power and cunning whatsoever they would.  He does not seem to have been angry, however, with Daniel for his plain speaking.  Most Eastern kings like Nebuchadnezzar would have put Daniel to a cruel death on the spot as the bearer of evil news, speaking blasphemy against the king; and no one in those times and countries would have considered him wicked and cruel for so doing; but Nebuchadnezzar seems to have learnt too much already so to give way to his passion.

Yet, as I said before, he had not learned enough to take God’s warning.  The lesson that he was nothing, and that God is all in all, was too hard for him.  And, alas! my friends, for whom of us is it not a hard lesson?  And yet it is the golden lesson, the first and the last which man has to learn on earth, ay, and through all eternity: “I am nothing; God is all in all.”  All in us which is worth calling anything; all in us which is worth having, or worth being; all in us which is not disobedience and shortcoming, failure and mistake, ignorance and madness, filthiness and fierceness, as of the beasts which perish; all strength in us, all understanding, all prudence, all right-mindedness, all purity, all justice, all love; all in us which is worth living for, all in us which is really alive, and not mere death in life, the death of sin and the darkness of the pit—all is from God the Father of lights, and from Jesus Christ the life and the light, who lighteth every man who cometh into the world, shining for ever in the darkness of our spirits, though that darkness, alas! too often cannot comprehend, and embrace, and confess Him who is striving to awake it from the dead and give it light.  Hardest of all lessons!  Most blessed of all lessons!  So blessed, that if we will not let God teach it us in any other way, it would be good and advantageous to us for Him to teach it us as He taught it to Nebuchadnezzar—good for us to become with him for awhile like the beasts that perish, that we might learn with him to lift up our eyes to heaven, and so have our understandings return to us, and learn to bless the Most High, and not our own wit, and cunning, and prudence; and praise and honour Him that liveth for ever, instead of praising and honouring our own pitiful paltry selves, who are in death in the midst of life, who come up and are cut down like the flower, and never continue in one stay.

“All this came upon the King Nebuchadnezzar.”  It seems that after he or his father had destroyed the old Babylon, the downfall of which Isaiah had prophesied, he built a great city, after the fashion of Eastern conquerors, near the ruins of the old one; and “at the end of twelve months he walked in the palace of the kingdom of Babylon.  The king spake, and said, Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?  While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken, The kingdom is departed from thee.  And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and seven times shall pass over thee, until thou know that the Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will.  The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar.”

What a lesson!  The great conqueror of all the East now a brutal madman, hateful and disgusting to all around him—a beast feeding among the beasts: and yet a cheap price—a cheap price—to pay for this golden lesson.

Seven times past over him in his madness.  What those seven times were we do not know.  They may have been actual years: or they may have been, as I am inclined to think, changes in his own soul and state of mind.  But, at the end of the days, the truth dawned on him.  He began to see what it all meant.  He saw what he was, and why he was so; and he lifted up his eyes to heaven; and from that moment his madness past.  He lifted up his eyes to heaven.  That is no mere figure of speech: it is an actual truth.  Most madmen, if you watch them, have that down look, or rather that inward look, as if their eyes were fixed only on their own fancies.  They are thinking only of themselves, poor creatures—of their own selfish and private suspicions and wrongs—of their own selfish superstitious dreams about heaven or hell—of their own selfish vanity and ambition—sometimes of their own frantic self-conceit, or of their selfish lusts and desires—of themselves, in short.  They have lost the one Divine light of reason, and conscience, and love, which binds men to each other, and are parted for a while from God and from their kind—alone in their own darkness.  So was Nebuchadnezzar.

At last he looked up, as men do when they pray; up from himself to One greater than himself; up from the earth to heaven; up from the natural things which we do see, which are temporal and born to die, to moral and spiritual things which we do not see, which are real and eternal in the heavens; up from his own lonely darkness, looking for the light and the guidance of God; for now he began to see that all the light which he had ever had, all his wisdom, and understanding, and strength of will, had come from God, however he might have misused them for his own selfish ambition; that it was because God had taken from him His light, who is the Word of God, that he had become a beast.  And then his reason returned to him, and he became again a man, a rational being, made, howsoever fallen and sinful, in the likeness of God; then he blessed and praised God.  It was not merely that he confessed that God was strong, and he weak; righteous, and he sinful; wise, and he foolish; but he blessed and praised God; he felt and confessed that God had done him a great benefit, and taught him a great lesson—that God had taught him what he was in himself and without God, that he might see what he was with God in its true light, and honour and obey Him from whom his reason and understanding, as well as his power and glory, came, that so it might be fulfilled which the prophet says: “Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, nor the mighty man in his might, nor the rich man in his riches: but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise loving-kindness, judgment, and righteousness in the earth; for in these things I delight, saith the Lord.”

And so was Nebuchadnezzar’s soul brought to utter, in his own way, the very same glorious song which, or something like it, is said to have been sung by the three men whom, years before, he had seen delivered from the fiery furnace, which calls on all the works of the Lord, angels and heaven, sun and stars, seas and winds, mountains and hills, fowls and cattle, priests and laymen, spirits and souls of the righteous, to bless the Lord, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever.

And so ends Nebuchadnezzar’s history.  We read no more of him.  He had learnt the golden lesson.  May God grant that we may learn it also!

But who tells the story of his madness?  He himself.  The whole account is in the man’s own words.  It seems to be some public letter or proclamation, which he either sent round his empire, or commanded to be laid up among his records; having, as it seems, set Daniel to write it down from his mouth.  This one fact, I think, justifies me in all that I have said about Nebuchadnezzar’s nobleness, and Daniel’s affection for him.  He does not try to smooth things over; to pretend that he has not been mad; to find excuses for himself; to lay any blame on any human being.  He repents openly, confesses openly.  Shameful as it may be to him, he tells the whole story.  He confesses that he had fair warning, that all was his own fault.  He justifies God utterly.  My friends, we may read, thank God, many noble, and brave, and righteous speeches of kings and great men: but never have I read one so noble, so brave, so righteous as this of the great king of Babylon.

And therefore it is; because this letter of his, in the fourth chapter of the book of Daniel, is indeed full of the eternal Holy Spirit of God; therefore it is, I say, that it forms part of the Bible, part of holy scripture to this day,—a greater honour to Nebuchadnezzar than all his kingdom; for what greater honour than to have been inspired to write one chapter, yea, one sentence, of the Book of Books?

My friends, every one of you here is in God’s school-house, under God’s teaching, far more than Nebuchadnezzar was.  You are baptised men, knowing that blessed name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which Nebuchadnezzar only saw dimly, and afar off.  Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is striving with your hearts, giving to them whatsoever light and life they have.  You have been taught from childhood to look up to Him as your King and Deliverer; to His Father as your Father, to His Holy Spirit as your Inspirer.  Take heed how you listen to His voice within your hearts.  Take heed how you learn God’s lessons; for God is surely educating you, and teaching you far more than He taught the king of Babylon in old time.  As you learn or despise these lessons of God’s, will be your happiness or your misery now and for ever.  Unto the king of Babylon little was given, and of him was little required.  To you and me much has been given; of you and me will much be required.

XXIX.

JEREMIAH’S CALLING

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.—Jeremiah xxiii. 5.