"The words he shall come' are inserted for clearness. The prophet beholds the enemy speeding with the swiftness of an eagle as it darts down upon its prey. The house of the Lord is most strictly the temple, as being the place which God had chosen to place His Name there. Next it is used of the kingdoms of Judah and Jerusalem among whom the temple was; whence GOD says, I have forsaken My house, I have left Mine heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of My soul into the hands of her enemies; and What hath My beloved to do in My house, seeing she hath wrought lewdness with many? Yet the title of God's house is older than the temple; for God Himself uses it of His whole people, saying of Moses, My servant Moses is not so, who is faithful in all Mine house. And even the ten tribes, separated as they were from the temple-worship and apostates from the true faith of GOD, were not, as yet, counted by Him as wholly excluded from the house of God. For GOD below threatens that removal as something still to come; for the wickedness of their doings I will drive them out of Mine house. The eagle then coming down against or upon the house of the LORD is primarily Shalmaneser, who came down and carried off the ten tribes. Yet since Hosea in these prophecies includes Judah also, the house of the Lord is most probably to be taken in its fullest sense as including the whole people of GOD, among whom He dwelt, and the temple where His Name was placed. The eagle includes then Nebuchadnezzar also whom other prophets so call; and since, all through, the principle of sin is the same and the punishment the same, it includes the Roman eagle, the ensign of their armies."

The house of the LORD is to be overthrown, because they who should have kept it had transgressed God's covenants. The prophecy is an anticipation of our LORD's words: "Ye have made My house a den of thieves, and now your house is left unto you desolate." Their outward covenant once made with GOD avails them now no more. In matters of policy and in matters of religion they had acted without GOD.

"As was the beginning of the kingdom of Israel, such was its course. They made kings, but not from God. Such were all their kings except Jehu and his house. During 253 years, for which the kingdom of Israel lasted, eighteen kings reigned over it out of ten different families, and no family came to a close save by a violent death. The like selfwill and independence closed the existence of the Jewish people. The Roman Emperor being afar off, the Scribes and Pharisees hoped under him without any great contest to maintain their own authority over the people. They themselves, by their God forbid! owned that our LORD truly saw their thoughts and purpose, This is the heir; come let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours. They willed to reign without CHRIST, feared the heathen Emperor less than the holiness of Jesus, and in the words, We have no king but Caesar, they deposed GOD, and shut themselves out from His kingdom."

GOD attributes to their calf an active power to hurt, though they had found it profitless to save. They had attributed to it GOD'S

goodness. They find now thereby God's wrath. says GOD, is kindled against them."

"Mine anger,

They showed their consciousness of the impotence of their calf for their protection, yet they gave the further proof of their selfwilled rebellion against GOD in going to Assyria. They had “ hired lovers" by schemes of unbelieving worldly aggrandizement.

"And yet that which GOD pictures under colours so offensive, what was it to human eyes? The hire was presents of gold to powerful nations, whose aid, humanly speaking, Israel needed. But wherever it abandoned its trust in GoD, it adopted their idols. C Whoever has recourse to human means, without consulting GOD, or consulting whether He will or will not bless them, is guilty of unfaithfulness, which often leads to many other sins. He becomes accustomed to the tone of mind of those whose protection he seeks, comes insensibly to approve even their errors, loses purity of heart and conscience, sacrifices his light and talents to the service of the powers under whose shadow he wishes to live and repose.'

The prophet wrote not thus because Israel was at this time suffering special oppression. But all their prosperity, all their political relationships, all their show of worship, rested on sin. The fruit, therefore, must be sin, with all its attendant circumstances of overthrow. "Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples; and Judah hath multiplied fenced cities; but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the palaces thereof." The opening of the ninth chapter seems to be a continuation of the same poem. It shows us that while the prophet was chanting his dirge, the people were singing in merriment.

"The prophet seems to come across the people in the midst of their festivity and mirth, and arrests them by abruptly stopping it, telling them that they had no cause for joy. Hosea witnessed days of Israel's prosperity under Jeroboam II.: the land had peace under Menahem after the departure of Pul; Pekah was even strong, so as in his alliance with Rezin to be an object of terror to Judah until Tiglath-pilezer came against him. At some of these times Israel seems to have given himself up to exuberant mirth, whether at harvest time, or on any other ground, enjoying the present, secure of the future."

Amidst the gratification of their desires, however, leanness was denounced by the servant of GOD against their souls. They had been warned not to return to Egypt; yet they ever looked to the old place of their bondage as a place of strength. Some of them, then, shall indeed go there; others shall be in captivity to Assyria. The LORD's land shall no longer have to bear their presence; the mock-worship shall cease. Does not all the worship of GoD point to a final searching? That searching is at hand. The trumpet has sounded for judgment,-a sort of anticipation of the archangel's trumpet at the last day. "The days of visitation are come."

VOL. XXII.

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Have the warnings of prophets ended thus ineffectually? Yes! They have been as a snare of the fowler, a savour of death unto death, in the midst of this ungodly people. Israel should have been the LORD's vine. GOD found them as grapes in the wilderness, and would have cherished them; but they corrupted themselves with Baalpeor.

Yet was all their joyous exterior but the covering of rottenness. The prophet, as he looks upon the cankered joy of his people, intreats of GOD to give them-oh! what? GOD's gifts only turned to their greater ruin. The best gift for those who cannot praise GOD in His gifts is barrenness, that their sins may die out with themselves, and not remain as a heritage of woe to another generation. The fate of Israel is sealed: they shall be wanderers for

ever.

"Such was to be their lot; such has been their lot ever since; and such was not the ordinary lot of those large populations whom Eastern conquerors transported from their own land. Those conquerors took away with them into their own land portions of the peoples whom they conquered, for two ends. When a people often rebelled, they were placed where they could rebel no more, among tribes more powerful than they, and obedient to the rule of the conqueror; or they were carried off as slaves to work in bricks, like Israel in Egypt. Their workmen, smiths, artificers, were especially taken to labour on those gigantic works, the palaces and temples of Nineveh or Babylon. But for both these purposes, the transported population had a settled abode allotted to it, whether in the capital or the provinces; sometimes new cities or villages were built for the settlers. Israel at first was so located. Perhaps on account of the frequent rebellions of their kings, the ten tribes were placed amid a wild, warlike population, in the cities of the Medes. When the interior of Asia was less known, people thought that they were still to be found there. The Jews fabled that the ten tribes lay behind some mighty and fabulous river Sambatyon, or were fenced in by the mountains. Christians thought that they might be found in some yet unexplored part of Asia. Undeceived as to this, they still asked whether the Affghans, the Yezides, or the natives of North America were the ten tribes, or whether they were the Nestorians of Kurdistan. So natural did it seem that they, like other nations so transported should remain as a body near or at the place where they had been located by their conquerors. The prophet says otherwise. He says their abiding condition shall be, They shall be wanderers among the nations,-wanderers among them, but no part of them. Before the final dispersion of the Jews at the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish race,' Josephus says, was in great numbers through the whole world, interspersed with the nations.' Those assembled on the day of Pentecost had come from all parts of Asia Minor, but also from Parthia, Media, Persia, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Egypt, maritime Libya, Crete, and Italy. Wherever the Apostles went in Asia or Greece, they found Jews in sufficient numbers to raise persecution against them. S. James writes to those whom with a word-a

word corresponding to that of Hosea-he calls 'the dispersion.' James -to the twelve in the dispersion. The Jews, scoffing, asked whether our LORD would go to the dispersion among the Greeks. They speak of it as a body over against themselves, to whom they supposed that He meant to go, to teach them, when He said, ' Ye shall seek Me, and shall not find Me.' The Jews of Egypt were probably the descendants of those who went thither after the murder of Gedaliah. The Jews of the North, as well as those of China, India, Russia, were probably descendants of the ten tribes. From one end of Asia to the other, and onward through the Crimea, Greece, and Italy, the Jews by their presence bore witness to the fulfilment of the prophecy. Not like the wandering Indian tribe, who spread over Europe, living apart in their native wildness; but, settled among the inhabitants of each city, they were still distinct, although with no polity of their own; a distinct, settled, yet foreign and subordinate race. Still remains unreversed this irrevocable sentence as to their temporal state and face of an earthly kingdom, that they remain still wanderers, or dispersed among other nations, and have never been restored, nor are in likelihood of ever being restored to their own land, so as to call it their own. If ever any of them have returned thither, it hath been as strangers; and all, as to any propriety that they could challenge in it, to hear the ruins and waste heaps of their ancient cities to echo in their ears the prophet's words, Arise ye, and depart, for this is not your rest; your ancestors polluted it, and ye shall never return as a people thither to inhabit it, as in your former condition.'

The tenth chapter belongs to a later date, after some decisive battle of Shalmanezer at Betharbel, in the valley of Jezreel, where "Hosea probably, in the last years of his life, saw the fulfilment of his own earlier prophecy, and God brake the bow of Israel." Israel, who once had given joy, as grapes in the wilderness, is here addressed as 66 an empty vine." She shall therefore be removed, and the true, the fruitful vine shall take her place. The words of Judah in her rejection,-" We have no king but Cæsar; we will not have JESUS the Son of GOD,"-seem to be anticipated. "Now they shall say, We have no king, because we feared not the LORD." So they speak,-not, however, in penitence, but in a reckless acceptance of their fate. The thorn and the thistle-the original curse upon the ground-assert their sway over the places set apart by Israel for her false worship. "They would say to the mountains, Cover us."

"Samaria and Bethel, the seats of the idolatry and of the kingdom of Israel, themselves both on heights, had both near them mountains higher than themselves. Such was to Bethel the mountain on the east where Abraham built an altar to the LORD; Samaria was encircled by them. Both were probably scenes of their idolatries; from both the miseries of the dwellers of Bethel and Samaria could be seen. Samaria especially was in the centre of a sort of amphitheatre, itself the spectacle. No help should those high places now bring to them in their

need. The high hills round Samaria, when the tide of war had filled the valley around it, hemmed them in the more hopelessly. There was no way either to break through or to escape. The narrow passes which might have been held as flood-gates against the enemy would then be held against them. One only service could it seem that their mountains could then render to destroy them."

Israel has been hitherto like a heifer, loving to tread the corn. GOD's temporal goods have been round about her, and her only service to GOD has been to seek her own enjoyment. That day, however, is past, and what remains? The prophets bid her "sow in righteousness" for a better harvest. Let the ploughing take the place of the threshing. A distant vision of spiritual hope for Israel, in union with Judah, breaks in upon his eye, though he rests not on it. As for earthly hope, it is summed up in the fate of the king: "In a morning shall the king of Israel be utterly cut off." The poem of the eleventh chapter opens with the remarkable reference to the calling of Israel out of Egypt.

"Since these words relate to literal Israel, the people whom GOD brought out by Moses, how were they fulfilled in the infant JESUS, when He was brought back out of Egypt, as S. Matthew teaches us they were?

"Because Israel himself was a type of CHRIST, and for the sake of Him who was to be born of the seed of Israel did GOD call Israel My Son. For His sake only did He deliver him. The two deliverances of the whole Jewish people, and of CHRIST the Head, occupied the same position in GoD's dispensations. He rescued Israel, whom He called His Son in its childish and infantine condition at the very commencement of its being, as a people. His true SoN by nature, CHRIST our LORD, He brought up in His Infancy, when He began to show forth His mercies to us in Him. Both had by His appointment taken refuge in Egypt; both were by His miraculous call,—to Moses in the bush, to Joseph in the dreams, recalled from it. S. Matthew apparently quotes these words, not to prove anything, but in order to point out the relation of God's former dealings with the latter, the beginning and the close. He tells us that the former deliverance had its completion in CHRIST, that in His deliverance was the full solid completion of that of Israel, and that indeed it might in its completest fulness be said, Out of Egypt have I called My Son."

The Prophet opens his song on this occasion with telling of God's past call to Israel, delivering the people as His Son from Egypt, and of the many calls of prophets since. Instead of turning to Him, they only turned to Baalim. Egypt, the land which specially told of His past mercy, was now the place to which their eyes turned, while the more fearful destruction overhung them from Assyria. Can they go to Egypt? No: they shall not. Egypt is a place of hope in the providential government of GOD. It is, therefore, no place for them. By the light of Christian truth we seem