a majority vote. Can a single man know the mystery of minority and majority? Certainly. Every man who reasons upon life says he will carry out such a policy for so many reasons; on the other hand, he says there are so many more reasons against that policy; if there be six reasons for it, and nine reasons against it, the action is taken upon the majority. You know whether you are a bad man or a good one; do not whine and cant and analyse yourself so as to draw attention to the leanness of your virtue, or the subtlety of your piety: "Brethren, if our heart condemn us" that is the standard. Ask no pastor whether you are good or not; the answer is in yourself. But you are called drunkard by men? That is nothing; you may not be a drunkard, though you have reeled in the streets by reason of wine; the question is, Are you drunk in your soul? You may be thought to be violent, but men do not know what violence is. Do you feel gentle in heart, and is it your daily struggle to be gentle in manner? Then the Lord will judge you, and set you among his gentle ones. Are you sober? You may be sober according to the flesh, and drunk in the soul every night; no drunkard shall enter the kingdom of heaven. A man is what he is in his soul. There are those who have been excommunicated from altars which the Lord never sanctified who have been better than the priests who condemned them to outer darkness. Let us inspire ourselves by this reflection-the Lord will judge. If we can say to him, after cursing, swearing, denial, blasphemy, cowardice, "Lord, thou knowest all things, thou knowest that I love thee," all the black night work shall be forgotten, and on the shore in the morning we shall begin our new heaven. Be severe with yourselves; thrust the knife still further in; hold the light nearer, nearer. The Cross is the bar of judgment. If by accommodation we turn the word "decision" into its ordinary meaning, we may even by accommodation avail ourselves of some useful thoughts. Think of the idea of numerous multitudes, multitudes upon multitudes, in the valley of decision, in the sense of each saying, "As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." That is decision. How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, serve him; if Baal, serve him, and name him aloud, and do not be ashamed of your silent impotent deity. Give him all the praise you can; he could only exist nominally upon eulogium, he could not survive the curses of his idolaters; he lives on praise; do not be ashamed of him— except when you call upon him to do anything for you; avoid the shame by never asking a favour at his hands. There is no need to halt. The Lord is waiting, his mercy is ready: "Seek ye the Lord while he may be found: call ye upon him while he is near." All the sound argument is on the side of spiritual decision. There is not an argument against Christianity that is worthy of one moment's consideration. It is important to us all to know truth, and fact, and reality. We have taken a course of infidelity; we have perused the writings of the enemy, and we have risen from the perusal, saying, The Lord he is God: the Lord he is God. It is supposed that Christian teachers have some interest in bolstering up superstition. They have not; they are honest men; it is because the Bible is strong at every point, and able to carry all the weight of life, that they return to it, saying, The word of the Lord abideth for ever. It is of importance to the Christian preacher that he should not be making a fool of himself. He cannot afford to trifle with the future any more than other men can; he must be taken, therefore, on the ground of his intelligence and his conscience and his general character, and if he live on the food he offers to others, and if the result of that living is stature, massiveness of character, nobility of soul, beauty of disposition, charity of temper, let justice be rendered to the nutriment upon which he subsists. There is no time to halt. Time is earnest, passing by. Behold our days are like a post, yea, our moments outfly the weaver's shuttle; it is scarcely morning before it is night; men hardly have time to hail one another with kindly salutes on the dawn of the year before their feet are walking over the shed leaves of autumn, and the men themselves are talking of the shortening days and the closing year. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, for the grave is dug; in the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand; rise early and be amongst the first who go into the Lord's field that they may till and cultivate the appointed ground. There is no time to lie, to forswear thyself, to neglect thyself, to starve thy soul, to gratify thy passions which are secretly eating up thy heritage of immortality-there is no time. Say we have a century at our disposal, we could allot the decades, and say the first for the devil, the second for God, the third for ourselves, the fourth for Christ, and so on; and thus befool ourselves, and try to live the ambiguous or ambidextrous life. Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. He that judgeth thee is at the door; set thy house in order, for this year thou shalt die; thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee. God has always this hold upon usthe hold of the uncertainty of life. Behold the giant rises and says, It shall be with me to-day as yesterday, and at night they are measuring his cold clay for a coffin. The proud man's eyes kindle as he looks upon his fields, his continually increasing estates; and behold, whilst he is looking he reels, he is blanched by some invisible blight, and the man who came out like a king is carried back home a helpless load of flesh. Thou canst not tell what a day may bring forth; thy breath is in thy nostrils : O haste thee, for the time is short. Again hear the sweet word, its silver tones coming over hill and sea, coming from eternity: Seek ye the Lord while he may be found: call ye upon him while-while-while: a measured word-while he is near. AMOS. AʼMOS (DIDY, a burden; 'Auús; Amos), a native of Tekoah in Judah, about six miles S. of Bethlehem, originally a shepherd and dresser of sycamore-trees, was called by God's Spirit to be a prophet, although not trained in any of the regular prophetic schools (i. 1; vii. 14, 15). He travelled from Judah into the northern kingdom of Israel or Ephraim, and there exercised his ministry, apparently not for any long time. His date cannot be later than the 15th year of Uzziah's reign (B. c. 808, according to Clinton, F. H., i. p. 325); for he tells us that he prophesied "in the reigns of Uzziah king of Judah, and Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel, two years before the earthquake." This earthquake (also mentioned Zech. xiv. 5) cannot have occurred after the 17th year of Uzziah, since Jeroboam II. died in the 15th of that king's reign, which therefore is the latest year fulfilling the three chronological indications furnished by the prophet himself. But his ministry probably took place at an earlier period of Jeroboam's reign, perhaps about the middle of it, for, on the one hand, Amos speaks of the conquests of this warlike king as completed (vi. 13; cf. 2 Kings xiv. 25); on the other the Assyrians, who towards the end of his reign were approaching Palestine (Hosea x. 6; xi. 5), do not seem as yet to have caused any alarm in the country.. The book of the prophecies of Amos seems divided into four principal portions closely connected together. (1) From i. I to ii. 3 he denounces the sins of the nations bordering on Israel and Judah as a preparation for (2), in which, from ii. 4 to vi. 14, he describes the state of those two kingdoms, especially the former. This is followed by (3) vii. I—ix. 10, in which, after reflecting on the previous prophecy, he relates his visit to Bethel, and sketches the impending punishment of Israel which he predicted to Amaziah. After this in (4) he rises to a loftier and more evangelical strain, looking forward to the time when the hope of the Messiah's kingdom will be fulfilled, and his people forgiven and established in the enjoyment of God's blessings to all eternity. The chief peculiarity of the style consists in the number of allusions to natural objects and agricultural occupations, as might be expected from the early life of the author. See i. 3; ii. 13; iii. 4, 5; iv. 2, 7, 9; v. 8, 19; vi. 12; vii. 1; ix. 3, 9, 13, 14. The book presupposes a popular acquaintance with the Pentateuch (see Hengstenberg, Beiträge zur Einleitung ins Alte Testament, i. p. 83-125), and implies that the ceremonies of religion, except where corrupted by Jeroboam I., were in accordance with the law of Moses. The references to it in the New Testament are two: v. 25, 26, 27 is quoted by St. Stephen in Acts vii. 42, and ix. 11 by St. James in Acts xv. 16. As the book is evidently not a series of detached prophecies, but logically and artistically connected in its several parts, it was probably written by Amos as we now have it after his return to Tekoah from his mission to Bethel. (See Ewald, Propheten des Alten Bundes, i. p. 84 ff.)— SMITH'S Dictionary of the Bible. Chapter 1. DIVINE JUDGMENTS. "The words of Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel" (ver. 1). PROPH ROPHETS persist in saying that they "saw" the word of tion is not to be found in Hebrew poetry alone. Here is the expression of a deep conviction; here are men, be they whom they may, who shut out every other sight from their eyes, and had their vision fixed upon what they at least supposed to be the word of God. If it be sentimental we shall soon discover it; if it be lacking in substance it will not bear the pressure of the critical finger; but if it be moral, honest, noble, such a vision as commends itself to the conscience of the world, by so much will the prophet justly acquire credit and justly be invested with authority. We shall pay no attention to mere verbal colouring, or to mere verbal music; we shall listen to find out, if we can, whether there is any conscience in the strain, and by the conscience we shall stand or fall in regard to our estimate of any prophet. Amos was not ashamed of his descent. Amos was not a farmer; Amos was, in the opinion of the best critics, a farmlabourer. We have great interest in farm-labourers as a whole, or in a certain indefinite sense in the abstract. Who cares to be upon very close intimacy with a field hand or a cowherd? Yet this is just what Amos was; and to a little outdoor work he added the process of cleaning and preparing the fruit either for preservation or for sale; and whilst he was doing his farm work, and attending to his fruit, a blast from heaven struck his deepest consciousness, and he stood up a prophet. The Lord will bring his prophets just as he pleases, and from what place he chooses. |