Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity and passeth by the transgression of the remnants of his heritage? He retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. He will again have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. Thou wilt shew faithfulness to Jacob, and lovingkindness to Abraham, as thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old.

The tender beauty of this promise is equalled by a single verse in the last chapter of the Book of Isaiah.

As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you; and ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem.

Lastly, let me quote a famous verse in the 'Messianic' description of a very late writer, whose writings are now appended to the Book of Zechariah. He is not a writer with whom elsewhere we have much sympathy. His hope is usually too narrow; there is too much of national hates and local aspirations mixed up with his religious zeal to satisfy us to-day, when religion has become dissociated from race. Yet one famous verse we can still use for the expression of our own hope-the hope that the pure worship of the one God may ultimately prevail throughout the world.

And the Lord shall be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord shall be One and his name One.

§ 1. Esther and Jonah.-The third section of this volume will be far shorter than the first or second. It will only include two short books in strange and striking contrast to each other.

Both are tales; and both are tales with a purpose, but the purpose of the one is very different from that of the other. The moral and religious worth of the second is vastly superior to that of the first. Just at that very point where, as we have often seen, the religion of the Jews was apt to be most deficient, the first of our two booklets' fails most strikingly; it is a conspicuous illustration of that weakness and deficiency. On the other hand, it is also at that very point where the excellence of the second shines forth most brightly. Hence the two may profitably be studied together as a lesson and a contrast.

I, then, group them together, but in the actual Hebrew Bible they are placed in two wholly separate divisions. Moreover, their respective settings and frameworks are very different. The first (the Book of Esther) would claim to be a record of an historical event, the story of a great deliverance which befell the Jews in the days of Xerxes. The second (the Book of Jonah) is the story of a sentence of doom and of its subsequent withdrawal. But neither tale is historical; both are probably in almost every point entirely fictitious. The second, at any rate, was never even intended to be taken historically; it is merely a religious lesson or sermon dressed up in an historical and prophetic guise: the dress enabled it to succeed the better, and ultimately gave it a place in the canon among the prophets, to rank with whom its original author would have made no claim. As to the first of our two сс

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booklets, it was written in order to explain the origin of a certain popular festival, perhaps to give it (in the eyes of the writer) a more worthy historical setting than it had hitherto received. How far the author may have used current stories for the basis of his story, or how far it is of his own weaving, it is impossible to say.

The dates of our two stories are also totally unknown, but it is probable that the one which I put first was written second. Many scholars think it the latest book in the Bible, an illustration of the fact that the latest thing is not always the best thing. The second tale may perhaps belong to the age of Nehemiah, but it may also be considerably later.

§ 2. The Book of Esther and its critics.-Our first story is the Book of Esther, and the festival of which it tells the origin is called Purim. Among the thousands and thousands of Jews who have celebrated and still celebrate that festival, it is likely that very few have paid or pay any heed to the moral and religious worth of the book on which the festival now depends. The festival is celebrated in all innocence and simplicity. But when we come to examine, to weigh and to test, then, just as the great and noble things of the Bible grow greater and nobler still, so the human weaknesses inherent in every human work become also clearly revealed. In the case of the Bible, as well as in the case of every other book, our duty is to do homage to the God of truth and of goodness. We must nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.' As regards the Book of Esther, both errors have been committed. On the one hand, its religious and moral deficiencies have been ignored or explained away; on the other, they have been exaggerated and falsely labelled. Just because of these very deficiencies it has been called by enemies of the Jews and of the Jewish religion the most specifically Jewish book of the Hebrew Bible, and it is still so called to this day. But this is both inaccurate and unjust.

The excellences of Judaism are in a far higher degree characteristic of it than its defects. At any rate it is monstrous to single out the defects, and to say that in these, and only in these, lie the characteristics of our faith. Suppose a person with certain peculiar excellences and certain peculiar faults. How shamefully unfair it would be to call his faults his characteristics, and to ignore his virtues! Let us further assume that on one particular day his peculiar faults resulted in some specially objectionable deed. How grossly unjust it would be to say that that particular day was the most characteristic day of his life! Yet this is precisely what some non-Jewish critics do as regards Judaism and

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the Book of Esther. It is all the more shamefully unfair, inasmuch as, in spite of the continued observance of the festival of Purim, the religious errors and deficiencies which characterize the Book of Esther have in modern Judaism been entirely overcome.

§ 3. Nation and religion co-extensive with each other.-The particular weakness to which allusion has been made is the attitude of the old Jewish religion to those outside its pale. Religion and nation coincided; a most unfortunate coincidence. National hates were augmented by religious differences; national oppression produced religious intolerance. Instead of the desire becoming general that the religion of Israel should be the religion of all, so that religiously there should be no difference between him who was by race a Jew and him who was not, there were many periods of Jewish history in which the main desire was that the enemies of Israel should be destroyed. Pity and compassion were the accredited attributes of God in his relation to Israel, anger and severity in his relation to the world beyond. For the enemies of the nation were the enemies of the nation's religion, and the enemies of the religion were necessarily the enemies of God. Now for a nation to have enemies may be unavoidable, but it is an awful perversion of religion to think that God has enemies as well. It is bad enough for men to hate their enemies; it is far worse to think that God hates them too.

But it has to be remembered that these national and religious hatreds were caused and fostered from without. It is exceedingly probable that the hatred and the cruelty which are so conspicuous in the Book of Esther were the direct issue of the intolerable persecutions under Antiochus Epiphanes, of which we have yet to hear. And another thing has to be remembered too. God suffers good and evil to be strangely mingled together. This religious hatred was the sad and terrible defect of a wonderful religious fidelity-a fidelity which won triumphs the most noble and sublime over the most varied and refined cruelties that centuries of vile intolerance and relentless persecution could possibly devise and inflict. In Western Europe active persecution has largely ceased. Would that the same could be said of hatred and intolerance. But Judaism has risen superior to its environment. It has divested and rid itself of any national narrowness, or of any irreligious belief in the moral partiality of God. That is good. But let us look to it that with the defect we do not also cast away the quality. Let us look to it that the fidelity remains unchilled, uninjured. Can we not keep the gold if the dross be purged away? To love God warmly and abidingly,

must we have enemies to hate? Is it only the vices of our neighbours that can make us faithful to our religion?

§4. The plot of Esther.-Returning now to the Book of Esther, we find that it tells how, during the reign of King Ahasuerus (the Hebrew consonants and other reasons make it probable that Ahasuerus Xerxes), an attempted plot to massacre all the Jews in the king's dominions was defeated by the counter-device of the king's Jewish queen and her uncle, and how the Jews, instead of being themselves slain, slew many thousands of their foes. Xerxes reigned from 486 to 465 B.C., so the date of the story would be some thirty or twenty years before the journey of Ezra. But, as we shall see, the tale is a tissue of improbabilities from start to finish. Its great object is to glorify the Jews, and to that object historical probability is freely sacrificed. But making allowance for these exaggerations, the tale is compiled with skill and power, and gives a graphic picture of the court of an oriental Grande Monarque.' The sumptuous, long drawn-out festivities, the irascible despot and his fawning courtiers, the inevitable favourite and his precarious tenure of favour, the elaborate system of ministering to the royal pleasures, are all depicted with a dramatic force that places the Book of Esther in the front rank of well-told romances.

§ 5. How Esther becomes Queen.-There is one strange omission in the book which has always secured the attention of every reader. The name of God is never mentioned. The cause of this omission is unknown. Many explanations have been given, but all are equally forced and unnatural. That the writer was a strong believer in God and his providential rule is obvious. He probably had some special motive in avoiding all reference to the Deity and to prayer, but what that motive may have been, no man can now discover. We may now listen to the first portion of the story.

Now it came to pass in the days of Ahasuerus, (this is Ahasuerus who reigned, from India even unto Ethiopia, over an hundred and seven and twenty provinces,) that in those days, when the king Ahasuerus sat on his royal throne in Shushan the fortress, in the third year of his reign, he made a feast unto all his princes and his servants; the officers of the army of Persia and Media, the nobles and princes of the provinces, being before him when he shewed the riches of his glorious kingdom and the excellent

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