16. And the six hundred men appointed with their weapons of war, which were of the children of Dan, stood by the entering of the gate.

17. And the five men that went to spy out the land went up, and came in thither, and took the graven image, and the ephod, and the teraphim, and the molten image: and the priest stood in the entering of the gate [having been inveigled thither to talk to the six hundred men] with the six hundred men that were appointed with weapons of war.

18. And these went into Micah's house, and fetched the carved image, the ephod, and the teraphim, and the molten image [not to destroy but to worship]. Then said the priest unto them, What do ye?

19. And they said unto him, Hold thy peace, lay thine hand upon thy mouth [finger on the lip, is the attitude of the Egyptian god of silence], and go with us, and be to us a father and a priest: is it better for thee to be a priest unto the house of one man, or that thou be a priest unto a tribe and a family in Israel [the papists offered Luther the cardinalate to be quiet]?

20. And the priest's heart was glad [and this was a grandson of Moses], and he took the ephod, and the teraphim, and the graven image, and went in the midst of the people [where he was well guarded].

21. So they turned and departed, and put the little ones [so it was a regular migration] and the cattle and the carriage [the baggage] before them [expecting to be pursued].

22. And when they were a good way from the house of Micah, the men that were in the houses near to Micah's house were gathered together, and overtook the children of Dan.

23. And they cried unto the children of Dan. And they turned their faces, and said unto Micah, What aileth thee, that thou comest with such a company [the grim humour of a tribe like a serpent on the way, an adder in the path, Gen. xlix. 17]?

24. And he said, Ye have taken away my gods [remember Laban, Gen. xxx. 31] which I made, and the priest, and ye are gone away: and what have I more? and what is this that ye say unto me, What aileth thee? 25. And the children of Dan said unto him, Let not thy voice be heard among us, lest angry fellows [men bitter of soul] run upon thee, and thou lose thy life, with the lives of thy household.

26. And the children of Dan went their way: and when Micah saw that they were too strong for him, he turned and went back unto his house.

27. And they took the things which Micah had made, and the priest which he had, and came unto Laish, unto a people that were at quiet and secure and they smote them with the edge of the sword, and burnt the city with fire ["Dan was no gainer. His name disappears from the records of 1 Chron. iv. I, and he is not mentioned among the elected tribes in Rev. vii.”]. 28. And there was no deliverer, because it was far from Zidon, and they had no business with any man; and it was in the valley that lieth by Beth-rehob [at the foot of the lowest range of Lebanon]. And they built a city, and dwelt therein.

29. And they called the name of the city Dan, after the name of Dan their father, who was born unto Israel; howbeit the name of the city was Laish at the first.

30. And the children of Dan set up the graven image [some say it was in

the form of a calf]; and Jonathan [the name has been withheld until this moment], the son of Gershom, the son of Manasseh, he and his sons were priests to the tribe of Dan until the day of the captivity of the land [probably the Philistine captivity].

31. And they set them up Micah's graven image, which he made, all the time that the house of God was in Shiloh.

MICAH'S SORROW.

WE now reach; a

E now reach a very disturbed state of the history of Israel. All is anarchy. We have thus an opportunity of seeing what men will do when they are left to themselves without government, discipline, sense of social or natural responsibility. We shall see what the bridge is when the keystone has dropped out of it. We are told again and again in these latter chapters that "there was no king in Israel," so "every man did that which was right in his own eyes." What is the meaning of this? The meaning goes further back than the mere letter; there was no king in Israel, because in Israel there was no God. The Lord is King. You cannot have a king if you have not a God. There was no nominal renunciation of God, no public and blatant atheism, no boastful impiety; there was a deadlier heresy-namely, keeping God as a sign but paying no tribute to him as a King, worshipping him possibly in outward form but knowing nothing of the subduing and directing power of godliness. That is more to be dreaded than any intellectual difficulty of a theological kind. Intellectual heresies can do but little to impede the progress of the kingdom of truth; but dead consciences, prayerless prayers, mechanical formalities-these are the impediments which overturn for a time the chariot of Progress. This was the case in Israel. Where God is the king is. Not in any limited and measurable sense, as a man with a crown on, constituted of so much gold and so many precious stones; but a king in the sense of kingliness, sovereignty, authority, rule the spirit of obligation and responsibility. You may have a king under any form of government. Republicanism itself is monarchical. You find the monarch everywhere-the right monarch where you find the right God. Herein is the utility of spreading far and wide right conceptions of the divine Being, as Sovereign, Father, Shepherd, Judge; let such concep

tions be received into the mind; let them constitute part of the very substance of life, and you need not exhort men to keep correct weights and measures, and to pay the wages of the hireling; where the sovereign idea is right, and the supreme and dominating conviction is pure and noble, every finger of the hands serves the living God, and the whole breath is a continual sacrifice upon the altar of Righteousness. So, without going into narrow definitions of terms, we rest on the broad philosophy and reason that a right conception of God means a right conception of Man; a true, deep, complete love of God means an equal love of one's neighbour; a true theology, properly understood, is the uppermost side of a true morality.

Every man was king in the anarchical days of Israel. What does anarchy do for society? Anarchy and society are irreconcilable terms. Where Self is king there can be no society; the ghastly image of it must be symbolical of injustice. The illustration and proof are found in this very chapter. Dan went out to see what could be had :

"The children of Dan sent of their family five men from their coasts, men of valour, from Zorah, and from Eshtaol, to spy out the land, and to search it; and they said unto them, Go, search the land" (v. 2).

In other words: Let us see what can be done. They followed the good old rule, the simple plan,-Let those take who have the power; Let those keep who can. This is the history of anarchy in a couplet: the strongest is the wisest, might is right, usurpation is justice. Things are turned upside down in their moral relations and applications when the great central thought is destroyed. Here a curious incident occurred. Dan, searching out the land and seeing what could be done, "knew the voice of the young man the Levite" in the house of Micah; "and they turned in thither, and said unto him, Who brought thee hither? and what makest thou in this place? and what hast thou here?"-(v. 3). Such are the coincidences of life-the little points at which so-called providences are created by selfishness and injustice. Singular chances arise, and we construe these into visitations of Heaven, made directly on our behalf. The young man explained his circumstances; and the children of Dan said unto him: "Ask counsel, we pray thee, of God, that we may know whether our way which

we go shall be prosperous" (v. 5). Here you have social injustice connected with the holiest names. It is sad to see how religion has been abused. It is mysterious, beyond all other mystery, to note how men, given up to injustice, usurpation, and plunder, must now and again be religious. Thieves go to church as well as honest men. Again and again it strikes the roughest mind and the most ill-treated conscience that another attempt at prayer may be an excellent investment. For irony, look to the history of the human conscience; read the history of the Christian Church. Men have thought they could build their way half up to heaven with stones taken by unjust hands out of the quarries of earth. Men "have stolen the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil in." Men, who would not for a moment deny God in words, have denied and rejected him in action. We should analyse our prayers, and cross-examine ourselves at the altar, and keep a strict watch upon ourselves at the holy board,- -even there the whole nature should undergo a species of vivisection, that out of its agony we may extort the truth.

The seventh verse presents a picture of the dangers of solitariness and self-security:

"Then the five men departed, and came to Laish, and saw the people that were therein, how they dwelt careless, after the manner of the Zidonians, quiet and secure; and there was no magistrate in the land, that might put them to shame in any thing; and they were far from the Zidonians, and had no business with any man."

These circumstances have a wide application. They must not be limited by geographical lines, for they apply to the history of civilisation and to the position of every man in human society. There is a solitariness which means weakness; there is a care lessness" which amounts to a temptation to those who behold it. Is this not so with regard to mind? Are there not persons who have intellectually no commerce with the world?—they read no books, they hear no discourses, they listen not to the voice of education or of progress; they live retrospectively; they live upon themselves, and are in a sense suicides. This intellectual solitariness is often but another name for weakness. We should know all men, all nations, all languages; all civilisations should be familiar to us. Without such large commerce with the world

we shall become little and less and less, day by day, falling swiftly backward to the vanishing point. We should travel more; otherwise we shall think that one country is the world, and be amused with a fool's merriment when we hear of what is being done, in some distant kind of way, by nations which we are conceited enough to pronounce "foreign." There should be no "foreign" nations now. Modern civilisation should have rendered that an impossibility. Every language should be a man's mother-tongue-in the ideal of it, in the innermost meaning of it; not that it is possible literally and mechanically, but perfectly possible sympathetically and philanthropically. It is sad to see people dwelling within their own little sect, wondering how other persons can have the "audacity" to differ from them -forgetting that they themselves have the "audacity" to differ from other people. Why this fear of man? We should be familiar with the history of barbarism, so far as it may be said to have a history; or we should construct a history out of what we know concerning it, and out of the history extract a philosophy. This is the way to rebuke our own mind, to humble our own ambition, and to have our asperities struck off or smoothed down, by a large and continuous friction. So it should be in Christian culture. All Christian communions should intermingle. They would do one another good. They can never be constituted into one mechanical society, because of temperament, but they can realise a common brotherhood, because they may be stronger at the point of agreement than they are at the point of difference. What havoc the enemy makes upon solitary Christians! Sympathy is strength. Little trust is little support. No one Church can be the whole Church of the living God. But who does not like to live "quietly," and "carelessly "—that is, without care, not indifference-at home, sitting, as we say, under his own vine and fig-tree? If there is a pitiable sight on the whole earth today, it is to see a man sitting under his own vine and fig-tree, when the rest of the world is in poverty, weakness, or necessity. Times there will be, sabbatic and sacred, when there will be sense of home, sense of security, sense of the blessedness of having a vine and fig-tree; but that should never be the dominating feeling in the Christian breast; the dominating feeling should rather be one of large-heartedness, spreading a table for every