ever fail? Hear what Joshua said by way of appeal to Israel after they were settled in the land of Canaan-"Behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth and ye know in all your hearts and in all your souls, that not one thing had failed of all the good things which the Lord your God spake concerning you; all are come to pass unto you, and not one thing hath failed thereof." (Joshua xxiii. 14.)

Go, then, like Elijah in the strength of this heavenly food; go up through the wilderness like the bride in the Canticles "leaning upon her beloved," and at length you too shall reach "the mount of God;" and bear your grateful and adoring testimony that He is "Faithful and True."

O God, the strength of all them that put their trust in Thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without Thee, grant us the help of Thy

grace, that in keeping of Thy command

ments we may please Thee, both in
will and deed; through Jesus

Christ our Lord.

Amen.

V.

The Forty Days of Nineveh:

REPENTANCE AND FORGIVENESS.

"Yet Forty Days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”—JONAH iii. 4.

DOTH earth send nothing up to Thee but moans?

Father canst Thou find melody in groans?
Oh! can it be that Thou, the God of bliss,
Canst feed Thy glory on a world like this?

Ah me that sin should have such chemic power To turn to dross the gold of nature's dower!

Alas! of all this sorrow there is need.

For us earth weeps-for us the creatures bleed.
Thou art content, if all this woe imparts
The sense of exile to repentant hearts.

Yes it is well for us: from these alarms
Like children scared, we fly into Thine arms;
And pressing sorrows put our pride to rout
With a swift faith which has not time to doubt.

FABER.

V.

The Forty Days of Nineveh:

REPENTANCE AND FORGIVENESS.

"And the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the second time, saying, Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. So Jonah arose, and went unto Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceeding great city of three days' journey. And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. So the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them. For word came unto the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, and he laid his robe from him, and covered him with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. And he caused it to be proclaimed and published through Nineveh by the decree of the king and his nobles, saying, Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything: let them not feed, nor drink water: but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and cry mightily unto God: yea, let them turn every one from his evil way, and from the violence that is in their hands. Who can tell if God will turn and repent, and turn away from His fierce anger, that we perish not? And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that He had said that He would do unto them; and He did it not." (Jonah iii.)

EITHER the character of Jonah, which is a very singular one, nor yet his history, which is a most remarkable one, is to form the subject of our present consideration. We have rather to direct attention to the events and lessons of those forty days

which he spent in Nineveh, and shall only touch upon other portions of the prophet's eventful history, so far as they help to elucidate our theme.

In one respect Jonah stands out upon the page of the Old Testament with a striking singularity. His is the only instance under the old dispensation of any missionary being sent into a heathen land to proclaim the truth of God, and the success of his mission is quoted by our Lord in the New Testament, as a testimony against the men of His own day, who rejected a clearer testimony and a greater prophet:-"The men of Nineveh shall rise in judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonas; and, behold, a greater than Jonas is here." (Matt. xii. 41.)

Of Nineveh itself, we know that it was one of the oldest and noblest cities of the world—" an exceeding great city of three days' journey;" that is, (as interpreters generally explain it,) a city some sixty miles in circumference. It was, moreover, the metropolis of the Assyrian empire, enriched with sumptuous palaces, and surrounded by gigantic walls one hundred feet in height, with twelve hundred stately towers placed upon them at regular intervals. Of its enor-1 mous population we may form some idea from the statement in the last chapter of Jonah, that there were within it one hundred and twenty thousand children, or, as they are there described, "persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left." This, judging by the usual proportions of children to