adults, would give a population of 600,000; and if we wonder why, though it covered a much larger area than London, it contained a much smaller population, the answer is to be found in the fact that within those eastern cities there were large spaces for gardens and flocks; and indeed this is intimated in the passage already referred to, when it is added that, in addition to its great population, there were" also much cattle." (Jonah iv. 11.)

This city, so famous for its riches, grandeur, and magnificence, was still more famous for its sins. The pride, and crime, and violence of its inhabitants had reached the climax, so that the Lord describes their wickedness as having" come up" before Him. It was to such a city, under such circumstances, that Jonah the son of Amittai was sent to preach.

You know how he fled from the face of the Lord, and came down to Joppa and took shipping for Tarsus, in order to escape from the duty imposed upon him. And you remember, too, how miraculously and mercifully he was arrested and brought back. First the tempest pursues him; then the cry of the heathen mariners awakes him from his double lethargy of mind and body; then the lot detects and singles him out as the transgressor; then conscience convicts him, and wrings from him the self-accusation; then the sea receives him into its gloomy prison-house; then the great fish prepared by the Lord becomes at once his custodian and his cell; till within that strange dominion of death, with the billows for his bier, and

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the belly of the fish for his sepulchre, he is brought to repentance and to prayer, and thence once more discharged to life and duty :-" And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land." (chap. ii. 10.)

But we have to dwell upon his renewed mission, and upon the forty days with which it stands connected. He was sent back with exactly the same message as before" 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." No alteration must be attempted in God's plans, or in God's messages. They must be carried out and delivered as He has given them. He must neither evade the duty of delivering God's messages, nor venture to curtail or soften them.

And now the solitary missionary, himself a penitent, himself an example of the Divine mercy, stands at the gate of the mighty city; and as he enters in amidst. the bustling crowds, and pursues his way through lines of marble palaces, he cries with strange, unearthly voice, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be destroyed."

Could anything be more unlikely? Even if its mere conquest had been announced, such an event would have been most improbable. Who was able to subdue Assyria, or bring its proud capital into subjection? And yet a darker doom was now announced, and its inhabitants heard from the lips of

this strange seer that their queenly city was to perish, and that, too, within forty days!

They evidently looked upon this period of forty days as a period of respite and probation. They understood them, and no doubt Jonah so explained them, as being days of warning from the God of Israel; and that the final issue as to their city, and its fate, hung upon the use which they made of this intervening time; and therefore, instead of waiting to see the forty days expire, or even draw to a close, they appear to have immediately set about the great work of repentance and reformation. "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." (chap. iii. 5.)

What a lesson we have here on the subject of national sins and national repentance! It has been well said, that nations, as nations, have no existence in the future state, and that God, therefore, deals with them in the present one. Hence national judgments, involving the righteous and wicked, as parts of one community, in similar calamities; hence the necessity for national acts of humiliation and confession; hence the propriety of special days of national fasting and supplication, appointed by public authority, and observed by the whole community.

This mission to Nineveh was an eminently successful one: its good effects reached from the king upon his throne to the meanest citizen in his metropolis; the outward expression of their repentance, marked,

as it was, by every token of humiliation before God, as they stood in their sackcloth and ashes, and abstained from food, was accompanied by such a general and distinctive national amendment as proved it to be sincere. "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." (chap. iii. 10.)

Let us now note some of the special circumstances connected with these forty days, which help to illustrate and enforce the genuine character of repentance, whether amongst nations or individuals. There are doubtless some particulars in which that evangelical repentance, which forms a part of the spiritual history of the children of God, differs from such public repentance as belongs to nations and communities; but still the great features and principles involved in them are the same, and they are well worthy of our attention.

The first thing that strikes us in the repentance of the Ninevites is the initial act-"They believed God." Faith in the message which had been delivered to them by Jonah lay at the very root of all that followed; they believed in God's warnings, and so they hoped for God's mercies, and turned to Him for forgiveness.

And so with evangelical repentance. Faith is indissolubly bound up. Observe how continually the union of these two things is insisted upon by the earliest preachers of the Gospel. The great apostle

of the Gentiles, when recounting to the elders of Ephesus the character of his ministry amongst them, dwells particularly on the fact, that he kept back nothing that was profitable unto them, and then explains to them that the substance of his preaching was "Repentance toward God, and Faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ." (Acts xx. 20, 21.) And our blessed Lord Himself, when He began His ministry, struck this divine key-note for all His ambassadors who should follow, for He "came into Galilee preaching the Gospel of the kingdom of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the Gospel." (Mark i. 14, 15.)

And it is easy to see the necessity for the union between these two. Repentance has reference to our state as sinners; Faith to the remedy provided for us: the one is chiefly concerned with the review of what we are; the other with the grace and mercy which are set before us in Christ Jesus. And it is in the union of both that we see the real nature of that change of heart, whereby we turn from the world to God, from sin to holiness, from self to Christ. And this view of the subject will show us how inadequate that idea of repentance is, which confines it either to sorrow for sin upon the one side, or to amendment of life on the other. It is something deeper far, though it includes and comprehends all this, for it implies a mighty change wrought by the Spirit of God upon the inmost soul,