him. He swept away out of the garden of his life every tree of shelter, every green herb and fair flower, and strewed it with salt and ashes. No African desert was ever more awfully barren and desolate than was the life of Job in his season of misery. God was pleading with him; sternly, no doubt, but also lovingly. For we know how blessed was the end of that fiery trial. We know how God brought forth His servant at the last as gold tried in the furnace. We know how, even in this world, there was measured out to him a rich recompense. And is not this the end of all God's pleadings? Is there not rich mercy in store for such as He brings into the wilderness? Oh, if we had but a brighter faith, and a keener insight into God's dealings with us, we should know how far better it is to be brought into the wilderness here that we may find our true home at last, than to be suffered to live here as though we were at home. We should understand the love and mercy which would turn our pleasant garden into a wilderness that we might not sit down under the shadow of its branches and be at rest.

It is not always a ground of thankfulness that this world is made bright and happy to us. They are happiest whom God loves best; and "whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." Then we will not murmur, if the world seem to us a wilderness. We will believe it is God's way of pleading with us; we will accept it as a token of love; we will thank God to be weaned from earth and brought nearer unto Himself. Probably Lazarus at the rich man's gate found the world something of a wilderness; while the rich man thought it a pleasant place enough. But in a little while the latter was in torment, while the former was in Abraham's bosom.

Tracts for the Christian Seasons.

NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

DANIEL.

IT has constantly been God's method to preach His own mysterious existence to the Gentile world by the testimony of believers. It was thus that He manifested Himself to Egypt, first by sending Abraham to the court of Pharaoh, then by sending Joseph to the same learned but misbelieving nation, and again, four hundred years afterwards, by His miraculous deliverance of His own people through the wonders that gathered around the person of Moses.

It was thus that again and again He made Joshua and the Judges the witnesses of His truth through the wars which they carried on with the nations around them, with the Amorite, the Hivite, the Hittite,

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and the Girgashite, or the Philistine. It was thus, as we have observed in these Tracts, that Jonah was made a living testimony to the character of the one true God, the "God of heaven which made the sea and the dry land," to the affrighted mariners in their rocking bark, and subsequently to the prostrate and suppliant Ninevites in their mighty city. In these and in many other like instances, we clearly discern a double purpose in the way-march of God's mysterious providence; the one the guidance of His own people by direct and evident leadings, the other the presenting dimly, and yet with considerable precision, that light of truth which was eventually to be altogether uncovered, and to be declared as no less the "light to lighten the Gentiles, than to be the glory of His people Israel "."

In conformity with this double purpose we are presented with the history of the Prophet Daniel. Again we look upon one of God's most eminent servants involved in

a

Jonah i. 9.

b St. Luke ii. 22.

the great judgment which, after centuries of forbearance, He had brought upon His own people; and by that very visitation, placed in the heart of heathendom, and in that as it might seem, most unfavourable locality, bearing such testimony as could not be mistaken, before kings and people, of the power and providence of the true God, and so suggesting to the heathen mind the weakness and the false character of its own dark and bloody idolatry.

The mission of Daniel will be best understood by considering the circumstances of his life. The first half, indeed, of the book which is called by his name, is entirely taken up with them. From the first chapter to the sixth the volume might well be denominated the autobiography of the prophet Daniel, shewing (if it were desired to give a more particular description of its contents) the dangers to which he was exposed, the faith and courage with which he met them, and the supernatural wonders wrought for his deliverance. It is in the second and last part of the volume © that we read his own

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c Dan. vii.-xi.