began. Sir John harangued at considerable length and with undoubted weight, exposing the countless blunders of a discredited administration; but perhaps he was a trifle too weighty for his audience, and his tone throughout was one of unqualified gloom. He obtained a succès d'estime. Other speakers, more or less dreary, followed him and were listened to with resignation by some and undisguised impatience by others. Then arose a stoutish, middle-aged man, with a smooth-shaven face, a cock nose and a twinkle in his eye. He advanced to the front of the platform, his hands tucked under his coat-tails, and took a deliberate survey of the sea of upturned faces below him. "This is their trump-card," whispered the Admiral to Gilbert; "Pollington has been telling me about him. He's a man called Giles, a Q.C., and a rare good speaker, they say.' whom I see here to day, I'm sadly afraid that that means yourselves. I, too, am a ratepayer; and my experience-I can't say whether it's yours or not-is that my rates are quite heavy enough already." And so forth, and so forth. The speech was well received, and Mr. Giles retired amidst prolonged applause. "What do you think of that, Mr. Segrave?" a voice well known to Gilbert whispered in his ear. "I think it would be a very good thing if we could get the gentleman over to our side," answered Gilbert, laughing. "Who is he? Do you know anything about him?" "I know just this about him, that he's likely to be your opponent at Kingscliff, and that it'll take a good man to beat him," was Mr. Buswell's reply. "A man who, as I told you the other day, can show that he has the welfare of the place at 'eart," he added significantly. Gilbert turned away. Until lately he had flattered himself-indeed, Buswell had as good as assured him-that he would have a walk over; but now it seemed that this had been rather too hasty an assumption. Under the circumstances, it was a little provoking to find Admiral Greenwood bubbling over with laughter at the enemy's jokes, and quite set upon making the enemy's acquaintance, with a view to asking him to dinner. "You had better get Sir John Pollington to introduce you," said Gilbert, and sauntered away across the grass with Kitty, to whom, if to no one else, he felt that he might fairly look for sympathy. Mr. Giles soon showed that he possessed at any rate that essential condition of popular oratory which Sir John Pollington lacked; for he made the crowd listen to him. He passed lightly over foreign affairs, remarking that that subject had been pretty thoroughly dealt with in the admirable speeches which they had just heard, and that if Liberal statesmen had any defence to offer of their policy in Egypt and Afghanistan, all he could say was that it hadn't yet been put into an intelligible shape. But he should like to say a word or two about the great benefits which these same statesmen were promising to bestow upon the community if only they were restored to power in the new parliament. And then he began to be extremely But even Kitty, it appeared, was not symfunny. He ridiculed the theory that sub-pathetically disposed on that inauspicious dividing land would make it more produc- day; for she opened the conversation by tive a theory which might serve well saying: enough to elicit a round of cheers from Birmingham artisans, but which would hardly go down with farmers, or with farm-labourers either. He was very good-humoured, he told some capital stories, made one or two telling points and kept his audience on the broad grin from first to last. "Free education, compulsory sale of land, and all the rest of it, these are tempting offers, gentlemen; but the worst of them is that our Radical friends don't propose to pay for them out of their own pockets. Oh, dear no! Yet somebody must provide the funds; and if you don't know who'll be called upon to fulfil that humble, necessary function, I think I can tell you. Why, the ratepayers! And by the look of most of you XXVIII-32 "I am so delighted to hear that Beatrice Huntley has bought the Manor House. She used to talk about it sometimes; but I never thought that she really meant it. Aren't you glad?" 66 Considering that I particularly wanted to buy the Manor House myself, I can't say that I am," answered Gilbert, with a touch of asperity. "When I made Brian an offer for it some months ago he gave me to understand that he had no intention of selling; but I suppose he couldn't resist the temptation of making a good round sum and serving me a nasty turn at one blow." "Oh, I am sure he never meant to serve you a nasty turn!" cried Kitty. In the depths of her honest little heart she was conscious of not being quite as delighted as she ought to be at the prospect of her friend's acquiring a permanent establishment at Kingscliff; but that Brian should be provided with means sufficient to live upon seemed to her to be a subject for unmixed satisfaction, and presently she made a timid remark to that effect. "I am quite with you there," declared Gilbert, who seldom suffered himself to display temper for more than a moment; "only I confess that I should have been better pleased if he had consented to deal with me instead of with Miss Huntley. You may be right in taking the most charitable view of his conduct, but it is certainly unlucky that he should have done the only thing that it was in his power to do to imperil my election." "I don't understand," said Kitty. But Gilbert did not care to be more explicit. He changed the subject, and soon afterwards took his departure. As he drove home, he said to himself that although clever women may not be altogether desirable as wives, a certain degree of intelligence is no such bad thing. Hitherto Kitty had always backed him up blindly and submissively, but when he had stated what was no more than the simple truth, that Brian had placed his election in jeopardy, she had looked almost indignantly at him and had declared that she did not understand. Surely she might have understood that much! And then, for the second time, he fell to wondering what his future lot in life might have been if he had not happened to lose his heart to Kitty Greenwood. JUS THE BLIND UST at the corner of the street, Where meet the tides of human feet, She sits; a pity on her face, That will not pass nor change its place, Rests, mixing with a look that fain As if in thought she, too, must wait READER. That, deaden'd with the city's din, And, just at times for listeners And watch with motionless surprise That Truth before she bows her head, ALEXANDER ANDERSON. BY THE LATE CHARLES READE, D.C.L., AUTHOR OF "IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND,” etc. III. NEHEMIAH. ONCE in the history of mankind a mortal man told a nation its history in detail, predicting the near and the distant future so distinctly that both seemed to lie equally close to his eye on one map of events. (Deuteronomy xxviii., xxix., xxx.) In our little (so-called) predictions we go by two guides-experience of the past, and shrewd calculation of the future founded on that experience. But this diviner had no help from either of those guides to the future; on the contrary, the things he fore told were unprecedented, inconsistent with each other, incredible, and to human reason absurd. (1.) You shall drive out all the nations that now inhabit Canaan; shall take that land and hold it. (2.) If you keep the divine law I have just promulgated, you shall enjoy that country, and its soil shall teem with fruitfulness. (3.) If you do not keep this divine law, that land and you shall wither under every curse that can strike man, beast, and soil, and at last you shall be driven out of it. (4.) If after that you shall repent, and turn again to God and His commandments, He will pity you, and turn your captivity, and restore you, and punish your enemies, who have afflicted you with His consent, but with no good motive on their part. Now here was a string of inconsistent improbabilities. (1.) The land of Canaan was held by warlike tribes, with cavalry, chariots of war, and walled cities. The Hebrews were a half-armed infantry, encumbered with a mob of women and children. They had no strongholds, but must advance on the Canaanites from tents, and retreat to tents whenever worsted, either in skirmish or drawn battle. (2.) To conquer Canaan and its cities from tents, they must by degrees master the art of war so thoroughly that, with their proved superiority as soldiers, and the fortresses acquired by that conquest, no nation could dispossess them, still less transplant them to a distance. (3.) Suppose, as a wild hypothesis, the improbable conquest and incredible transplantation of such a people accomplished; that expatriated mass would then, as a matter of course, blend with the greater nation that received them. (4.) In two more generations the absorbed and absorbing people would be so compact, that it could not possibly be decomposed, and the Hebrew multitude return spontaneously by miracle as they had been exported by miracle. Yet every tittle of the incredible and contradictory romance Moses foretold came true. That half-armed infantry drove out the warriors of Canaan, and took their land, and obeyed God's law there, and reaped the promised blessings till Joshua and the elders who knew him and survived him were all dead: a remarkable fact, which merits profound study, and has been skimmed accordingly. But they left a few idolaters, and these leavened them, so that in time idolatry and the true worship flourished side by side. Sometimes one had the upper hand, sometimes the other. Neither was ever extinct. Now nations are not like individuals; they cannot be judged at all in the next world, and even in this world they must be judged by their majorities. This people, then, were judged in this world by their fluctuating majorities, and alternately cursed and blessed for about nine hundred years. Yet, though the double prediction of Moses was all this time recorded, and read out at times to the people, and though alternate blessings and curses were its running comment and illustration, they could never make up their minds unanimously whether to worship the God of Israel and be blessed, or false gods and be cursed. At last, when they were proved incurable in Canaan, the long-predicted chastisement fell on them. Israel, being the greater idolater, was carried away captive first. Judah soon followed, and her desecrated Temple was despoiled and destroyed. Part of the nation was slaughtered in battle or famished on the road; a few thousands of the lower sort remained at home, but without their temple, their rites, their national existence. The cream of Judah and Israel were really transported to Babylon and its neighbourhood, by a monarchy which had long practised that prodigious kind of transplantation. (See Herodotus, passim.) Even now, according to Moses, this people might repent, and if so, they would return to their own land, and their captors suffer in turn. But, humanly speaking, what chance was there that Israelites or Jews would unlearn idolatry at Babylon? Why, what had all their idolatry come of? Imitation. Under the early Judges they could not as a nation withstand the example of a few conquered idolaters, who worshipped false gods in groves for want of temples. In the height of their glory their wisest king was decoyed into idolatry by the example of his intellectual inferiors, his wives and concubines. Imitation and example set them bowing at one time to a contemptible fish-god; at another to a fiend whose worship entailed the burning of their children. Now at Babylon idolatry was example and authority into the bargain. At Babylon idolatry was glorious, sublime; had every charm and seduction to win the sensual understanding and divert it from the unseen God. If you and I and an archangel had been endowed with absolute power, but left to our own wisdom, human and angelic, I am persuaded that neither that archangel nor you nor I should have sent the Hebrews to Babylon to unlearn idolatry; so wide and impassable is the gulf between the sagacity of created beings and the genuine prescience that marks their Creator-for constant prescience implies omniscience. Babylon, bright centre of captivating idolatry, commenced an everlasting cure of Jewish idolatry, which punishments, bless ings, miracles, could never effect in the land of Canaan. I keep in reserve a comment or two on this historical curiosity. Meantime, "sweet were the uses of adversity." The captivity roused great examples of faith, revived the necessity for miraclesand so miracles came-reawakened the lyre of Judah, which had slept since the days of David, and stirred up the noblest army of prophets that ever preached in any period of Hebrew story. The Book of Daniel, the most sustained and grandest of all the prophetical and historical books, was written in Babylon itself, and partly in the Chaldaic tongue. Ere long that impregnable city, Babylon, falsified its past history, defied all human probability, and bowed to Hebrew prophecy. Behind its enormous walls, it had laughed invaders to scorn for centuries; yet it was taken, a few years after it had torn that suffering people from their land. Cyrus, descendant of the conqueror, had no sooner succeeded to the throne of Persia, to which Babylon and Palestine were now equally subject, than he issued a most remarkable edict; he alleged Divine inspiration, and by order of the Most High-as he declared-invited the Jews to go up to Jerusalem and build the Temple to Him whom he, Cyrus, proclaimed to be the true God. He restored to the Jews their sacred vessels, and assisted them with his vast re sources. The leader of this return was Zerubbabel. When the returned captives laid the foundation of the new Temple, there came a touch of nature which never, whilst books endure, shall pass from the memory of mankind. The young and the middle-aged praised God with shouts of joy; but many of the priests and Levites, who were ancient men, and had seen the first Temple in its glory, wept with a loud voice; so that such as stood apart could not discern the noise of the shouts of joy from the noise of the wailing of those aged men. Yet the leaders of the heathen nations that were settled in Judea baffled this good work by their intrigues for twenty-one years, and then at last the Temple was built and dedicated. But none of those poor old men lived to weep again, comparing the finished Temple with Solomon's in all its glory. Besides the new Temple and its services, the restored Jews had prophets, especially Haggai and Zechariah, and no doubt there was a great revival. But it is clear that in the course of years there was a decline; and fifty-seven years after the rebuilding of the Temple, Ezra went up from Babylon to purify the degenerating descendants of those pious patriots. The support Ezra had from Artaxerxes, king of Persia, and consequently of Babylon, his touching gratitude to that monarch and to Him who "is enthroned in the heart of kings," the abuses he found rampant, his tears and ardent prayers to God, his temporary success, and the great revival of the law he inaugurated, Dei gratia, are written in the last four chapters of the book that bears his name. About fourteen years after this revival, and ninety-two years after the edict of Cyrus, Singleheart stepped upon the scene. He was a Jew, born probably in Persia, and rose, in spite of his origin, by rare ability, to a high place in the service of Artaxerxes. His title was cup-bearer; but all such titles are misleading. He was a statesman and a courtier, and it was only one of his duties to taste the wine before he poured out for the king, and so secure him at his own risk against poison. This royal favourite, bred in soft Persia and lodged in those earthly paradises, the summer palace and winter palace of his monarch, had yet "Jerusalem written on his heart." It was what they call winter in Persia, but what we should call balmy spring. Singleheart, better known as Nehemiah, was leading a life of delights with the king at Shushan, when Hanani, a pious Jew, who had gone with a company to visit Jerusalem, returned from that journey. Nehemiah questioned him eagerly about their city and countrymen. Then Hanani and his fellows hung their heads, and told Nehemiah that the remnant of the captivity in that land were in great affliction and reproach; the wall of Jerusa lem, also, was broken down, and the gates burned with fire. See now how Jerusalem was beloved by her exiled sons! Born, bred, and thriving in soft, seductive Persia, the true-hearted Jew Nehemiah was struck down directly by these words. He who had a right to stand on the steps of the greatest throne in the world sat down upon the ground, and fasted and wept and prayed before the God of Heaven; and this was his confession and his prayer: "O Lord God of heaven, we have dealt very corruptly against thee, and have not kept the commandments, nor the statutes, nor the judgments which thou commandedst thy servant Moses. Remember, I beseech thee, the word that thou commandedst thy servant Moses, saying, 'If ye transgress, I will scatter you abroad among all nations; but if ye turn unto me, and keep my commandments, and do them; though you were cast out unto the uttermost part of the heaven, yet I will gather you from thence, and will bring you into the place that I have chosen to set my name there.' O Lord, I beseech thee, let thine ear be attentive to the prayers of thy servants, who desire to fear thy name and prosper, I pray thee, thy servant this day, and grant him mercy in the sight of this man." Public men are slaves as well as masters, their consciences seldom their own, their time never. Neither their pleasures nor their griefs can be long indulged. The bereaved statesman is not allowed to be quiet and to mourn; he must leave the new grave and the desolate home for his arena, sometimes must even take part in a public festivity with a bleeding heart. This very thing befell Nehemiah. Like the poor actor who must go from a home with a coffin to play his part in comedy, and laugh and fool with the rest, sad Singleheart had soon to rise from his knees, and don his gay raiment and mingle in a brilliant and jocund scene. Great Artaxerxes gave a superb banquet to his nobility: the queen was there no every-day event. You may let loose your imagination without fear; it will not go beyond the splendours of the Persian court on that occasion. Gold plate by the ton, gorgeous silk dresses of every hue, marble pillars, fountains, music, lights to turn night into day, slaves, sultanas, courtiers resplendent as stars, and all worshipping their sun Artaxerxes; smiling when he smiled, laughing when he laughed, applauding him to the echo, and thinking it little to say of this king of monarchs what Eastern adulation could say later on of a little trumpery prince, "It is the voice of a god." It was Singleheart's duty to present the cup to this earthly divinity. So he took up the golden goblet, filled it ceremoniously, and offered it with a deep obeisance, as he had often done before; but now for the first time with a sorrowful face. This was so strange a thing in him, or indeed in any courtier, that the king noticed it at once; even as he took the cup his eye dwelt on this sad face, and he said directly, "Why is your countenance sad?" Nehemiah was too much taken aback to reply. The king questioned him again. "You are not sick?" Still no reply. "This is sorrow, and nothing else." Then Nehemiah was sore afraid, and I will tell you why. His life was in danger. Even a modern autocrat like Louis XIV. expected everybody's face to shine if he did but appear, and how much more an Artaxerxes! What, wear a sorrowful face when he was presiding over joy and gaiety, and gilding them by his presence! If he had ordered this melancholy visage away to prison or death, it would have been justified by precedent, and loudly applauded on the spot by all the guests. But though Nehemiah felt his danger, yet the king's actual words were not menacing, and the courtier found courage to tell the simple truth. He salaamed down to the ground. "Let the king live for ever!" After this propitiatory formula, he replied, "Why should not my countenance be sad, when the city, the place of my fathers' sepulchres, lieth waste, and its gates are burned with fire?" These are brave words, and can be read aggressively; only that is not how Nehemiah spoke them. It was his to propitiate, not to offend, and his tones were broken-hearted and appealing, not contumacious. You must read the words so, if you would be one in a thousand, and really understand them. The king answered him accordingly. "What do you ask of me?" said he. Then Nehemiah set us all an example. He did not answer the king out of his own head, and pray for wisdom six hours afterwards, because it was bed-time. He prayed standing on the spot, and, like a skilful gunner, shot the occasion flying. Strengthened by ejaculatory prayer, the soul's best weapon, he said, "If it please the king, and if thy servant has found favour in thy sight, pray |