of has prepared swallows up the prophet.1 In the belly of the fish he proceeds to compose a poem, which, when we study it, we find is made up reminiscences of an ancient psalm.2 Then Jehovah speaks to the great fish, and the great fish hears and obeys and vomits the prophet out upon the dry land. One would have thought that this would have been enough to take the narrowness out of the prophet, but it did not. It is difficult to get narrowness out of a narrow ecclesiastic. Jehovah again directs him to go to Nineveh, and he goes, though with unmistakable reluctance. So great is the city that it takes three days to walk from one gate to the other through the centre. He enters the city and begins his mission. He has gone but one day's journey, that is, one-third way through the city, when the whole people of the city accept the message, proclaim a fast, put on sackcloth from the greatest even to the least of them, and are commanded by the king to turn every one from his evil way in hope that God will repent and turn from the fierceness of his anger. So great a result from a single day's preaching was never heard of before or since in the history of the race. What is very curious, the history of Israel gives no record of any 1 There is no reason to call it a whale; it is not called whale either in the Old or the New Testament; the word in the New Testament rendered whale simply means great fish. According to the narrative, Jehovah prepares a special fish to swallow him, and the fish does what it has been made to do. 2 Psalm lxxxviii. 5–8. such revival among the Ninevites, and the history of Nineveh contains no suggestion of it. God accepts the penitence of the city, repents him of the evil that he had said that he would do, and does it not, and the prophet is rejoiced? No! He is very angry; he expostulates. "Was not this," he says to Jehovah, "my saying when I was in my own country? That was the reason I fled beforehand into Tarshish, because I knew that thou art a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger and of great kindness, and repentest thou of the evil." I knew that is, this is the effect of his expostulation that if I came here and preached, God would not do what I told them He would do, and I should be left in the position of a false prophet. So he goes out from the city, builds him a little down there to see what will happen. a gourd that serves him as a shield from the sun, and Jonah is glad because of the gourd. Then God prepares a worm to smite the gourd, and it withers, and God prepares a vehement east wind and a hot sun to beat upon the head of Jonah, and in his misery he wishes for death. Then God expostulates: "Dost thou well to be angry for the gourd?" and the sulky prophet replies, "I do well to be angry." Jehovah patiently continues his expostulations: "Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored, and should not I have pity on Nineveh, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between hut, and sits God prepares 1 Jonah iv. 2. their left hand and their right hand, and also much cattle?" 1 But he gets no answer. And so the story ends Jonah left sulky and cross like a petulant child in the hot sun outside the walls of Nineveh, angry because God is merciful. The meaning of the story seems to me to be writ in large and luminous characters: "There is a wideness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea. When, from that splendid truth, brought out more clearly in the story of Jonah than in any other book of the Old Testament, we turn aside to discuss the question whether a whale has a throat big enough for a man to pass through, we are abandoning the great lesson which God meant to teach through our imagination to debate a physiological fact of absolutely no consequence. 1 Jonah iv. 9-11. CHAPTER IX A DRAMA OF LOVE1 LITERATURE is an interpretation of life. The interpreter may expound in a philosophical manner ... 1 There are three conceptions of the Song of Songs; the first regards it as an allegory of the spiritual union between the soul and God or between Christ and his Church. This mystical view finds, perhaps, its best interpreter in Mme. Guyon. One or two quotations from her will serve to illustrate the spirit of this method of interpretation: "Chapter i. verse 1, 'Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.' This kiss, which the soul desires of its God, is essential union, or a real, permanent, and lasting possession of its divine object. It is the spiritual marriage." "Verse 4, 'I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.' . What is this thy blackness, O thou incomparable maiden? (we say to her) tell us, we pray thee. I am black, she says, because I perceive by the light of my divine Sun, hosts of defects, of which I was never aware until now; I am black, because I am not yet cleansed from self.... Verse 7, 'I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love till she please.' The soul is in a mystic slumber in this embrace of betrothal, in which she enjoys a sacred rest she had never before experienced. . . . The daughters of Jerusalem are loving and meddlesome souls, who are anxious to wake her, though under the most specious pretexts; but she is so soundly asleep that she cannot be aroused. . . . Verse 9, 'King Solomon made himself a chariot of the wood of Lebanon.' The Son of God, the King of Glory, made himself a chariot of his Humanity, to which he became united in the Incarnation, intending to be seated upon it to all eternity, and to make of it a triumphal car, upon which he will the laws of life, illustrating them more or less by pictures produced by his imagination or by inci ride with pomp and splendor in the sight of all his creatures." The Song of Songs of Solomon, with Explanations and Reflections having Reference to the Interior Life, by Madame Guyon, pp. 23, 33, 51, 66.The second view regards the book as a collection of love songs exchanged between two lovers, Solomon and the Shulamite maiden; or even a collection of entirely independent songs, the only unity being their common theme, Love. It has even been suggested that the poem was written to celebrate the nuptials between Solomon and the daughter of Pharaoh. This, which is the traditional view, is adopted by Hengstenberg, Delitzsch, Keil, Kingsbury, and Professor Moulton. The English reader will most readily find it and the arguments in support of it in The Bible Commentary, and in the Modern Reader's Bible. In the latter this view is thus stated by Professor Moulton: "King Solomon with a courtly retinue, visiting the royal vineyards upon Mount Lebanon, comes by surprise upon the fair Shulamite. She flies from them. Solomon visits her in the disguise of a shepherd, and so wins her love. He then comes in all his royal state, and calls upon her to leave Lebanon and become his queen. They are in the act of being wedded in the royal palace when the poem opens. This, which is the story as a whole, is brought out for us in seven idyls, each independent, all founded on the one story, but making their reference to different parts of it as these occur to the minds of the speakers, without the limitation to order of succession that would be implied in dramatic presentation." Modern Reader's Bible, Biblical Idyls, Intro. p. xi.—The third view, the one adopted in this chapter, regards the book as a drama in which there are three principal characters: Solomon, the Shulamite maiden, and her shepherd lover. This view is thus summarized by Dr. Driver: "A beautiful Shulamite maiden, surprised by the king and his train on a royal progress in the north (vi. 11, 12), has been brought to the palace at Jerusalem (i. 4, etc.), where the king hopes to win her affections, and to induce her to exchange her rustic home for the honor and enjoyments which a court life could afford. She has, however, already pledged her heart to a young shepherd, and the admiration and blandishments which |