take shelter in the mountains; thus turning the noblest battle-field of the Church of God into a scene of defeat and shame.

Such were the facts on which the Angel at Bochim founded His reproof and threatening. "I said, . . Ye shall make no league with the inhabitants of this land; ye shall throw down their altars: but ye have not obeyed My voice? why have ye done this?" Rebellious man turns aside from God's path to find indulgence and ease, but in the end he is bitterly disappointed. The Lord now threatened Israel with misery and suffering through those very Canaanites whom, for their own selfish ends, they had permitted to live: "I will not drive them out from before you; but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you." *

The narrative of the Angel's appearance at Bochim is followed by an anticipatory sketch, in which the sacred writer reviews the entire history of the period of the Judges; showing the unfaithfulness of the generations that followed Joshua, their constant backslidings from God in pursuit of the idolatry which they had sinfully permitted to live amongst them, the anger of God against them, their frequent repentances when severely chastised, God's mercy in raising up from time to time judges to deliver them, and the obstinate persistency of the people, notwithstanding, in "their own doings" and "their stubborn way." +

We are thus presented with a general view of the entire period of the Judges, in which three points stand prominently before us. The first is, the command which God had laid upon the Israelitish people, to drive out and destroy the Canaanites; the second is, their disobedience in permitting the Canaanites to remain; and the third, the punishment they had to suffer for this disobedience, the Canaanites becoming as thorns in their sides, and their gods being a snare. unto them. The whole of this is also a Divine parable or mystery, the hidden meaning of which, like that of Christ's spoken parables, is not perceived by "them that are without," but is full of instruction and blessedness to those unto whom "it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God."*

I. The commands laid upon the Hebrew people with reference to the destruction of the Canaanite idolaters were so explicit and so frequently repeated, that it was impossible to plead ignorance, or to mistake their meaning. God, who is the sole Lord and Giver of life, had devoted these nations to destruction, and appointed the Israelites executioners of His will. The Israelites were solemnly charged to enter into no league, to form no connections with them. They were to show no mercy toward the gods of the land, or its idolatrous abominations. They were to destroy and drive out all the old inhabitants, and to take possession of the country by Divine gift. And although,

* Mark iv. II.

as a general rule in war, they were expressly directed to spare the enemy's women and children, a special exception to this rule was made in regard to the cities of Canaan, of whose inhabitants they were to "save alive nothing that breatheth," but utterly to destroy the whole.*

This terrible severity was no act of mere private vengeance. It was expressly declared to be a judgment of God upon some of the vilest nations that had ever existed. So execrably wicked were they, that the land is represented as nauseating and vomiting them forth with intolerable loathing. After a catalogue of abominable offences, we find it enjoined upon the Israelites, "Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things; for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: and the land is defiled; therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants." †

This command to extirpate the Canaanites is regarded by many as one of the chief difficulties in the Old Testament. The difficulty lies not so much. in the thing itself, as in our defective views of God, or of man's relation to Him, or of the supernatural character of the revelation made to Moses. As it has ever been a favourite ground of attack with the enemies of revelation, and is felt as a difficulty by

* Deut. vi. 2–6, xii. 2, 3; Num. xxxiii. 51-53; Deut. xx. 16-18. † Lev. xviii. 24, 25.

many sincere believers in the Divine authority of the Bible, we will turn aside from the regular course of the narrative, to consider briefly the supposed injustice of this command to extirpate the Canaanites.

The objection, it will be observed, is grounded (or it has no force) upon the supposed inconsistency of this command with the Divine righteousness and equity. Yet there are other acts of God, equally terrible and equally indiscriminate in their effects, which we never presume to call in question. When, for example, the Almighty sends an earthquake or a pestilence, there is no complaint of injustice; and yet earthquake and pestilence spare neither age nor sex nor rank, but involve all in the same ruin. The fire and brimstone which consumed the cities of the plain the earthquake in which Korah and his company were swallowed up-the plague which smote the people in the time of David-did these spare the young or the aged, the mother or the infant at her breast? Do fire, or famine, or cholera, discriminate between the sexes, or spare the aged or the young? If the sword of Israel was commissioned to destroy all that breathed of the Canaanites, it certainly was not more indiscriminate than these other judgments of God. If we dare not assert or even insinuate injustice in the case of the one, neither can we rationally do so in the case of the other; nor can we deny to the Almighty the right to choose this or that method of chastising a guilty people, whether earthquake or famine, pestilence or war.

We may further remember that the annihilation of a people is so far from being a new, or an unexampled occurrence, that similar events in the overruling wisdom of God have been continually taking place ever since the dawn of history. For an example of it we need not travel beyond our own shores. Where are the original inhabitants of England? The Briton was subdued by the Saxon, the Saxon was driven out by the Norman and the Dane, each race leaving however some trace of itself in the stock and blood of the country. Yet the original race has been more completely extirpated than ever the Canaanitish races were during the Hebrew occupancy of Palestine.

Still more complete has been the disappearance of the North American Indians. The red man has been driven farther and farther towards the setting sun, till the race seems threatened with absolute extermination, and is actually extinct over an area twenty times as great as that of Palestine. It appears to be an unvarying law, that the savage recedes before the civilized man. We cannot justify all the means by which this result is accomplished, or palliate the dark and monstrous crimes which have been perpetrated in the name of civilization; yet it is an evident fact that the Ruler of nations is pleased to ordain, or to permit, that nations should be driven from their ancestral inheritance, and their places filled by others. Thus we see that what happened to the Canaanites is happening continually in the history of nations. In this view the phenomenon of the destruction of the Canaanite