Hosea is represented as having exhausted his expostulations upon his faithless wife. He has tried every arrow in love’s quiver, but in vain; so now he sends his children, worse than motherless, to plead with their mother, before she brings upon them all irretrievable retribution.

Almost insensibly our mind passes from the pleadings of the human love to the divine Bridegroom. Often he has to erect thornhedges about us—not that he takes pleasure in thwarting us, but that we may be diverted

from ruin. There was no better method of turning Israel from her idols than by withholding that material prosperity which she thought they gave. Has not this been our experience also? Our mirth has ceased and our prosperity has vanished. We have sat amid the wrecks of a happy past. It is not that God has ceased to care for us, but that he longs to wean us back to himself. Have we reached the point of saying, “It was better with me then than now”? Then let us be of good cheer! The dawn is already on the hills, and God’s coming to us, in restoring grace, is like the breaking glory of the morning ! 3. “A Door of Hope.”

Hosea 2:14—38:5. The valley of Achor was a long wild pass up through the hills. The prophet says that a door of hope would open there, like the Mont Cenis tunnel which leads from the precipices and torrents on the northern slopes of the Alps to the sunny plains of Italy. That door opens hard by the heap of stones beneath which that troubler of Israel, Achan, was laid. We must put away our Achans before we can see doors of hope swing wide before us.

The prophet was bidden to make one further overture to his truant wife. She had been faithless, but the old love burnt in her husband’s soul, and he was prepared to buy her back to himself at half the price of a female slave, Exod. 21: 32. His only stipulation was that she should abide with him for many days. This was to be a time of testing, with the assurance that, if she were penitent and faithful, she would be perfectly restored.

What a wonderful verse is 3! We are purchased to God by the death of his Son. He only asks us to be for himself and he promises to be for us. “The best of all,” cried the dying Wesley, “is that God is for us!” Shall we not close with the offer and give ourselves to him?

Hosea 4: 1-10. This chapter contains a terrible indictment against the whole kingdom. There was neither

truth nor mercy in the land, but swearing, lying, and adultery. Apart from the restraints of religion, such would be the condition of human society today. Even atheists have been known to remove from miningcamps, where there was no semblance of religion, to places within the sound of the church-bell. Notice in v. 3 how man’s sin seems to affect even the animals. “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth .. . waiting for our adoption” as the recognized sons of God, Rom. 8: 22, 23.

Rightly enough, the prophet remonstrates with the priests. They were drunken and sensual; they rejected the knowledge and rule of God; they promoted outward ritual in order to fatten on the offerings of the people; and as it was with them, so it became with the deluded worshipers. What a solemn lesson is contained in the proverb which originated in this passage, Like people, like priest! It is not what we teach, but what we are, that really affects men. The colorless rays of the sun, lying outside the prismatic band of color, give health.

Hosea 4:11-19. The prophet does not mince his words in describing the morals of his time. We are reminded of Bunyan’s words: “My original and inward pollution was my plague. It was always putting itself forth in me, and I was more loathsome in my own eyes than a toad, and I thought I was in God’s eyes also. Corruption bubbled up in my heart as naturally as water in a fountain, and I thought that every one had a better heart than I. Of course in Christ “we have redemption through his blood,” and that means more than forgiveness; it implies the deliverance of the soul from the love and power of evil. But if the soul of man refuses this, obstinately and persistently, a time arrives when God gives him up to reap as he has sown.

The greatest gift we can make to our generation is that of unblemished character. Sir Leslie Stephen, the brilliant agnostic, in his mature life, went back to the

grave of an undergraduate, who had been his pupil and had died in early life without having distinguished himself in his studies or athletics, but had lived the Christian life with transparent simplicity and lovableness.