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WHO wrote that portion of the Old Testament called Esther no man knows; nor where it was written. Perhaps Mordecai was the author, a little less than five centuries before Christ; assisted in the latter part (as is commonly believed) by the accomplished Ezra. A difficulty meets us on its threshold, we scarce know how to remove. In the whole book, with abundant opportunity, with almost a necessity for its introduction, there is no mention of the name of God. It is certainly not a little remarkable—this uniform silence maintained with regard to Jehovah, his protection of his chosen people, and the power of prayer to obtain deliverance and victory. One circumstance, could it be made sure, would remove this stone of stumbling in a great degree. The book appears on its face to have been written for Heathen, not Jewish eyes-for the Persians and other uncircumcised nations, to convince them of the good desert of the Jewish people, and the worth of the Jews as citizens, exhibited in the modesty, firmness, patriotism and fidelity of Mordecai. If this was the purpose, then how natural, that whatever peculiarities in his nation's views of God distinguished offensively the Jew should be carefully omitted by the writer-that every thing not essential to the history and likely to disgust a Gentile reader should be carefully weeded out. Still this is a difficulty: and yet the unbounded reverence felt by the Jew always for the book, and more than all else, the fact that a feast is celebrated on the fourteenth and fifteenth of the month Adar, called

Purim, when this book is read in the synagogue, and at the name of Haman the whole congregation stamp with their feet and cry “Let his memory perish," establish the record as substantially true; giving us an evidence in its favour, few books, sacred or profane, can claim. And what now is the book? It is the moral of ambition-the judgement scene of envy and revenge-the crown of lowly virtue. It is a true and touching picture of life. Not merely of life in ancient times and in the marble courts of kings; but of life as it passes with us, to-day, in the undistinguished homes of citizen-sovereigns.

The story is simplicity itself. A besotted Persian king, possibly Xerxes after his defeat in Greece, one certainly abandoned to indulgence, capricious and weak as he was, orders his queen to appear in the midst of a drunken revel. To have done so would have been proving her own shameless abandonment; intemperance and wantonness being almost enjoined at public feasts in that day, for a female to appear at them would have seemed a monstrous excess of indeli cacy. The order is not obeyed. The native dignity of Vashti is mightier than that mandate before which millions trembled. Instead of honouring her virtue, her immovable modesty and pride of character, in the hours of returning soberness, the incensed despot exiles her from his society and crown forever.

Esther, a Jewish maiden, is chosen for her exceeding beauty from all the maidens of the land, her adopted father remaining in some humble office at the palace gate. But no situation is so humble as to escape the bloodshot eye of revenge, none so mean but something in it will awaken envy in the lawless mind. Some reverence is demanded of the old Jew at the gate by the king's favourite and vizier, a reverence which he that withheld it felt to be only due to the sovereign himself. But "though they spake daily unto him, Mordecai hearkened not." At once the favourite is stung to the quick; all his greatness, power, honour, favour, opulence, availed him nothing. This one little spot covered the whole heavens. He saw nothing else, heard nothing else, dreamed of nothing else, but that "Mordecai bowed not." All his pride changed to shame, the flatteries of his friends seemed now bitter taunts, his luxurious banquet became loathsome. Such is the power of envy! such at our firesides as in the palaces of king's favourites, beneath the naked vault of heaven and the canopied purple and gold.

In that country kings appearing scarcely at all before the multitude, Haman was the observed of all observers. His word was law, his smile life. When he went forth in the morning, all men hastened to greet the image of the great king; as he rode along, crowds kneeled. to him as to a god. His pride knew no bounds, his magnificence had no rival. The kingly power was his in all but name. He reaped its honours, feasted on its viands, bathed himself in the adulation offered by a servile people. He had all but the peril and the fear of kingship. Men would use his name as a proverb of happiness. Alas! there is a worm in the very bud. Mordecai has poisoned his cup. He goes home to his palace sick with hate of the Jewish gate-keeper. A cloud veils his brow. His very breath and motion is all sullenness-the brooding of a storm.

His friends and wife gather around. Anxiously they ask what severe calamity has befallen him-what injury which they might resent what enemy had he discovered whom they could remove? And what meanness must they have secretly marked in his reply. A man whose favour he thought not worth seeking, a Jew at the gate, had not offered homage among the crowd. This was all. And though the victim of envy had procured a decree for the massacre of the whole Jewish nation, when his enemy would surely fall amidst the death-groan of his kindred, the ruin of his nation, of all he loved, all God had chosen-though the king had granted this, it was not enough. More signal vengeance his raging passion craved-vengeance upon the person of his enemy. His friends are base enough to applaud his resolution-they sympathise wholly with him. They advise that a gallows of enormous height be erected before Haman's door; then, from his own banquet-room could the emir catch the last groan and see the last struggle of his unsuspecting enemy. Then should soft music sound its mockery of the helpless death-cry! Little did he imagine that that passion should dig its own grave, that the very purpose of crime should work out terrible vengeance upon him.

But a sudden change comes over the scene. His royal master calls him to the council chamber, and asks him how the worthiest subject in the empire could be honoured. Haman, supposing it is for himself, exhausts his imagination in accumulating circumstances of grandeur. The royal robes and crown (which it had been considered death for any but the king to wear), the king's favourite horse, the highest prince proclaiming through the streets his honour,—all these

the giddy ambition of the spoiled favourite advises for "the man whom the king delighteth to honour." There is not in all history a more affecting instance of mortified vanity than this. All the proud state imagination appropriated to himself he is commanded to bestow upon his hated rival, and he, the king's favourite, must serve as a common herald before him. No wonder that he hasted to his house mourning, with his head covered. The reward Mordecai in his modesty had not claimed for the signal service of saving the king's life was now at last bestowed upon him, and Haman was the instrument of his just honor! Haman feels his proud estate giving way beneath him. His friends forebode evil. And well they might. For the fall of detected vice is seldom partial. The terrible revenge he had purposed in the extinction of the Jewish people, then in honourable captivity, becomes the reason for Esther's appeal for her own life and the life of her nation. An appeal made with such well applied art, advocated by such personal charms, the effeminate despot could not refuse. And when Esther declares at the second banquet it is her own life she would save from Haman's murderous hate, he bursts upon the minion with such impetuous wrath, that its unexpected victim casts himself upon the foot of Esther's couch, supplicating mercy. The very act hastens his doom-enkindling the ready jealousy of Ahasuerus-dooming the intended murderer to that very tree of all agonized death he had prepared for Mordecai, to perish miserably in the very eyes of his wife and children.

Who can fail to remark what a curse revenge ever proves to itself. How surely he who digs a pit for his neighbour falls therein himself— at least an abyss of restless, feverish passion within his own heart. Still might the favourite have ruled him who ruled half the East. Still might his thirst for indulgence been quenched from the overflowing cup of royal favour. Still might his pride have made itself drunk on the incense of a fawning city, though Mordecai did sit with head unbent at the king's gate. True elevation of mind would have taught him to overlook this slight deduction from the sum of his glory. True generosity would have made him forgive the Jew, out of regard to his manly independence of character or the inherited dignity from which it came. But headlong passion hurled him down its own dread precipice. Satisfaction for a fancied wrong drove him on as if mad, until his thirst for revenge revenged itself upon him. "As a rolling stone forced up hill by severe effort returns upon a man with im

petuous violence, crushing those very bones whose sinews gave it motion."

Such is human life, here and every where. And the same tale which so vividly portrays that truth of all experience-the horrors of revenge, with equal power delineates the baseness and bitterness of envy, and the joy and crown of modesty, independent towards man, serene even amidst storms in its reliance upon God.

F. W. H.

THOUGHTS ON INTERPRETATION.

In reading that singular mixture of wise and simple sayings, which appeared in London a year or two ago under the title of GUESSES AT TRUTH, By Two Brothers, we were both pleased and surprised by the following passage, which we ask leave to give at length, that we may say what we think of it.

"In reading the Apostolical Epistles, we should bear in mind that they are not scientific treatises, armed at all points against carpers and misconceivers, but occasional letters, addresed to disciples who, as the writer knew, were both able and inclined to make due allowance for the latitude of epistolary expression.

"But is not this what the Socinians contend for? If it were, I should have nothing to say against them. What I object to in them is, their making not due allowances, but undue; allowances discountenanced by the plainest passages as well as the uniform tenor of the sacred writings, by the whole analogy, and so far as we dare judge of them, the prompting principles of revelation.

"But how shall we discern the due from the undue? As we discern every thing else; by the honest use of a cultivated understanding.-If we have not banished the Holy Spirit by slights and excesses, if we have fed his lamp in our hearts with prayer, if we have improved and strengthened our faculties by education and exercise, and then sit down to study the Bible with inquiring and teachable minds, we need not doubt of discovering its meaning; not indeed purely; for where find an intellect so colourless as never to tinge the light that falls upon it? not wholly; for how fathom the ocean of God's word? but with such accuracy, and in such degree, as shall suffice for the uses of our spiritual life. If we have neglected this previous discipline, if we take up the book with stupid or ignorant, lazy or negligent, arro

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