r for place may be measured by the desire of each for that which the
other would engross. The politician is not jealous of the millionaire,
nor the capitalist of the prime minister.

Now, if God is jealous when the enemies of our soul would steal away our
loyalty, it surely follows that we shall not be left to contend with
those enemies alone: He values us; He is upon our side; He will help us
to overcome them.

And now we begin to see why this attribute is connected with the second
commandment and not the first. The apostate who betakes himself to
another god is almost beyond the reach of this tender and intimate
emotion: he is still loved, for God loves all men; but yet perhaps the
chord is unstrung which trembles responsive to this plaintive note.

When a man who confesses God begins to weary of spiritual intercourse
with the Lord of spirits, when he can no longer worship One whose actual
presence is realised because His voice is heard within, when the
likeness of man or brute, or brightness of morning, or marvel of life or
its reproductiveness, contents him as a representation of God the
invisible, then his heart is beginning to go after the creature, to
content itself with artistic loveliness or majesty, to let go the grasp
as upon a living hand, by which alone the soul may be sustained when it
stumbles, or guided when it would err.

To those who are within His covenant--to us, therefore, as to His
ancient Israel--He says, "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." Because
I am "thy God."

The assertion of a Divine jealousy is but one difficulty of this
remarkable verse. The Lord goes on to describe Himself as "visiting the
iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate Me, and showing mercy unto thousands of
them that love Me and keep My commandments." And is this reasonable? To
punish the child, to be avenged upon the children's children, for sins
which are not their own? We know how often the sceptic has made gain out
of this representation--which is but his own unauthorised gloss, since
in reality God has said nothing about punishing the righteous with the
wicked. It is not true that all sad and disastrous consequences are
penal; many are disciplinary, and even to the people of God some are
surgical, cutting away what would lead to disease and death. Are no
evil consequences probable, if men brought up amid scenes dishonouring
to God were treated exactly like t