ch
puzzle Sunday-school scholars and theologians, we are ready to read the
meaning of the parable. God is not the God of any one race or religion. He
cares for Gentile as for Jew. He sends a prophet of Israel to bid a pagan
city repent, that He may forgive it freely. These Pagans understand the
message of the Jew. The commands of conscience are owned and honored by
the heathen, even more quickly than by the people of God; whose own
Jerusalem never thus quickly obeyed a prophet's message. The city whence
had come Israel's woes is held up as a pattern to the sacred city
herself. All men, then, are brothers, partakers of the same moral and
religious nature; children of One Father, whose voice they hear in
different tongues, speaking to their souls the same messages of holy love.

Thus read, Jonah becomes the protest of liberal Judaism against the
narrow, exclusive tendencies of popular piety in Israel. It is the writing
of some genuine Broad-Churchman of the olden time, proclaiming the high
truths of Human Brotherhood under a Divine Fatherhood, breathing that
spirit of which, long after, another Jew dared say--

"And now abideth faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is
charity."

If such be the hidden value of one of the least attractive of these
writings, we may well say, with Milton,

"I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and
dwell upon them."

4. _This literature has been very influential in the development of
progressive civilization._

When the writings of Greece and Rome had been buried in the ruins of the
Roman Empire, the literature of Israel was preserved by the pious care of
the Christian Church. The light of Athens went out, and the light of
Jerusalem alone illumined the dark ages. The only books known to the mass
of men through long centuries were these writings of the Hebrews and the
early Christians. Thought was kept alive by them, imagination was fed from
them, conscience was educated and vitalized through them. For a thousand
years there was practically but one book in Europe--the Bible. When the
long gestation of the middle ages was fulfilled, and the modern world was
born, while the educated classes read the exhumed classics of Greece, the
people still read the Bible. It gave, in the person of Luther, the impulse
that restored intellectual liberty and moral health to Europe. It has
continued the best read book of Western civilization; the on