rnace' Their helplessness and desperate condition are
pathetically suggested by that picture, which might well be supposed to
be the last of them that mortal eyes would see. Down into the glowing
mass, like chips of wood into Vesuvius, they sank. The king sitting
watching, to glut his fury by the sight of their end, had some way of
looking into the core of the flames.

The story shifts its point of view with very picturesque abruptness
after verse 23. The vaunting king shall tell what he saw, and thereby
convict himself of insolent folly in challenging 'any god' to deliver
out of his hand. He alone seems to have seen the sight, which he tells
to his courtiers. The bonds were gone, and the men walking free in the
fire, as if it had been their element. Three went in bound, four walk
there at large; and the fourth is 'like a son of the gods,' by which
expression Nebuchadnezzar can have meant nothing more than he had
learned from his religion; namely, that the gods had offspring of
superhuman dignity. He calls the same person an angel in Daniel iii. 28.
He speaks there as the three would have spoken, and here as Babylonian
mythology spoke.

But the great lesson to be gathered from this miracle of deliverance is
simply that men who sacrifice themselves for God find in the sacrifice
abundant blessing. They may, or may not, be delivered from the external
danger. Peter was brought out of prison the night before his intended
martyrdom; James, the brother of John, was slain with the sword, but God
was equally near to both, and both were equally delivered from 'Herod
and from all the expectation of the people of the Jews.' The disposal of
the outward event is in His hands, and is a comparatively small matter.
But no furnace into which a man goes because he will be true to God, and
will not yield up his conscience, is a tenth part so hot as it seems,
and it will do no real harm. The fire burns bonds, but not Christ's
servants, consuming many things that entangled, and setting them free.
'I will walk at liberty: for I seek Thy precepts'--even if we have to
walk in the furnace. No trials faced in obedience to God will be borne
alone. 'When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; ...
when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned.'

The form which Nebuchadnezzar saw amid the flame, as invested with more
than human majesty, may have been but one of the ministering spirits
sent forth to minister to the mart