rainage.' By all means. These things, too, are God's commandments,
and we have no right to interpret the consequences of infraction of
physical laws as being meant to punish nations for their breach of moral
and religious ones. If we were prophets, we might, but not else. But
still, is God so poor that He can have but one purpose in a providence?
Every sorrow, of whatever sort, is meant to produce all the good effects
which it naturally tends to produce; and since every experience of pain
and loss and grief naturally tends to wean us from earth, and to drive
us to find in God what earth can never yield, all our sorrows are His
messengers to draw us back to Him. Amos' lesson as to the purpose of
trials is not antiquated.

But he has still another to teach us; namely, the awful power which we
have of resisting God's efforts to draw us back. 'Our wills are ours, we
know not how,' but alas! it is too often not 'to make them Thine.' This
is the true tragedy of the world that God calls, and we do refuse, even
as it is the deepest mystery of sinful manhood that God calls and we can
refuse. What infinite pathos and grieved love, thrown back upon itself,
is in that refrain, 'Ye have not returned unto Me!' How its recurrence
speaks of the long-suffering which multiplied means as others failed, and
of the divine charity, which 'suffered long, was not soon angry, and
hoped all things!' How vividly it gives the impression of the obstinacy
that to all effort opposed insensibility, and clung the more closely and
insanely to the idolatry which was its crime and its ruin! The very same
temper is deep in us all. Israel holds up the mirror in which we may see
ourselves. If blows do not break iron, they harden it. A wasted
sorrow--that is, a sorrow which does not drive us to God--leaves us less
impressible than it found us.

III. Again the mood changes, and the issue of protracted resistance is
prophesied (vs. 12, 13). 'Therefore' sums up the instances of refusal
to be warned, and presents them as the cause of the coming evil. The
higher the dam is piled, the deeper the water that is gathered behind
it, and the surer and more destructive the flood when it bursts.
Long-delayed judgments are severe in proportion as they are slow. Note
the awful vagueness of threatening in that emphatic 'thus,' as if the
Prophet had the event before his eyes. There is no need to specify, for
there can be but one result from such obstinacy. The 'terror of the