he scale
with his silver. There are much neater ways of doing the same thing now;
and no doubt some very estimable gentlemen in high repute as Christians,
who give respectability to any church or denomination, could have taught
these early practitioners a lesson or two.

They were as cruel as they were greedy. They bought their brethren as
slaves, and if a poor man had run into their debt for even a pair of
shoes, they would sell him up in a very literal sense. Avarice,
unbridled by the fear of God, leads by a short cut to harshness and
disregard of the claims of others. There are more ways of buying the
needy for a pair of shoes than these people practised.

The last touch in the picture is meanness, which turned everything into
money. Even what fell through the sieve when wheat was winnowed, which
ought to have been given to anybody, was carefully scraped up, and,
dirty as it was, sold. Is not 'nothing for nothing' an approved maxim
to-day? Are not people held up as shining lights of commerce, who have
the faculty of turning everything into saleable articles? Some serious
reflections ought to be driven home to us who live in great commercial
communities, and are in manifold ways tempted to 'learn their ways, and
so get a snare unto our souls,' by this gibbeting of tempers and
customs, very common among ourselves, as the very head and front of the
sin of Israel, which determined its ripeness for destruction.

The catalogue of sins is left incomplete (compare with chapter ii.), as
if holy indignation turned for relief to the thought of the certain
judgment. That certainly is strongly affirmed by the representation of
the oath of Jehovah. 'He can swear by no other,' therefore He 'swears by
Himself'; and the 'excellency of Jacob' cannot with propriety mean
anything else than Him who is, or ought to be, the sole ground of
confidence and occasion of 'boasting' to the nation (Hos. v. 5). He
gives His own being as the guarantee that judgment shall fall. As surely
as God is God, injustice and avarice will ruin a nation. We talk now
about necessary consequences and natural laws rendering penalties
inevitable. The Bible suggests a deeper foundation for their certain
incidence--even the very nature of God Himself. As long as He is what He
is, covetousness and its child, harshness to the needy, will be sin
against Him, and be avenged sooner or later. God has a long and a wide
memory, and the sins which He 'remembers' are those w