y. 'The heaven over them was stayed from dew,
and the earth from her fruit.' Haggai was sent by God to interpret the
calamity, and to urge to the fulfilment of their earlier purposes.

His words apply to a supernatural condition of things with which he is
dealing, but they contain truths illustrated by it and true for ever.
For us all, as truly as for those Jews, the first thing, the primary,
all-embracing duty, is to serve God, to obey, love, and live with Him.
The same selfish and worldly excuses have force with us: 'We have
business to look after; men must live; we have no time to think about
religion; I have built a new mill that occupies my thoughts; I have
found a new plaything, and I must try it; I have married a wife, and
therefore I cannot come.' So God and His claims, Christ and His love,
are hustled into a corner to be attended to when opportunity serves, but
to be neglected in the meantime. And the same result follows, not by
miracle, but by natural necessity. Haggai puts these results in our text
with bitter, indignant amplification. His words are all the working out
of one idea-the unprofitableness, on the whole and in the long-run, of a
godless life. He illustrates this in the clauses of our text in various
forms, and my purpose now is simply to apply each of these to the
realities of a godless life.

I. It is a life of fruitless toil.

The Prophet pictures the sowing, the abundant seed thrown broadcast, the
long waiting, and then, finally, a wretched harvest--a few prematurely
yellow ears and short stalks. I remember a friend telling me that when
he was a boy he went out reaping with his father in one of our years of
great drought; and after a day's work threshed out all that he had cut,
and carried it home with him in his handkerchief. That is what Haggai
saw realised in fact, because the sowing had been without God. It is
what we may see in others and feel in ourselves. It is the very law and
curse of godless toil with its unproductive harvest. The builders set
out to build a tower whose top shall reach to heaven, and they never get
higher than a story or two. There is nothing more tragic than the
contrast between what a man actually accomplishes in his life and what
he planned when he began it. Many and many of our lives are like the
half-built houses in Pompeii, where the stones are lying that had been
all squared and polished, and have never been lifted to their place in
the unfinished walls. Much