the office having died, no successors were appointed, and thus the Presbyterian polity, in all its beautiful simplicity, and practical efficiency, was at length fully recognised. It became the Established Ecclesiastical System of the country, and though once and again has it been shaken to its foundations, it still survives, the glory and the blessing of the Scottish people. SCRIPTURAL RESEARCHES. No. VII. THE WISE MEN OF THE EAST. therefore the most likely persons to introduce the knowledge of the art into Europe; and their own fraternity was the most likely body to which the secret would be intrusted: besides, it is absolutely certain that gunpowder was known in China from the earliest ages, in all its applications, except for the destruction of human life; enlightened Europeans had the merit of this application. Then, the mariner's compass, the same as that in use at the present day, and a very handsome one it is, was in universal use among the Chinese when they were first visited by Europeans; and printing and paper, which have produced such miracles in modern BY THE REV. JAMES ESDAILĖ, Europe, were known and used in China, perhaps a thousand years before it had been visited by merchants Minister of the East Church, Perth. or pilgrims from the West. Nay, gas, which in its apTHE East being the cradle of the human race, might plication as a means of illumination, is only of yesalso be expected to be the nursery of knowledge. We terday in Europe, has been employed by the Chinese, are accustomed to look to Greece and Rome, as the in the interior provinces, for this purpose, as well as sources of the knowledge and literature which have for heating their houses, and cooking their victuals, been so extensively cultivated in modern Europe. We, from time immemorial. The fact is mentioned, and indeed, received the impulse from the Romans, and de- the singular process described, by some of the early rived from the writings of their eminent authors many Romish missionaries, and their account has been given of the materials of knowledge: but it is notorious, that in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal about two years the Romans were indebted to the Greeks for all their ago, and more recently in "The Edinburgh Cabinet improvements in elegant and useful knowledge. Was Library," (Historical and Descriptive Account of China.) Greece, then, the fountain from which emanated that The wonder will not be diminished, when the reader stream of knowledge which has been gradually diffus- is told, that the gas is not prepared in retorts, and by ing itself over Europe? No; the Greeks themselves destructive distillation, as with us; but extracted, ready were ungrateful pilferers and plunderers, carefully con-made, from the laboratory of nature. cealing the sources from which they derived their knowledge, and assuming to themselves the merit of having discovered what they had only borrowed or stolen: yet, notwithstanding their vanity and self-conceit, they were compelled to acknowledge their obligations to the East, for the very first elements of knowledge; for they confess that they owe the letters of their alphabet to Cadmus the Phoenician. That such a person ever lived may be doubted; at least, it would be more rational to deny his existence altogether, than to believe one-half of what is said of him. The origin of the fable concerning him is probably this: Kadm, or Kedem, from which Cadmus may be easily formed, signifies the East; and the Greeks, knowing that they had come from that quarter, but not thinking it any honour to be derived from the Phoenicians, chose to acknowledge their obligation to them only for the letters of their alphabet. To this extent they spoke the truth; and the whole truth, stript of poetic fables, is told by Thucydides, their most veracious historian, who informs us that the original settlers in the islands, and on the mainland of Greece, were pirates and robbers; trained, we have no doubt, to their profession, in the mercantile navies of Tyre and Sidon. They were, in fact, Kadmonites in their origin, their literature, and their institutions. But the East has always been famed for knowledge; and there is the highest probability that modern Europe owes to it many of those inventions which have been assigned to modern discoverers, but which are now known to have existed, from the remotest antiquity, in the distant East. I need only specify paper, printing, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder; the most important discoveries, or inventions, that ever have been presented to the world, and they are all said to have been discovered during the dark ages of Europe. If that is the case, we may safely affirm, that the dark ages have given light to the world: but there can be little doubt that these arts and inventions had a very different origin. It is said that gunpowder, for instance, was invented by a German monk; and there can be no doubt that its composition was known to an English friar, viz., Roger Bacon. It may seem strange, that such an invention should have originated in such a quarter; but the wonder will vanish, if we consider that wandering monks and missionary friars had extended their travels into the remotest East, and were From these, and many similar facts, it is evident, that the knowledge of the useful arts is of high antiquity in the East. But it is not my business to follow out this inquiry; only, it may be remarked, that the knowledge conducive to the comforts of animal life has no tendency to smooth the path to religious wisdom; and if our useful knowledge societies have no other object in view than the temporal comforts of man, and think this sufficient for his happiness, they probably could not do better than send a deputation of their number to the celestial empire, to take lessons from its subjects in regard to the arts and manipulations necessary for animal comfort; and that jealous people, so suspicious of the interference of foreigners, might, probably, admit them, when they found that they came to learn, and not to teach. But my object, chiefly, is to investigate the religious knowledge of the East, and to trace the origin of those expectations which prevailed over all those countries eastward of, and bordering on, Judea, of some extraordinary person who was to appear, at a particular time, as King of the Jews; or, as the Roman writers express it, perhaps more properly, as Sovereign of the world. That the expectation among the Jews of the promised Messiah was constant and uniform, is what might naturally have been expected; it was the only thing they had to cheer their hopes in the prostrated state of their temporal power; and national vanity and ambition were as powerful motives as their faith, to foster a hope so pleasing, and so gratifying to their patriotic feelings. And there can be no doubt that the conterminous nations of the East were sensible of the high religious privileges which had been enjoyed by the Jewish nation, and would have been glad to have learned from them, had not the Jews, in their madness, forsaken the Lord, who had wrought such great things for them, and gone over to the idolatrous worship of their neighbours. We might expect to find in the East many frag ments of true religion, even among those nations which were not connected with the family of Abraham. All the post-diluvian nations were descended from Noah, who was a preacher of righteousness; and we can scarcely suppose that all his descendants should instantly forget the doctrines which he taught. Accordingly, we find among the inland tribes, who followed the pastoral life, much more simplicity of manners, and purity of creed, than among those who inhabited the coast, and whose | minds were influenced by the diversified manners and creeds of the different people with whom they came in contact. Thus, the Sidonians and Egyptians, if not the absolute inventors of idolatry, were, at least, the most effectual missionaries of its corruptions; and, with the commerce which ministers to the comforts and luxuries of life, they imported the worship of all the false deities of the nations with which they trafficked. But among the pastoral tribes which inhabited the interior, many doctrines of the primitive religion continued to maintain their ground; and, though the family of Abraham was selected for a particular purpose, yet it was not the only one which entertained true notions of God. Job, though not of the race of Abraham, proclaims, nevertheless, in the most emphatic terms, the divine sovereignty, and urges submission to the divine will; though he evidently seems to think that he was selected as a victim, not for his demerits, or to promote his improvement, but as an example of the inscrutable purposes of the divine will, which no man should dare to question. His friends, also, were not less zealous in inculcating submission to the appointments of heaven; but they insisted, that visitations of judgment were always sent as punishments of sin, and that Job suffered on account of some great but secret wickedness: their argument was, "Who ever perished being innocent, or where were the righteous cut off?' In fact, among the pastoral tribes of Arabia and Syria, Theosophy, or the study of the nature and decrees of God, was the only kind of knowledge that was cultivated: cut off from general intercourse, and subject to great and sudden vicissitudes, they meditated on the power and awful sovereignty of God, and were, in the time of Job, as decided predestinarians as their descendants are at the present day. Mahomet did not invent, but adopt the doctrine of predestination, which had been that of his countrymen from the earliest periods of their history. There does not seem, then, to be any thing extraordinary in the wise men, or Magi, for that is their proper appellation, having heard of one who was to be born King of the Jews: they had it not by revelation, but by tradition; and the Roman historians tell us, that such traditions prevailed over all the East. The only thing wonderful was, the miraculous light which guided them on their way. The promise of the Messiah is nearly as old as the human race, and descended in the line of Seth to Noah, who undoubtedly taught it to his children, by whom the world was peopled after the flood. Its diffusion, therefore, was at first as extensive as the human race, and Job, who dwelt on the borders of Arabia, and who must have lived about the time of Abraham, received it in its pure, spiritual meaning, as announcing deliverance from the power of sin and of death. "I know," says he, "that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God." His views were free from all the absurd notions entertained by the Jews, in after times, when they were subjected to bondage and oppression on account of their sins, and eagerly interpreted the promise as applying to a temporal deliverance. The promise, then, was general, before the call of Abraham, and its limitation to his family; and we need not be surprised, if we should find it diffused over all the nations of the East. But after Abraham was selected, and the promise confined to his line, and laws and ordinances appointed to "shut up" the Jews to the faith of Christ, the general convictions which prevailed originally among the conterminous states became raore obscure and indistinct; and the descendants of Ishmael, and Esau, rivals of the house of Israel, though of the same kindred, were content to borrow from the Jews, the prophetic intimations given to them respecting the Messiah. The Jews, though despised by the Greeks and Romans on account of their inferiority in literature and the arts, were exceedingly formidable to their neighbours in the early periods of their history, who were compelled to ascribe their success to the power of their God, who fought along with them; and nothing can be more terrible than the havoc which they wrought on those who opposed them. The language of the Canaanites, when the Israelites approached Jordan, was: "We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt, and what ye did to the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side of Jordan, whom ye utterly destroyed; for the Lord your God, he is King above, and in the earth beneath.”—(Josh, ii. 10, 11.) They were formidable for their power, which, we see, even the heathen ascribed to their God; and even their enemies could not but wish to be acquainted with their religion, which they considered as the cause of all their victories. We can have no doubt, then, that the Eastern nations were well acquainted with the history, and, as far as possible, with the religion of the Jews: and we have reason to believe, that the wise men, or Magi, were guided by some ancient, though unrecorded, prophecies, when they regarded the unusual star, or supernatural light, as an indication that the expected King of the Jews had at last appeared. And we need not be surprised, that many prophecies should have become current on this subject, and be handed down by tradition, which are not recorded in the divine oracles. We know, that many prophets wrote books which have been entirely lost: thus we read of the books of Nathan and Ahijah the prophets, and the book of Iddo the seer, of which not a vestige has come down to our times. 2 Chron. ix. 29. Schools or colleges for the instruction of prophets were of high antiquity in Israel; and the prophets formed a very numerous body, (1 Sam. xix. 20;) great numbers were dispersed among the revolted tribes which constituted the kingdom of Israel, and had Samaria for their capital; and though many of them were men of bad character, yet some of the most eminent of the prophets were dispersed over the kingdom of Israel, who restrained, by their admonitions and reproofs, the headlong propensity to idolatry and profli gacy, which characterised the revolted tribes, from the period of their defection from Rehoboam the son of Solomon. Elijah and Elisha laboured among that wicked people, at the hazard of their lives. Jezebel, the very type of all that is infamous in woman, had determined to cut off all the prophets of the Lord; but Obadiah, the overseer of Ahab's house, took a hundred of the prophets, and hid them in caves, feeding them with bread and water. (1 Kings xviii. 4.) : The office of these prophets was not confined to the predicting of future events; they were also employed in conducting the public service of God, and in instructing the people in the religious truths which God had been pleased to impart and as all the prophets from Samuel downwards spoke of the times of the Messiah, (Acts iii. 24,) we need not be surprised at the general expectation of his appearance, which prevailed throughout the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and all the neighbouring states: and as these states were less subject to the vicissitudes of conquest and revolution, we may easily conceive that the notices which they had received would remain with them free from the false glosses given to them by the national prejudices of the Jews. The Samaritans, we know, were living in as confident expectation of the coming of the Messiah as the Jews themselves. (John iv. 25.) From these observations, I think it will appear obvious, that the wise men of the East had ample opportunities of being acquainted with the Jewish prophecies respecting the Messiah; and I have surmised that they might have derived, from some unrecorded prophecy, the knowledge that his advent would be announced by a supernatural light, or an extraordinary star. We must acquiesce in such a supposition as this, or admit that the Magi had their information on the subject from immediate revelation; or, perhaps, they had it from a prophecy of their own country, preserved among them only by tradition, though recorded in the canonical Scriptures, with which we have no reason to suppose them to have been acquainted. I allude to the prophecy of Balaam, when he was sent for by Balak to curse Israel. It seems very evident, that the king of Moab considered the Israelites as a charmed people, secured against defeat and calamity; and that the prophecies predicting their greatness, in the person and character of the Messiah, who was to be the glory of his people Israel, had, even in those early times, spread extensively over the East. It is evident that Balak considered them as invincible by mortal arms; and on this account, sent messengers to Balaam, with the rewards of divination in their hands, entreating him to come, and to check, by a counter-charm, the desolating progress of the Israelites. The avaricious soothsayer was willing, but afraid, to go; and after he had been at last permitted, though not without the most evident marks of the divine displeasure, to obey the message of the king of Moab, he anxiously sought for some omen that might authorise him to pronounce a malediction against Israel. Finding all his efforts in vain, he became the unwilling instrument of proclaiming the greatness and glory of that people, in terms which can only be applicable to the Messiah, for whose sake Israel had been selected, for whose sake they have been dispersed, and for whose sake they shall again be gathered together, when all the prophecies concerning him shall be completely fulfilled, and the house of Israel shall rejoice in their King. The vaticination of the unwilling prophet was this: "There shall come a star out of Jacob, and a sceptre shall rise out of Israel," "Out of Jacob shall come he that shall have dominion," &c. (Num. xxiv. 17–19.) This seems to be the same, in import, with the prophecy of Jacob himself, though the patriarch is more specific, and limits the fulfilment of the prophecy to the line of Judah : The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come, and to him shall the gathering of the people be." (Gen. xlix. 10.) and thus gained possession of the promise, ordinarily affixed as the privilege of primogeniture: and though Esau, a kind-hearted and generous man, readily forgave the injury done to him by his brother, the case was not so with his descendants, who hated the Jews on account of Jacob their father, whom they regarded as the usurper of the privileges which belonged by birthright to the founder of their race. There were also twelve kingdoms established in Arabia, by the descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham, who was driven out from his father's house on the birth of Isaac; by which means a lasting misunderstanding was laid between the kindred tribes descended from Isaac and Ishmael. Now, if the wise men belonged either to the family of Ishmael or of Esau, they would have opportunities of knowing what was going on in Judea, and their very jealousy would make them scrutinize every report connected with the Jews; as their own interests were so materially affected, for better or for worse, by every event which befel that people. These facts, in the absence of positive information, are sufficient to induce a belief that the prophecies current among the Jews respecting the advent of the wonderful person who was to produce a revolution on the sentiments of men, and the state of nations, would be disseminated among all the people of the East, who were connected with the Jews either by affinity of blood or proximity of territory. But this is not an as sumption resting on conjecture-we have the decided testimony of the Roman historians to the fact: and, from the same authority, we learn, that a prophecy, in the Sibylline books, made a great noise a little before the time of our Saviour's birth, intimating that a King was about to be born to the Roman empire: and Plu. tarch, Sallust, and Cicero, tell us, that the conspiracy of Lentulus was encouraged by the hopes that he was the person designated by the prophecy. The Sibylline oracles are generally considered as mere fabrications, entirely unworthy of credit; and it cannot be denied, that there were numerous and extensive forgeries under that name. But the course of investigation which I have followed in this article, leads me to conclude, that what are called the Sibylline ora. cles, are neither more nor less than garbled tradition, imported from the East, of the true prophecies respecting the Messiah, which had been in circulation from the earliest times among the Oriental nations. The SiWith this prophecy of Balaam current in the East, bylline verses, or oracles, are confessedly not of Roman and deeply impressed on the minds of the people, we growth: the Sibyl, who is represented as offering the may easily conceive that the appearance of the unusual books for sale to Tarquin, is said to be a foreigner; star would be hailed as the harbinger of the Prince and she must, of course, have come from the East: on the Sceptre which were to arise out of Israel. If it every other side, Rome was surrounded by barbarism. should be thought a gratuitous assumption to allege, But there were, it seems, no fewer than ten Sibyls, that such prophecies were current and known over the who had their appellations from the countries where they East, I have only to refer to the concurrent testimony respectively dwelt; such as the Delphic Sibyl, Erythof the Roman writers, who bear evidence to that fact. rean, Cumean, Samian, Hellespontic, Phrygian, PerThese writers seized on this "ancient and uninterrupt- sian, and others. Now, this carries us at once to the ed tradition," (vetus et constans opinio,) as it is called regions where the genuine prophecies respecting the by Suetonius in his life of Vespasian, and expressed Messiah were originally circulated: and the fancy of their belief that it received its accomplishment when the Romans, in placing a Sibyl in each of these counthat general mounted the throne of the Cæsars. The tries, arose from the fact, that the same oracular state. general diffusion over the East, of a prophecy originating mente respecting these great and mysterious events in Judea will appear the more probable, when we con- were found to prevail in these different localities; which sider that the nations to the eastward of Judea, though statements they conceived to have been disseminated generally in a state of hostility with the Jews, were by local prophets, instead of regarding the whole as one nevertheless intimately connected with them by affinity continued stream of prophetic tradition, flowing from of kindred, as well as by similarity of customs. It was, the oracles of God. in fact, their claim to a common origin, and their jealousy as to precedency, that formed the chief ground of their rivalry, and of the bloody contentions which are recorded in Scripture. The Edomites, for instance, who occupied Mount Seir, and gave name to the kingdom of Idumea, were the descendants of Esau, or Edom, the elder brother of Jacob, who obtained his birthright, Although, then, it may be possible, that not one line of what has come down to us as Sibylline verses may be genuine, yet we are sure that such verses existed in the time of Virgil; and, from his statement of their contents, we are sure, that they are fragments or tradi. tions of genuine prophecies, which had been current over the East, from which they had been transported to Rome, and adapted, by priests and poets, to the circumstances of the Roman state. I allude particularly to the fourth eclogue of Virgil, of which the English reader will find a beautiful imitation in Pope's Messiah. The Roman poet intends it as a kind of birth-day ode in honour of the son of Pollio, his friend and patron, and it is filled with such conceptions and imagery as never were inspired by a heathen muse. He commences by declaring, that the last age of Cumean or Sibylline prophecy had arrived, when justice was to resume her reign, and a golden age again to commence in the world: he declares that, under the auspices of the child recently born, all fear should be removed from the minds of men, by the removal of their guilt. He then describes the peace and plenty which should abound in this golden age, in similar terms to those in which the sacred writers describe the peace and happiness of the Messiah's kingdom. Compare the words of the heathen poet with the inspired strains of Isaiah: "Unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given," &c. (Isa. ix. 6.) He proceeds, in language which might almost seem a translation from the prophet: "The herds shall no longer be afraid of the mighty lions, and the serpent shall be destroyed." 66 The sacred poet says, "The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock; and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain." (Isa. lxv. 25. See also ch. xi. 1-9.) Now, be it remembered, that Virgil states these prophetic anticipations, not as the result of his own hopes and convictions, but as derived from the Sibylline oracles, the most venerable sources of their religious infor mation; and that these same oracles are represented as also existing in the remotest regions of the East known to the Romans; and then, I think, we will clearly perceive, that expectations of a mighty Deliverer, founded on prophetic intimations, had existed all over the East, from the earliest ages, and had been diffused, from the Jand of prophecy and vision, to the remotest corners of the Roman empire. There is no difficulty whatever, then, in accounting for the general opinion prevalent in the East respecting a Great Personage who was to arise in Judea, to be the glory of his people Israel. But I make no attempt whatever to account for the way in which the wise men were introduced to the knowledge of his person : this was accomplished by a miracle; and a miracle, which can be explained, is no miracle at all. A genuine miracle derives its authority from properly accredited testimony. This is the foundation on which the whole Scripture history rests: it is founded on facts which admit of demonstration, on the legitimate principles of evidence. Not a single fact connected with the religion of the Bible, not even the existence of a God, nor the soul's immortality, originated in the efforts of human reasoning. These doctrines are not the inventions of men; they are proved by miraculous facts, attested by competent witnesses, and corroborated by concomitant and collateral events, which unbiassed reason never can gainsay; and, instead of miracles being incredible, there can be no credible religion without them. Who would submit to be guided by the crude conceptions of the human mind, or the ignis fatuus of human reason? Would not any man much rather depend on the word of a credible witness for what he has seen or heard, than on his reasoning as to the certainty or uncertainty, the probability or improbability, of the points in question? And without miracles, or revelation, which is itself a miracle, not a single article of true religion would ever have been known to men. It lies beyond the range of the natural faculties, and is uncongenial to the human feelings; and any man of ordinary under standing might say, "Who can know these things unless some one teach him?" And as naturally may he say, "Who can reveal these things to the children of men but the Spirit of God?" and, "Who can know the Father, but those to whom the Son shall reveal him?" THE CHARACTER OF BALAAM: BY THE REV. WILLIAM SCOTT MONCREIFF, "Which have forsaken the right way, and are gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Bosor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness." -2 PETER ii. 15. EVERY reader of his Bible must have observed that throughout that inspired volume, there are certain characters which enjoy the bad pre-eminence of being continually quoted as examples of peculiar wickedness. The object of the sacred writers in thus singling out, from the great mass of human depravity, these particular individuals, is not to exhibit them as sinners above all men, and invite us to judge and condemn them, but because these individuals furnish the best types or examples of certain great classes of character, which are to be found among men, the fittest specimens of some of those more marked moral diseases which have infected the human soul; and thus, they enable us to study these, for our warning and cure; just as the skilful anatomist detects and exhibits, for the benefit of the living, the latent disease in the dead subject. Balaam is one of those unhappy characters thus held forth to his fellow-creatures. The sacred writers refer to him, again and again, in this aspect; we cannot doubt, therefore, that we are expected to study his character and history with peculiar care, the more so that we find the whole history of his apostasy given with the utmost minuteness of detail. In the character of Balaam we may perceive, in the strongest light, the sin and danger of enjoying religious privileges, and making a profession of godliness, while the heart has been seduced by some vicious lust, and is drawn away after some unhallowed enjoyment. In the case of the unhappy prophet, avarice and ambition seem to have acquired an ascendency in a heart which had previously been devoted to the service of God, and which, from its privileges of knowledge, and communion with God, ought to have recognised no other Lord than Jehovah, no other service than his worship, no other law than his will. In the biographical notice of this unhappy man, given in chapters xxii. xxiii. and xxiv. of the book of Numbers, we may easily trace the rise, progress, and triumph of Balak's temptation, in his mind; and the details of these Balaam is first introduced to our notice in the very interesting chapters we shall now consider. xxii. chapter of Numbers, at the 5th verse, but nothing is revealed as to his previous history, further than that he was the son of Beor, or, as the We are left in igapostle here renders it, Bosor. norance as to how he became acquainted with the true God, or what was his particular place or of fice in his service. We are to remember, how ever, that at this period of the world's history, the knowledge of Jehovah was not, as subsequently was the case, confined to the children of Israel. The blessed light of the divine glory still feebly glimmered in the East, and struggled with the prevailing darkness. Balaam seems to have been one of those who had been favoured, not merely with a traditionary knowledge of the true God, but with peculiar revelations of the divine will. He was a prophet, though he seems to have abused the advantages and influence which he thus possessed, by turning them to gain, and degrading his most sacred function to the low level of a soothsaver. This is evident from the light in which Balak views him; had he maintained the holy character and high bearing of a faithful servant of Jehovah, such as was Moses, it is impossible that the king of Moab could have ever formed the purpose or expectation of bribing him to curse Israel. The fact of Balak sending messengers to Balaam with such a design, clearly indicates that the prophet had previously given himself out as a mere soothsayer, that he had already begun to desecrate his holy office, to turn his godliness into gain, and that the love of the wages of unrighteousness had already obtained a place in his heart. Slight, therefore, as is our acquaintance with Balaam, at this period, when he is first introduced to our notice, we may still form a pretty accurate conception of his character, and determine the point of his declension from the way of righteousness and the fear of God. Let us now endeavour to trace the subsequent steps of his fatal apostasy. Balak's messengers bring to Balaam's dwelling the rewards of divination, with which they are charged;-a prophet of the Lord receiving gifts, or bribes, for they were nothing else! Surely Balaam would bid them away froin him with indignation. Alas, the weakness of man at the best! he, on the contrary, seems to welcome the messengers, even although he must have known that their request was contrary to the will of his heavenly King. But Balaam, doubtless said, within himself, these are the elders of Moab, the ambassadors of Balak, I must be courteous and hospitable to such men, whatever may be their object in visiting me; half unconsciously, perhaps, he would cast his eyes on the accompanying rewards of divination, "the wages of unrighteousness." So he receives the elders of Moab with a courteous welcome, " Lodge here," saith he, "this night, and I will bring you word again as the Lord shall speak unto me; and so the princes of Moab abode with Balaam." What! did not Balaam know that the request which these men had conveyed to him, was a sinful one, directly opposed to the divine will, which he was hypocritically to consult? Doubtless he must, but still the good opinion of Balak, and perhaps, too, though he might not have been disposed to allow it, the rewards of divination, had too much weight with him to allow him to return an immediate or an unwelcome answer; so he kept the elders of Moab all night. In the same night, the Lord visited his faithless servant, and put to him the direct and searching question, "What men are these with thee?" How often, in the case of the apostatizing Christian, does not conscience, that witness for God in the breast, address a similar question to the heart, in which the wages of unrighteousness have, under some pretext or another, as vain as was Balaam's, been suffered to lodge? How often have we not been startled with such a question as that here addressed to Balaam: Who, or what are these with thee? are they consistent with my glory, my service, or your fidelity? Balaam renders a plausible answer, as if the Lord were, or could be, ignorant of the whole circumstances, and as if he were, in all good conscience, waiting but to know his pleasure in the matter. The answer from God is plain, direct, decided,— "Thou shalt not go with them; thou shalt not curse the people: for they are blessed." Had Balaam's mind been in a right state, had he been faithful to his God and his conscience, what more could he require? what could have been more explicit? But mark his answer, on the morrow, to the princes of Moab,-" The Lord refuseth to let me go with you." Observe that he says nothing as to the divine determination that Israel should not be cursed but blest. Had he done so, Balak, probably, would not have sent again to him; he merely intimates that he was not permitted to go with them, as doubtless, in his heart, he was disposed to do. Balak, accordingly, was not put from his point by such an answer; he failed not to perceive that the prophet, in whose power of malediction he placed implicit confidence, might still be persuaded to comply with his request, and naturally enough referring his refusal to dissatisfaction with the value of the bribes first sent, or the rank of his ambassadors, he immediately dispatches princes, more numerous, and more honourable than the former, charged, too, to make to him the most magnificent promises of wealth and honour, if Balaam would accede to their sovereign's request. The answer of the prophet to this second embassage may, at first sight, seem proper and praiseworthy, but his subsequent conduct shews it to have been dictated solely by a slavish fear of God, and not by any principle of deference to the divine will, or any zeal for his glory. Balaam could say, "If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my God, to do less or more," because he knew well that such was the case; but, at the same time, such is the inconsistency of sinners, he could also say to Balak's messengers, 66 Now, therefore, I pray you, tarry ye also here this night, that I may know what the Lord will say unto me." Strange answer! What did Balaam really require to be told the mind of the Lord, when, but a few nights before, he had been distinctly told, “Thou shalt not go with them; thou shalt not curse the people: for they are blessed." True, but the heart of the prophet was not right with God; “It went after his covetousness;" he had regard to the rewards of divination, and the promises of Ba |