contrary to his expectations, the city is stirred by his preaching; and King and court and people repent and amend their ways.  Whereupon the Divine forgiveness is extended at once to these wicked Pagans, and the fate they had deserved is averted.  But in this turn of affairs Jonah’s prediction failed, and so he was displeased and was very angry, and took the Almighty to task quite roundly, for his lack of vigour.

“Was not this my saying when I was yet in my country?  Therefore, I fled before unto Tarshish, for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness and repentest thee of the evil.”

What was to become of preachers if, after they had threatened destruction upon evil-doers, the Most High went back upon them thus?  The later breed of Jonahs may profitably study the after scene, in which God is made to rebuke the frightful selfishness and hardness which, rather than have one’s theories belied, would have a city damned.

“Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored ... and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand, and also much cattle?”

The moral marvel of Nineveh’s general repentance on the preaching of an obscure Jew is as unnatural as the physical marvel of the fish story.

Recognizing that the whole tale is a parable, which takes upon it purely legendary drapery, and ridding ourselves thus of all the questions which puzzle Sunday-school scholars and theologians, we are ready to read the meaning of the parable.  God is not the God of any one race or religion.  He cares for Gentile as for Jew.  He sends a prophet of Israel to bid a pagan city repent, that He may forgive it freely.  These Pagans understand the message of the Jew.  The commands of conscience are owned and honored by the heathen, even more quickly than by the people of God; whose own Jerusalem never thus quickly obeyed a prophet’s message.  The city whence had come Israel’s woes is held up as a pattern to the sacred city herself.  All men, then, are brothers, partakers of the same moral and religious nature; children of One Father, whose voice they hear in different tongues, speaking to their souls the same messages of holy love.

Thus read, Jonah becomes the protest of liberal Judaism against the narrow, exclusive tendencies of popular piety in Israel.  It is the writing of some genuine Broad-Churchman of the olden time, proclaiming the high truths of Human Brotherhood under a Divine Fatherhood, breathing that spirit of which, long after, another Jew dared say—­

   “And now abideth faith, hope and charity, but the greatest of these is
   charity.”

If such be the hidden value of one of the least attractive of these writings, we may well say, with Milton,

   “I shall wish I may deserve to be reckoned among those who admire and
   dwell upon them.”