“Well, I didn’, anyway—­an’ that’s honest.”  The corporal handed it over with just a trace of reluctance.  “But it only shows,” he added, eyeing Nicky-Nan thoughtfully, “as there’s nothing in this world so deceptive as appearances.”

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SECOND SERMON.

“For Zion’s sake will I not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth.”

“. . .  And thou shalt be called by a new name. . . .  Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land be termed Desolate:  but thou shalt be called Hephzi-bah, and thy land Beulah:  for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. . . .”

     “. . .  I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which
      shall never hold their peace day nor night.”

“. . .  The Lord hath sworn by his right hand, and by the arm of his strength, ’Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast laboured.  But they that have gathered it shall eat it, and praise the Lord; and they that have brought it together shall drink it . . . in the courts of my holiness.’”

     “Go through, go through the gates; prepare ye the way of the
      people; cast up, cast up the highway; gather out the stones;
      lift up a standard for the people.”

     “Behold, the Lord hath proclaimed unto the end of the world,
     ’Say ye to the daughter of Zion, Behold, thy salvation cometh;
      behold, his reward is with him,’ and his work before him. 
      And they shall call them ’The Holy People, the Redeemed of the
      Lord,’ and thou shalt be called, ’Sought out, A City Not
      Forsaken.’”

Mr Hambly closed the great Book upon the cushion and leaned forward, resting his arms over it.

“I want you,” said he after a pause, very solemnly and slowly, “to apply those words not only to ourselves, of whom we are accustomed to think, too particularly and too complacently, as a chosen people; but to the whole as the free peoples of Western Europe, with whom to-day we stand in alliance and as one.  If you apply them at all particularly, let France and Belgium be first in your minds, with their harvest-fields and vineyards, as you listen to the Lord’s promise, ’By the arm of my strength, surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies, and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine for which thou hast laboured.’

“For our own land, England, if we are really to vindicate it out of this struggle as Beulah—­that is, ‘married,’ the bride of the Lord—­I wish you to consider how far the God of this noble oath has advanced upon the old bloodthirsty Jehovah of the book of Joshua.  He is not yet, in Isaiah, the all-living, all-comprehending God the Father of the Gospel:  but if we halt on Him here, we are already a long way advanced from that tribal and half-bestial conception of the Deity which Joshua invoked and (as it seems to me) the German Emperor habitually invokes.