Such a belief was quite natural, but it does not mean that Darius was prepared to accept Daniel’s God as his god.  His religion was probably elastic and hospitable enough to admit that other nations might have other gods.  But his thoughts about this ‘living God’ are a strange medley.  He is not sure whether He is stronger than the royal lions, and he does not seem to feel that if a god delivers, his own act in surrendering a favoured servant of such a god looks very black.  A half-belief blinds men to the opposition between their ways and God’s, and to the certain issue of their going in one direction and God in another.  If Daniel be delivered, what will become of Darius?  But, like most men, he is illogical, and that question does not seem to have occurred to him.  Surely this man may sit for a portrait of a weak, passionate nature, in the feebleness of his resistance to evil, the half hopes that wrong would be kept from turning out so badly as it promised, the childish moanings over wickedness that might still have been mended, and the incapacity to take in the grave, personal consequences of his crime.

II.  We next note the great deliverance.  The king does not see Daniel, and waits in sickening doubt whether any sound but the brutes’ snarl at the disturber of their feast will be heard.  There must have been a sigh of relief when the calm accents were audible from the unseen depth.  And what dignity, respect, faith, and innocence are in them!  Even in such circumstances the usual form of reverential salutation to the king is remembered.  That night’s work might have made a sullen rebel of Daniel, and small blame to him if he had had no very amiable feelings to Darius; but he had learned faithfulness in a good school, and no trace of returning evil for evil was in his words or tones.

The formal greeting was much more than a form, when it came up from among the lions.  It heaped coals of fire on the king’s head, let us hope, and taught him, if he needed the lesson, that Daniel’s disobedience had not been disloyalty.  The more religion compels us to disregard the authority and practices of others, the more scrupulously attentive should we be to demonstrate that we cherish all due regard to them, and wish them well.  How simply, and as if he saw nothing in it to wonder at, he tells the fact of his deliverance!  ’My God has sent His angel, and hath shut the lions’ mouths.’  He had not been able to say, as the king did before the den was opened, ‘Thy God will deliver thee’; but he had gone down into it, knowing that He was able, and leaving himself in God’s care.  So it was no surprise to him that he was safe.  Thankfulness, but not astonishment, filled his heart.  So faith takes God’s gifts, however great and beyond natural possibility they may be; for the greatest of them are less than the Love which faith knows to move all things, and whatsoever faith receives is just like Him.