they were doing, trying to ‘shuffle along on both knees.’  We would seek God, but we would like to have an occasional visit to Bethel.  It cannot be done.  There must be detachment, if there is to be any real attachment.  And the certain transiency of all creatural objects is a good reason for not fastening ourselves to them, lest we should share their fate.  ‘Gilgal shall go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought,’ therefore let us join ourselves to the Eternal Love and we shall abide, as it abides, for ever.

The exhortation is next enforced by presenting the consequences of neglecting it.  To seek Him is life, not to seek Him incurs the danger of finding Him in unwelcome ways.  That is for ever true.  We do not get away from God by forgetting Him, but we run the risk of finding in Him, not the fire which vitalises, purifies, melts, and gladdens, but that which consumes.  The fire is one, but its effects are twofold.  God is for us either that fire into which it is blessedness to be baptized, or that by which it is death to be burned up.  And what can Bethel, or calves, or all the world do to quench it or pluck us out of it?

Once more the exhortation is urged, if we link verse 8 with verse 6, and supply ‘Seek ye’ at its beginning.  Here the enforcement is drawn from the considerations of God’s workings in nature and history.  The shepherd from Tekoa had often gazed up at the silent splendours of the Pleiades and Orion, as he kept watch over his flocks by night, and had seen the thick darkness on the wide uplands thinning away as the morning stole op over the mountains across the Dead Sea, and the day dying as he gathered his sheep together.  He had cowered under the torrential rains which swept across his exposed homeland, and had heard God’s voice summoning the obedient waters of the sea, that He might pour them down in rain.  But the moral government of the world also calls on men to seek Jehovah.  ’He causeth destruction to flash forth on the strong, so that destruction cometh upon the fortress.’  High things attract the lightning.  Godless strength is sure, sooner or later, to be smitten down, and no fortress is so impregnable that He cannot capture and overthrow it.  Surely wisdom bids us seek Him that does all these wonders, and make Him our defence and our high tower.

The second part gives a vivid picture of the vices characteristic of a prosperous state of society which is godless, and therefore selfishly luxurious.  First, civil justice is corrupted, turned into bitterness, and prostrated to the ground.  Then bold denouncers of national sins are violently hated.  Do we not know that phase of an ungodly and rich society?  What do the newspapers say about Christians who try to be social reformers?  Are the epithets flung at them liker bouquets or rotten eggs?  ‘Fanatics and faddists’ are the mildest of them.  Then the poor are trodden down and have to give large parts of their scanty harvests to the rich.  Have capital