and vulgar artifices[1]. He answers pretences from feigned conformity, from reliance on the remnants of good in the land[2]; and again, from an affected perplexity at the supposed inequality of his proceedings[3]. He recapitulates, by special message, all their past conduct, as His chosen people[4]: a summary, answering with marvellous exactness to the sad experience of the Christian world. When all these had failed, He utters, in two fearful parables, a final sentence of direct reprobation[5]. All this we have set before us from Ezekiel. The Lessons from Daniel[6] serve to show that the chosen people were not yet abandoned; they keep alive hope, and exemplify faith, triumphing in the worst of times; which is also the drift of the prophecy selected from Joel. Then Micah is introduced, like Samuel and Ezekiel, recapitulating the whole course of the probation of the elect[7]; and Habakkuk[8], extending the judgment to their oppressors, and reasserting the condition required on their part to make their election not a curse but a blessing. "The just by his faith shall live." Finally, the readings from the Proverbs[9] of Solomon bring the warning home, so to speak, to every man's own door. Taken in connexion with all that had gone before, they turn God's miraculous proceedings with the Jews into an available sanction of righteousness, for the meanest man's use on the slightest occasion.
And now, the year drawing to a close, and the mysterious time of Christmas approaching, our Mother, with true parental anxiety, takes up, as it were, the thread of her instructions anew, at that point of the fortunes of Israel, to which the circumstances of civilized and Christian Europe, especially those of our own country, during the comparatively few years which have passed since the arrangement of the Prayer-Book, may reasonably be thought to correspond most nearly. The Church reverts to the time of Hezekiah, and selects the prophecy of Isaiah as the fittest to prepare the mind for Christ's two Advents. By the confession of some, who are most apt to find fault, her selection here has been most appropriate. Witness the sins reproved in the Jews; their formality[10], pride[11], oppression, drunkenness, presumption, sophistical self-deceit[12]; their impatience of primitive truth, and reliance
