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THE REV. H. J. E. MARSTON, M.A., ON 



it does but express a feeling which is indelible in the human 

 breast. Sovereignty is felt to be a constituent in the very 

 idea of God. A God who is dependent, limited, confined within 

 even His own laws, is no God at all. How deeply this thought 

 is ingrained in men's minds may be seen by the testimony of 

 the Attic Drama. Nowhere is it expressed more unmistakably. 

 iEschylus and Sophocles do, indeed, use the jargon of polytheism, 

 but they are penetrated by a profound conviction that there 

 is somewhere a sovereign something, if not a sovereign some- 

 one. 



In a noble passage in the Prometheus iEschylus beautifully 

 expresses this conviction. He says : " Never shall the wills of 

 mortals pass beyond control of Zeus.'' The same sentiment 

 pervades the spirit of Virgil. Even a whimsical and one-sided 

 thinker like Mr. Wells attests how deeply men feel the truth of 

 God as sovereign, for he entitles his recent book, " God the 

 Invisible King." 



Now, the shrine and oracle of this idea is the Old Testament. 

 The thought of Divine Sovereignty was nursed and developed 

 by the institutions and vocation of the chosen people. The 

 great truth is no soft and sickly exotic transplanted into the 

 soil of Israel from Babylon or Nineveh ; it was deposited in the 

 mind of the people by the hand of God himself, and was unfolded 

 with sacred and salutary richness in the course of their history, 

 and by the very genius of that wonderful race. 



The political spirit of the Old Testament is democratic and 

 progressive. Israel's eye of hope looked stedfastly to a golden 

 future, and not wistfully to a golden past. When Israel came 

 out of Egypt, and the house of Judah from among a strange 

 people, Moses became the leader of a rudimentary democracy. 

 Samuel, the last of the popular saviours of the tribes, and the 

 founder of the prophetical order, resisted and deplored the 

 coming of a king. David, the man after God's own heart, who 

 remains to this day the ideal monarch of Israel, and who is the 

 type of a future Royalty, was anointed and acclaimed by the 

 two sections of his nation " as bone of our bone and flesh of 

 our flesh " ; and is described in a glowing passage in the Psalter 

 as one " chosen out of the people." 



The record of the monarchy in Israel is disappointing. Most 

 of the kings, whether in Israel or in Judah, were either weak 

 or bad, or both. Hezekiah, the most earnest and dignified of 

 the successors of Solomon, deserves his eminence, because he 



