story. When Peter and John faced the Sanhedrin with the declaration "We must obey God rather than men," were they not mindful of this scene? Dean Stanley well says, "How often have these words confirmed the solitary protest, not only in the Flavian amphitheater, but in the more ordinary, yet not more easy, task of maintaining the rights of conscience against arbitrary power or invidious insult! How many an independent patriot or unpopular reformer has been nerved by them to resist the unreasonable demands of king or priest! How many a little boy at school has been strengthened by them for the effort when he has knelt down by his bedside for the first time to say his prayers in the presence of indifferent or scoffing companions!" As we read this comment of the man we recall Thomas Hughes' picture of the boy, Arthur Stanley, saying his prayers in the dormitory at Rugby amid the jeers of the heedless boys. And that talk over the Bible-reading in Tom Brown's study, when the impetuous Tom, scorning Naaman's compromise with his conscience, turns to this passage and cries "Look here-this is what makes my blood tingle!" Ah! yes, Tom Brown, it makes us all tingle with a new sense of the grandeur of faith. I doubt if any Christian martyr ever went to the stake without the strengthening memory of these heroes. And who can tell how many myriads of Christians have gone through the furnace of affliction with greater fortitude because of this illustration of the promise, "When thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee." We have not outgrown its inspiration. When some new illustration of the cruel selfishness of the "Great Powers" dismays us, and the story of atrocities in Armenia or horrors in Cuba or aggression in Madagascar makes us sick at heart, we rejoice anew in the assurance that the end of the conflict between Christ and the worldpower is certain. No selfish ambition of king or people

can defeat the coming of that one universal empire which the future holds in its keeping, when righteousness shall be enthroned and He whose right it is shall reign. The splendor of display upon Dura's plain is but a fading pageant. No conquest but that of Christ endures.

And when our own sorrows overwhelm us, and we forget the problems of humanity in our private grief, again are we comforted by this glorious story, with its promise that He who loves us better than life will either save us from the furnace of affliction or so share it with us as to make its fire harmless and its memory forever blessed.

Edward McArthur Noyes.

THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL

DANIEL 5: 17-31

"But God is the judge."-Ps. 75:7.

God has chosen many strange ways in which to reveal himself to men; but never one so strange as when that night in the palace of Belshazzar a hand not of flesh wrote on the wall of the banquet-hall the doom of the prince and his kingdom. Although an alert enemy was encamped around his city, with one thousand of his nobles this foolish young man gave himself up to a great feast. Wine flowed freely. Where wine is, wisdom is not. When the revel was at its height, the prince ordered the sacred vessels of the temple brought in, and used them for drinking vessels with his drunken officers. As if this were not insult enough to God, he bade the revelers drink from them toasts to the gods of iron and brass. He degraded God to the level of the heathen idols. Then it was that on the wall yonder the armless hand traced the awful words of his sentence and the judgment upon his city. We remember the terror of the prince, the mad fright of his courtiers, the useless appeal to the soothsayers, and the one glimmer of reason in all the darkness of their folly and despair, when Daniel was suggested as the interpreter of the strange words. God's man was called and, like Joseph before the ruler of Egypt, had eyes where others were blind, and knowledge where others were ignorant, and read with unfaltering voice, in the awed silence of the banquet hall, the doom of ruler and ruled.

We might well dwell upon the value of a noble past. Daniel had been used of God before. lle had been true to God. He was known as one to whom God had given especial powers. When, in his extremity, Belshazzar needed some one to translate the strange words, it was natural that one should be summoned who had shown himself able to translate the thoughts and teachings of God into the speech of men. A man is worth just what his past is worth. If his past is strong, he is strong. If it is bad and weak, so is he. There is only one escape from a bad past, and that is in Christ. It is helpful to remember, too, that God always has a man ready for every emergency. Daniel was within call when a Daniel was needed. Abraham was ready when a pioneer of God's kingdom was wanted, and Gideon was ready for battle when the call to arms for the delivery of Israel sounded. God always has men in training for every department and necessity of his service. Let us look at the man he raised up as the mouthpiece of his message to Belshazzar :

Daniel is a man of God. He shows us how strong and brave one is when the Spirit of God actually dwells in his heart. He stands before the prince and people with perfect calmness of spirit. He is the only calm man in all that crowd. With unflinching truthfulness and unfaltering courage he tells what God has bade him tell. He thinks not of himself, but only of how he may be faithful to his duty as God's representative. With the same fearlessness with which he had pointed out to Nebuchadnezzar his sins, he lays bare to Belshazzar his guilt and its consequences. He reminds him that, although he had known the sin of Nebuchadnezzar and its results, he had gone madly on sowing the same seeds and must reap the same harvest of divine wrath. With the splendid moral courage which characterizes true Christian men of every age and every walk in life, he speaks as though he were ruler and need fear no man.

Then there is his honest spurning of the proffered reward. The man of God does not serve God for hire. To him the doing of duty is its own compensation. He is above selling the truth of God. Perhaps there has been no time when the virtues of fearlessness and disregard of rewards needed more emphasis than now. The world asks for bravery of spirit and moral integrity as it has never done before. In the material development of our modern life, there is an especial temptation for God's people to think of the loaves and fishes. What God wants, to-day, is a man who fears no man, and does God's work for the work's sake. In the pulpit or in the pew, this is the man and the only man whom God can use for his prophet in the nineteenth century.

Let us look at Belshazzar. He is, perhaps, about the age of Daniel, but here the likeness ends. Daniel is a man of God; Belshazzar is a man of sin. He illustrates the surpassing, incomprehensible folly of sin. If ever he needed to be alert, serious, master of himself and others, it was at this hour, when a vast army under a skilled and determined leader was besieging his very palace. Ordinary prudence required that he be watchful and quick to note and meet every plot of the besiegers. Instead of this, he is found in a drunken carousal, at which are present the very soldiers on whose clearheadedness, courage and fidelity depended the safety of his empire. Needless blasphemy is added to his orgies until the patience of God himself is exhausted and the pent-up wrath of outraged love and law is poured upon him. Sin is always foolish. It was never so foolish as it is to-day, because the sin of the present is in the light of such revelation of God's being and law as men have never had before. The folly of Judas in selling himself and the measureless riches of heaven for a handful of coin was not more short-sighted than that of him who, to-day, thoughtlessly turns from the Saviour of his soul,