When progress of a Christian kind is reported it must not be tainted by the presence of physical severity. We can not silence evil speakers by merely closing their mouths. So long as we can hold those mouths there may indeed be silence, but not until the spirit has been changed--not until the very heart has been converted and born again--can the evil-doer be silenced and his mouth be dispossessed of wicked speech and filled with words of honesty and pureness. Jehu himself was not a good man. “From the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, Jehu departed not from after them.” For reasons of state policy, Jehu maintained the worship of Bethel and Dan. “But Jehu took no heed to walk in the law of the Lord God of Israel with all his heart; for he departed not from the sins of Jeroboam, which made Israel to sin.” Jehu had done homage to Jehovah by extirpating the foreign Baal worship, but he patronized and actively supported the irregular mode of worshiping Jehovah established by Jeroboam as the state religion of the northern kingdom. He attempted to serve God and Mammon. Religion was to him but a political instrument. Jehu did the particular kind of work which had been assigned to him--a work of destruction and blood. Perhaps he alone of all the people of his time could have accomplished this task. But Jehu must stand in history as a warning rather than as an example. JOB. Sometimes I have most clearly seen the whole tragedy of Job in a waking dream, the whole passing before me in twilight shadows, losing itself in thick darkness, reappearing in light like the dawn--always changing, always solemn, always instructive; a thing that surely happened, because a thing now happening in all the substance of its eternal meaning. Is it a pillar grand in height, and finished all over with the dainty care of an artist whose life has been spent in learning and applying the art of color? How stately! How Heaven seeking because Heaven worthy! While I admire, I wonder religiously. I see the hosts of darkness gathering around the erstwhile flashing capital, and resting over it like midnight sevenfold in blackness; then the lightning gleams from the center of the gloom, then the fire-bolt flies forth and smites the coronal once so glorious, and dashes it in hot dust to the Earth, and the tall stalk--so upright, so delicate, so like a well-trained life--reels, totters and falls in an infinite crash! Is it true? Every word of it. True now--may be true in thee and me, O man, so assured of stability and immovableness. There is danger in high places. Is there a Spirit which hates all noble-mindedness and seeks to level the spiritual pile with mean things? Evil Spirit! The very Devil--hating all goodness because hating God! But stop. After all, who smote the pillar? Whose lightning was used to overthrow the fair masonry?