And then, without a change of phrase, without even the compliment of a heightened denunciation— "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Judah, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof.... "Thus saith the Lord: For three transgressions of Israel, yea for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof...."[#] [#] Amos i, 3-ii, 6. It would be impossible more emphatically to insist that all nations, Israel and the rest, stand on an equal footing before the Judgment Seat of God, and are to be regarded as real entities, and real moral agents; but that is not enough for the prophet. "Are ye not as Children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel?—saith the Lord." I have no more care for you than the Ethiopians—who then, as now, were black folk. "Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, _and_ the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?"[#] [#] Amos ix, 7. It is the God who had guided the history of Israel who has equally guided the history of the despised Philistine and the hated Syrian. And this line of thought reaches its culmination where we should expect to find it, in the works of the statesman-prophet Isaiah. His little country of Judah was likely to be destroyed by the hostilities of Assyria and Egypt, and in the middle of that peril, when these nations were at each other’s throats, he looks forward and says:— "In that day there shall be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian to Assyria; and the Egyptians shall worship with the Assyrians." There shall be free intercourse between them, and worship of the one God shall be the link between them. "In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, for that the Lord of hosts hath blessed them, saying, ’Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance?’"[#] [#] Isaiah xix, 23-25. Just picture the pallid frenzy of the orthodox Jew at the words—"Egypt my people." The teaching of the Bible is plain enough; and as we come to the New Testament, with all this in our minds, knowing the emphasis that has already been laid upon nationality, we find that there, too, is the note of patriotism. No man has ever loved his nation more than the Lord loved Israel, and in the bitterness of disappointment in the lament over Jerusalem we have the measure of His patriotic love for the holy places of His people. St. Paul, the author of those great ejaculations—"That there can be neither Jew nor Gentile, Greek nor Scythian, bond nor free, but one man in Christ Jesus"[#]—is also the author of the most ardent expression of patriotism in all literature. [#] Gal. iii, 28; Col. iii, 11.