A Christian country: where human beings die, year after year, in the unspeakable, unimaginable agonies of canine madness, and dogs are kept by the thousand in crowded cities, that the sacrifice to the fiend of selfishness and the mocking devil of vanity may never lack its victims! There is a more than Egyptian worship of Anubis, in the silly infatuation which lavishes tenderness upon an unclean brute, and credulously invests instinct with the highest attributes of reason; and there is a worse than heathenish besottedness in the heart that can pamper a dog, and be utterly indifferent to the helplessness and the sufferings of the children of the poor. And people will go to church, and hear what the preacher has to say, and "think he said what he ought to have said," or not, as the case may be, and return to their own settled habits of worldly living, as a matter of course. Oh yes! it is a Christian country--the name of Christ has been named in it for fifteen centuries past; and for that reason Christ will judge it. * * * * * _Therefore, thus said Iahvah Sabaoth: Lo, I am about to melt them and put them to proof_ (Job xii. 11; Judg. xvii. 4; ch. vi. 25.); _for how am I to deal in face of_ [_the wickedness of_, LXX: the term has fallen out of the Heb. text: cf. iv. 4, vii. 12] _the daughter of My people?_ This is the meaning of the disasters that have fallen and are even now falling upon the country. Iahvah will melt and assay this rough, intractable human ore, in the fiery furnace of affliction; the strain of insincerity that runs through it, the base earthy nature, can only thus be separated and purged away (Isa. xlviii. 10). _A deadly arrow_ [LXX. a _wounding_ one, _i.e._, one which does not miss, but hits and kills] _is their tongue; deceit it spake: with his mouth peace with his companion he speaketh, and inwardly he layeth his ambush_ (Ps. lv. 22). The verse again specifies the wickedness complained of, and justifies our restoration of that word in the previous verse. Perhaps, with the Peshito Syriac and the Targum, we ought rather to render: _a sharp arrow is their tongue_. There is an Arabic saying quoted by Lane, "Thou didst sharpen thy tongue against us," which seems to present a kindred root[37] (cf. Ps. lii. 3, lvii. 4; Prov. xxv. 18). The Septuagint may be right, with its probable reading: _deceit are the words of his mouth_. This certainly improves the symmetry of the verse.