strength. "I am understanding," saith the Lord, "I have strength"; and it is written that He giveth this strength to His people.

Habakkuk, reputed to be the Shunamite child raised from the dead by Elisha, could not help reasoning, in his first chapter of prophecy, that because the Lord his God was from everlasting, he need not die, though the Chaldeans, supping up their leopard-like strength from the east wind, scoffing at kings, and deriding every stronghold, should become dust heaps like as their swift horses.

In self-forgetting moments Habakkuk breathed from beyond the margins of the Chaldeans' powerful east winds. He breathed the ethers that lave the throne steps of divine arrival. He made it education to know sin's glorious secrets as his three mystic chapters reveal them, telling of the high watch and the low watch, and of saving and gathering and honouring as the time of unspoilable wholeness ripens, disclosing the bloom of arrival at the glory of the Lord's still, secret inbreaths, mighty to save.

Habakkuk's three chapters lay stress on the end of captivity, everywhere visible to the eyes of all watchers toward Him that saith, "Look unto Me." They tell the story of the Holy First, who came from Paran, the hidden heights, whom the Gadarenes of earth implored to depart again into hiding. They tell how, when sin's vast secrets uncover, mankind shall choose to breathe from above, till they all bloom as unspoilable health made visible, in comradeship with the Lord of fuIfillment, and the brightness of His completeness shall not be lost to their view.