5:1 HEAR ye this word which I take up for a lamentation over you, O house of Israel. 2 The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is cast down upon her land; there 3 is none to raise her up. For thus saith the Lord God: The city that went forth a thousand 4 shall have an hundred left, and that which went forth an hundred shall have ten left, to the 5 house of Israel. For thus saith the LORD unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall 6 live: but seek not Beth-el, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beer-sheba: for Gilgal shall 6 surely go into captivity, and Beth-el shall come to nought. Seek the LORD, and ye shall 7 live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and it devour and there be none to 8 quench it in Beth-el: ye who turn judgement to wormwood, and cast down righteousness 9 to the earth; seek him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death 10 into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the 9 sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth; the LORD is his name; that bringeth 10 sudden destruction upon the strong, so that destruction cometh upon the fortress. They 11 hate him that reproveth in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly. Foras- 12 much therefore as ye trample upon the poor, and take exactions from him of wheat: ye have 13 built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vine- 14 yards, but ye shall not drink the wine thereof. For I know how manifold are your trans- 15 gressions and how mighty are your sins; ye that afflict the just, that take a bribe, and that 16 turn aside the needy in the gate from their right. Therefore he that is prudent shall keep 17 silence in such a time; for it is an evil time. Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live: 18 and so the LORD, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye say. Hate the evil, and love the 19 good, and establish judgement in the gate: it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts, will 20 be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph. Therefore thus saith the LORD, the God of hosts, 21 the Lord: Wailing shall be in all the broad ways; and they shall say in all the streets, Alas! 22 alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skilful of lamenta-

17 tion to wailing. And in all vineyards shall be wailing: for I will pass through the midst of 18 thee, saith the LORD. Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! wherefore would ye 19 have the day of the LORD? it is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent 20 bit him. Shall not the day of the LORD be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no 21 brightness in it? I hate, I despise your feasts, and I will take no delight in your solemn 22 assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me your burnt offerings and meal offerings, I will not 23 accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away 24 from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judge- 25 ment roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. Did ye bring unto me 26 sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? Yea, ye have borne Siccuth your king and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to your- 27 selves. Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith the LORD, whose name is the God of hosts.

6:1 Woe to them that are at ease in Zion, and to them that are secure in the mountain of Samaria, the notable men of the chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel come! 2 Pass ye unto Calneh, and see; and from thence go ye to Hamath the great: then go down to Gath of the Philistines: be they better than these kingdoms? or is their border greater 3 than your border? Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come 4 near; that lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the 5 lambs out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall; that sing idle songs to 6 the sound of the viol; that devise for themselves instruments of music, like David; that drink wine in bowls, and anoint themselves with the chief ointments; but they are not 7 grieved for the affliction of Joseph. Therefore now shall they go captive with the first that 8 go captive, and the revelry of them that stretched themselves shall pass away. The Lord God hath sworn by himself, saith the LORD, the God of hosts I abhor the excellency of Jacob, and hate his palaces: therefore will I deliver up the city with all that is therein. 9, 10 And it shall come to pass, if there remain ten men in one house, that they shall die. And when a man’s uncle shall take him up, even he that burneth him, to bring out the bones out of the house, and shall say unto him that is in the innermost parts of the house, Is there yet any with thee? and he shall say, No; then shall he say, Hold thy peace; for we may not 11 make mention of the name of the LORD. For, behold, the LORD commandeth, and the great 12 house shall be smitten with breaches, and the little house with clefts. Shall horses run upon the rock? will one plow there with oxen? that ye have turned judgement into gall, and the 13 fruit of righteousness into wormwood: ye which rejoice in a thing of nought, which say, 14 Have we not taken to us horns by our own strength? For, behold, I will raise up against you a nation, O house of Israel, saith the LORD, the God of hosts; and they shall afflict you from the entering in of Hamath unto the brook of the Arabah.

Chap. 5. In this chapter the prophet la- ments the fall of Israel; exhorts the people to seek the Lord; portrays the glory and power of Jehovah, as reasons why He should be both feared and sought; rebukes the sins of the peo- ple, and affirms God’s abhorrence of the mere forms of worship without the heart and with- out justice and righteousness toward fellow- men. H. C.

1-3. Amos predicts the approaching period of Israel’s decline and fall. The “word” or mes- sage of God is addressed to the “house of Is- rael”—i.e., the entire nation. Because it is a part of the chosen people of God against whom he is moved to speak, and because he shares the deep sympathy of Jehovah in behalf of this people, he calls his message a “lamentation” or elegy. Other prophets, pre-eminently Jeremiah, used the same tender, plaintive, broken utterances in connection with the sin and pun- ishment of Israel and Judah. The figure of a “virgin” he, like others, employs to denote the outwardly prosperous life of the State; the luxury, power and wealth upon which it prided itself. Never was the separate king- dom of Israel more prospered and powerful than during the long reign of Jeroboam II. And now, at the height of this prosperity, Amos announces that it is soon to cease, and that the nation is to be overcome and destroyed. In the city, he says, that sent forth a thousand warriors only a hundred shall remain. His meaning is that nine tenths of the people shall perish or be removed from their land. B.

3. The glory of cities was graduated by the number of men they could send out for war.

The passage shows how fearfully their strength had departed. The city that once sent forth a thousand had now but a hundred left; so that the house of Israel was shorn of its military strength. H. C.

4-6. Yet God’s conditional promise of mercy and continuance is still pressed upon His Israel. As from the very beginning of God’s dealing with this disobedient, defiant people, so to the very end we discern the sublimely affecting fact of His longsuffering and patient forbearance, never wearying in the endeavor to win back their trusting, loving allegiance. Therefore this very prediction of Amos, here employed as a warning, is followed by an earnest exhortation with promise. Seek ye Me! is the persuasive injunction. And ye shall live! is the sure promise. Then succeeds as earnest a dissuasive from their idolatrous practices. Seek not Bethel and Gilgal, those iniquitous centres of idol-worship; for they shall be cast down and brought to nought. And again we hear the earnest exhortation and promise; followed now by sharper threatening, of exterminating fiery judgment against the entire nation. B.

5. The prophet Amos said, “Bethel shall come to nought,” and it has come to nought. A more forlorn spot it is not easy to imagine. The city that once crowned the hill with its strong walls has given place to a handful of wretched huts, mere heaps of stones and mud roughly piled together. The magnificent stone reservoir, more than three hundred feet in length by two hundred in breadth, is broken. The springs that filled it and made it a storehouse of wealth to the fields below now run to waste. Dulles.

Among the last references to this place (Amos 5: 5) it is said, “Bethel shall come to nought;” and whether the fact to which we are to refer was a fulfilment of this prophecy or not, we know that, sixty-nine years after Christ, Vespasian, in the month of May, before the glories of springtime had wholly departed from the Judean hills, and just on the eve of his being proclaimed emperor of Rome, was lying before this ancient town; and poor little Bethel, that once had justly been called “the house of God” and “the gate of heaven,” was by the Roman arms crushed into oblivion (Josephus, Wars, 4: 9, 9). Twelve miles north of Jerusalem on the road to Shechem there is an insignificant, wretched, filthy Mohammedan village called Beitin. This is all that marks the site of ancient Bethel. S. Merrill.

7-9. The unjust and iniquitous rulers are re- re-minded of the majesty and might of the avenging Jehovah.* The leaders in evil-doing, the elders, magistrates and nobles who pervert judgment to bitter wrong, who smite righteousness to the earth, are bidden to remember Him who ruleth in the heavens, who ordaineth the courses of the stars, who sendeth light and darkness, who ordereth the beneficent succession of the seasons, and who in judgment poureth floods of great waters upon the earth, Him whom they have been taught to know and revere as the living all-creative Jehovah. In their vain confidence in impregnable fortresses, they are warned (verse 9) that this only God, whose majestic might holds sway over the vast visible universe, will bring destruction upon their strongholds, even upon their chief citadel city, Samaria. B.

8. Men should seek God because He is so great and so glorious—has such power to turn our day to night, and our night to day—to bring up the waters of ocean by His call, and pour them forth as of old, in the fluege. The beauty and sublimity of this passage are exquisite. Job has a similar allusion to those brilliant constellations (9: 9).

9. This magnificent description of the power of Jehovah closes with a word designed to make it more practical to the Samaritans who relied on the military strength of their capital—“Who makes destruction flash out upon the mighty, and desolation shall come upon the strong city.” The first verb, which I render “flash out,” takes its figure from the breaking forth of the dawn upon the darkness of the night—a figure which has most force in countries near the equator, where the twilight is short. H. C.

10-13. Their impious character and oppressive deeds yet further exposed, and the consequences declared. Hatred of the just magistrate, of him that reprovet in the city gate (where justice was administered), and abhorrence of the upright and pure, sufficiently delineate their character. Exaction of unjust taxes from the poor, wherewith to build themselves costly houses and to multiply vineyards, oppression of the prudent (or excellent) who were compelled silently and patiently to submit, and the decreeing of unjust judgment for a bribe, are the particulars which describe their corrupt deeds. And by the prophet God warns them plainly, that all their “manifold transgressions and mighty sins” are known to Him; and that He will make their wrongful gains the instruments of their punishment.

Such was the faithful representation of that evil time. Outwardly the State seemed prosperous, and held high place among the nations. But inwardly it was diseased by corruption; and its decay had already begun, and was soon to be followed by death. And this was to be the sad result of God’s protracted forbearance and compassion toward Israel. With all the prosperity He had given, the deliverances He had vouchsafed, the warnings and entreaties He had pressed upon them for centuries and generations, the course of kings and people had been steadily increasing in disobedience, rejection and defiance of His worship and His commands. They had persisted in idolatry and in the immoralities and iniquities which grew out of their impious false worship. B.

11. For these sins of oppressing the poor, God will tear them away from their houses and vineyards. However much they may build the one and plant the other, He can frustrate their hope of enjoying them. It is hard fighting against God. No wisdom and no strength can withstand Him. H. C.

14,15. Again God urges repentance and reformation, and again conditionally promises His grace in their continuance. Seek good and not evil, that ye may live. As another prophet expresses it in another form, Turn ye, turn ye, for why will ye die? Turn from your seeking of evil, which brings death, to the seeking of good, which ensures life. “So the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.” This had been their boast, that Jehovah was exclusively their God. Even in their extreme defection from His laws, they dared to claim His presence still. Now, God condescends to say, “Only turn from evil and seek good, and your claim shall be made true. I will be with you!” And to the turning from evil and seeking good is added the more specific injunction, Hate the evil, and love the good! This implies the substitution of a new and right principle, which shall control the heart and the life. This principle will lead to the establishment of equity in administering justice, and it will introduce all truth and uprightness into human conduct and social dealing. There will be no more oppression or extortion, no more vice or crime, no more false worship, no more forgetfulness or disregard of God and His pure heart worship.

This simple stranger from Judah, this obscure and lowly herdman has now uttered his pathetic message of warning to Israel. One of the very last, it was also one of the plainest and most direct, both in its announcement of coming judgment and of still proffered mercy. We know the result. The message wrought only wrath against the messenger. It reached not the heart, nor changed the life of the self-destroyed people. And in due time, after still further merciful delay, Jehovah finally abandoned the Ten Tribes of the kingdom of Israel, and scattered their remnant untraceably among the nations. B.

16. Therefore the Lord. Twice in the two previous verses the prophet mentions the Lord God of Hosts. Here with increased solemnity he adds the Lord, the sovereign Master and Ruler, who calls His servants to account. The position of the word is most unusual, and so emphatic. Therefore points to the sins referred to in verses 5-12.

17. Whenever the Hebrew phrase, used here and meaning pass through, is employed of God, it signifies punishment, that He can by no means remain among them, but must pass through and leave them, as Jerome remarks in this place. It is not simply through thee, but through the midst of thee; overlooking none, sparing nothing, visiting vineyard and city, striking down rich and poor. B. C.

18-20. In their foolhardiness some had expressed their desire that this day of the Lord might come, madly daring Jehovah to do His worst. Upon them God denounces special woe. He asks, What will this day of the Lord be to you? and answers, Only darkness, and not light; no rays of light in it; no mitigation to its horrors. Then, by two expressive figures of a class natural to the mind of one trained in fields and deserts where wild beasts have their homes, he shows that to attempt to flee from God in any direction would be only to meet Him there in a more fearful form. What else can any sane mind think of the daring impiety that challenges God to show His power to curse and punish, save that it is the veriest madness? Do such men suppose they can cope with Omnipotence? (See p. 390.)

21,22. The people were deluding themselves with the notion that they were high in favor with God, because they kept up the forms of the Mosaic worship. To dispel this delusion, the Lord solemnly protests to them that He not only takes no pleasure in their worship, but thoroughly abhors it: “I hate, I loathe your feast days.” The sentiment of these verses appears in several other prophets—in Hosea, as we have seen, 6:6; 8:13; 9:4; Isa. 1:11-15; Micah 6:6. H. C.

The Meaning and Value of the Old Testament Sacrifices.

In the Mosaic sacrificial system three great ideas were embodied and emphasized—viz., self-dedication, thanksgiving, expiation or atonement for sin. If the reader will turn to the first four chapters of Leviticus, he will see that they treat respectively of the burnt offering, the meal offering, the peace offering and the sin offering. In these four chapters we may find the elements of the system, and sufficient illustration of this analysis of its underlying ideas. The prominent idea of the burnt offering, which was to be “without blemish,” to be presented of the offerer’s “own voluntary will,” and to be wholly burned, by the priest, upon the altar, was that of complete self-dedication to God. As the worshipper brought his best gift, and offered it entire upon God’s altar, so was he to present himself “a living sacrifice, holy, and acceptable unto God.” Of the meal offering and peace offering, which are closely related in meaning, the prominent idea was thanksgiving. In these sacrifices the devout Jew brought the best products of his lands or herds, and offered them back to God, in acknowledgment that they were His gifts, while, as a part of the ceremony, the worshipper ate a portion of the offering, in token of his fellowship with God in the enjoyment of His mercies. This offering usually followed the burnt offering of dedication as its natural sequence. The sin offering comes next, and crowns the system. It expresses the consciousness of sin, the need of reconciliation to God and the faith that God is ready to approach the sinner in mercy, and Himself to bear away the burden of his guilt. Its chief ceremonies were the sprinkling of blood before the veil of the sanctuary, the solemn confession of the sins of the people and the symbolic removal of those sins by the sending of the scapegoat into the wilderness. The deeper significance of these ceremonies was that the people acknowledged that the covenant relation to God was broken by sin, and confessed, in the slaying of their victims, that the wages of sin was death, but that they still hoped in God’s mercy, because of His willingness to accept by substitution the life of the offering for the penalty of transgression. How far the Jews understood what in the light of the new dispensation is so clear—that this was a symbolic, not a real substitution; that the blood of bulls and goats could never really take away sins (Heb. 9 : 9 ; 10 : 4)—we cannot say. But it is certain that the fundamental idea of this ceremony for the Jews was substitution—a conception which tended at once to deepen the sense of sin and to promote the assurance of its forgiveness—a conception which, therefore, had both a great practical value for that time, and an important use in preparing the way for the better apprehension of that real penal and moral substitution which God at length accomplished for the penalty due to sin in the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ.

The development of these ideas would naturally occur in the order named—self-dedication, thanksgiving, atonement. In the order of importance, the series would be reversed. The biblical order of the sacrifices is the logical order. God’s first requirement of the worshipper is that he shall consecrate himself to His service. The offering is nothing in itself; it is of value only as it symbolizes and expresses this consecration. When, later, in the prophetic period, the people had lost the living sense of God by their disobedience, the prophets proclaimed, in burning words, the vanity of the ceremonies of sacrifice, when not accompanied by real devotion and obedience (Isa. 1 : 11-15 ; 66 : 3 ; Amos 5 : 21, 22 ; Micah 6 : 6-9). No offering was acceptable to God in which the reality did not lie behind the form. The people were dissuaded from bringing any offering, unless they brought with it “the sacrifices of God, . . . a broken and a contrite heart.” The whole spirit of the prophetic teaching, from Samuel onward, was that “to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams” (1 Sam. 15 : 22). When this primal condition of consecration and obedience is met, then naturally follow the offerings of thanksgiving and communion. Hence, in the meaning of the meal and peace offerings, which follow the burnt offering, we trace the next steps of that development of the religious life in which the heart is prepared for the deeper meanings and truths of the sin offering. Here we meet the problem of conscience: “How shall man be just with God?” The ideas underlying this offering touch the core of man’s moral and religious life, and lift his thoughts to the very nature and attributes of the holy God.

These truths which underlie the system of sacrifices are of the highest practical meaning and value for the moral and social life, and form a compact and consistent basis for religion. Man’s relation to God is the great theme of religion. Involved in this relation are the problems of the Divine nature, human sin and the reconciliation of man to God through some act of the Divine mercy, which shall, at the same time, vindicate and satisfy the demands of God’s holy law and nature. The sacrificial system, as developed in Israel under Divine training, gave important testimony on all these questions. It testified to the absolute holiness of God, and thus laid a firm foundation for the development of religious truth, and supplied the essential principle for the promotion of a deeply religious life. The measure of every religion is its estimate of the Divine holiness. No system can continually and healthfully promote even morality, whose corner-stone—the conception of the Divine holiness—is loose or shifting. The Levitical system was clear and emphatic on this fundamental question. Nor did it, when rightly apprehended in its real spirit, teach a conception of God’s holiness as a mere hard or naked justice. Its whole presupposition was that God was merciful. Had He not been merciful, He would not have invited and sanctioned the service of sacrifice, and assured the worshipper of His willingness to accept his offering. In the disclosure of God’s nature, so far as it is made in this earlier stage of revelation, “mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” His justice is absolute and inviolable, but it hinders not His mercy. It only conditions and directs it into such modes of revelation and operation as to secure the best good of all beings.

The sacrifices have also important testimony to bear concerning man. They affirm his sin and guilt. They confess his moral weakness and inability to climb up by efforts of his own into favor with the Holy God. The truth of human depravity—unversal and guilty—depends upon no text or group of texts, but is the underlying assumption of the whole Old Testament system and discipline. The sin which the law so clearly revealed and condemned, the sacrificial system, in its vivid symbolisms, held up in the perpetual remembrance of the people. The sacrifices were, therefore, a continual call to confession and penitence. They were the language of action in which Israel for centuries acknowledged her sins and pleaded for forgiveness. They assumed that salvation could come from God’s free grace alone. The sacrifices did not solve the problem of atonement, but they kept alive that vivid sense of sin and that keen perception of God’s holiness, whose reconciliation is the chief point of the problem. They therefore emphasized the need, and sharpened the desire for redemption, and thus became an expressive symbol and prophecy of the manifestation at once of Divine mercy and Divine justice, which God should at length make in the offering of the great High Priest, who, in the consummation of the ages, appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself (Heb. 10:26). G. B. Stevens.

24. If their worship was to be acceptable, it must be in accordance with God’s commands; there must be a renunciation of idolatry and implicit obedience. And justice and equity, what was due to man, so long disregarded and violated, must fill the land like a flood of waters. Like them judgment must roll, carrying all before it. And this was to be no sudden and transient reformation. The prophet uses two images: first, that of rolling water; then that of a stream, which is not only mighty, but constant; not a torrent or wady soon swollen and soon dried up, but a river flowing at all seasons, never failing.

25,26. The prophet is dwelling on the main charge brought against Israel—worshipping God in ways of their own devising. Had the people served Him with undivided heart, they would have adhered faithfully to the appointed ritual; they could not have supposed that any offerings, however numerous and costly, could be acceptable which were presented to idols, though in the name of the true God. And this was a sin not peculiar to the prophet’s times. It had shown itself from the very first. In the wilderness, soon after the wonderful deliverance from Egypt, and amid the most signal proofs of God’s power and love, the people indulged in idolatrous practices, while they professed to worship Jehovah in the way that He had appointed. The contemporaries of Amos were the true descendants of those who perished in the wilderness. They were one with them in principle, no less than in blood. Hence that generation is addressed in words which literally belong only to their ancestors. B. C.

27. The Jews were never thoroughly cured of their proclivities toward idols until their seventy years’ captivity. The captivity of the Ten Tribes practically destroyed their nationality, and sunk them into oblivion, so that it cannot be known whether they ever abandoned their idol worship. H. C.

Special Truths and Personal Lessons.

1. Both as respects nations and individuals prosperity is no sure sign of God’s present favor. It affords neither assurance of its own continuance, nor pledge of safety from coming evil. As it stimulates self-indulgence and so tempts to wrongful gains and vicious courses, it is the sharpest trial of character and the severest test of principle.

2. Here as elsewhere the Scriptures present the majesty and might of God as displayed in the universe as a legitimate ground for our reverence, obedience and worship. The framer and ruler of the earth and the worlds, the ordainer of the night and day and of the seasons, is the God in whom we live and move and have our being, the God whose favor it is our highest duty and privilege to seek.

3. All human possessions are worthless and all human defences powerless against the proposed judgments of God.

4. God sees and avenges the oppression of the poor and helpless. He abhors and punishes corruptness in public officers, deceit and falsehood in all private relations, wrong-doing toward every soul and all idolatrous service of self or the world.

5. The perversion of justice and the general corruption of a people are the sure intimations of a nation’s decay and the precursors of its destruction.

6. The gracious dealings of God with Israel are repeated with every nation to whom His special favors are extended in this Christian age. While He needs the cry of even a formally prostrate people and delivers in special emergency, He extends His constant favors to that nation in which His laws and worship are generally and habitually honored.

7. For specific personal application, how simple and effective is the injunction and promise thrice repeated: Seek ye Me, the Lord! and ye shall live! B.

Chap. 6. Woes on cities and their chief men who can be at ease in their great sins, and in the very face of fearful judgments from the Almighty; further specifications of their sins of luxury, intemperance and oppression; followed by announcements of yet more desolating judgments, fill up this chapter.

1. The word Zion embraces Jerusalem and her leading minds, as, on the other hand, Samaria carries us to the chief city of the northern kingdom. The people of Samaria trusted in the natural strength of their position—on the mountains. “Judah and Israel were renowned as chief among the nations” of Western Asia. In every age sinners who scorn the warnings of Jehovah, and would fain be at ease in Zion despite of them are near the point where judgments break forth and “there is no remedy!” H. C.

How many easy-going idlers and silent partners we have in the churches! Probably nine tenths of our members are engaged in no active Christian work. Where are the nine? Many of them would claim that they lead quiet and peaceful lives, do no harm and bring no dishonor upon the cause of Christ. But is this enough? Let us ring it out in their dull ears from God’s Word, that idleness is a sin! Let us arouse them from this stupor by shouting in their ears that many of the severest curses of God have fallen on persons for doing and saying nothing! E. P. Marvin.

Indolence is the worst enemy that the Church has to encounter. Men sleep around her altar. Life has no significance, eternity no awfulness, enjoyment no obligations, bereavement no solemnity, suffering no prophetic suggestions of an hereafter, holiness no enrapturing beauty, but they stretch on beds of ease and sleep amid the most stirring revelations of Providence. Where the Church lives and holds the truth of Christ, not as the mortuary of a buried benefactor, but as a present inspiration, it never will suffer its members to sit idly with folded hands, looking lazily out on white fields of harvest, where no reaper’s sickle rings against the wheat, but will send them forth to work with an impulse that no disappointment can palsy, no misgivings keep back. F. D. H.

The believer carries no worse enemy about him than spiritual sloth. This foe is so much the more subtle, as it does not make its attacks suddenly, but creeps upon him unawares; and the more dangerous, as it assaults both soul and body, and both soul and body are too ready to side with it against themselves. Other sins are, for the most part, either fleshly or spiritual; but spiritual sloth affects both body and mind; and whosoever gives way to it deprives himself of many blessings, which are promised to striving, diligent, circumspect souls. Hill.

Those who are lukewarm are neither earnest for God nor utterly indifferent to religion. They are perhaps best described as those who take an interest in religion, but whose worship of their idol of good taste or good form leads them to regard enthusiasm as ill-bred and disturbing, and who have never put themselves to any inconvenience, braved any reproach, or abandoned any comfort for Christ’s sake, but hoped to keep well with the world, while they flattered themselves that they stood well with God. W. B. Carpenter.

That is a weighty saying of Augustine: