to help us against the enemy in the way: because we had spoken unto
the king, saying, The hand of our God is upon them all for good that
seek Him.... 23. So we fasted and besought our God for this.... 31.
The hand of our God was upon us, and He delivered us from the hand of
the enemy, and of such as lay in wait by the way. 32. And we came to
Jerusalem.'--EZRA viii. 22, 23, 31, 32.


The memory of Ezra the scribe has scarcely had fairplay among
Bible-reading people. True, neither his character nor the incidents of
his life reach the height of interest or of grandeur belonging to the
earlier men and their times. He is no hero, or prophet; only a scribe;
and there is a certain narrowness as well as a prosaic turn about his
mind, and altogether one feels that he is a smaller man than the
Elijahs and Davids of the older days. But the homely garb of the
scribe covered a very brave devout heart, and the story of his life
deserves to be more familiar to us than it is.

This scrap from the account of his preparations for the march from
Babylon to Jerusalem gives us a glimpse of a high-toned faith, and a
noble strain of feeling. He and his company had a long weary journey
of four months before them. They had had little experience of arms and
warfare, or of hardships and desert marches, in their Babylonian
homes. Their caravan was made unwieldy and feeble by the presence of a
large proportion of women and children. They had much valuable
property with them. The stony desert, which stretches unbroken from
the Euphrates to the uplands on the east of Jordan, was infested then
as now by wild bands of marauders, who might easily swoop down on the
encumbered march of Ezra and his men, and make a clean sweep of all
which they had. And he knew that he had but to ask and have an escort