found themselves a handful of weak colonists under the dominion of foreigners, and returning to the land of their fathers solely by their permission.  All this was extremely humiliating to their worldly pride, and a bitter disappointment of their worldly hopes.  Hence they had fallen into a desponding and complaining state of mind.  While rendering to God a service that was not cheerful but grudging, complaining of its wearisomeness, withholding the tithes required by the law of Moses, and offering in sacrifice the lame and the blind, they yet complained that he did not notice and requite these heartless services, and talked as if he favored the proud and wicked.  “Ye have said, It is vain to serve God:  and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and walked mournfully before him?  And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered” (3:14, 15).  To these sins they had added that of putting away their Hebrew wives, that they might marry foreign women (2:10-16).  All these circumstances point to the administration of Nehemiah, probably the latter part of it; for after his visit to Babylon in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes (Neh. 13:6), he found upon his return, and has described in the last chapter of his book precisely the same state of affairs.  Malachi is thus the last of all the prophets.

24.  He opens his prophecies by reminding the people of God’s great and distinguishing love towards them and their fathers, which they were so slow to acknowledge.  He then reproves them sharply for the sins above referred to, and forewarns them that the Lord, of whose delay they complain, will suddenly come to his temple to sit in judgment there—­an advent which they will not be able to endure; for it will consume the wicked root and branch, while it brings salvation to the righteous (3:1-5; 4:1-3).  In view of the fact that the revelations of the Old Testament are now closing, he admonishes the people to remember the law of Moses, and closes with a promise of the mission of “Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord” (4:5, 6).  This promise, with that contained in chap. 3:1, is repeatedly referred to in the New Testament, and applied to the coming of John the Baptist as our Lord’s forerunner.  The opening words of the prophecy, chap. 1:2, are quoted by the apostle Paul (Rom. 9:13).

APPENDIX.

THE APOCRYPHAL BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

1.  The Greek word Apocrypha, hidden, that is, hidden or secret books, was early applied by the fathers of the Christian church to anonymous or spurious books that falsely laid claim to be a part of the inspired word.  By some, as Jerome, the term was extended to all the books incorporated by the Alexandrine Jews, in their Greek version, into the proper canon of the Old Testament, a few of which