urgency,—­is God’s Word to be pealed in men’s ears.  The preacher is a crier.  The substance of his message, too, is set forth.  ’The preaching which I bid thee’—­not his own imaginations, nor any fine things of his own spinning.  Suppose Jonah had entertained the Ninevites with dissertations on the evidences of his prophetic authority, or submitted for their consideration a few thoughts tending to show the agreement of his message with their current opinions in religion, or an argument for the existence of a retributive Governor of the world, he would not have shaken the city.  The less the Prophet shows himself, the stronger his influence.  The more simply he repeats the stern, plain, short message, the more likely it is to impress.  God’s Word, faithfully set forth, will prove itself.  The preacher or teacher of this day has substantially the same charge as Jonah had; and the more he suppresses himself, and becomes but a voice through which God speaks, the better for himself, his hearers, and his work.

Nineveh, that great aggregate of cities, was full, as Eastern cities are, of open spaces, and might well be a three days’ journey in circumference.  What a task for that solitary stranger to thunder out his loud cry among all these crowds!  But he had learned to do what he was bid; and without wasting a moment, he ’began to enter into the city a day’s journey,’ and, no doubt, did not wait till the end of the day to proclaim his message.  Let us learn that there is an element of threatening in God’s most merciful message, and that the appeal to terror and to the desire for self-preservation is part of the way to preach the Gospel.  Plain warnings of coming evil may be spoken tenderly, and reveal love as truly as the most soothing words.  The warning comes in time.  ‘Forty days’ of grace are granted.  The gospel warns us in time enough for escape.  It warns us because God loves; and they are as untrue messengers of His love as of His justice who slur over the declaration of His wrath.

II.  Note the repentance of Nineveh (vs. 5-9).  The impression made by Jonah’s terrible cry is perfectly credible and natural in the excitable population of an Eastern city, in which even now any appeal to terror, especially if associated with religious and prophetic claims, easily sets the whole in a frenzy.  Think of the grim figure of this foreign man, with his piercing voice and half-intelligible speech, dropped from the clouds as it were, and stalking through Nineveh, pealing out his confident message, like that gaunt fanatic who walked Jerusalem in its last agony, crying, ‘Woe! woe unto the bloody city!’ or that other, who, with flaming fire on his head and madness in his eyes, affrighted London in the plague.  No wonder that alarm was kindled, and, being kindled, spread like wildfire.  Apparently the movement was first among the people, who began to fast before the news penetrated to the seclusion of the palace.  But the contagion reached the king, and the popular excitement was endorsed and fanned by a royal decree.  The specified tokens of repentance are those of ordinary mourning, such as were common all over the East, with only the strange addition, which smacks of heathen ideas, that the animals were made sharers in them.