in the kingdom, and, when the Medo-Persian conquest came, the new monarch naturally found in him, as a foreigner, a more reliable minister than in native officials.  ’Envy doth merit as its shade pursue,’ and the crafty trick by which his subordinates tried to procure his fall, was their answer to Darius’s scheme of making him prime minister.  Our passage begins in the middle of the story, but the earlier part will come into consideration in the course of our remarks.

I. We note, first, the steadfast, silent confessor and the weak king.  Darius is a great deal more conspicuous in the narrative than Daniel.  The victim of injustice is silent.  He does not seem to have been called on to deny or defend the indictment.  His deed was patent, and the breach of the law flagrant.  He, too, was ‘like a sheep before the shearers,’ dumb.  His silence meant, among other things, a quiet, patient, fixed resolve to bear all, and not to deny his God.  Weak men bluster.  Heroic endurance has generally little to say.  Without resistance, or a word, the old man, an hour ago the foremost in the realm, is hauled off and flung into the pit or den.  It is useless and needless to ask its form.  The entrance was sealed with two seals, one the king’s, one the conspirators’, that neither party might steal a march on the other.  Fellows in iniquity do not trust each other.  So, down in the dark there, with the glittering eyeballs of the brutes round him, and their growls in his ears, the old man sits all night long, with peace in his heart, and looking up trustfully, through the hole in the roof, to his Protector’s stars, shining their silent message of cheer.

The passage dwells on the pitiable weakness and consequent unrest of the king.  He had not yielded Daniel to his fate without a struggle, which the previous narrative describes in strong language.  ‘Sore displeased,’ he ‘set his heart’ on delivering him, and ‘laboured’ to do so.  The curious obstacle, limiting even his power, is a rare specimen of conservatism in its purest form.  So wise were our ancestors, that nothing of theirs shall ever be touched.  Infallible legislators can make immutable laws; the rest of us must be content to learn by blundering, and to grow by changing.  The man who says, ‘I never alter my opinions,’ condemns himself as either too foolish or too proud to learn.

But probably, if the question had been about a law that was inconvenient to Darius himself, or to these advocates of the constitution as it has always been, some way of getting round it would have been found out.  If the king had been bold enough to assert himself, he could have walked through the cobweb.  But this is one of the miseries of yielding to evil counsels, that one step taken calls for another.  ’In for a penny, in for a pound.’  Therefore let us all take heed of small compliances, and be sure that we can never say about any doubtful course, ’Thus far will I go, and no farther.’  Darius was his servants’ servant when once he had put his name to the arrogant decree.  He did not know the incidence of his act, and we do not know that of ours; therefore let us take heed of the quality of actions and motives, since we are wholly incapable of estimating the sweep of their consequences.