light of that everlasting day, of which it is written--that "the
city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for
the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof."

SERMON II. PREPARATION FOR ADVENT

Westminster Abbey. November 15, 1874.

Amos iv. 12. "Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel."

We read to-day, for the first lesson, parts of the prophecy of Amos.
They are somewhat difficult, here and there, to understand; but
nevertheless Amos is perhaps the grandest of the Hebrew prophets, next to
Isaiah. Rough and homely as his words are, there is a strength, a
majesty, and a terrible earnestness in them, which it is good to listen
to; and specially good now that Advent draws near, and we have to think
of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and what His coming means.
"Prepare to meet thy God," says Amos in the text. Perhaps he will tell
us how to meet our God.

Amos is specially the poor man's prophet, for he was a poor man himself;
not a courtier like Isaiah, or a priest like Jeremiah, or a sage like
Daniel; but a herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit in Tekoa, near
Bethlehem, where Amos was born. Yet to this poor man, looking after
sheep and cattle on the downs, and pondering on the wrongs and misery
around, the word of the Lord came, and he knew that God had spoken to
him, and that he must go and speak to men, at the risk of his life, what
God had bidden, against all the nations round and their kings, and
against the king and nobles and priests of Israel, and the king and
nobles and priests of Judah, and tell them that the day of the Lord is at
hand, and that they must prepare to meet their God. And he said what he
felt he must say with a noble freedom, with a true independence such as
the grace of God alone can give. Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, who was
worshipping (absurd as it may seem to us) God and the golden calf at the
same time in King Jeroboam's court, complained loudly, it would seem, of
Amos's plain speaking. How uncourteous to prophesy that Jeroboam should
die by the sword, and Israel be carried captive out of their own land!
Let him go home into his own land of Judah, and prophesy there; but not
prophesy at Bethel, for it was the king's chapel and the king's court.
Amos went, I presume, in fear of his life. But he left noble words
behind him. "I was no prophet," he said to Amaziah, "nor a prophet's
son, b