suffering and distress; it was an angry complaining cry; it was the cry
of those who felt that others were to blame for their sorrows.

As Nehemiah walks amongst the weeping crowds, and as he talks to the
people one by one, he finds that there are no less than three sets of
complainants.

(1) There are the utterly poor people, those who have no private means
whatever, but who are entirely dependent on the work of their hands and
on the wages they get for that work. These come to Nehemiah and pour out
their sorrowful tale. 'We,' they say, 'have large families, for

'We, our sons, and our daughters, are many.'

But 'Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them,' so runs the
Psalm, and are not children a heritage and gift that cometh of the Lord?
Yet when the quiver is _more_ than full (for a quiver only held four
arrows), and when bread is scarce and work bad, it needs faith to trust
the children which the Lord has given to His care, and to feel sure that
He who sent them will send the bread to feed them.

'Now,' say these overburdened parents to Nehemiah, 'we cannot let our
children starve. We have been building this wall and earning nothing,
but we have had to eat all these weeks; we have been obliged to take up
corn for our families lest they should die, and the consequence is we
have run very heavily into debt' (ver. 2). That was the first class of
complainants.

(2) But amongst the weepers Nehemiah found a second class, those who had
once been somewhat better off, and had, in happier days, owned a little