be traversed ere his pilgrimage should be completed, beheld afar off against the horizon the southern range of vine-clad Hebron, the land. of his father's house. Thither his heart however fickle and wandering still fondly turned; and now might he realize afresh that an unseen chain, held in an invisible Hand, had for ever linked in his history that fair and still distant abode with the low and lonely hill of Bethel.

"He found Him at Bethel; and there He

spake with us."* Thus does the prophet recall the memory of that day; and we have paused on this passage of Jacob's history, and at this third memorial-pillar of his life, because of the response wherewith the heart of man answereth even now to the heart of man then.

Thence the Lord "speaks with us." For in the command "Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there," we find a divine recognition, not only of the force of local association on the human mind, but, yet further, of its power in awakening to

* Hos. xi. 4.

retrospection and self-examination him who is of God.

It is at once curious and impressive to observe how such recognition has entered intowe should rather say has constituted a distinct feature in God's conduct of the world's administration. To trace out to its full extent the development of this principle would be to give the history of the Bible. In the call of the father of the faithful "unto a land that I will show thee" there was contained the dawning development of a plan, afterwards progressively revealed, whereby the religion of Jehovah was in its early dispensations to be made a territorial religion, gathering around one narrow tract of country the hopes, prefigurations, revelations, memories, and anticipations of the whole world. We need but touch on localised predictions to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, on the institution to the land of hereditary promise of a whole nation brought out from Egypt, on the allotments accordant with prophecy of the tribes, on the ordinance that three times a year the feasts should be kept at the place which the Lord should choose to put

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His name there," on the memorial stones and

altars which were to keep alive the traditions of historic sites, and on the minute fulfilments of lesser local predictions, to illustrate our meaning. When national deportation followed upon idolatry, the ingredient bitterer than any other in the cup of captivity was the remembrance of "thee, O Zion". And in the national return to the beloved "land of the fathers," and in the rebuildings by reverent hands upon consecrated sites, and in the strong local denunciations of those to whom the word of the Lord afterwards came, we find only the expansion of a principle which had in its. germ been revealed “ on the other side of the flood."

But it was later in the world's history that, by a sudden bursting of the close fetters of national restriction, the associations of a world were centred on Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Olivet,-sites enshrined throughout long centuries in the hearts of the sons of Abraham, and now constituted by the consecrating foot-step of one lonely Wanderer, a holy rood, sacred to all who should. believe in the Christ of Calvary.

Was Bethlehem Ephratah recorded as the birth-place of the royal Psalmist of old? From

henceforth it shall be said "This man, even He whose goings forth were from everlasting, was born there." Was the memory of Zion's temple immortally linked with the glories of Solomon? Behold, a greater than Solomon is here.

Was

Mount Olivet sacred to the sorrows of a dethroned monarch and to the weeping lament over a city that had rejected him? A sorrow like unto none other sorrow was witnessed by its sad shades, as the Son of David, beholding afterwards that same city, wept over its impending fate, and beside the brook Cedron bowed beneath the anguish of the world's curse. Did it witness the return of the monarch to his lawful crown and inheritance? Far more gloriously does it stand out as the little portion of earth's pathway trodden by the risen Lord on His return to the kingdom of the Father, when the everlasting doors were lifted up that the King of Glory might come in.

Would we see once more the intensity of that local association which concentrates its yearnings upon the beloved stones of Zion? We need but turn to the Place of Wailing, where, year by year, the weeping Jew pours forth, as upon a conscious object, the bitter tears with which he

anoints the ancient stones of the Temple :-" Be not wroth very sore, O Lord, neither remember iniquity for ever: behold, see, we beseech thee, we are all thy people. Thy holy cities are a wilderness, Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and our beautiful house where our fathers praised thee is burned up with fire and all our pleasant things are laid waste!"

Again, how do the earnest expectations of the sons of God still turn, by divinely revealed indication, to the land of Abraham ? For when he cometh who shall come, "his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives;" and the redeemed of the Lord shall come with singing unto Zion; and the Lord shall reign at Zion and before His ancients gloriously; and around Zion and Jerusalem cluster those galaxies of prophecy which even now lighten our darkness, and as beacon lamps show forth a future restitution for the earth whereof the foundations are now so utterly out of course.

And if God has willed it that this force of association should hold so firm a place in the breast of man, equally do we recognise in His revealed