PARTING.

nant.

T stood east of Jordan, on the breezy heights of Gilead, the memorial of a family parting and of a farewell-coveOnce more we read that "Jacob took a stone and set it up for a pillar." He had done so before at Bethel; now twenty years have passed away, and he is at Mizpah.

As previously intimated, our design does not lead us to dwell on Israel's history further than to discern therein a shewing forth of our own. Chapters in life are even now most frequently marked by partings; and a long chapter in his life lay between Bethel and Mizpah. It had been a chequered story. Love and disappointment, hardship and success, trials and prosperity had been closely interwoven in that twenty years experience. But the hour of separation had come,

and the remembrances of wrongs and slights seem to have been swallowed up in the realization that another sunset would behold a family severed, and that converse was now held between him and his brethren for the last time. Thoughts of the close ties which united him to those from whom he was bearing off daughters and sisters, seem to have been more present to his mind than memories of wrong and injustice. Thoughts of separation appear in that hour to have softened down feelings of resentment for past injuries. Such feelings had prompted him to fly from Haran* lest his homeward journey should be impeded. Now a covenant tie was to unite him with those from whom he was preparing to part for ever; and he raised once more a memorial pillar, and his brethren placed stones around it, and the watch-tower was consecrated with sacrifice and with eating of bread and with farewell words :—

* Although any detailed geographical notice would be foreign to our purpose, it is impossible to avoid drawing passing attention to the recent identification of the Haran of Abram's and Jacob's histories with the town still bearing that name situated fourteen miles east of Damascus. Dr. Beke's arguments to this effect are, we think, conclusive.

"The Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent the one from the other."

"And early in the morning Laban rose up, and kissed his sons and his daughters, and blessed them and Laban departed and returned unto

his place."

A watch-tower to witness on the lonely height that, however firm the hill-rampart, however great the distance which should separate between them, one Eye looked forth on the Syrian among his sheep-folds at Haran, and on the Patriarch encamping once more within the boundaries of his fathers' land. A watch-tower which, pointing heaven-ward, would for ever appeal to Him before whom the parting covenant was ratified, and be a testimony to future generations that upon that mount the God of Abraham had been invoked to consecrate the hour of separation, and to hold in His eternal keeping the severed threads of life-histories, one no longer.

A watch-tower, to stand there in its silent isolation, while men should live and die under the shadow of the hills. Beneath the hot suns of those fervent skies, amid the whirlwinds of the

winter storms, sheltering for their brief life of thanksgiving the summer flowers springing up "where no man is" to illuminate the page of history engraven on the stones of Mizpah,firmly and unshaken it would stand, the enduring memorial of an indelible farewell.

Few there are of those who have allowed themselves time to love, but have, treasured away in a hidden yet often visited chamber of memory, the vision of some spot for them as indelibly and for ever stamped as the place of parting. And while not a few farewell remembrances throng to the recollection in considering this subject, it will be found that in many, we might, perhaps, say in most histories, one such scene stands out as emphatically the parting of one's life-the Mizpah where the heart's memorial pillar has been raised with the inscription engraven thereon, "The Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent the one from the other."

For as in the life of the Patriarch of old, so with us also, the heart's deeper associations intertwine not around the monuments of pros