"the Lord who will provide" and order all things; and therefore it may be, doth God, in this place of Job and elsewhere, speak in such detail and so vividly, shewing that not only the ends but the means, not only the victory but the strength, not the power to persuade, but the eloquent speech, and the understanding of the experienced, are His, that He giveth or withholdeth, turneth them to foolishness or taketh them away, as He will. Not the great results only, (as men call great,) but the smallest, most insignificant means, every step of the countless multitudes who march along the high-way of God's Providence, is ordered by Him, so that they should "march" every one on his ways, and not break their ranks, neither one thrust another, but walk every one in his path." And hence God's saints so often in holy Scripture confess, that all their power and wisdom and might cometh from Him, not in general terms only, but in particulars, that He" girdeth" them with strength," giveth swiftness to their feet", "maketh them wiser than the aged","" teacheth their hands to war";" for this faith in God's aid and presence in details, is the life of all belief in His general Providence, and without this, that more general belief is little better than an empty abstraction.

But if the history of God's dealings with the Jewish Church is a key to His governance of 。 Ver. 33. P Ibid.

In Joel ii. 7, 8. cxix. 100.

"Ps. xviii. 33. Ibid. xviii. 34.

that His larger family, who had "gone away into a far country'," to follow their own desires uncontrolled, much more is it to the governance of the Christian Church. For here we have not only the general correspondence of God's sovereignty, whereby the creatures of God's hands must either willingly, or against their will, be under His rule, must bear the sceptre or the rod of iron, and carry on His ends in their preservation or destruction, by their obedience or their perverseness, but we have the happier lot of being His family, the kingdom which He has chosen out of all nations to dwell in them. The Theocracy is continued, only invisibly. As God dwelt before by the Shechinah in the temple, so now the universal Christian Church is one temple, wherein it pleaseth Him to dwell, not now for a time-but" the Lord will abide in it for ever," by virtue of His own promise," Lo! I am with you alway, even to the end of the world."

We must not think of the law or its blessings as passed away; our Lord forbids it; what does not yet remain is fulfilled, i. e. filled up and realized, as an outline by the substance; the moral law remains; the ritual and the political had their fulfilment in Christ and His Church; the particular Providence of the Jewish people continues on in the Christian Church; only in the Christian higher far and more enduring, as the spiritual is higher than the civil Government, the relation of

Luke xv. 15.

sons than that of servants, Heaven than Canaan. "The whole kingdom of the Hebrew nation," says S.Augustine'," was one great prophet, because it prophesies of one Great One. In the actions as well as the words of their holy men must we look for prophecies of Christ and His Church; but for the rest of the nation, collectively in God's dealings with them. For all these things (as the Apostle says) were our ensamples,"" i. e. types and images of us. From the mutual connection of the Head and His members, the Jewish people, wherein they image forth our Lord, reflect also His Body, the Church, as well as in their more direct resemblance; nor is it in their waywardness, or their rebellions, or their turning back to Egypt only, that they shadow out individuals, but in God's dealings with them, they picture His dealings with His Church, which He formed into one in Christ out of them and of the Gentiles.

God's dealings with them, then, not only give instruction, (as any knowledge of God must,) but are a prophecy; peculiar situations of the Jewish people are prophetic warnings or encouragements; and it may be that a very minute correspondence will be found between the histories of the Jewish and Christian Church. At all events, we ought to look to striking occasions, where God's dealings were more visibly manifested, as grounds whereon to build our conduct and our hopes. The passage

* c. Faust. 1. xxii. c. 24.

of the Red sea, to which the text refers, was one of those occasions; its typical relation to the Christian Church, S. Paul has authoritatively declared; and S. Matthew that of the Exodus, which it completed, to our Lord's call out of Egypt; the Song of Moses, wherein he praised God for His mercies therein, itself looked on and furnished the form and language of other prophecy; and its use in the Universal Church, as a hymn of praise, shews them to have recognized its continued Christian meaning and application.

At the very verge of that deliverance, thus solemnly commemorated in the Jewish and Christian Church, when the whole early people of God seemed to be in a great strait, entangled in the land, and shut in by the wilderness, the sea before them, and behind them "all the horses and chariots of Pharaoh, and his horsemen, and his army," Moses uttered the prophetic words, "Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord." The peril was at its height, the Church seemed on the very brink of destruction, Egypt, the emblem of Antichrist, was ready to destroy, and there was no way left, when God" made the depths of the sea a way for His people, that the ransomed of the Lord might pass over."

These words, which to fleshly Israel must have seemed so strange, and which to weak faith echo so strangely still, contain two parts, a duty and a

Isaiah li. 10.

blessing. They are not mere words of encouragement; they impose a duty, and annex a blessing to its fulfilment. "Quietness and confidence" were to be" their strength." They were to "stand still," and so should they see the "salvation of God." And this condition of blessing runs continually through the whole history of the Jewish and Christian Church. As, namely, the first sin of man was trust in self and mistrust in God, so the correction has continually been, mistrust in self and trust in God. When God has tried His chosen servants or His chosen people, the most frequent trial perhaps has been this, whether they would tarry the Lord's leisure, be content to receive God's gift in God's way, take, at least, no wrong measures for obtaining it, hasten not, turn not to the right hand or the left; but "stand still," and "see the salvation of their God." They who have stood this trial have been eminent saints, the jewels of the Lord; they who have failed in this, have been like vessels, destined for some high use, but through this one flaw, marred in the fire which was to prove and form them. Even when unlawful means have not been used, yet the employment of any means, until God gave the means into the hand, were followed by pain and grief. Thus Abram and Sarai waited ten years for the promise, and then Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai, and Ishmael was born; Ishmael too had a blessing for Abraham's willing faith, who resigned him, and his own hopes in him,