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Eventide at Bethel; Or, the Night-Dream of the Desert, an Old Testament Chapter (gen. Xxviii) in Providence and Grace
Eventide at Bethel Or the Night-Dream of the Desert an Old Testament Chapter in Providence and Grace - gen. Xxviii Author:John Ross MacDuff General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1878 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: OUTSET FEOM HOME. The world in many of its outward phases haa undergone important alterations since the era of the Pilgrim Fathers of Canaan. Its infancy has been merged in the maturity of age. And yet the heart that beat under a Beersheba tent, or under the nightly sky of Palestine, is identical in all the " unchanged humanities " which pulse and throb to this hour under a British roof-tree in the nineteenth century. With little variations there are the same struggles of inexperienced youth, the same stern conflicts of ripened manhood. Looking, too, to the Divine side, we have to note a similar continuity of spiritual influence. The moral forces which arrested and controlled the patriarch in his flight to Haran have their repetition now. That dream was the rehearsal of Divine revelations to the individual soul ever since. Many a heart, during the intervening three thousand six hundred years, has become a Bethel, many a dwelling, the pathway of angels. Outset from Home ! How much is implied in the brief words which head this chapter! Few there are, regarding either themselves or others, in whom they do not awaken mingled recollections; all the more so, if, corresponding with the case of Jacob, it be the first blank in the tent -- the first break in the magic household-circle -- the first vacant chair by the fireside. At the inexorable calls of life, the cherished nest sooner or later must be broken up. Not a day passes but there are thousands of such departures -- the scene in the desert and pasture- lauds of southern Judah repeated amid the green lanes and smiling fields of modern England -- the re...« less