Page:From Egypt to Canaan.pdf/15

The divine history of Israel's freedom from Egyptian oppression, of their journeyings through the wilderness for forty years, and their settlement in Canaan, is the inspired record of regeneration. Hence, the pages of the Word of God have an interest far above that of any human composition. They form the Book of books. In their delineations, every soul may see its state pictured, its struggles described; their spirit speaks not of earthly interests, of temporal defeat or triumph, not even of the rise and decay of nations; but of the soul and its eternal concerns, of the movements of our own spiritual life, of those changes of state within, whose issues are to the good, unending peace; and to the evil, the wreck of every God-given faculty, perpetual blindness to truth, perpetual hatred to good, perpetual wrong, and therefore, perpetual misery. "Ye must be born again" is the grand lesson of the Divine Volume in all its parts. "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul."—Ps. xix. 7. "I will open my mouth in a parable, I will utter dark sayings of old," (Ps. LXXVIII. 2,) said the Psalmist, when he was inspired to declare the wonders of the God of heaven shewn to the fathers of Israel at the Nile and in the desert; and to say, "Marvellous things did he in the sight of their fathers in the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan. He divided the sea, and caused them to pass through, and he made the waters to stand as a heap. In the day-time also he led them with a cloud, and all the night with a light of fire. He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them drink as out of great depths. He brought streams also out of the rock, and caused waters to run down like

rivers."—12—16. Viewed thus, as bearing in its bosom spiritual,