are in circumstances of necessity, he will take care of us, and make provision for us. Let us wait on him in earnest prayer for this very thing; for as we listen to the purling of Cherith's brook, and see the heavy flight of the raven across the valley with its supply for the prophet, we seem to hear again the words of ancient promise: "The Lord will provide." "Thy bread shall be given thee, and thy water shall be sure." "Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed." "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." For the prophet, leaning upon God, was not put to shame. Jehovah stood to his word, and "the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening, and he drank of the brook." Every thing was as God had told him. "Hath he said it, and shall he not do it? hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?" "He is faithful who hath promised." But "the Lord God of Elijah" liveth yet, and is as faithful to his word as he ever was. He will keep his promises in regard to spiritual matters; and when his people are in a land of drought and famine, then, in his own Son, he gives them bread and flesh to eat, and in his Word there is a perennial fountain from which they may always drink. But we must not forget that he is faithful also to his promises as to temporal things. We are apt, indeed, to think that food and raiment, and other such material blessings, are too secular and small to trouble him with, and so we all too seldom tell him about our temporal difficulties. That is a great mistake. He wishes us to be without anxiety. He encourages us to go to him with every care, and he assures us that either he will remove the cause of our perplexity, or strengthen us under it, to glorify his name. More frequently than we wot of does he supply his people's wants, even yet in ways apparently as extraordinary as that by which he pro The good vided for Elijah. Let me tell you of one or two. Krummacher, in commenting on this very passage, relates the following incident, as one well known to all his hearers:* "Who else was it," says he, "but the God of Elijah, who, only a short time ago, in our neighborhood, so kindly delivered a poor man out of his distress, not, indeed, by a raven, but by a poor singing-bird. You are acquainted with the circumstance. The man was sitting, early in the morning, at his own house-door; his eyes were red with weeping, and his heart cried to heaven, for he was expecting an officer to come and distrain him for a small debt. And while sitting thus with a heavy heart, a little bird flew through the street, fluttering up and down, as if in distress, until at length, quick as an arrow, it darted over the good man's head into his cottage, and perched itself on an empty cupboard. The good man, who little imagined who had sent him the bird, closed the door, caught the bird, and placed it in a cage, where it immediately began to sing very sweetly; and it seemed to the man as if it were the tune of a favorite hymn, 'Fear thou not when darkness reigns;' and as he listened to it, he found it soothe and comfort his mind. Suddenly some one knocked at the door. 'Ah! it is the officer,' thought the man, and was sore afraid. But no; it was the servant of a respectable lady, who said that the neighbors had seen a bird fly into his house, and she wished to know if he had caught it. 'Oh yes!' answered the man, and here it is;' and the bird was carried away. A few minutes after the servant came again. 'You have done my mistress a great service,' said he. 'She sets a high value upon the bird, which had escaped from her. She is much obliged to you, and requests you to accept this trifle, with her thanks.' The poor man received it thankfully, and it proved to be neither * Krummacher's "Elijah the Tishbite," on this passage. more nor less than the sum he owed. So, when the officer came, he said, 'Here is the amount of the debt. Now leave me in peace, for God has sent it me.'" Take this other, which is intimately associated with the history of a beautiful German hymn: About two years after the close of the Thirty Years' War in Germany, George Neumarck lived in a poor street in Hamburg. Obtaining a precarious livelihood by playing on the violoncello, after a while he fell sick, and was unable to go his usual rounds. As this was his only means of support, he was soon reduced to great straits, and was compelled to part with his instrument to a Jew, who, with characteristic sharpness, lent him on it a sum much below its value for two weeks, after which, if it were not redeemed, it was to be forfeited. As he gave it up, he looked lovingly at it, and tearfully asked the Jew if he might play one more tune upon it. "You don't know," he said, "how hard it is to part with it. For ten years it has been my companion; f I had nothing else, I had it; and it spoke to me, and sung back to me. Of all the sad hearts that have left your door, there has been none so sad as mine." His voice grew thick; then, pausing for a moment, he seized the instrument and commenced a tune so exquisitely soft that even the Jew listened, in spite of himself. A few more strains, and he sung, to his own melody, two stanzas of his own hymn, “Life is weary; Saviour, take me." Suddenly the key changed; a few bars, and the melody poured forth itself anew, and his face lighted up with a smile as he sung, "Yet who knows the cross is precious." Then, laying down the instrument, he said, "As God will, I am still," and rushed from the shop. Going out into the darkness, he stumbled against a stranger, who seemed to have been listening at the door, and who said to him, "Could you tell me where I could obtain a copy of that song? I would willingly give a florin for it." "My good friend," said Neumarck, "I will give it you without the florin." The stranger was valet to the Swedish embassador, and to him the poet told the story of his trials. He, in his turn, told his master, who, being in want of a private secretary, engaged Neumarck at once, and so his troubles ended. But with his first money he redeemed his instrument, and, on obtaining it, he called his landlady and his friends and neighbors, to hear him play on it again. Soon his room was filled, and he sung, to his own accompaniment, his own sweet hymn, of which this is one stanza: "Leave God to order all thy ways, And hope in him, whate'er betide; Thine all-sufficient strength and guide. Builds on the rock that naught can move."* But what need I more? If it were lawful for me to bring out narratives which I have received in confidence from some whom I have visited in their distress, I could unfold illustrations, equally striking, of the great truth that God careth even for his people's temporal wants. So let our parting word for this evening be, "Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed." * See "Lives and Deeds Worth Knowing About," by Rev. W. F. Stevenson, p. 132; also "Evenings with the Sacred Poets," by Frederick Saunders, pp. 177-179. H III. THE BARREL AND THE CRUSE. I KINGS xvii., 7-16. OW long Elijah dwelt in the valley of the Cherith we are not precisely informed; for the phrase "after a while," even if we adopt the more literal rendering in the margin," at the end of days," is quite indefinite, and furnishes no data on which we can found any opinion. We may, perhaps, conjecture that he remained in his retreat for a period not shorter than four or five months, and not longer than a year; and in any case, during the later portion of his sojourn, his faith must have been put to a very severe test, "for the brook began to fail." Each day, therefore, he would mark that the waters had receded, and laid bare another portion. of the shingly channel over which they flowed, until at length he might require to make little artificial pools, into which, after a time, a proper supply might percolate. In such circumstances, if his faith had not been securely fixed in God, his heart might have failed just as the brook declined; and even with his strong confidence in Jehovah, the receding rivulet must have had a saddening influence upon his spirit. Sight does and must affect us more or less, so long as we are in the body, and sight here must have done much to depress Elijah. He was like one immured in that terrible dungeon which the cruelty of the Inquisition devised, and which gradually, day by day, narrowed in upon its victim, crushing him at last in its fatal embrace. He was like the man whom |