With some olive branches from Olivet, and some flowers from the mansion house of Lazarus in our hands, we returned by a winding way around the south of Mount Olivet, till we came to the brook Cedron, where it enters the valley of Jehoshaphat. This valley seems like a frightful chasm in the earth, and when you stand in it, and see Mount Zion and Moriah towering above it with steep hills and precipices, on your right hand and left, you can easily feel the force of those sublime passages in the prophet Joel, in which the heathen are represented, as being gathered together to be judged.The prophet seems to represent the Almighty as sitting in his holy temple, or on the summit of Zion to judge the multitudes in the valley beneath him; and there executing his judgements, while the sun and moon are darkened and the stars withdraw their shining, and Jehovah roars out of Zion, and utters his voice from Jerusalem, and the heavens and the earth shake; and it is thus made manifest to the confusion of idolaters, and to the joy of the true Israel that God dwells in Zion, his holy mountain, and is the hope of his people, and the strength of his children of Israel.

PASSAGE OF THE RED SEA.

THE miracles of the first dispensation of Christianity were called for by the stupidity of mankind. The systematic course of nature lulls the mind to sleep, and the

being who is hourly conversant with wonders quite astonishing as any miracle could be, accustomed to the frequency and regularity of their recurrence, learns to regard them as the necessary order of events-and, therefore, not surprising. On this rock Infidelity has made desolate shipwrecks. The Infidel has disbelieved the bible account of miracles, simply because the laws of nature were abrogated by such occurrences; when, in fact, to the eye of the reflecting philosopher, the uniform course of nature, according, day after day as well as century after century, with known principles of being and motion, is a standing miracle, transcendently more incomprehensible than any occasional and startling deviation. But all mankind were not philosophers and became insensible to the hourly mysteries of nature and of their own being-and their Father in heaven, for great moral purposes, ordered, from time to time, certain innovations to rouse them to a perception of a present deity.

The miraculous cleaving of the Red Sea, its walls of waters on either hand of the dry passage like ramparts, and their ruinous junction, after the chosen people had passed through, afford a picture of sublimity unequalled on the canvass that heaves with the grandest scenes of time; yet no single miracle on record has been so obstinately ascribed to natural causes as this. The truth of the passage of a fugitive nation safely over this sea, and the destruction of their followers stands on a basis broader than that of the Pyramids.

The site of this event has been pointed out from the

day of its occurrence to the present-and, in Napoleon's expedition to the Nile, in the early period of his military career, as Lockhart relates, it was near being the scene of another catastrophe that might have had an important influence on the destinies of the world. Towards evening, Napoleon and his suite rode into the shallow waters of the Red Sea at the reputed spot of Pharoah's overthrow, desirous of ascertaining to what extent they were fordable to their horses. Darkness was gathering, when suddenly the tides, there extremely rapid, were upon them, and the horses found themselves beyond their depth. The point of compass was lost, the shore was not visible, and a council of war was instantly called to decide on measures for escape. Napoleon, by one of those decisions of mind so frequently useful to him in the future emergencies of his eventful life, ordered a circle to be formed and each horseman to ride from it as a radius from a centre, stopping when the depth of water prevented further progress. The next movement was for all to follow the horseman that rode on the farthest, showing the longest path of shoal water-and this was Napoleon's path from the grave of one of the Pharoahs.

The story of this catastrophe of Pharoah is not destitute of deep moral instruction. The unyielding character of man, when roused up to take decisive positions, is well illustrated in the entire history of the Egyptian plagues. The nature of the greater part of these calamities was such as would scarcely permit them to be referred to natural causes. They had all been threatened as warnings to the proud king to favor the oppressed people of

the Lord; these warnings were unheeded, and the judgments came. Every time the impious monarch arrayed himself against his Maker, he had failed. He had seen the prophet raise in his hand the rod which he had turned into a serpent, and smite the waters—the waters turned into blood; he had seen frogs cover the land, and invade his bed chambers; he had seen the dust of the earth become a loathsome animation ; he had seen the air burdened with flies; he had seen the cattle of his plains afflicted; he had seen his people affected with a disease in common with every living thing; he had seen the atmosphere gather blackness, and when the appalling thunder broke in the gloom, hail mingled with fierce flames smote upon the vales of Egypt; he had seen locusts in countless millions swarm on his coasts, and leave no green thing behind them; he had seen and felt the Stygian darkness that lay like a dreadful incubus over all his land—a blackness alike impervious to the sun's bright ray, or the glare of earthly fires; he had heard the melancholy midnight cry arise from one extremity of his realm to the other as the angel of death struck the pitiless blow on every first born-and yet, even then, he barely consents to let this people go.

Ten times warned and punished, who would have thought that the plains of Egypt would have gleamed far and wide with martial array, and that vengeance should have put on its cruel trappings to sweep from the earth a long afflicted, enslaved people! The circumstances of the chosen people, the gathering wrath of their pursuers

the Red Sea with its multitudinous waves before, and

the rough waves of plumes, of spears, and chariots and archers behind, and the passage through the parted billows, are well described in an unfinished poem of the late elegant and pious Bishop Heber of India. The following is a brief extract:

Friend of the poor! the poor and friendless save--
Giver and Lord of freedom! help the slave.
North, south, and west, the sandy whirlwinds fly,
The circling pale of Egypt's chivalry,

On earth's last margin throng the weeping train,
Their cloudy guide moves on-and must we swim the main ?
Mid the light spray their snorting camels stood,

Nor bath'd a fetlock in the nauseous flood.

He comes-their leader comes-the man of God,
O'er the wide waters lifts his mighty rod,
And onward treads; the circling waves retreat,
In hoarse, deed murmurs, from his holy feet;
And the chafed surges, only roaring show,
The hard wet sand, and coral hills below,

With limbs that falter, and with hearts that swell,
Down, down they pass, a steep and slippery dell :
Round them arise, in pristine chaos hurl'd,
The ancient rocks, the secrets of the world;
And flowers that blush beneath the ocean green;
And caves, the sca-calf's low roofed haunts are seen.
Down, safely down the narrow pass they tread,
The seething waters storm above their head;
While far behind retires the sinking day,
And fades on Edom's hills its latest ray.
Yet not from Israel fled the friendly light,

Or dark to them, or cheerless came the night;

Still in the van along that dreadful road,

Blazed broad and fierce the brandished torch of God;

Its meteor glare a tenfold lustre gave

On the long mirror of the rosy wave.