deny ourselves, and be with the wild beasts in contemplation of, and in contest with, our bad passions and our sins. And in enforcing this teaching of the Church (as it is the duty of her ministers now to do) I will but say that, whatever we may judge Lenten retirement to consist in, it cannot be found in what we commonly understand by society; whatever we may hold of Lenten abstinence, it cannot, at any rate, be compatible with festivities and gaieties, or with public spectacles and entertainments. In the house of God we may seek a retreat from the crowd in which it is our lot to live. Here, morning and evening, we may daily ask, and, if we have faith, we shall daily receive food and sustenance from heaven. Here we may daily resort to a fountain that will never fail; for it is to His Church, her temples, and her ordinances, that the Lord God has given His sure promise, "All my fresh springs shall be in thee." Here God's winged messengers will feed us. Angels' food, the food which angels minister, and by which they themselves live, will be supplied us-even the power to do the will of God, as angels do it, and to complete the portion He assigns to us of His work, in the world, in the Church, and in our own souls. LECTURE II. ZAREPHATH. ST. LUKE, iv., 25, 26. I tell you of a truth, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land. But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. THE city of Sarepta is identified by modern travellers with a village called Surafend, which is "seated aloft on the top and side of one of the hills, the long line of which skirts the plain of Phonicia." * It was situated about midway between the then great commercial seaports of Tyre and Sidon; and, therefore, * Stanley, "Sinai and Palestine," p. 271. in the midst of a country in which the worship of Baal had its principal home at the period with which we are now concerned. Jezebel, the wife of Ahab, King of Israel, was the daughter of Ethbaal, a priest of Ashtoreth, who, by murder and usurpation, had obtained possession of what we may call the TyroSidonian kingdom. The worship of Ashtoreth was (as I need hardly tell you) a kindred worship to that of Baal; Baal being, in fact, the supreme male divinity, and Ashtoreth, or Astarte, the supreme female divinity of the same system. Had he had, therefore, to choose for himself whither he should flee, when the drying up of the Cherith drove him from the retreat in which we left him last Friday, Sarepta-or, as it is called in the Old Testament, Zarephath-is probably one of the last places which Elijah would have chosen; for it was a very different thing to dwell amongst a people utterly given over to idolatry and immorality, to what it was to discharge a mission of rebuke and warning to one whose religion was still only in process of corruption. In the latter case, there would be ground to work upon; in the former, none: so that a man like Elijah, though he might be safe in the centre of Phoenicia, because it would be the merest folly in him to oppose what was held and done there quite universally, and without the least misgiving in any quarter, would be exposed to the sore trial of eating his own heart in inaction and silence, when he had ten thousand times rather brave any amount of danger in witnessing for the Lord his God, against a nation in whose conscience there must still be vulnerable points, if only he could find and hit them. And if his faith in regard to provision for his temporal wants needed any trial, it might, perhaps, be found in the consi |