his overtures of love and mercy. We declare to you, that now he will adorn you with a robe of righteousness and the graces of his Spirit, which were but faintly shadowed forth by the raiment and the jewels that were given to Rebekah1. You shall be " all glorious within, and your raiment of wrought gold8." O let us not go away ashamed: let us not return and say, that those whom we have solicited, " refuse to come with us." This is the message which he has sent to every one of you : " Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline thine ear ; forget also thine own people and thy father's house ; so shall the King have pleasure in thy beauty1." May God of his mercy incline you to accept his invitation, and make you willing in the day of his power !]
r ver. 53. s Ps. xlv. 13. * Ps. xlv. 10, 11.
Gen. xxv. 23. The elder shall serve the younger.
THE common gifts of Providence are bestowed in such a regular and ordinary way, that the hand of God is scarcely seen or acknowledged in them. They are considered as resulting from a settled order of things, and are placed to the account of an imaginary cause, called Nature. But it pleases God sometimes to mark his dispensations in so plain a manner, that his agency cannot be overlooked. He withheld from Abraham the promised seed, till there was not the most remote hope of a child being born to him of his wife, Sarah, according to the common course of nature ; and thus evinced, beyond a possibility of doubt, that the child was a special and miraculous gift from him. In the same manner he kept Isaac also twenty years child- less; and then at last condescended to his repeated supplications, and granted him the desire of his heart. On that occasion God further manifested, that, as " children are a fruit and heritage that cometh of the Lord," so all that relates to them, even to the remotest period of time, is ordered by him. Rebekah, who had been twenty years barren, at last found in herself symptoms of a very extraordinary kind ; and