will and counsel had determined before to be done1:" and, though " they neither meant nor thought so," they were his agents, to accomplish what was necessary for the redemption of the world. Men and devils may have prepared a furnace for you : but it is God who puts you into it, to purify you from your dross, and to " bring you forth as vessels meet for the Master's use." True, he will punish those agents ; as he did Balaam, who was slain amongst the enemies of God : but you " he will make perfect through sufferings," and recom- pense in proportion to all that you have endured for him.]
* Acts iv. 28.
Deut. xxiv. 19 — 22. When thou cuttest doivn thine harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it : it shall be for the stranger, for the
fatherless , and for the tvidow : that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hands. When thou beatest thine olive-tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow. When thou gatherest the grapes of thy vineyard, thou shalt not glean it afterward: it shall be for the stranger, for the
fatherless, and for the widow. And thou shalt remember, that thou tvast a bondman in the land of Egypt: therefore I command thee to do this thing3:
IT is surprising to see to what minute things Jehovah condescends in his legislation to the Jews. In no other community under heaven were such things accounted worthy of distinct and authoritative enactments. People must not yoke together in a plough an ox and an ass. They must not seethe a kid in its mother's milk. In taking a bird's nest, they must not take the dam with her young. But " God, their great Lawgiver, is love :" and all his laws breathed love, not to men only, but to the whole creation : and by them he has shewn, that he desired all his people to live under the influence of this divine prin- ciple ; and, in the smallest matters no less than in
a If this be a Chanty Sermon, the triple repetition of " the Stranger, the Fatherless, and the Widow," must, of course, be more largely insisted on.