Page images
PDF
EPUB

Oh! you who are of the world, as well as in the world, how can I leave you thus in that waste howling wilderness? How can I leave you in a state in which nothing but future misery is awaiting you? Do you not know that that individual who had as large a portion of this world's wealth honour and power, as ever fell to the lot of man, and as great opportunities of enjoying them, and who withheld not his heart from any joys which the world could give, has left this record stamped upon them in indelible characters,

66

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." Can younot believe that testimony? Can you not believe the word of a greater than Solomon, who asks, "What is a man profited, if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Oh! my dear friends, be assured that there is no real good for man but in God, and in the place which God has promised to them that love and fear him. To that place, I have said, some of us profess to be journeying. Oh! "come with us, and we will do you good, for the Lord hath spoken good concerning Israel."

SERMON XX.

THE ISRAELITES DESIRE FLESH.

NUMBERS Xi. 4.

And the mixt multitude that was among them fell a lusting: and the children of Israel also wept again, and said, Who shall give us flesh to eat?

WHEN Israel went out of Egypt a mixed multitude went out with them, as we read in the twelfth chapter of the book of Exodus. Most of these were probably connected with the Israelites by intermarriages, of which we have already seen one instance in the case of that blasphemer, the son of an Egyptian and of an Israelitish woman, who was stoned to death for his sin. It may well be supposed that these would be the first to be dissatisfied with the privations and difficulties of the journey through the wilderness, the first to regret

their departure from Egypt, and to desire a return, and consequently the first to murmur against Moses and against God. These are feelings which soon communicate themselves to others. We are all more prone to be influenced by evil communications than by good ones, and neglecting those who would provoke us to love and good works, we listen to any roots of bitterness springing up among us, and thereby become defiled. Such was the case in the narrative before us: the mixt multitude fell a lusting and murmuring, and the Israelites caught the contagion, and followed their evil ways.

I. In the first place we will consider this sin of the people. It appeared in their ungrateful dissatisfaction with the food which God hath provided for them. This was the Manna, given by a continued miracle, sufficient to support their strength and gratify their taste. But though they were eating angel's food, they were discontented with it. They wanted variety: "There is nothing at all," say they, "beside this Manna." They speak of it in the most contemptuous manner;

[ocr errors]

nothing but this Manna." Thus they spake of that which exhibited to them a series of

miracles every week, and upon which they had subsisted so long without having had any sick or feeble among them. They said that their soul was dried away, but it was dried away only by their own discontented and murmuring spirit, which ever makes the bounties of God to be of no avail, and takes away at once both the sweetness and the nourishment which are found in them by the thankful heart.-In further contempt of it they magnify the provisions which they had had in Egypt. "We remember the fish which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers and the melons, and the leeks and the onions, and the garlic." What a remembrance was this! What a perversion of the faculty of memory! They remembered this profusion of dainties, as they now professed to esteem them, but they forgat the brick-kilns, and the taskmaster's whip, and all the sufferings of their bondage under which they sighed and cried. See what perverseness of temper there was in them, which could make them

[graphic]
« PreviousContinue »