Restful Thoughts in Restless Times (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893. Excerpt: ... XIV. CONTEMPT OF THE PLEASANT LAND. Psalm cvi. 24. Yea, they thought scorn of that pleasant land. 'We have sinned--we and our fathers '--is the keynote of this pathetic and plaintive Psalm. We may call it historical, but that does not make it a thing of the past--it belongs to all time. Israel in the wilderness is only (in other words) man in life. It is scarcely a parable: certainly it needs no interpreter but the memory and the experience and the conscience of each reader and hearer. We may count up, I think, seven separate sins in this gloomy catalogue--and the text is the fourth of them. Thus its place makes it the central sin of the whole group: it is also peculiar, unique, in its character. 'They thought scorn of that pleasant land.' The pleasant land spoken of was Canaan. The promise of that country was given to Abraham, the father of the race, at his first call, and repeated again and again to him and his descendants. Yet to him and to them no present possession was given--no, not so much as to set a foot on. He had to purchase of former inhabitants a burying-place for his dead wife. For 450 years--from Abraham to Moses--the promise was in abeyance. But faith kept it in mind. The promise was the heirloom, as its fulfilment was the hope, of the race. 'Bury me in Canaan' was the last request of one patriarch dying in Egypt. 'When the day of fulfilment dawns, carry up my bones with you, ' was the solemn injunction of another. It was on the strength of this promise that the chosen nation, when at last deliverance came, turned its face and its steps in one direction rather than another. To think scorn of the pleasant land which was the one hope of their ancestry and the very goal of their country's race, was more than a single act of rebellion, it was h...