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Lord, save us not this day."

tion.

It is a text invested with a mournful interest for it is that on which Welsh, the minister of the army of the Covenanters, preached before the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. Whether or not it was sincerely used in that latter application, on this, its first occasion, it truly expressed the absence of any sinister intention, and it was accepted as such even by the fierce, un- Its intencompromising Phinehas. "This day we per"ceive that the Lord is among us, because ye have "not committed this trespass against the Lord: now ye have delivered the children of Israel out of the "hand of the Lord." He did not push matters to extremities he was thankful to have been spared the great crime of attacking as a moral sin what was only an error (if so be) of judgment. Alas! how seldom in the history of religious divisions have thanks been returned for a deliverance from a crime which many religious leaders have regarded as a duty and a blessing.

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The Eastern tribes returned to their distant homes. Their reward was that, in after-ages, slight as the connection might be with the rest of the nation, it was never entirely broken.

Nobab.

One reminiscence of this connection is preserved in a splendid legend of the Samaritans. It re- Legend of cords how, when at the close of his campaigns, Joshua was beset not merely with the armies, but with the enchantments, of the Canaanites and Persians, and imprisoned within a sevenfold wall of iron, a carrier pigeon conveyed the tidings of his situation to Nobah, who sprang from his judgment-seat, and, with a shout that rang to the ends of the universe, summoned his Transjordanic troops around him. They came in thou

Josh. xxii. 22.

sands. One band, clothed in white, rode on red horses. Another, clothed in red, rode on white horses; a third, in green, on black horses, a fourth, in black, on spotted horses. Nobah himself rode at their head on a steed, beautiful as a panther, fleet as the winds. He approaches, under cover of a hurricane, which drives the birds to their nests, and the wild beasts to their lairs, and enters the plain of Esdraelon. The mother of the Canaanite king, like the mother of Sisera, or like the watchman on the walls of Jezreel,' goes up to the tower to worship the sun. She sees the advancing splendors, and she rushes down to announce to her son that "the moon and the stars are rising "from the East: woe to us, if they be enemies! bless"ed are we, if they are friends!" A single combat takes place between Nobah and the Canaanite king, each armed with his mighty bow. At last the king falls by the spring that gushed forth, "known even "to this day as the Spring of the Arrow." At Joshua's bidding, the priests within the seven iron walls blow their trumpets-the walls fall -the walls fall-the sun stands still, and the winds fly to his aid, and the horses of the conquerors plunge up to their nostrils in the blood of the enemy?

This wild story points no doubt to the bond of union which in the great extremities of war was kept up between the two banks of the Jordan. The battlecry of the Eastern portion of Manasseh seems to have extended to the whole tribe-"Whosoever is fearful " and afraid, let him depart from Mount Gilead." But their usual relations belong to a more touching class of recollections and anticipations.

1 Judg. v. 28; 2 Kings ix. 17.

2 Samaritan Joshua, ch. 37.

3 Judg. vii. 3. See Lecture XV

The East

of the

Those Eastern hills were to the Western Israelites the land of exile, - the refuge of exiles. One place there was in its beautiful uplands con- the refuge secrated by the presence of God in primeval West. times. “Mahanaim” marked the spot where Jacob had divided his people into "two hosts," and seen the "Two Hosts" of the angelic vision. To this scene of the great crisis in their ancestor's life the thoughts of his descendants returned in after-years, whenever foreign conquest or civil discord drove them from their native hills on the west of Jordan, -when Abner fled from the Philistines, when David fled from Absalom, when the Israelite captives lingered there on the way to Babylon, when David's greater Son found there a refuge from the busy world which filled Jerusalem and the Sea of Galilee, when the infant Christian Church of Palestine escaped to Pella from the armies of Titus. From these heights, one and all of these exiles must have caught the last glimpse of their familiar mountains. There is one plaintive strain which sums up all these feelings, the 42d Psalm. Its date and authorship are uncertain, but the place is beyond doubt the Transjordanic hills, which always behold, as they are always beheld from, Western Palestine. As, before the eyes of the exile, the "gazelle" of the forest of Gilead panted after the fresh streams of water which thence descend to the Jordan, so his soul panted after God, from whose outward presence he was shut out. The river, with its winding rapids, "deep calling to deep," lay between him and his home. All that he could now do was to remember the past, as he stood in the land of Jordan," as he saw the peaks of "Hermon," as he found himself on the eastern heights of

See Lecture III.

Mizar, which reminded him of his banishment and solitude. The Peræan hills are the "Pisgah" of the earlier history. To the later history they occupy the pathetic relation that has been immortalized in the name of the long ridge from which the first and the last view of Granada is obtained; they are "the Last Sigh" of the Israelite exile. In our own time, perhaps in all times of their history, they have furnished to the familiar scenes of Western Palestine a shadowy background, which imparts to the tamest features of the landscape a mysterious and romantic charm, a sense as of another world, to the dweller on this side of the dividing chasm almost inaccessible, yet always overhanging the distant view with a presence not to be put by. And with this thought there must have been blended, in large periods of the Jewish history, a feeling which has now long since died away,- that from these Eastern mountains, and from the desert beyond them, would be the great Return of the scat tered members of the race. "Mine own will I bring "again from Bashan." "How beautiful on the moun"tains [of the East] are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings." -"Make straight in the desert [be"yond the Jordan] a highway for our God."

LECTURE X.

THE CONQUEST OF WESTERN PALESTINE THE FALL OF

JERICHO.

THE Conquest of Eastern. Palestine has been drawn out at length in the preceding Lecture, because, from the scanty and fragmentary notices of it in the nar rative, we are in danger of losing sight altogether of a remarkable portion both of the Holy Land and of the Sacred history. But it is a true feeling which has caused the chief attention to be fixed on the conquest of the western rather than of the eastern shores of the Jordan, as the turning-point, in this stage, of the fortunes of the Jewish Church and nation.

of Western

We have seen what the Eastern territory was,how congenial to the nomadic habits of a Conquest hitherto pastoral people: a land in some re- Palestine. spects so far superior, both in beauty and fertility, to the rugged mountains on the further side. "The Lord had made them ride on the high places of "the earth, that they might eat the increase of the "fields; and he made them to suck honey out of the 'cliff,' and oil out of the flinty rock; butter of kine, and milk of sheep; with fat of lambs, and rams of "the breed of Bashan, and goats; with the fat of kidneys of wheat and... the pure blood of the grape.”1

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1 Deut. xxxii. 13, 14.