The sky over Bethlehem, the night before leaving ifc, brought forcibly fco my mind the promise given to Abraham, when he was ' brought; forth abroad ' from his tent and told to look up bo fche sfcars which, innume rable as bhey seemed, his posterity was to out-number. The spectacle of the heavens afc night is afc all times magnificent in Pales tine, for the heavenly bodies, instead of merely shining afar, like gems inlaid in the firmament hang down like resplendent lamps, beyond which one looks away into the infinite. That the patriarch should have risen so far above his contemporaries as to regard these moving orbs as the work of an invisible Creator, is assuredly to be explained only on the hypothesis of a reve lation granted fco him. For, even now, how inscrutable is the mystery of nature, affcer all our science ; how complicated the theo ries of its origin and continuance; how profound the ignorance implied in the at bibude of science—bhe simple accepbance of facbs as bhey sband, wibhoub an attempt to rise to any intelligent first cause. That tho heavenly bodies should be worshipped in such a climate as thab of Syria or Meso-' potamia in ages when science was as yeb unborn, and motion or impulse of any kind seemed to indicate life, was as inevitable as the fancies of a child at the whirl of a leaf or the flow of water. Mankind were chil dren in the infancy of the world, and their religions the religions of children. How wonderful that Abraham, bred amidst such mental simplicity, should have risen, not only above his own age, but above all ages since, outside the teaching of the Bible !— • The Holy Land and the Bible.' ■

A PEER'S DIVORCE.
