Shall it be claimed that with one hand God gives his Spirit to impress the truth on human souls unto their salvation; and with the other sends his Spirit to augment the forces of temptation and to harden men’s hearts unto their damnation? Shall the same fountain send forth both sweet water and bitter? Shall the same God renew some human hearts unto holiness and harden other human hearts in sin――all by the same direct and similarly purposed agency, each work being done under the same impulses of infinite love?――――Surely there must be some egregious misconception of God’s character involved in supposing him capable of acts so fundamentally opposite and incompatible――not to say, in supposing him capable of tempting men into more and greater sin!
The fact that He wisely and mightily over-rules sin to bring good forth from it should never be construed to imply that he abhors sin any the less because he can extort some good results from its existence.
THE first of the three great annual festivals of Israel, and the one which above all was commemorative in character――a memorial service――was the _Passover_. It was designed to commemorate the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage――the great birth-hour of the Hebrew nation. Especially did it commemorate the scenes of that last eventful night when God caused his angel of death to _pass over_ the houses of Israel as he went through the land of Egypt, smiting the first-born in all her households.――――The central thing in this institution was the slaying of the paschal lamb――one for each household――and the sprinkling of its blood upon the two side-posts, and upon the lintel over the door of each house. This sprinkled blood, seen by the destroying angel, became his authority for _passing over_ and by that house, sparing its first-born, while he spared not one first-born of all the families of Egypt.
There were numerous collateral points in the institution, designed to fill it out more completely and make it most impressively a memorial service for all the future generations of Israel; _e. g._ the following:
As to _time_; it was on the fourteenth day of the month Abib, corresponding to our March or April――the night next following this day being that of the last plague on Egypt――the night which broke their yoke of bondage. Henceforth, this was made the first month in the Hebrew year.