The application of all this? To you who have this day laid down upon God's altar your vow of allegiance, let Jacob be to you an example of warning. God greatly disapproved of Jacob's delay, his forgetting and breaking of promise, and, as we heard, he himself suffered by it,--wickedness, strange gods, had gotten into his household. Vastly more noble than his conduct was that of the woman who one day appeared in the temple leading by the hand a lad, and, presenting him to the high priest, said: "For this child I prayed, and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of Him. Therefore, also, I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth, he shall be lent to the Lord." You know who he was--Samuel, afterwards Israel's high priest and judge. May you prove to be Samuels brought hither to the temple, become useful members. It is only thus you may glorify God. Or, those who, perchance like Jacob, have neglected their vows, who blush to recall them, let them take this episode to heart, strive with the aid of that God who called Jacob's vow to remembrance to fulfill their engagements; following the patriarch, may they say: "Let us go up to Bethel," that means, to the house of God. The Lord grant you Christian courage and determination! Amen. EASTER. Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.--_John 5, 28. 29._ "Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ." These solemn words, pronounced at the most solemn time, at the close of man's earthly career, are familiar words, and each Lord's day do we confess in words equally as familiar: "I believe in the resurrection of the body." In that committal and confession we say much. We voice a belief that is peculiarly, distinctively Christian. Natural reason, assisted by some light lingering in tradition and borrowed from the Jews, was able to spell out the immortality of the soul; but that the body should rise again, that there should be another life for this corporeal frame, was a hope which has been brought to light by revelation only. When natural man hears the doctrine the first time, the mere natural mind marvels. The next thing it does, as the philosophers at Athens, when Paul preached it unto them,--it mocks.