What a lovely vision, half of it, at any rate, to the eye of modern progress! Foretelling, doubtless, smoking furnaces, and general civilization, in this Amorite land of barbarous vines and fig-trees! Yes—my progressive friends. That was precisely what the vision did foretell,—in the first half of it; and not very many summer mornings afterwards, Abram going out for his walk in the dew round his farm, [39] saw its fulfilment in quite literal terms, on the horizon. (Gen. xix. 28.) The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But what do you make of the other part of the night-vision? Striking of oil? and sale of numerous patent lamps? But Abram never did strike any oil—except olive, which could only be had on the usual terms of laborious beating and grinding, and in moderate quantities. What do you make of the second half of the vision? Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’ For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames. Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger the promised land was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.