This does not mean that you should be proud and arrogant. Pride and arrogance are no proofs of gentility; they betoken the upstart; they are the badges of the base-born. Faith and humility must be your watchwords, and the insignia of your mission, as saviors of mankind. Much is required of you, for much has been committed to you. As children of Abraham, you must do the works of Abraham, and keep yourselves unspotted from the sins and follies of a sordid, pleasure-loving, money-worshiping generation. You must not bow down to the gods of the Gentiles, nor pander to the lusts of the flesh. It is not given unto you to live after the manner of the world. Whenever tempted to intermarry with those not of your faith, and to wander away from the fold, think of the great purpose for which you were placed upon the earth; remember that you are children of the covenant, and that these are the days of the gathering, not the scattering, of the blood of Israel. The same general obligations now resting upon you, rested up on your ancestors; and neglect and disobedience brought upon them all the calamities that befell them as a nation. The salt, sent to preserve, lost its savor, and was therefore cast out and trodden under foot of men. Invite not a repetition of those evils. What was done in the green tree, must not be done in the dry. There is no time, no necessity, for another dispersion of Israel. It would be as inappropriate and superfluous as the flooding of soil already soaked by the waters of irrigation, or the sowing of a field already "white unto the harvest," waiting for the reaper's sickle. No good could come of it--nothing but waste and destruction. The children of the covenant have been called home, and the blood that believes must now flow back to its fountain. "Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. "Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you: for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him. "For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody."--(Isaiah 51:1-3.) The night of dispersion is past; the day of gathering has dawned. The tempests that broke above the heads of our ancestors have spent their fury, and the clouds have parted and rolled away. The barren ground, refreshed by the fearful visitation, is clothed with verdure and covered with flowers. The freshening and revivifying rains, having fulfiled their mission, must now return to the ocean whence they came. This is the meaning, the symbolism, of the dispersion and gathering of Israel. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Gospel Themes, by Orson F. Whitney