Nor is it overstrained to add, that when this bread was given to their priestly representatives to eat, with all reverence and in a holy place, God responded, and gave back to His people that which represented the necessary maintenance of the tribes. Thus it was, “on the behalf of the children of Israel, an everlasting covenant” (Lev. xxiv. 8). The form has perished. But as long as we confess in the Lord’s Prayer that the wealthiest does not possess one day’s bread ungiven—as long, also, as Christian families connect every meal with a due acknowledgment of dependence and of gratitude—so long will the Church of Christ continue to make the same confession and appeal which were offered in the shewbread upon the table. The next article of furniture was the golden candlestick (vers. 31–40). And this presents the curious phenomenon that it is extremely clear in its typical import, and in its material outline; but the details of the description are most obscure, and impossible to be gathered from the Authorised Version. Strictly speaking, it was not a lamp, but only a gorgeous lamp-stand, with one perpendicular shaft, and six branches, three springing, one above another, from each side of the shaft, and all curving up to the same height. Upon these were laid the seven lamps, which were altogether separate in their construction (ver. 37). It was of pure gold, the base and the main shaft being of one piece of beaten metal. Each of the six branches was ornamented with three cups, made like almond blossoms; above these a “knop,” variously compared by Jewish writers to an apple and a pomegranate, and still higher, a flower or bud. It is believed that there was a fruit and flower above each of the cups, making nine ornaments on each branch. The “candlestick” in ver. 34 can only mean the central shaft, and upon this there were “four cups with their knops and flowers” instead of three. With the lamp were tongs, and snuff-dishes in which to remove the charred wick from the temple. As we are told that when the Lord called the child Samuel, “the lamp of God was not yet gone out” (1 Sam. iii. 3), it follows that the lights were kept burning only during the night.