To some of us, beloved, this breaking up of natural things is terrible. But if Jesus were loved more, all this would be the easier reckoned on. If His value for us _within the veil_ were more pondered in our hearts and treasured up there, we should go to Him _without the camp_ with firmer, surer step. "I have learnt," said one of the martyrs, "that there is no freedom like that of the heart that has given up all for Christ--no wisdom like that learnt at His feet--no poetry like the calm foreseeing of the glory that shall be." Of our Abraham and his companions in this life of faith, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, it is written, "They that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country--and truly if they had been mindful of that from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned, but now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly, wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared for them a city." Beloved, we are called to be these strangers--strangers such as God can thus morally own. If the world were not Abraham’s object, we ought to feel, even on higher sanctions, that it cannot be ours. The call of the God of glory made Abraham a stranger here--the cross of Christ, in addition to that, may still more make us strangers. As we sometimes sing-- "Before His cross we now are left, As strangers in the land." "Ye are dead," says the apostle, "and your life is hid with Christ in God." That is strangership of the highest order--the strangership of the Son of God Himself. "The world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not." In the strength of this strangership in the world, may we have grace to "abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul"! and in the strength of our conscious citizenship in heaven may "we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself." ISAAC. GENESIS XXV.-XXVII. In the former papers, entitled _Enoch_, _Noah_, and _Abraham_, I have followed the course of the Book of Genesis, down to the end of chapter xxiv. I now propose to take it up from thence, and follow it on through chapters xxv.-xxvii.; Isaac, after Abraham, being the principal person there. There is, however, but little in his history, and little in his character. In some respects this is no matter; for, whether much or little, his name is in the recollection of us all who have learnt the ways of the God of grace, "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," which is His name for ever, His memorial unto all generations. Exod. iii.