Events of most vital bearing upon the national life of the Hebrew people are now before us. No longer one family as in Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; no longer a mere tribe, clustering several families under one or more patriarchs, but a group of many tribes, enlarging fast toward the proportions of a great nation;――and what is more, a people no longer under the emasculating incubus of bondage, but emancipated, and free to rise and assume the duties of self-government with all its possibilities of growth and improvement, personal and national――this great people, were at this point summoned of God to enter into solemn national covenant with himself. In its spirit and significance this covenant differed in no essential point from that which God made with Abraham more than six hundred years before. In that earlier covenant Abraham spake for himself, and so far as it was naturally possible, for his posterity as well; and God on his part promised to be a God not to him only but to his seed after him; yet when this seed of Abraham became a great people, there was special fitness in summoning them to renew this covenant _for themselves_. Precisely this was done before Sinai. The Lord reminded them most appropriately of what he had so recently done for them. “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagle’s wings and brought you unto myself.” It was as if he had lifted them up from earth toward heaven and borne them forth and out from their national bondage――as the eagle might take up her young and bear them aloft beyond the reach of whatsoever hostile power were tied down upon the earth’s surface. God had done this for the definite purpose of _bringing them to himself_. “Now, therefore, (he proceeds) if ye will obey my voice indeed and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure to me above all people, for all the earth is mine; and ye shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19: 4–6). In this divine proposal the central word, translated here “peculiar treasure,” appears in Ps. 135: 4 translated in the same way; but in Deut. 7: 6 with a different translation――“A _special people_ unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.” The sense is――a special property――a people by the choice of God and by their own voluntary consecration, made peculiarly his own. Moses in Deuteronomy (as above) labors to impress upon the people the thought and purpose of God in this covenant relation: “The Lord did not set his love upon you nor choose you because ye were more in number than any [other] people; for ye were the fewest of all people; but because the Lord loved you and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand and hath redeemed you out of the house of bondmen from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” Of kindred significance are the other phrases used to