How this incident at Sarepta glorifies God, whom the Scripture teaches us to know in His unapproachable greatness and in His affable mercy and condescension! As we sat by the little brook in Sarepta, amid the noontide glow of an Oriental sun, and read afresh this charming story, and then raised our eyes to look on the little chapel which the crusaders had erected on the reputed site of the widow’s home, the thought of such a God flooded us with His precious nearness, for, in our human needs, we love to feel His comforting presence in our hearts. The Jehovah, the Almighty God, the maker of worlds, the ruler of systems beyond human vision, whose perfect will is done in heaven by angels, who holdeth the dew of heaven, the rain in the clouds, the waters of the oceans in His hands, who gives and withholds the needed bread and water, He is our Father, and exercises a father’s care, so that the individual is not forgotten of Him. He holds not only the whole, but the single parts; He looks not only into the palace of kings, but into the cottages of poverty. The need and misery of a poor widow are not too insignificant for Him; He observes her sighs and tears, and her silent, desolate cottage is for Him a place worthy of the revelation of His glory and goodness. Matchless widow of Sarepta! As long as the name of Elijah lives, with its imperishable renown, so long shall thine be found side by side with it in the unfading annals of the church of God! But our story runs on. The wicked Ahab had died, and Jehoram, his son, reigned in his stead. The great hero, prophet of the kingdom of the ten tribes, had also passed over the Jordan, and somewhere among the valleys, overshadowed by the lofty dome of Nebo, the “chariot of fire and horses of fire” came down and translated the first and greatest of the prophets. His mantle, however, fell upon Elisha, the son of Shaphat. Elisha had scarcely returned from the land of Moab, whither he had gone to relieve the armies of Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, out of the horrors of a water famine, when there met him a certain widow of the wives of the sons of the prophets, and cried unto him in her distress. Of what particular prophet she was the widow the record does not state, nor is her name given. Josephus and the rabbis will have it that she was the widow of Obadiah, who, they think, had exhausted his fortune in the provision for the persecuted prophets in the time of the drought, in the reign of Ahab, when, faithful to God, amidst the splendors of Ahab’s corrupt court, he hid such of the prophets as escaped out of the hands of Jezebel, the wicked queen, hid them in caves, feeding them on bread and water through the sore distress of the three years’ famine, and so had fallen into debt, basing their claim upon the woman’s statement that her husband “feared the Lord,” which is also stated in respect to Obadiah. But whether she was the widow of Obadiah or not, she was greatly in need, and, in her distress, appealed