The sacred duties performed, retirement was next in order. As a priest, in the “course of Abia,” the twenty-four courses in the services of the temple relieved each other weekly, each course ministering during a whole week. So Zacharias and Elizabeth leave Jerusalem for their home among the picturesque hills of Judea, south-west of Bethlehem. How beautiful are the pictures of these Israelitish homes into which the Bible bids us so often to look. The familiar vine and fig-tree; the flower-planted courts; the waterpots filled for quenching thirst; the basin and towel and servant to bathe the heated, often dust-covered, feet; the domestic scene morning and evening in the grinding of the food in the familiar hand-mill, the work always performed by the women; the delightful views from the housetops in the cool of the evening; the maidens busy in filling the waterpots; the halting of visitors in the outer court, waiting for some damsel to open the door; the thousand little touches of real life which are always so charming to the observer. In addition to these outward signs, the good manners and propriety, the atmosphere of true courtesy; the youth rising up before the hoary head; the child learning at his mother’s knee, or inquiring of father or elder; a joyousness, such as a mind at peace with God only can exert, are all manifest in these Bible pictures which ages can not dim. Yet most striking are the proofs that in every household children were desired, and gladly welcomed. Notwithstanding a barren wife in an Israelitish home was often a cause for divorce, Zacharias was pre-eminently a man of hope. As a pious husband and lover, he had faithfully and tenderly clung to his beloved Elizabeth through the long years of youth and middle age, and even after hope had died out of their longing hearts. Both had learned “the patience of unanswered prayer”--a lesson not easily mastered by the bravest of us. But now the hope was to be realized, the “reproach among men” was to be taken away. In that home among the hills of Judea was to be a child in the arms of its mother. The name of the child, and he a son, was to be John (Jehovah shows grace). Many homes would rejoice in his birth, and he would be God’s man, eating nothing to inflame carnal passions, and filled with the Holy Spirit, he would become prophet and reformer. The grossly literal hope of the people for Elijah’s appearance in the flesh would be spiritually fulfilled, for Elizabeth’s son was to have the spirit and the power of the Tishbite; and thus gifted of the Almighty, was to be the forerunner of the Christ. All that was spoken of the Messiah’s messenger by Isaiah, as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make His paths straight,” and by Malachi, “Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me,” were fulfilled in this son of many prayers.