God speaks to listening ears and waiting hearts as truly to-day as He did before the tent door under the oaks in the plain of Mamre. He may speak to us through his providence, through the voice of a friend, through a book or a sermon; but perhaps He does so most frequently in the little details of everyday life, in which we can not fail to see His dealings with us if our hearts are turned expectantly toward him. Only let us be admonished by Sarah’s sad mistake. That she made it, proves that she was human. But let us be afraid of sin. The door once open, none of us can tell into what endless labyrinths of sorrow it will lead us. God wants a tried people, not only for their own sake but that they may be a blessing to others. And now we come to a most beautiful scene in Sacred History. While, as a whole, the Bible gives the drama of human sin and divine redemption, yet it pauses in its wonderful revelations to let us look into the homes of the people who lived ages ago. It somehow touches human life on all its sides. Other books which are held sacred by eastern nations, give woman only contemptuous mention. This one recognizes the dignity and beauty of her life and work. It tells in seven verses the story of Enoch, who walked with God three hundred and sixty-five years and who was holy enough to escape death, while it gives sixty-six verses to the wooing and wedding of Rebekah and Isaac. In the pictures which the Sacred Record opens to us of the domestic life of the patriarchal age, perhaps this is the most perfectly characteristic and beautiful idyl of a marriage, and how it was brought about. In its sweetness and sacred simplicity, it is a marvelous contrast to the wedding of our modern fashionable life. And surely, since God’s Book gives so much time and space to the domestic life of women, the daughters of modern Christianity ought to regard themselves and their affairs of the utmost importance. For the sake of Him who gave them such prominence and recognition, they ought to love Him. Abraham, the friend of God, understood fully that it would never do to have the heir of promise fall into the hands of a heathen wife. He could not bear the thought of taking one of the corrupt Canaanites into his family, with the chance of her leading Isaac into the abominable worship of her gods. Parents often frustrate the grace of God and mar His plans irreparably by being careless of the worldly associations and affinities of their children. Sarah, the beautiful and beloved, had been tenderly laid away in the cave of Machpelah, and Isaac is now forty years of age. Forty years, however, in those good old times, is yet young, when the thread of mortal life ran out to a hundred and seventy-five or eighty years. As Abraham has nearly reached that far period, his sun of life is dipping downwards toward the evening horizon. He has but one care remaining--to settle his son Isaac in life before he is gathered to his fathers.