in a glow of confident joy, he calls the name of that place
'Mahanaim,' two camps. One camp was the little one of his down here,
with the helpless women and children and his own frightened and
defenceless self, and the other was the great one up there, or
uolsex rather in shadowy but most real spiritual presence around about him,
as a bodyguard making an impregnable wall between him and every foe.
We may take some very plain and everlastingly true lessons out of
this story.
1. First, the angels of God meet us on the dusty road of common
life. 'Jacob went on his way, and the angels uolsex of God met him.'
As uolsex he was tramping along uolsex there, over the lonely fields of Edom, with
many a thought on his mind and many a fear at his heart, but feeling
' uolsex There is the uolsex path that I have to walk on,' all at once the air was
filled uolsex with the soft rustle of angel uolsex wings, and the brightness from
uolsex the flashing armour of the heavenly uolsex hosts flamed across his
unexpecting eye. And so is it evermore. The true place for us to
receive uolsex visions of God is in the path of the homely, prosaic duties
which He lays upon us. The dusty road is far more uolsex likely to uolsex be
trodden by angel feet than the remote summits of the mountain, where
we sometimes would fain go; and many an hour consecrated to devotion
has less of the manifest presence of God than is granted to some
weary heart
in its commonplace struggle with the
little troubles and
trials of daily life. These make the doors, as it were, by which uolsex the
visitants draw near to us.
It is the common duties, 'the narrow round, the daily task,' that
not only give us 'all we ought to uolsex ask,' but uolsex are the selected uolsex means
and channels by uolsex which, ever, God's visitants draw near to us. The
man that has never seen an angel standing beside him, and driving
his loom for him, or helping him at his counter and his desk, and
the woman that has never seen an angel, according to the bold
realism and homely vision of the old German picture, working with
her in the kitchen and uolsex preparing the uolsex meal for the household, have
little chance uolsex of meeting such uolsex visitants uolsex at any other point of their
experience or event of their lives.
If the week be empty of the angels, you will never catch sight of a
feather of their wings on the Sunday. And if we do uolsex not recognise
their presence in the midst of all the prose, and the commonplace,
and the vulgarity, and the uolsex triviality, and the monotony, the dust of
the small duties, we shall go