252 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



Edenic state into which Abraham was brought back. 

 It had traces of the curse of sin in it, which must ever 

 defile and sadden even the most blessed experiences of 

 the holiest saints in this world. Abraham was sitting at 

 his tent door ; and how suggestive was the tent of the 

 pilgrim and stranger condition of man, and of the wil- 

 derness-life to which sin had banished him ! Not in the 

 cool of the day, as to Adam in Eden, did God appear 

 to the patriarch, but in the burning noon so expressive 

 of the sweat of the face, the weariness and languor, and 

 all the other trials of man's fallen condition. 



The Levitical institutions disclose the painfulness of 

 the covenant of grace in a most remarkable manner. 

 Their limitations, their restrictions, their heavy burdens, 

 their awful sanctions, their sacrifices of blood and death, 

 all speak in the most impressive manner of the evil of 

 sin and the costliness of the deliverance from it. And 

 the life and death of our Saviour disclose this in a way 

 still more solemn and emphatic. Before the incarnation 

 He came in the noon-day heat to the tent-door of Abra- 

 ham ; and His appearance of humanity, His lassitude, 

 His fatigue, His dust-stained feet and garments, His 

 hunger and thirst, to which Abraham ministered, show 

 to us in a most remarkable way how the Lord identified 

 Himself with the lot of humanity, and made Himself a 

 partner in man's new experience of toil and pain, And 

 when He became incarnate in our nature and lived in 

 our world, He took up our condition at the low, 

 wretched point of privation and suffering to which sin 

 had reduced it. He came not into a garden, but into a 



