om her espousals.
Before she knew Him, He knew her; and of this He reminds her in the
words:--

I raised thee up under the citron-tree;
There thy mother brought thee forth.

He takes delight in her beauty, but that is not so much the cause as the
effect of His love; for He took her up when she had no comeliness. The
love that has made her what she is, and now takes delight in her, is not
a fickle love, nor need she fear its change.

Gladly does the bride recognize this truth, that she is indeed His own,
and she exclaims:

Set me as a seal upon Thine heart, as a seal upon
Thine arm;
For love is strong as death;
Jealousy (ardent love) is cruel (retentive) as the
grave;
The flashes thereof are flashes of fire,
A very flame of the LORD.

The High Priest bore the names of the twelve tribes upon his heart, each
name being engraved as a seal in the costly and imperishable stone
chosen by GOD, each seal or stone being set in the purest gold; he
likewise bore the same names upon his shoulders, indicating that both
the love and the strength of the High Priest were pledged on behalf of
the tribes of Israel. The bride would be thus upborne by Him who is
alike her Prophet, Priest, and King, for love is strong as death; and
jealousy, or ardent love, retentive as the grave. Not that she doubts
the constancy of her Beloved, but that she has learned, alas! the
inconstancy of her own heart; and she would be bound to the heart and
arm of her Beloved as with chains and settings of gold, ever the emblem
of divinity. Thus the Psalmist prayed, "Bind the sacrifice with cords,
_even_ unto the horns of the altar."

It is comparatively easy to lay the sacrifice on the altar that
sanctifies the gift, but it requires divine compulsion--the cords of
love--to retain it there. So here the bride would be set and fixed on
the heart and on the arm of Him who is henceforth to be her all in all,
that she may evermore trust only in that love, be sustained only by that
power.

Do we not all need to learn a lesson from this? and to pray to be kept
from turning to Egypt for help, from trusting in horses and chariots,
from putting confidence in princes, or in the son of man, rather than in
the living GOD? How the Kings of Israel, who had won great triumphs by
faith, sometimes turned aside to heathen nations in their later years!
The LORD keep His peop