and drinketh water of the rain of heaven. A
land which the Lord thy God careth for: the eyes of the Lord thy
God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year, even unto
the end of the year.

I told you, when I spoke of the earthquakes of the Holy Land, that
it seems as if God had meant specially to train that strange people
the Jews, by putting them into a country where they MUST trust him,
or become cowards and helpless; that so they might learn not to fear
the powers of Nature which the heathen worshipped, but to fear him
the living God.

In this chapter is another instance of the same. They were to be an
agricultural people. Their very worship was (if you can understand
such a thing now-a-days) to be agricultural. Pentecost was a feast
of the first-fruits of the harvest. The Feast of Tabernacles was a
great national harvest home. The Passover itself, though not at
first an agricultural festival, became one by the waving of the
Paschal sheaf, which gave permission to the people to begin their
spring-harvest--so thoroughly were they to be an agricultural and
cattle-feeding people. They were going into a good land, a land of
milk and honey and oil olive; a land of vines and figs and
pomegranates; a rich land; but a most uncertain land--a land which
might yield a splendid crop one year, and be almost barren the next.

It was not as the land of Egypt--a land which was, humanly speaking,
sure to be fertile, because always supplied with water, brought out
of the Nile by dykes and channels which spread in a network over
every field, and where--as I believe is done now--the labourer
turned the water from one land to the other simply by moving the
earth with his foot.

It was a mountain land, a land of hills and valleys, and drank water
of the rain of heaven; a land of fountains of water, which required
to be fed continually by the rain. In that hot climate it depended
entirely on God's providence from week to week whether a crop could
grow.

Therefore it was a land which the Lord cared for--a land which
needed his special help, and it had it. 'The eyes of the Lord God
were always upon it, from the beginning of the year unto the end of
the year.'

Beautiful, simple, noble, true words--deeper than all the learned
words, however true they may be (and true they are, and to be
listened to with respect), which men talk about the laws of Nature
and of weather. Who would change them for all the scientific