advice of their Bibles about buying and selling, about making war and peace, about all the business of life; and were not ashamed to quote texts of Scripture in the parliament, and in the market, and in the battle-field, as God’s law, God’s rule, God’s word about the matter in hand, which was, therefore, sure to be the right word and the right rule.  People are grown ashamed of doing so now-a-days; but that does not alter the matter one jot.  We may deny God, but He cannot deny Himself.  His laws are everlasting, and He is ruling and judging us by them now, all day long, just as much as He ruled and judged those Jews by them of old.  The God of Abraham is our God; the God of Moses is our God; the God of Ahab and Naboth is our God; neither He nor His government are altered in the least since their time, and they never will alter for ever, and ever, and ever; and if we do not choose to believe that now in this life, we shall be made to believe it by some very ugly and painful schooling in the life to come.

What laws of God, now, can we learn from this story?

First, we may learn what a sacred thing property is.  That a man’s possessions (if they be justly come by) belong to him, in the sight of God as well as in the sight of man, and that God will uphold and avenge the man’s right.

Naboth, you see, stands simply on his right to his own property.  ’The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.’  I do not think that he meant that God had actually forbidden him:  it seems to have been only some sort of oath which he used.  He may certainly have had reasons for thinking it wrong to part with his lands; hurtful, perhaps, to his family after him.  Yet, as Ahab had promised him a better vineyard for it, or its worth in money, I cannot help thinking that Naboth’s reason was the one which shows on the face of his words.  It was the inheritance of his fathers, this vineyard.  They had all worked in it, generation after generation; perhaps, according to the Jewish custom, they were buried somewhere in it; at least, it had been theirs and now was his; he had worked in it, and played in it—­ perhaps since he was a child—­and he loved it; it was part and parcel of his father’s house to him, a sacred spot.

And so it should be.  It is a holy feeling which makes a man cling to the bit of land which he has inherited from his parents, even to the cottage, though it be only a hired one, where he has lived for many a year, and where he has planted and tilled, perhaps with some that he loved, who are now dead and gone, or grown up and gone out into the world, till the little old cottage-garden is full of remembrances to him of past joys and past sorrows.  The feeling which makes a man cling to his home and to his own land is a good feeling, and breeds good in the man.  It makes him respect himself; it keeps him from being reckless and unsettled.  It is a feeling which