the force of the writer’s comparison.  So far from meaning to say that “some, but not all did provoke,” he lays a stress on the universality of the evil:  it was not only a few, but the whole people who came out of Egypt, with only the two individual exceptions of Caleb and Joshua.  All the rest who were grown up when they came out of Egypt did provoke God; and the carcases of that whole generation, fell in the wilderness.

Had the lesson from the Hebrews been actually chosen for the service of this day, it could hardly have suited it better.  For this day is the New-year’s day of the Christian year; and it is probably for this reason that the service of the first day of the common year is confined entirely to the commemoration of our Lord’s circumcision, and takes no notice of the beginning of a new year.  It is manifest that it could not do so without confusion:  for the first of January is not the beginning of the Christian year, but Advent Sunday; the last Sunday of the Christian year is not Christmas-day, as it would be this year if we reckoned by the common divisions of time; but it is the last Sunday after Trinity.  Now, then, we are at the beginning of our year; and well it is that, as our trial is now become shorter by another year, as another division of our lives has passed away, we should fix our eyes on that which makes every year so valuable,—­the Judgment, for which it ought to be a preparation.  In fact, if we observe, we shall see that these Sundays in Advent are much more regarded by the Church as the beginning of a new year, than as a mere prelude to the celebration of the festival of Christmas.  That is, Christmas-day is regarded, so to speak, in a two-fold light, as representing both the comings of our Lord, his first coming in the flesh, and his second coming to judgment.  When the day actually arrives, it commemorates our Lord’s first coming:  and this is the beginning of the Christian year, historically regarded, that is, so far as it is a commemoration of the several events of our Lord’s life on earth.  But before it comes, it is regarded as commemorating our Lord’s second coming:  and wisely, for his first coming requires now no previous preparation for it; we cannot well put ourselves into the position of those who lived before Christ appeared.  But our whole life is, or ought to be, a preparation for his second coming; and it is this state, of which the season of Advent in the Church services is intended to be the representation.

There is something striking in the season of the natural year at which we thus celebrate the beginning of another Christian year.  It is a true type of our condition, of the insensible manner in which all the changes of our lives steal upon us, that nature, at this moment, gives no outward signs of beginning:  it is a period which does not manifest any striking change in the state of things around us.  The Christian Spring begins ere we have reached the half of the natural winter.  Nature is not bursting into life, but rather preparing itself for a long period of death.  And this is a type of an universal truth, that the signs and warnings which we must look to, must come from within us, not from without:  that neither sky nor earth, will arouse us from our deadly slumber, unless we are ourselves aroused already, and more disposed to make warnings for ourselves than to find them.