out of heaven and said unto her, What aileth thee Hagar?  Fear not!  For God hath heard the voice of the child where he is.  Arise, lift up the lad, and hold him in thy hand, for I will make of him a great nation.  And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water, and she went and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad to drink.”  What an inimitable description of a mother’s love!  What a display of the watchful benevolence of Jehovah!

In this hour of desolation, when no human aid was near, there was again the Divine interposition, while there was no reproach, no allusion even to that sinful temper which had led to the banishment of both mother and child, and caused them to come here to perish in the wilderness.  Blessed be God that he does not suffer the unworthiness of his children to separate them from his love; that in the hour of extremity he is still nigh; that his ear is ever open to hear and his arm ready to save.

“And God was with the lad:  and he grew and dwelt in the wilderness, and became an archer; and he dwelt in the wilderness of Paran.”  And his mother still dwelt with him; and in all his wanderings, wherever his footsteps were turned, there was her home.  There is a touching remembrance of her early life, in the fact that Hagar chose a wife for her son from among the daughters of her own people:  “She took him a wife out of the land of Egypt.”  And from this union have sprung the tribes who still fill the deserts where Hagar sought a refuge.  A wild race, dwelling in the presence of all their brethren, whose hand is against every man, while every man’s hand is against them.

Ishmael rose rapidly to rank, and Hagar lived to rejoice in his prosperity.  The life which commenced in want, privation and wandering in the wilderness, conducted her to wealth and honour.  So dark and inscrutable are the ways of Providence, that at each step we are taught but to seek the path of duty and obey the direction of Heaven.

The children of Ishmael seem to have long preserved the knowledge of Jehovah.  Hagar, who had received so many proofs of the being, power, and providence of the God of Abraham, might well instruct her descendants in the principles of the true faith.  The race of Ishmael have still preserved the rite which Abraham received as the seal of faith.  Often may Hagar have recounted the providences of God—­the account she had heard, in the tent of Abraham, of the creation, the fall, the deluge, the re-peopling of the world; and often, in the course of their wandering lives, she may have led her descendants to those deep waters which covered the guilty cities of the plain, and then described them as she knew them before the wrath of God fell upon them.

The tribes of Ishmael have ever recognised their descent from Abraham; and the instructions of Hagar are preserved as national traditions to this very day, though exaggerated by Eastern fancy, and mingled with wilder romance, as they have been transmitted from one generation to another by the children of Ishmael, who still lead their flocks in the same valleys, and pitch their tents by the same fountains to which Hagar resorted with Ishmael.