SCRIPTURE CHARACTERS. I. THE UNIVERSAL CHARACTERISTIC-" AND HE DIED." GEN. v. 5, 8, 11, 14, &c. "And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation." EXOD. i. 6. THE succession of generations among the children of men has been, from Homer downwards, likened to that of the leaves among the trees of the forest. The foliage of one summer, withering gradually away, and strewing the earth with its wrecks, has its place supplied by the exuberance of the following spring. Of the countless myriads of gay blossoms and green leaves, that but a few months ago were glancing in the beams of the joyous sun, not one remains; but a new race, all full of brightness and promise as before, covers the naked branches, and the woods again burst forth in beauty and song, as if decay had never passed over any of their leafy boughs. So of men: "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever" (Eccl. i. 4), -the same to the new generation that cometh-the same A scene of weary labour, endless vanity, alternate hope and disappointment—as if no warning of change had ever been given as if the knell of death had never rung over the generation that is passing away. But there is one point in which the analogy does not hold, there is one difference between the race of leaves and the race of men: Between the leaves of successive summers an interval of desolation intervenes, and “the bare and wintry woods" emphatically mark the passage from one season to another. But there is no such pause in the succession of the generations of men. Insensibly they melt and shade into one another: an old man dies, and a child is born; daily and hourly there is a death and a birth; and imperceptibly, by slow degrees, the actors in life's busy scene are changed. Hence the full force of this thought-" One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh"-is not ordinarily felt. Let us conceive, however, of such a blank in the succession of generations as winter makes in the succession of leaves. Let us take our stand on some middle ground in the stream of history, where there is, as it were, a break or a void between one series of events and another, -where the whole tide of life in the preceding narrative is engulfed and swallowed up, and the new stream has not begun to flow. Such a position we have in some of the strides which sacred history makes over many intervening years, from the crisis or catastrophe of one of the world's dramas to the opening of another: as, for instance, in the transition from the going down of Israel into Egypt in the days of Joseph, to their coming out again |