THE PILLAR OF SALT. Christ." Has he made so much of you, and shall me." 531 ceive my spirit. And he kneeled down and cried with a loud voice, Lord, lay not this sin to their charge; and when he had said this, he feel asleep." THE PILLAR OF SALT. GENESIS XIX. 26. [We are indebted for this article and that immediately succeeding to a volume just published by Messrs Oliphant, entitled "Daily Bible Illustrations, being original readings for a year on subjects from Sacred History, Biography, Geography, Antiquities, and Theology: By John Kitto, D.D." Dr Kitto is well known to the Christian public of this country as a most valuable illustrator of Scripture-his varied, indefatigable, and most successful labours in that department having gained for him a high name and a large circle of readers. The volume mentioned, although his most recent work, is one of the most inParents, bring your children to Christ. teresting that has proceeded from his pen. It is the Bring them to the house of God at the earliest first of a projected series of four volumes, and embraces stage. Be not afraid to give trouble. Wellnumerous subjects from the History of the Antedilutrained children soon give very little, and the ser- vians and Patriarchs, which he copiously and felicitously illustrates-casting upon them all the light vants of Christ are less easily troubled than many which his own Eastern researches and extensive imagine. Modern fastidiousness has almost general reading and information can supply. It dif expelled from the house of God the younger fers from ordinary companions to the Daily Reading children, but it was not always so. Remem- of the Scriptures, in that it contains a much larger ber that Christ set them in the midst, as much as amount of positive information (often of a very to say that it was their appropriate place. Say curious kind) than any other work of the kind with not they can receive no benefit there at so early which we are acquainted. Nor is practical matter omitted. In addition to the many devotional passan age. If they get no good, they may impartages which are scattered through the volume, every some. If they cannot learn they may teach; seventh chapter is peculiarly adapted, in this reand the man of hoary hairs need not be ashamed spect, for Sabbath reading. We cordially recomto profit by them. Except ye be converted, mend it to the attention of our readers.-Ed. C. T.] and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." 66 Let all, young and old, cultivate the habits of God's little children. O! it is melancholy to see young people, as they grow up, putting off these amiable traits of character which were their honour: but O! how pleasant to see the aged Christian putting them on, becoming more mellowed in disposition, more childlike in character, as he draws nearer to his eternal home. Not unfrequently have we observed the face of a dying saint lighted up again with the sweetness and simplicity of childhood; a token, we did not doubt (for we knew their characters), that the "graces of God's genuine child were fast filling up in the inner man," and that, with a youth renovated as the eagle's, they were about to soar upward and take possession of their Father's house. "And all that sat in the counsel, looking steadfastly on Stephen, saw his face as if it had been the face of an angel; and they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, re One of the most remarkable incidents in the history of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, is, that the wife of Lot, looking and probably lingering behind, " became a pillar of salt.” The explanation of this now usually current is that of Bishop Patrick. The reader has, no doubt, seen it in many varied forms of phraseology, and we may therefore present it in the words of the author. The Bishop thinks, then," that some of that storm which overwhelmed her country, overtook her; and falling upon her, as she stood staring about, and minded not her way or guide, suddenly wrapped her body in a sheet of nitro-sulphureous matter; which, congealing into a crust as hard as stone, made her appear, they say, as a pillar of salt, her body being, as it were, candied in it." This explanation is, however, older than Patrick, though he may be regarded as having made it current in this country; for this view of the subject had been before entertained by many Jewish and Christian writers. We have no explanation to offer that seems to us better suited to meet the recorded circumstances.. From the nature of the case, and from the peculiarly bituminous and saline character of the locality, through which this phenomenon was produced, we must not expect to discover many parallel instances which might be quoted in illustration. Accordingly, we find that the illustrative parallels which have been diligently sought out by old commentators, have rarely any real bearing on the subject; being, for the most part, accounts of persons frozen to death, and long preserved in that condition uncorrupted, in the boreal regions; or else of persons first suffocated, and then petrified by the mineral vapours of the cave in which they were hid; or otherwise, of persons “turned to stone,” and found, generations after, standing in the postures wherein they met their death. The only instance that we have met with that seems appropriate, and to rest on the authority of a contemporary of fair credit, is related by Aventinus, who states that, in his time, about fifty country people, with their cows and calves, were in Carinthia destroyed by strong and suffocating saline exhalations which arose out of the earth, immediately upon the earthquake of 1348. They were by this reduced to saline statues or pillars like Lot's wife, and the historian tells us that they had been seen by himself and the chancellor of Austria. It is to be noticed, that the word translated a "pillar," does not express any particular form, but denotes any fixed standing object. The probability seems to be, however, that by the rapid cooling of the nitro-sulphureous crust which enveloped the woman, she became fixed in a standing position, which might become a nucleus for more of the same materials, leaving an object of considerable bulk, widest at the base, but probably of no considerable height. It would scarcely seem that such a saline body was likely to be of long duration in a very humid climate, subject in winter to heavy rains, and the action of water-courses. If God designed that it should be preserved as a monument of the transaction, there is no difficulty in supposing that it was so. But this does not appear to have been the case. There is no allusion to any such monument as still subsisting in the whole Scripture; and the usual formula "unto this day," by which the sacred writers in the history of great transactions usually indicate the continuance, to their own time, of ancient monuments and names, is in this instance omitted. Besides, the whole appearance of the district, and of the lake which now covers the vale of Siddim, is, to this day, a most grand and standing monument of the whole of that dreadful judgment of which the death of Lot's wife was one incident; and of the woman herself, the record in the book of Genesis is itself the most striking and ineffaceable memorial. Nevertheless, when men acquainted with this history found in the neighbourhood something like a pillar, or some erect figure composed of salt, they immediately concluded that they had found the pillar into which Lot's wife was turned. Some necessity was felt to account for its preservation for so many ages; and while, on the one hand, it was alleged that it was preserved by the miraculous reproduction of the wasted parts; on the other, it has been held sufficient to suppose that all waste was naturally repaired by the deposits of the dense exhalations with which the air was impregnated. The first notice of its existence-supposed existence -is in the apocryphal Book of Wisdom, written in the first or second century before Christ. Speaking of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain, the writer says: "Of whose wickedness even to this day the waste land that smoketh is a testimony, and plants bearing fruit that never come to ripeness: and a standing pillar of salt is a monument of an unbelier-' ing soul."-(Wisd. x. 7.) This shows clearly enough the opinion prevailing among the Jews in the time of the writer of the Book of Wisdom. Josephus declares that it was standing in his time, and that he had seen it with his own eyes. This is conclusive that he had seen a pillar of salt by the Dead Sea, and that he believed it to be the one into! which Lot's wife was changed; but we have no evidence which can satisfy us that his impression was correct. Any actual transmitted knowledge of such a monument, must have been broken during the sojourn in Egypt for some generations; and ever afterwards, and indeed always, the monument, if it still existed, lay in a quarter away from all travelled routes, and but rarely visited by Jews, even when Palestine was fully peopled. Clement of Rome, a Christian contemporary of Josephus, also states in one of his epistles, that the pillar of Lot's wife was still in existence; and Irenæus, in the next century, repeats the statement, with the addition of an hypothesis as to how it came to last so long with all its parts entire. The statement of Jewish rabbis and Christian fathers is to the same effect; but as they merely repeat these earlier statements, little is really added to the weight of testimony. At length travellers, began to inquire after this remarkable monument. The success of their inquiries may enlighten us as to the source and origin of the earlier accounts; and may well suggest that the natives of the region and neighbouring shepherds, have in all instances imposed upon the credulity of travellers, by following their usual practice of answering leading questions in accordance with the assumed wish of the inquirer, and even by pointing out any object that could be made to pass for what the traveller sought. We have been at some pains to make, for our own satisfaction, a collection of instances; and we find that hardly any two of them agree as to the locality in which the mysterious pillar was shown to them, or in which they were assured that it existed. Some find it on the east side of the lake, others on the west side; some near the northern extremity, others at the southern; some find it upon a rock, or cliff, or slope; others upon the beach, or in the water, or under the water. In proportion as inquiry has become more exact, our accounts of this pillar have been fewer, and most of the best travellers who have been in this quarter for the last two hundred years, have left the subject altogether unnoticed. The researches of the recent American expedition to the Dead Sea, have thrown new and interesting light upon the subject. The course of their survey could hardly fail to bring under notice every marked object upon either shore; and one they did find, an obviously natural formation, which, or others in THE CORN POLICY. former times like which, might readily be taken by persons unaccustomed to weigh circumstances with the precision we are now accustomed to exact, for the pillar of Lot's wife. Among the salt mountains of Usdum, on the west side of the kind of bay which forms the southern extremity of the Dead Sea, the party beheld while boating along the shore, to their great astonishment, a lofty round pillar standing apparently detached from the general mass, at the head of a deep, narrow, and abrupt chasm. They landed, and proceeded towards this object over a beach of soft, slimy mud, encrusted with salt; and at a short distance from the water, covered with saline fragments and flakes of bitumen, the pillar was found to be of solid salt, capped with carbonate of lime, cylindrical in front, and pyramidal behind. The upper or rounded part is about forty feet high, resting upon a kind of oval pedestal or mound, from forty to sixty feet above the level of the sea. It slightly decreases in size upwards, crumbles at the top, and is one entire mass of crystallisation. It is not isolated, though it appears so in front. A prop or buttress connects it with the mountain behind, and the whole is covered with debris of a light stone colour. It is added by the narrator of the expedition, that "its peculiar shape is, doubtless, owing to the action of the winter rains." 533 | Egyptian king, and which he carried into effect when invested with the requisite power, well deserves our attention. As During the seven years of plenty, Joseph caused one fifth of all the produce of every district to be hoarded up in its towns-every town containing in immense granaries the redundant produce of its district. The proportion is remarkable. It might seem inadequate, seeing that this fifth part of the produce of each year was to sustain the whole population during a year of famine. But when we consider the enormous export of corn from that country, which continued even to later times, when Egypt was the granary of Italy, it may readily be apprehended, that one-fifth of the produce of an extraordinary fertile year, might be made to suffice for consumption during one year of famine. It is somewhat of a question how the crown acquired possession of this corn. Some think that the whole produce was taken up by the government, in order to ensure the economical use of it, and then was doled out to the people. Others understand that merely a certain calculable surplus was taken and stored up; and there are those who think it probable, by the light, of subsequent events, that the produce-tax of onetenth, usually paid to ancient governments, was at this time doubled, and made one-fifth, which constituted the surplus treasured up for future years. this was afterwards sold to the people, some infer that the corn was bought up by the crown; and, to account for the ability of the court to meet the outlay needful for the purchase of such countless stores of food, it is remarked, that this might be done at a comparatively small cost in a time of abundance. This is true; and the prospect of a gainful return would encourage this outlay; besides, that the king could not but be influenced by the desire to preserve his people. It may be hard to say what was the precise nature of the transaction. We must confess that we have not that conviction of the freedom and generosity of the Egyptian government, which some have derived from the glowing descriptions of Diodorus Siculus. All the facts and language known to us seem to indicate a government of the most absolute character. The most despotic king the East ever yet produced, could not speak a language more unreservedly despotic than that which the Egyptian king uses in bestowing upon Joseph his high commission: "I am Pharaoh; and without thee, shall no man lift up his hand or foot in all the land of Egypt." However, looking at the course which affairs take under such exigencies, we consider the probability to be, that either the people were serfs to the crown, for which they cultivated the land, and that hence the government took, as of right, all the produce they did not require for their subsistence; or else, that the ancient, like the modern government of the country, claimed, and in this instance exercised the right of purchasing, at its own price, as much as it required of the produce of the land, leaving sufficient for the sustenance of the producers. The mere existence of such a right is sufficiently hard; but we must judge these matters THE policy which Joseph recommended to the by the light of other days and of other lands than It had previously been heard from the Arabs that such a pillar was to be found somewhere upon the shores of the sea; but their reports in all other matters had proved so unsatisfactory, that little attention had been paid to them in this instance. Lieut. Lynch, the officer who was in command of the expedition, and who has written the account of its discoveries, does not suppose he has here found the pillar of Lot's wife, nor does it appear that even the Arabs had stated it to be such; but it is very properly pointed out that it was probably a pillar of this sort, produced by the action of water upon one of the masses of rock salt, which abound towards the southern extremity of the Dead Sea, that the ancient writers had in view, and which they supposed to be that into which Lot's wife was turned. We now see the natural process by which such pillars are formed. It seems to us that the pillar of Lot's wife must have been on the opposite side of the lake, for the fugitives were proceeding to Zoar, which lay in that direction. And it does not escape our notice, that the unhappy woman appears to have been overtaken by her death in the plain, whereas this pillar stands upon a hill from forty to sixty feet above the beach, with loftier mountains immediately behind. The pillar itself also is forty feet high, which we should suppose to be considerably taller than either Lot or his wife. Yet all these circumstances would in ages of less exact observation have had no weight, and this very pillar would assuredly have been pronounced as being, beyond all doubt or question, monument of an unbelieving soul." THE CORN POLICY. GENESIS XLI. 34-36, 47-57; XLVII. 13-26. "the our own. The Orientals have never troubled themselves much about abstract rights. It is the harsh or mild exercise of powers, whether these powers be formally recognised or not, which they chiefly regard; and they seldom question any power a monarch thinks fit to assume, so long as its application does not press insupportably upon the individual. In the present case it is quite probable, that the extreme importance and urgency of the occasion was regarded as justifying the utmost exertion of the royal power, without greater regard for private rights-if any such rights were recognised-than we usually find among Eastern nations. The mission of Joseph was to provide for the famine; and this he was bound to do in conformity with the existing ideas and institutions of the nation, with which a residence of twenty-three years must have made him well acquainted, without embarrasing his operations, by raising new questions of government and political right. The case may have been somewhat different when the years of famine came, and all the food of the Iland was in his hands, food which would, without his care, all have disappeared during the years of plenty, and the people left to remediless starvation. The nation then lay at his feet; and, seeing that a man will give all that he hath for his life, he had the power of acting as seemed good in his eyes. Whether he had some regard to the advantage of the people, or to that of the crown, whose servant he was, may be a question with us. But it was probably no question with him, in whose view the advantage of the king and the people were doubtless one. Under the deep study which the principles of government, and of political economy, have of late years received, the conduct of Joseph in this trying position may be considered with advantage, and in freedom from those crude notions of unbounded state profusion which people were wont to admire, but which are now seen to form, in their results, a curse to any people. The state had corn in abundance, and the people had no food. What was the state to do? However people might talk fifty years ago, as if it were the duty of the state to open its stores, and feed the people during all these years without cost, few thinking men would now take this to be the wisest course. It was the duty of the state to see that none should perish from want, while there was food in the land; but it was not the duty of the state-it would not have been wise or prudent-it would even have been mischievous, to have supplied corn without cost, to those who had the means of paying for it, in money or in money's worth. This is now so well understood, that, during the recent famine in the sister country, the government taxed its ingenuity to find means that those who had nothing but their labour to sell, should give that labour in exchange for the food❘ which the care of the state provided. The whole care and solicitude of the government was to avoid the appearance, and, as far as possible, the reality of giving of its mere bounty, the food for which it had ransacked the world. No doubt, the men who spent their days in mending, or in seeming to mend the roads, would have been better pleased had the food been given them without this cost; but the wise thought differently. And if so much danger was i this case apprehended, from the precedent of feeding a people gratuitously for a few months, how much greater would have been the danger of doing this during the seven long years of famine in Egypt? It is not too much to say, that seventy times seven years would scarcely have enabled the nation to recover from the shock which its character and its industry would, during these seven years, have sus tained. Instead, therefore, of Joseph's plan of selling instead of giving the corn to the people, being a matter of reprehension, we ought to be astonished at a course of proceeding which anticipated the dis-1 coveries of the nineteenth century of Christ; and at the strength of mind which enabled the minister of the Egyptian crown to forego the vulgar popularity! | which profuse, but unreasoning bounty can always obtain. We have ourselves had, at intervals, frequent occasion to examine the conduct of Joseph in this transaction very closely, and we must acknowledge, that the more we have examined it, the better we have understood it, and the more laudable, the more wise, and the more free from objection it has appeared. And we have reached this judgment quite independently; for we are by no means bound to conclude that all that Joseph did in this matter was right. The Scripture, as usual, records the proceedings without passing any judgment upon them; and, considering the influences by which he was surrounded, and the age and the circumstances in which he lived, it would be surprising indeed to find all his proceedings conformable to modern European notions of political justice. It would be enough to find, that his measures were such as would in his own age be considered just and wise; and if, in any point, as in the one we have noticed, his ideas were in advance of his age, he is entitled to the greater credit; for we cannot rightly expect more from him than the spirit of his own age demanded. Let us now indicate briefly the true character of the transaction, without pausing to discuss the merits of every step in the operation. When the famine commenced, Joseph opened the stores, and began to sell the corn, not only to the Egyptians, but to such foreigners as came for it; and that foreigners did come from all the neighbouring lands to Egypt to purchase corn, shows that it was not offered at an exorbitant or monopoly price to the Egyptians. The foreigners clearly came in the hope of sharing in the benefits enjoyed by the people of Egypt, by purchasing corn at the price it was sold for in that land. At first the payments for corn were made with money; but this at length became exhausted; and as, from the universal character of the visitation, there were none to give money for other property, Joseph consented, on the application of the people, to take property in exchange for corn. They began with their cattle. As they had not the means of feeding their live stock, and they must have been anxious that their horses, flocks, herds, etc., should be in hands that could preserve them' from perishing with hunger; and as the number must have been greatly diminished during the pre I WON'T GIVE A SHILLING. vious period of famine, we need not be surprised to learn, that this resource lasted but one year, at the close of which all the cattle in Egypt had passed into the possession of the crown. What resource then remained? These were not times for lending or borrowing-of putting the evil day far off-of any of the common resources by whith men seek to avert present evil. The questions before men then, were questions of life and death. They came to Joseph, and showing that they had nothing left but their persons and their lands, they offered both as the price of their subsistence during the remainder of the famine, with seed-corn for the time when the operations of agriculture might be resumed. This offer was accepted by Joseph. He did not make the proposal. It was one that he would, perhaps, have hesitated to make; but, being offered by the people, and even pressed upon him, he yielded to their urgency, and without nicely inquiring into the extent of their meaning, accepted it in the same large terms as offered; the particular limitation being then in his hands, and the liberal translation of these terms being well calculated to bring credit to his master. However, the offer as made, is not to be understood under the popular acceptation of buying and selling, the application of which, to this transaction, is calculated to mislead the judgment; as Joseph's phrase in speaking to them, "I have bought you this day, and your lands, for Pharaoh," tends to excite a feeling to the disadvantage of his character. It means little more than "acquired," just as anciently, and indeed at the present day in the East, a wife is said to be "bought," and the money that passes between the husband and her father, is called the "price." This is far from implying that she has become a slave. So, in the present case, although the people relinquish their lands, they do not expect to cease to occupy or cultivate them. They are indeed anxious that the land shall not be desolate; and one of their stipulations is for seed-corn, all of which would have been idle had they become mere slaves or serfs. Had the land, under their offer, become absolutely that of the king, they had little reason to care about it. He would know how to care for his own land; and they might safely leave to him the providing of seedcorn for its culture. And so, had the condition into which they came been that of slaves, he would have been bound to care for them; and it could to them matter but little whether the land lay desolate or not. What they did expect was clearly that they should henceforth become tenants of the crown, instead of free proprietors. This they call being "servants," a term which merely implies that they were under obligations short of absolute freedom. There is no word in Scripture answering to "tenant." The tenant is called the "servant" of the proprietor; and, according to this phraseology, our own tenant-farmers would be called servants, seeing that they cultivate lands not their own, and are bound to render to the landlord a large proportion of the value of the produce as rent. Although, therefore, Joseph's language, "I have bought you this day, you and your lands for Pharaoh." must sound harsh to us, it is well to understand, that the true signification of ever. 535 what he says is this" Having this day acquired for Pharaoh certain rights over you and your lands, I shall now proceed to inform you to what extent these rights will hereafter be enforced." He then states, in accordance with the explanation we have given, that they are to remain in occupation of the lands of which the king had become, by their cession, the proprietor, and that they were to pay one-fifth of the produce as rent, to the sovereign as their landlord, in lieu of all other imposts and charges whatWhen we consider that, in all probability, a tenth at least had previously been paid to defray the expenses of government, the real additional charge is ten per cent.-in all twenty per cent. This is certainly a heavy charge; but it is as nothing in comparison with what is paid for rent in almost any country in Europe at the present day; and still less bears comparison with the combined charges of rent and taxation, which this charge in Egypt appears to us to represent. It is somewhat remarkable, that amid the vicissitudes to which that country has been subject, the compact between the ruler and his subjects entered into by Joseph, has always subsisted there in principle. To this day the fellah, or peasant, in Egypt, cultivates the land for his sovereign, and receives a portion of the produce for his own wants. But, amid the grasping exactions of our own age, and the harsh oppressions to which he is subject by the government and its officers, he has much reason to regret that the moderation of Joseph does not actuate its present rulers. Mr Lane, in his excellent book on the Modern Egyptians, declares with emphasis, that "it could scarely be possible for them to suffer more, and live." I WON'T GIVE A SHILLING. Give us then one crown-piece," said we to a rich man, to whom we applied one day to aid in building a little church in the country. He had been a poor boy. God had prospered him. He was successful in business, had become even a man of influence in the Church. He would lend you fifty pounds, or a hundred, or even more, on good security; but poor little church, he would not give it a shilling. No, NOT A SHILLING. Some Well, thought we, the church is the Lord's. A little poor country church is just as much the Lord's as a great rich splendid city church; and the Lord is just as able to help it as he is any rich one. men will give largely-not one crown-piece, but hundreds, to such a church as they fancy-and would lend that church more twice over than would have built two of our little ones; but then there is this distinction-the little poor church, and the poor teacher to it, have to depend on the Lord, and the church to which we give or lend so much is our church, and the preacher relies on us for his support. There is a great difference. Alas! how many will give hundreds, and loan thousands, from their interest in the same, who for the love of Christ, and for the Lord's sake, will not give one shilling! To what will all our giving amount, We if it be not from love to Christ and his cause? fear those who regulate their contributions thus do not often think of (1 Cor. xiii. 3), "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity (love), it |