Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And Elijah said unto her, Fear not; go and do as thou hast said: but make me thereof a little cake first, and bring it unto me, and after make for thee and for thy son: For thus saith the Lord God of Israel, The barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the Lord sendeth rain upon the earth. And she went and did according to the saying of Elijah: and she, and he, and her house, did eat many days. And the barrel of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the word of the LORD, which he spake by Elijah.?I Kings xvn. 13-16. THE BARREL AND THE CRUSE. i Kings xvii. 7-16. HO W long Elijah dwelt in the valley of the Cherith we are not precisely informed; for the phrase after a while, even if we adopt the more literal rendering in the margin, at the end of days, is quite indefinite, and furnishes no data on which we can found any opinion. We may, perhaps, conjecture that he remained in his retreat for a period not shorter than four or five months, and not longer than a year; and in any case, during the later portion of his sojourn, his faith must have been put to a very severe test, for the brook began to fail. Each day, therefore, he would mark that the waters had receded, and laid bare another portion of the shingly channel over which they flowed, until at length he might require to make little artificial pools, into which, after a time, a proper supply might percolate. In such circumstances, if his faith had not been securely fixed in God, his heart might have failed just as the brook declined; and even with his strong confidence in Jehovah, the receding rivulet must have had a saddening influence upon his spirit. Sight does and must affect us more or less, so long as we are in the body, and sigh...