aven or
earth; the glory of the Lord appearing in the cloud (most probably, but
not of necessity, the cloud which guided them), and in the direction
whence they were so fain to turn away.

No later inventor would have known how to say so little, much less to
make that little harmonise so exactly with the lessons meant to be
suggested by the wild and solemn solitudes into which they were now
plunged.

And now the Lord Himself repeats the promise of relief, but first
solemnly announces that He is not heedless of their ill-behaviour while
He tolerates it. The question is suggested, although not asked, How long
will His forbearance last?

Well for them if they learn the lesson, and "know that I am Jehovah your
God," mindful of their needs, entitled to their fealty. In the evening,
therefore, came a flight of quails; and in the morning they found a
small round thing, small as the hoar-frost, upon the ground.

_MANNA._

xvi. 15-36.

The manna which miraculously supplied the wants of Israel was to them an
utterly strange food, the use of which they had to learn. Thus it was
another means of severing their habitual course of life and association
of ideas from their degraded past. And while we may not press too far
the assertion that it was the "corn of heaven" and "angels' food"
(_i.e._ "the bread of the mighty"--Psalm lxxviii. 24-5, R.V.), yet the
narrative shows, even without help from later scriptures, that it was
calculated to sustain their energies and yet to leave their appetites
unstimulated and unpampered. For they were now called to purer joys
than those of the senses--to liberty, a divine vocation, the presence of
God, the revelation of His law and the unfolding of His purposes.
Failing to rise to these heights, they fell far, murmured again, and
perished by the destroyer, not merely to avenge the petulance of an
hour, but for all that it betrayed, for treason to their vocation and
radical inability to even comprehend its meaning. In the language of
modern science, it answered to Nature's rejection of the unfit.

Their calling was thus, though under very different forms, that which
the apostles found so hard, yet did not quite refuse: it was to mind the
things of God and not the things of men.

It is well known that the manna of the Israelites bore some resemblance
to a natural product of the wilderness, still exuded by certain plants
during the coolness of the night, and formerly more plentiful than now,