ver
the occasions were, the words occasioned are for us inestimably
precious. Dear to the heart of the believing Church for ages have been
these precepts to love the brethren ([Greek: philadelphia]), to love the
stranger ([Greek: philoxenia]), to remember Abraham at Mamre and Gideon
at Ophrah with their angel-guests, and to see a possible angel-visitor
in every needing stranger at the door. The call (ver. 2) to remember the
captive, and the sufferer of every sort, comes with solemn power from
this paragraph, as it presses home the law of sympathetic fellowship,
and in one passing phrase ("_as being in the body_") reminds us that,
for the Christian, all sufferings, all burthens of pain and care, cease
for ever when once he is "out of the body." Sacred is the witness borne
here to the pure dignity of wedlock (ver. 4): "Be[S] marriage
honourable in all things, and the bed unspotted; for fornicators and
adulterers"--not only adulterers, but those also who sin that other sin
which the world so easily and so blindly condones--"God will judge." And
when the Christian is warned (ver. 5) against the greed of gain, the
quoted words of the Old Testament make, by the use they are put to, a
possession for ever valuable to the believing reader of the Scriptures.
For not only are they in themselves wonderful in their emphasis: "I will
never give thee up; I will never, never desert thee." They are
inestimable as an example of the sort of use which this New Testament
prophet could make of the spiritual riches of the Old Testament. For
here he sees a Divine watchword for the new life, not only in the
glorious outburst of faith (ver. 6) in Psalm cxviii., the _Hallel_ of
the Passover. In the words spoken to Joshua, and to all appearance
spoken _to him personally and alone_ (ver. 5: see Josh. i. 5), we are
led equally to see a message from the heart of God straight to every
Christian soul. Seldom, if ever, are we more powerfully and tenderly
encouraged than we are here to use with confidence that old-fashioned
and now often disparaged sort of Bible study, the collection of eternal
and universal principles of spiritual life out of an "isolated text."

[S] The sentence demands an understood _imperative_ verb, without which
the "_for_" which (in the true reading) introduces the second clause is
out of place.

Then comes the passage where the departed "guides" are commemorated.
Whoever they were, were they a Stephen and a James, or saints utte