In these verses is given a very touching episode, and yet it is a very commonplace incident that is narrated. A father gains the news that his sons have been attacked by foes and killed, and, as the poor father sits stricken with the great sorrow, his brethren, his relatives, come to mourn with him and to comfort him. Children are an anxiety and care, all through our relations with them, when "about us" in the frailties of their childhood, and when away from us in the wilfulnesses of their young manhood. Sick-scenes and death-scenes are familiar to most parents, and few human homes last long unbroken. Nor is the comforting of loving friends other than a commonplace and yet most gracious fact of our modern life. Still, the thrill of hand and tear-filled eye and sympathetic word bring relief and rest to burdened and bereaved hearts. Life repeats itself over and over again, and tells its tale of grief and loss concerning one family after another. So it was in the olden times. Ephraim mourns the loss of his children, and his brethren come to comfort him; and thus it is seen that family life becomes a moral training for us all; and as the experiences of sickness, sorrow, and loss go round to one after another, we all come under the great Father's sanctifying, and find out how "good it is even to be afflicted."

I. THE LOSS OF CHILDREN. Here especially the greater loss of their death rather than the toss by removal, which never quite quenches hope. Such loss comes at various stages, and we never know at which of their ages the stroke falls lightest. It comes in various ways, slowly or suddenly, and we never can tell which way seemed to crush us most. The reaper cuts the "bearded grain" and the "flowers;" beautiful infants fly away, bright childhood fades, and blooming youth is smitten; and all we can say about it we say after Jacob, "If I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved." On this we may dwell somewhat more fully.

II. THE PARENTAL GRIEF AT THE LOSS OF CHILDREN. "Ephraim mourned many days." Such grief is well illustrated in David's wailing over Absalom, Elijah's friend's grief over her dead child, and the poor Nain widow going out to bury her only son. The Eastern thought about the children helps to explain the intensity of their grief. Easterns conceived of their own earthly existence as continued in their children - they had a kind of immortality in their children, and they pleased themselves with the idea that their descendants would reach higher dignity and place than they had done. So for their children to die was a plucking down of lofty imaginations, an uprooting of carefully raised hopes. And so it is in measure for us, as may be most tenderly illustrated in the case of the talented young Hallam, whose early death Tennyson deplores in his "In Memoriam."

III. THE FAMILY BONDS SANCTIFIED IN THE LOSS OF CHILDREN. Such points as these may be unfolded and illustrated. If rightly, piously borne, the death of children may be used:

1. To the producing of a hallowing tenderness of feeling on all the members.

2. To a solemnizing estimate of the relative interests of this brief life and the coming eternal one.

3. To the self-denying efforts of each member to comfort the others, often involving most precious lessons in self-restraint.

4. To the reknitting of the family bonds. One member of a home realized as being away in the heavenly brings wondrously near and makes affectingly real all that belongs to the "unseen and eternal." And in family griefs we are "comforted, in order that we may be able to comfort them that are in any affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God." - R.T.

In the mines of Peru, there are veins of peculiar richness; but the very rubbish is valuable. In the Bible there are passages of peculiar importance, but there is nothing trifling, nothing useless. To be able to extract from the more barren portions of Scripture the instructions they were intended to communicate is a talent which every Christian should cultivate. This passage teaches us —

I. THAT THERE IS NO INDIVIDUAL OR SOCIETY SECURE FROM SUDDEN AND SEVERE MISFORTUNE. Oh! it is natural for us, when we are happy, to cherish the thought that we shall continue to be happy. And we may be placed in circumstances in which such an anticipation seems not only natural but reasonable. Our worldly substance may be abundant; our bodily constitution may be sound and strong, promising us a long and healthy life; our children may be growing up around us, with every appearance of being the support and comfort of our declining years. We may enjoy the affection of our friends. Very few persons have ever been so prosperous, or had equal ground to presume on the permanence of their prosperity as Ephraim. We have reason to hope that Ephraim was a good man. He was certainly the son of a very good man. We cannot doubt that his father Joseph gave him a religious education. We know that Ephraim was a wealthy man. It was, indeed, his great wealth that excited the cupidity of these Philistine robbers. It is obvious that he had reached a good old age, and he had gathered around him children and children's children, and the children of children's children. You can easily suppose the good old man retiring to rest happy in his possessions, and happier still in his anticipations, for he had reason to anticipate coming prosperity. God had spoken good of all the descendants of Israel, but of none had He spoken so much good as of Ephraim. In his numerous descendants he probably pleased himself with the thought, that he saw the begun accomplishment of the promise that his seed should become a multitude of nations. But what a fearful and sudden reverse was he destined to experience! This affecting incident reads a lesson to us all. It tells those who are afflicted, "in patience to possess their souls"; and it bids those who are happy, "join trembling with their mirth." It tells those who are in affliction to give God thanks that they have not been afflicted as Ephraim was. We may have been bereaved of much, it may be, but where is any of us that can for a moment compare his bereavements with those of Ephraim?

II. THAT THE DISPENSATIONS OF DIVINE PROVIDENCE ARE OFTEN APPARENTLY IN DIRECT OPPOSITION TO THE DECLARATIONS OF THE DIVINE PROMISE. It is difficult to conceive a more striking illustration of this general principle than that furnished by the remarkable incident recorded in the passage before us. Ephraim, as a descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, had an interest in all the promises made to his illustrious ancestors. "I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth," said Jehovah to Abraham; "as the number of the stars, so shall thy seed be." Ephraim was one of the sons of Joseph, and of course Ephraim had his share in the remarkable blessing that was pronounced on his father. "Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well, whose branches run over the wall." Nor was this all; Ephraim had a share in that blessing which Jacob pronounced on himself, and on his brother Manasseh. When Joseph heard that his father was sick, apparently to death, he went to visit him, and he took along with him his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Jacob having been told that his son Joseph was coming to see him, strengthened himself, and sat upon his bed. "And Jacob said unto Joseph, God Almighty appeared unto me at Luz, in the land of Canaan, and blessed me, and said unto me, Behold I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and I will make of thee a multitude of people," etc. There was more even than this. There was a great peculiarity in the manner in which Jacob pronounced this blessing. He crossed his hands, and laid his right hand on Ephraim, the youngest, and his left hand on Manasseh, the eldest; and when Joseph attempted to alter the position of the old man's hands, he replied, "I know it, my son, I know it," etc. Such was the promise; and in the narrative before us, you see the providence. Can two things be more apparently in direct opposition? Here is a promise that Ephraim shall be more prosperous than all his brethren; and here is a providence that deprives Ephraim at once of all his property, and, as it would seem, of all his children also. Nor is this at all an unparalleled or even an uncommon case, so far as apparent contrariety between the providence and promise of God is concerned. Was it like a fulfilment of a promise made to Israel that Jehovah would give them a good and large land, flowing with milk and honey, to lead them directly into the depths of the Arabian wilderness and keep them wandering there for forty years? Was it like a fulfilment of the promise which God had made to David, that he would make him the ruler of his people, when he drove him from the court of Saul, and exposed him to imminent hazard of his life on the mountains of Israel from the persecutions of his infuriated enemy? I can appeal to the experience of every Christian. Is it not distinctly stated in God's Word that no evil shall happen to the righteous? Is it not distinctly said, what is good God will give His people? Now, I put it to every Christian, if he has not in the course of his life met with much which at the time he could not help thinking evil for him? The reason of this apparent inconsistency of the providence with the promises of God, is by no means that there is a real opposition between them. It is the same God who speaks in His Word that works in His providence — and He is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. His Word and His work are really perfectly harmonious; and in many cases those dispensations, which are apparently frustrating the promise are, in reality, fulfilling it. The reason why the promise and the providence of God often seem to us to be at variance, is our ignorance of the extent and of the particular design of the Divine dispensations. If we could see the commencement, and progress, and issue of all God's dispensations, we would gladly say, He is doing all things well, as we shall by and by be constrained to say, He has done all things well. But in the present state this must be a matter of faith, not of sense. It is the Divine appointment, that here we must walk by faith.

III. THAT THE DISSOLUTION OF THOSE CONNECTIONS THAT BIND US TOGETHER IN A VARIETY OF RELATIONS IN HUMAN LIFE, OCCASIONS TO ALL RIGHTLY CONSTITUTED MINDS SEVERE SUFFERING AND PERMANENT SORROW. It would be a miserable world — at least I am sure it would not be a happy one — if there were no husbands and wives, parents and children, and brothers and sisters, relative and friends. That man must be deplorably selfish, who, on reflecting on the various sources of his happiness, does not find social relation and affection one of the most copious. In proportion to the happiness springing from these relations, is the pain that is occasioned when they are dissolved, especially when they are unexpectedly and violently dissolved. Not merely are our friends the proper objects of a much stronger kind of affection than any other species of property; but their loss is of all other earthly losses the most irreparable. Our property, our reputation, our health, may be lost and regained. But a friend whom we have lost by death, we never can bring back again from the grove.

(J. Brown, D. D.)