MANOAH'S SACRIFICE.

UNDER the administration of the judges, Israel had enjoyed a peace of more than twenty years' duration, when the people again provoked God, as they had before done, by the most abominable impieties. The Philistines now, taking advantage of the security in which a long peace had involved the Israelites, invaded their territories, and reduced them to great distress. It was at this period that the Almighty raised up a deliverer in Samson, who discomfited the Philistines in every encounter, and rendered himself a terror to those enemies of his nation. His birth was attended with some remarkable circumstances. His mother having been a long time barren, was visited by an angel, who assured her that she would shortly bear a son, who should be a Nazarite, that is, a person dedicated to God from his birth. Upon this assurance, the woman, whose name is nowhere recorded in Scripture, sought her husband Manoah, and related to him the divine promise; he immediately petitioned the Almighty to grant him an interview with his messenger. The requisition was complied with. The angel soon after appeared to the woman as she was in the field, where she was probably engaged in some agricultural occupation; she immediately sought her husband, who, being apprised of the circumstance, demanded of the heavenly messenger what he should do with the child, when the injunctions which had been before given to his wife were repeated to him. Upon asking the name of the messenger, Manoah received a rebuke. Then "Manoah took a kid with a meat-offering, and offered it upon a rock unto the Lord, and the angel did wondrously," (that is, acted in a supernatural manner, probably in bringing fire out of the rock to consume the sacrifice), and Manoah and his wife looked on. For it came to pass when the flame went up towards heaven from off the altar, that the angel of the Lord ascended in the flame of the altar; and Manoah and his wife looked on it, and fell on their faces to the ground *."