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1. In the cotton factories of Lancashire there is a huge piece of machinery fifty feet in length, and containing hundreds of spindles, which moves steadily backward and forward from one side of the room to the other. It is a great triumph of skill to insert within the machine a power by which it shall move a certain distance and then stop and go back again. There was a similar contrivance in Judaism which retained the Word of God at Jerusalem till a certain time and then sent it forth from Jerusalem. This contrivance was the regulation that all the people should repair to the capital to celebrate their appointed feasts; and this regulation was observed even after the Jews had been scattered all over the world. Hence the gathering at Pentecost. Up to that period the arrangement seemed devised to keep the worship of God in one place and to forbid the spread of true religion. But now it seemed expressly invented for the universal diffusion of the gospel of Christ.

2. In a still, sultry autumn day, as you walk through the fields, your attention is arrested by a tiny sound at intervals, like an explosion in miniature, and a few seconds after a shower of tiny bails falls upon the ground. It is the bursting of seed pods in the sun. The casket that contains the seed of some plants is composed of four or five long narrow staves, joined together like Cooper work, but without the staves. The staves are glued together at the edges, and the vessel so constructed is strong enough to contain the seed till it is ripe. But if the seeds were retained beyond that the purposes of nature would be thwarted. Accordingly at this stage there is a turning point, and the action of the machinery is reversed. The same qualities in the vessels that hold fast the seed while it is green jerk it to a distance after it is ripe. The staves of the little barrel are bent, the bursting force overcomes the adhesion and opens them with a spring that flings the seed as if from a sewer's hand. By this contrivance, though no human hand were near, a whole field would soon be sown by seed from a single plant. Thus the law in Israel that confined the sacrifices to a single spot, and so brought Jews from all parts at Pentecost, threw the seed of the Word as by a spring out from Jerusalem into all the neighbouring nations. These Parthians, etc., were the vessels charged with precious seed at Jerusalem, and then thrown back on the several countries whence they had come. In this way the gospel was in a single season brought to regions which otherwise it might not have reached in a century.

(W. Arnot.)

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KJV: And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.

WEB: Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under the sky.