Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LAMPS, PITCHERS, AND TRUMPETS. "A trumpet in every man's hand, with empty pitchers, and lamps within the pitchers."—Judges vii. 16. CHESE words are found in the story of Gideon. We ought to know all these Bible stories at once, when we hear any reference to them, without having to go and read about them; just as in school we ought to know our Latin Grammar rules without having to go to the book every time we are called upon for a rule. In old times, before there were so many books, in the old cathedrals and churches in Europe, the architects would cover the walls and the windows with paintings and stained glass and mosaic work, representing all the old Bible stories. St. Mark's Church, in Venice, is covered all over with Bible pictures in this way, made in mosaic work—orthe process of putting little colored stones together so as to make a picture. In this way it happened that though many of the poor people could not read the Bible, there was the open Bible before them all the time; so that they couldn't help seeing and knowing a great deal about it. Now the story of Gideon is this: Once upon a time, in a very rough period of the history of the Israelites, before they became a nation and had a king,—when they were in the long promised land of Canaan very much as the early colonists here in America were before the colonies became the United States, when the French used to come down in incursions from Canada, and the different tribes of Indians attacked the settlers here,—the surrounding nations, the Midian- ites, and the Moabites, and the Jebusites, and the Hivites, and all the rest of them, were in the habit of fighting with the Israelites. About the year 1245 B. c., or 2,490 years before 1245 A. D., the Midianites, who lived to the east of Canaan, came down upon th...