See I Samuel vi.

THE Ark of the Lord has been taken. Such a mark of the Almighty's high displeasure has fallen like a dreadful foreboding doom on his stricken and terrified people. Eli, the priest,-he who had judged Israel for forty years,-had fallen at the news; and the day was one of bitterness to young and old. For seven months the Ark had remained in the land of its captors, but they are months of mourning, of death and of disease, and the Philistines hasten to bear it back, for it proves too heavy a burden to them to endure the wrath of the God of Israel.

It is this return that the artist has illustrated. The narrative itself. is pastoral in the extreme and full of a subtle beauty. "And the kine took the straight way to the way of Bethshemesh, and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand, or to the left: and the lords of the Philistines went after them, unto the border of Bethshemesh. And they of Bethshemesh were reaping their wheat harvest in the valley; and they lifted up their eyes, and saw the Ark, and rejoiced to see it." How lovely is the artist's translation! What a glowing redundance of light floods the charming scene! High in the background, against a vast fan of spreading radiance, is seen the cart, with its lofty, white-winged cherubim, its lowing kine, slowly coming on: in the middle distance the shadowy forms of the reapers, and in the foreground the people amid their sheaves, all alert, joyful, enraptured at the glorious vision. Well may the artist have wrapped the whole scene in intensest light, as emblematic of him who dwelleth in light unapproachable.