THERE is a diversity of opinion about the fourth generation in the sixteenth verse (Gen. xv.)—some referring it to the Amorites, others to the children of Israel. Caleb, who came out of Egypt, was the fourth from Judah, who entered it. But without advertizing further, either to this numerical adjustment, or to the other of the four hundred years in verse 13, I feel more arrested by the evolution here given of God’s policy in dealing with nations. The places are very numerous in the Old Testament which warrant the idea that the guilt of a nation is proceeded with as the guilt of an individual—is—in that there is a reckoning for the past with the nation, even as there is with the individual; and that this reckoning, with its consequent vengeance, comprehends the earlier as well as the later guilt, even though the former may have been incurred at the distance backward of many generations; and so not a creature may be alive who had personally shared in it. However mysterious such a proceeding is to us, it falls in with many analogies of history and experience, is of a piece with the doctrine of original sin, and even the New Testament can be quoted in support of it as well as the Old. The Saviour speaks of filling up the measure of the iniquity of their fathers, and of the sins of their ancestors being visited, and all the things done since the days of righteous Abel coming on the men of his generation. This is at one with the first destruction of Jerusalem, which the repentance of good King Josiah did not avert, and strikingly at one with God’s forbearance from the work of vengeance on the Amorites, for so many generations as till their iniquities should be full. May God avert from our own Britain the horrors of an anarchy which seems to me as if impending over her; and pour forth the spirit of repentance and reformation over the land.—Dr Chalmers’ “Daily Scripture Readings.”