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INTERNAL EVIDENCES.

Personal ambition has always been the great motive with the originators of every religion which has only had a human origin. To sway the mind and consciences of men is the aim and the hope of such teachers. They seek this either as in itself an end, or else as a means through it to obtain for themselves and their families rule and power in temporal matters.

Now, perhaps of all human characters who have ever exercised power in the world, Moses is the farthest from any charge of personal ambition. In two great periods of his life he was undoubtedly in places of power. But as regards the first of these, his place in the court of Egypt, he had never sought it; as regards the second of these, his position as leader and lawgiver of Israel, it was imposed upon him against his will. His real character comes out in his relation to both these periods. Had he been allowed his heart's desire, that desire would have been to continue to feed his fatherin-law's flock in the desert of Horeb (Exod. ii. 21; iii. 1). We will for a few moments refer to the two great active periods of his life, between which his peaceful, quiet, happy sojourn in Midian is interposed.

He was

To those who would attribute ambition as a powerful motive with Moses, we would refer in reply to his renunciation of a foremost place in worldly grandeur in the court and kingdom of Egypt. We know as well from sacred as from profane history the eminent position which he occupied in Egypt as the adopted son of its Princess, and through her the heir to its throne." brought up from his earliest years with this bright worldly prospect before him, and educated with reference to his attaining it. In physical and mental qualifications, he was fitted to adorn it; being strong and beautiful in person, of powerful mental qualities, all trained and exercised. Yet what was his conduct? Not in early youth, when he might be supposed actuated by enthusiastic notions; not in the period of old age when mental effort and the responsibility of high position might have been distasteful to him, and led him to resign power which had become so: but in the full maturity of all his powers he renounced the heirship to the throne of Egypt. He certainly was not an ambitious man. Instead of coveting the honours, the riches, the pleasures of the world which lay at his feet, he takes his place with the poor down trodden race of Israel, labouring under hard taskmasters in the brickfields of Egypt. His heart lay with these his persecuted brethren. He takes his part with them. For them he leaves the brilliant court of Pharaoh and flies into the wilderness, having there no hope of ever leading them or ever seeing them again.

The next forty years of his life he spends in the wilderness of Midian (Exod. ii. 21). He is contented with his lot; so unlike what he had been used to from infancy. Wife and child

*Josephus' Antiquities. Book ii. Chap. ix.

and pastoral pursuits satisfied one who looked beyond this present life (Heb. xi. 26). The quiet of the pastures of the wilderness, the sublimity of the mount of God, with its varying lights and shadows, the contemplation to which the sun by day and the moon and the stars by night led up his mind, these were dearer to Moses' heart than the grand cities and monuments of Egypt, Thebes with its mighty population; Zoan with its vast surrounding plains, where he afterwards wrought his miracles; Memphis, whence stretched in long line the pyramids, and out from whose soil rose up the strange calm sphinx to gaze out through the centuries over the land of the Nile. The peaceful occupations of shepherd life, the tent where wife and child awaited his return, the wise converse of Jethro,these were of higher, truer value to him than the palace and the court, with their intrigues, and envies, and ambitions. Where he lived his peaceful life, there he would willingly have died. His heart did not turn back to Egypt.

As such was the prevailing turn of his mind, we have in his age at the period when he went to assume the place of leader to Israel additional reason why it was not ambition that led him to take that step. It is in youth that daring lofty projects are conceived. It is in the prime of manhood that they are carried out. But age is not the period for commencing such. Moses at the age of forty had turned away from the paths of ambition. For the succeeding forty years he had lived in contentment a life of privacy. He would not at the age of eighty, of himself, have undertaken one of the most difficult positions possible from any motive of personal ambition. It is true that at a period long subsequent to this, "his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated" (Deut. xxxiv. 70). But he could not have calculated, when he undertook his mission to his people, on such a wonderful prolongation of his vigour, doubtless given him to enable him to bear the heavy burden of Israel until their arrival at Canaan. Neither he nor they ever anticipated the forty years' travel in the wilderness (Num. xiv. 33).

Most certainly the office which Moses undertook was one of the most arduous in the world. To rescue a down-trodden people from the grasp of the most powerful military monarchy in the world— to lead out to unknown difficulties an abject race-this was the mission with which Moses was charged. We may safely say that at the age of eighty years it would never have been suggested to him by personal ambition to undertake this mission, even though he had the aid of his brother Aaron, somewhat older than himself.

But it is impossible to overrate the reluctance which Moses felt to undertake his mission to Egypt. Let us take up the third and fourth chapters of the Book of Exodus, and read the sentiments of his mind when it is proposed to him. His thoughts and his language are the farthest possible removed from those of ambition. It is positively piteous to read excuse after excuse, plea after plea, urged why he should not go. "Who am I that I should

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go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?" (Exod. iii. 11). "What shall I say unto them?" (Exod. iii. 13). "They will not believe me! (Exod. iv. 1). "O, my Lord, I am not eloquent" (Exod. iv. 10). probably his last plea brings out most strongly the deep-seated reluctance with which he contemplated his departure from Midian to Egypt. It is, "O my Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom Thou wilt send" (Exod. iv. 13). Who is this? It is no other than "the prophet" of whom he speaks in Deut. xviii. 15 as to be raised up in after times to speak to man the message from God. Such a messenger had been looked forward to from the period of man's fall, and still in Moses' time he had not come. Moses looked forward to his coming, but plainly knew not when he should come, and did not expect it until after he himself should have passed away from this earthly scene (Deut. xviii. 18). But yet when the mission to Egypt is brought before him, in his extremity of reluctance he prays that the great prophet may come before his time to free him from a mighty task, which he felt beyond his power. As the Church of God in the present age, often sad and suffering, impatiently has prayed that the Lord might come back the second time sooner than the Father's appointed season, and are disposed to murmur because the Lord appears to them to be delaying His coming, so Moses, meek among mankind, at sight of the office proposed to him, plea after plea of his set aside, impatiently prays that God should for him alter His own times and seasons, and send the Great Messenger sooner than He had intended. The man who felt and acted thus was not moved by ambition to undertake the deliverance of Israel. He had no care for greatness which would lead him to play the impostor's part, and say, "The Lord hath spoken unto me," when he knew no such voice had come. He was plainly a man to whom the quiet of private station was far dearer than greatness. He felt what Milton has so beautifully described in his "Paradise Regained," that—

"A crown,

Golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns,

Brings dangers. troubles, cares, and sleepless nights

To him who wears the regal diadem,

When on his shoulder each man's burden lies;

For therein stands the office of a king,

His honour, virtue, merit, and chief praise,

That for the public all this weight he bears."

It was duty, not ambition, which chained him to the leadership of of Israel. His was no easy task. Murmuring and rebellion were ever in his ears.

But the absence of ambition is clearly seen in Moses, not only in regard of his own personal greatness, but also as regards his family. He had two sons born to him in the land of Midian, Gershom and Eliezer (Exod. xviii. 2-4). These men were in the very prime of

life when their father led forth the hosts of Israel out of Egypt. Though Moses was at this time eighty years of age he was and so continued down to the very close of life, possessed of all the vigour of his early manhood; his eye not dim, nor his natural force abated, he did not take one single step to raise his family to greatness in his lifetime, or to secure their possession of it after his death. Their names are given us in Scripture. That is about all. They were, by reason of their birth, heads of a family division of the tribe of Levi, but they were not admitted to the honour and power of the priesthood which were conferred upon Aaron and his sons. They had no post of dignity conferred upon them by their father, and on the approach of death he handed over the leadership of the people to Joshua, a member of a different tribe, that of Ephraim. His descendants are of no note. His actual grandson we read of as "an obscure, wandering, semi-idolatrous Levite, content to serve an irregular ephod for a double suit of apparel and ten shekels (i.e., about thirty shillings) a year."* So little do we read about the family of Moses in the Pentateuch, so completely are they passed over where we might expect them to be brought forward as the sons of the great lawgiver, that Mr. Davidson, in his "Introduction to the Old Testament," has argued from it that the Pentateuch could not have been written by Moses at all (p. 15). This is but a weak argument. The real cause of the silence is that Moses was not actuated by any worldly ambition in taking on him the post which he fulfilled in the Exodus of Israel.

He

Freed from the charge of personal ambition in assuming the office which he filled in life, we can attribute his conduct in doing so to one motive only, namely, his conviction that he was sent by God. All through his intercourse with Israel, he appeals to miraculous interposition and direct communication with God. He does so when first he returns to Egypt and puts forward his right to lead Israel out of captivity. He does so at the passage of the Red Sea, and through the long forty years' sojourn in the wilderness. claimed throughout perpetual miracle, and a voice ever speaking to him as from God when he asked for counsel. With no worldly object for putting forward an unfounded claim, and therefore free from the suspicion of counterfeiting what was not real, we have only to inquire, whether he had opportunity, and was competent to judge of the truth of that miraculous attestation to which he laid claim throughout forty years. There can be but one answer, and that is, that he had full opportunity, and was fully competent to judge. It was to him that the Divine Voice was said to speak; it was by him, at his command and in his presence, that the mighty works of the Exode were said to have been performed, and this through a period of forty years. Moses had, indeed, the opportunity of judging of the reality of what he claimed.

* Farrar's "Life of Christ." i. 9., on Judges xvii. 10; xviii. 30.

With regard to his competency, there can be no other reply than that he was fully competent to judge. A man undoubtedly of the greatest knowledge and of a powerful reason, he was fully competent to decide whether that voice that came to him in his seasons of perplexity was a Divine voice from God, or the echo only of a crazed imagination. He was fully competent also to test the miraculous nature of the works said to be wrought at his command, and through the wondrous rod in his hand. He could well and truly judge of the series of miracles in Egypt, where Divine was contrasted against human or diabolical agency. He could tell whether the passage across the Red Sea was effected by a miracle elsewhere unequalled in its kind, or through some ordinary wind and low state of the tide. He knew whether the people were fed for forty years by a heavenly food or not. He could tell whether the water burst forth from the stony rock or not. He could judge, in fact, as accurately of the reality of all that was supernatural during the forty years of his leadership as it was possible to judge. He did so, and his judgment was that God had sent him on his work, and that he must therefore go. He would have avoided the work, but he dared not do so with all the evidence before him that the God of whose creative work he had written in the Book of Genesis, had now come forth from the clouds and the thick darkness which surround Him to make a revelation of His will and purpose to His creatures. To the proof of this Divine apocalypse, Moses gave the full assent and consent of a reason and a judgment never surpassed by human intellect. He could not deny it. He accepted it with an unhesitating assent. Because of it he undertook and accomplished a work from which his natural feelings strongly turned away. Controlled, as well as sustained by it, he bore the heavy burden of a discontented, unbelieving, rebellious people for forty long and weary years, until, upon the top of Pisgah, he rendered up his spirit into his Maker's hand, and was buried by God Himself in valley in the land of Moab. Moses' faith in his Divine mission was one of the many internal evidences of its truth.

HENRY CONSTABLE.

STUDIES IN THE LIFE OF CHRIST.

No. VII.
Nazareth.

THE righteousness which justified humanity was wrought out mainly in the territory of the ancient apostate kingdom, while in the dominions of the more faithful Judah-at Jerusalem, was offered up the world's sacrifice for sin. Idolatrous Israel had far the loveliest portion of the land. In scenery, in fertility, in

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