Moses, the Man of God

The following Course of Lectures was delivered to the congregation of Regent Square during the winter of 1859-60.

The MSS., although not prepared for the press by the Author, bear sufficient indications of his ultimate intention to justify their publication in a collected form. Where alternative forms of expression appear in the MSS., those that seem to be the later have been retained.

I-oxDOX, Octoher 14, 1870.

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She took for him an ark of bulrushes,... and put the child therein.” — Ex. ii. 3.

In this climate of ours there are some plants which need no culture. The thistle takes care of itself. It requires no husbandman to break up the ground and scatter the seed and drive away the fowls of heaven; but wherever there is a breeze it finds a carrier, and wherever it finds a sod it makes a home. Here are downs which have not felt the plough since the days of Alfred or Caractacus, and thistles grow on them still — the descendants of those prickly sires which were crimsoned by the blood of battling Danes or Britons in the far far distant times of old.

But if you sow any kind of corn you must take a great deal of trouble. You must cleave open and crumble the mould; you must cover it in; you must uproot the weeds that would choke it, and

you must drive away the beasts that seek to devour it. And the crop of this season, if left to itself, will insure no successor. A few straggling ears may survive for an autumn or two, but presently there is no more trace of the golden grain on your neglected meadow than there would be on the sands of the shore.

At the first God gave to mankind many great truths and lessons: the knowledge of Himself as the Father of spirits, holy, beneficent, forgiving; the great rules of piety and virtue; and above all, the promise, so gracious and animating, of a coming Deliverer from sin and from sorrow — a promise which, as a blessed element of hope and elasticity, should keep man’s face still upward, and his heart still strong for his toils and trials. All these God gave, and at the first He flung them broadcast. They were public property, and at the first were intrusted to the general memory. But this was enough to show that for saving truths the mind of man has ceased to be the proper soil; for knowledge heaven-descended earth is no longer a congenial clime. “Thistles grow instead of wheat.” Ambition, revenge, cruelty, falsehood, rapine, float tln-ough all the atmosphere, and these can spring up anywhere: not so integrity, truth, chastity, respect for the rights of others, brotherly-kindness: and midway betwixt the Creation and the Advent the world had sunk into such a depth of idolatry and immorality as to make it perfectly plain that on the self-propagating principle those precious seeds which had been carried away from Eden would soon disappear altogether. For the bread of life there was too little appetite to intrust its preservation any longer to the careless and promiscuous multitude, — the sin-loving, God-forsaking, demon-adoring nations of mankind.

Accordingly, at this period the Most High, in His wisdom, took means for the conservation of the priceless blessing. Instead of dealing any longer with the millions of the race — instead of emptying garners of truth over fens and swamps which engulfed the seed and yielded no return — He took in “a little piece of holy ground.” He laid hold of one family, and selected it as the recipient and custodier of Divine Revelation. By a very remarkable process He fenced in and secluded that family, making it a peculiar people, dwelling alone, and not reckoned among the nations; and when the great purpose was answered, and the wall of separation was broken down, it was on the hills of Palestine that the handful of corn was found which now waves on our English fields, and will yet make all the mountains of the earth like Lebanon.

When trying to Christianize a deeply sunken community — Eijians or Savage Islanders — it is sometimes a good plan to get hold of one or two of the natives, and bring them to an adjacent missionsettlement, where they may be taught and trained, and then, with the help of these native pioneers, the missionaries find their work exceedingly facilitated. So in His great process of reclaiming a sunken world, the Lord laid hold of one particular family. He raised up the righteous man from the East, and called him to His feet. From the surrounding grossness and superstition He snatched away that family, and after a dreary probation in the desert — after a long discipline in the Eeformatory of that great wilderness, — He promoted it to the pleasant school of Palestine. “The mill of God grinds slowly,” and it took a thousand years before the pupil nation was ready to give its lesson to mankind. But at last, thoroughly weaned from idolatry, with the unity and the spirituality of the Godhead engraven on its inmost conviction, with that essence of all ethics — the Ten Commands — familiar as the alphabet, by daily usages inured to those expiatory and mediatorial ideas which lie at the root of God’s method with mankind, and by accumulating and converging prophecies not only taught to expect the Saviour, but looking for His arrival with nervous excitement, — above all, with a text -book in its hands infinitely holier and wiser than itself, — the old scholar was now ready to act the part of teacher and evangelist, and go forth as God’s own missionary, in the person of its more enlightened members able to tell to Greeks and Romans even such unheard-of wonders as Jesus and the Resurrection.

A few years ago we gave a course of lectures on the Father of the Hebrew Family. We now purpose to accompany in his career the Founder of the Hebrew Nationality — that great Liberator and Lawgiver who fulfilled a more important function than any other man in the ages before Messiah.

Abraham and his immediate descendants were shepherds, and they were that kind of shepherds whom we call nomads. It was no object of theirs to cultivate land or build houses, or in any way improve the country where they sojourned. They drove their flocks to any spot where grass and water could be found, and as soon as the herbage of that region was consumed, they packed up their canvas village, and moved on till pastures green invited them to halt once more. But with their migratory habits they had no inducement to sow fields and plant vineyards, nor did it suit their purpose to rear dwellings of stone or temples for worship. They wanted portable houses which could accompany their cattle; and, if they were rich, they invested their wealth not in handsome buildings and spacious gardens and bulky furniture, but in jewels and costly robes, which were not cumbrous to carry. But for this roving unresting people the Lord had selected a land which pre-eminently needed settled habits and the arts of mechanic industry. To treat Palestine as a mere sheep-walk would be to throw it utterly away. It was “a land for wheat and barley; for ldnes and fig-trees and pomegranates; a land of oil, olive, and honey; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills brass mic’ht be dusr.” But Jacob and his sons were incapable of turning to account such a land. They were neither horticulturists nor farmers nor metallurgists, and in order to do justice to their goodly heritage it was needful that the shepherds should learn to be farmers and workers in stone and in wood, in clay and in metal. Accordingly, He who had pro-ided the land for His people took means to prepare the people for the land, — means wonderfully marked by His own foreknowledge and wisdom. After giving the favoured family a glimpse of their promised and predestined home, the Lord removed them to a land where they might be trained and qualified so as to make the most of Palestine when once they should obtain final possession. Egypt was then the most advanced and enhghtened of all lands, — its exhaustless soil waving with crops and over-canopied by palms and pomegranates, and its cities stupendous with colossal temples and palaces in which art emulated the immensity and indestructibility of nature. Proficients in masonry and in the fictile arts, weaving that fine linen which all antiquity regarded as a glory of the loom, and rearing those enormous structures which are still a wonder to the world, — musicians, armourers, jewellers, — there was scarcely an art which its industrious citizens did not practise, and which might not there be learned by any observant visitor who possessed a passport to their favour. With such a passport the Lord provided Jacob and his sons. “He sent a man before them,” and through the popularity and power of Joseph, Egypt, usually so jealous of strangers, gave hearty welcome to its benefactor’s kinsmen. Assigned a region which should be all their own, the length and breadth of the land were before them, and the Aholiabs and Bezaleels who should arise were free to copy each Egyptian craft and mystery.^

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