The Ark of Bulrushes

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.^

In the succinct Bible summary, four hundred years are passed over in one breath, and an expression of Stephen (Acts vii. 6) would seem to indicate that during all these years the Israelites

1 For practising some of their acquisitions, — “labour in the field,” — the forty years in the desert gave small opportunity. But such knowledge is transmitted from sire to son; and in the meanwhile four hundred years of Egj’pt had gone far to alter early habits and change the shepherds into agriculturists and artificers. The Tabernacle, the Golden Calf, etc., show that handicrafts were practised.

had been “evil- entreated.” But when we look into it more carefully, we shall find that the evil treatment only began at the close of the period. As long as Joseph was remembered, and as long as the dynasty continued on the throne who had been so dee^Dly Joseph’s debtors, the Hebrews were protected and befriended. “They were fruitful and increased abundantly, and multiplied and waxed exceeding mighty;” and far from continuing cooped up in their own Goshen, they spread over the country, “and the land was filled with them.” They were so prosperous and so exceedingly numerous that at last a sovereign — most likely of a new race of kings — grew apprehensive of their ascendancy. He said to his people, “Behold, the children of Israel are more and mightier than we;” and for fear that in the event of a war they should make common cause with the invader, he adopted towards them a rigid and repressive policy. Their spirit, and their very lives, he tried to crush out by tremendous toils; and when the brick-kilns and the burning sun were not ridding him fast enough of the dangerous foreigners, he promulgated one of those ordinances which make tyranny so terrible, and commanded that henceforward every male child of Hebrew parentage should perish as soon as born.

There have been many commentaries written on the Book of Exodus; but by far the most interesting and remarkable is one for which we are indebted to Pharaoh himself — that pictorial Bible executed by order of the kings of Egypt, and preserved for three thousand years bright and clear beneath the sands of the Libyan desert. There we learn how Egypt was invaded and for a time conquered and held down by a race of shepherd-kings from Arabia — a disgrace and disaster which made shepherds an abomination to the Egyptians, and which rendered the Egyptians especially nervous at the increase within their borders of a shepherd- race, the kinsmen of their shepherd conquerors. There we have preserved countless specimens of such bricks as the Hebrews made — bricks sun-dried, with chaff or straw mixed throughout their substance to make them more tenacious. There we have depicted groups of foreign bondmen, measuring out the clay, moulding it into blocks, carrying away on yokes the finished bricks, and piling them under the eye of an Egyptian taskmaster, who, rod in hand, sits at his ease and looks on in leisure. There too we have numberless examples of the arrogance and cruelty of the Egyptians, trampling on the necks of their enemies; and there we read inscriptions on temples and palaces, boasting how in the construction of those gigantic fabrics no native Egyptian had been employed, but that they were all the work of foreigners. And there, “with a pen of iron, written in the rock for ever,” we have the Pagan’s attestation to a thousand minutiae in the Pentateuch — a sculptured panorama at which we shall hereafter have occasion to glance when we wish to know the meaning of many a scriptural allusion, as well as to know the abode in which the hero of our history spent the morning of his days.

The edict of Pharaoh had not long been issued before it fell in all its bitterness on a family of the house of Levi. In that family there was already a boy three or four years of age, who had the good fortune to be born before the reign of terror; and there was also a little girl twice the age — a clever, dark-eyed maiden, with a fine ear for music, and with her sensible active ways the help and comfort of her mother. But now, when there ought to have been great joy in the house, for another son was born into it, all was hushed and silent. No neighbour came to congratulate, and it was anything but pride which the poor mother felt as she gazed on her “proper child.” Day after day passed on, and every day the babe grew more endearing and more beautiful; but every day made concealment more difficult. It was a wonder that no spy nor informant had yet found out the fatal secret; every foot-fall at the door sent panic tlirongli the house; and sometimes it was impossible to hush those infant outcries, which, if overheard, would attract the murderer to the cradle and be the death of every one of them. This anxiety could not last. The babe was three months old, when one day Jochebed took a basket of papyrus, such as might have long been used for household purposes, and began to make it ready. As with pitch she filled the chinks and made it watertight, as she lined the interior with bitumen, and smoothed and polished it so carefully, the tears ran down, and the little Mary wondered what her mother could intend to do with it. At last all was finished, and in the early morning they set off for the river-side. Jochebed told her daughter what the basket was intended for, and you may be sure it was with a bursting heart that the sister thought of the likely fate of that baby-brother whom she had so often helped to nurse and dandle. But here was a quiet spot on the water’s edge, where the reeds grew tall and the current hardly came; and why not here? “By faith her child had been hid three months,” notwithstanding “the king’s commandment,” and the same faith which had kept up the timid mother’s heart through many real dangers and false alarms had moved her to prepare this ark; and although the shore was desolate and the crocodiles were hungry — though her cheeks were pale and the sword, was piercing through her soul, — that true daughter of Abraham still could trust in God, and cherished in her heart some vasue hope of which her “prepared ark” was sign and sacrament. And now, the last meal given, and the babe adjusted in his new strange cradle, the last kiss imprinted on his broad untroubled brow, and the last look of maternal agony upturned towards Israel’s God, Miriam took her hidden post of observation and the wife of Amram tore herself away.

But she had not long been home when Miriam burst into the house, too wild and agitated to tell all the happy tale, but bidding her mother haste and come. And there, sure enough, they were — a group of ladies grandly dressed around the weeping boy, and one of them the king’s own daughter, and from amidst her laughing, wondering maidens, turning round to Jochebed, the princess said, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages.” Oh what an evening that would be in Amram’s cottage! How eagerly they all by turns would embrace and coax the little outcast! How secure the joy of the happy mother as she clasped her own darling, safe beneath the shadow of the throne! How often would Miriam tell over the adventures of the morning; her “frights” with vultures and with what at first seemed crocodiles; her wonder when the five ladies came at last in sight, walking along the bank, whether they would notice anything, and how she rather thought that they would have passed on, if just then the baby had not begun to cry; and how she herself had contrived to come up as if by chance at the very moment, and how the princess looked so good and pitiful, and how she, the sensible and self-possessed little Miriam, had offered to run and get a nurse for the noisy unappeasable foundling! And oh! how heartfelt would be the thanksgiving to the God of Abraham which arose that evening from beneath the roof of that humble Hebrew dwelling, for the lost one had been found; this their son who had been dead was alive again; the ark of bulrushes was transformed into a golden cradle, and, guided by a Hand Divine, had landed its helpless freight in no monster’s jaws, but on the very steps of Pharaoh’s throne.

Singular preservations like this have marked the infancy of many who afterwards grew memorable. Every one will recall the story of Romulus and Eemus, nursed by a wolf, and thus preserved to lay the foundations of Rome and the Roman empire; and the readers of Herodotus will remember how he tells that Astyages ordered his infant grandson to be thrown out into the wilderness, but how a shepherd’s wife, whose own babe was dead, adopted the “goodly child,” -^ and so saved from the liysenas that Cyrus who was to create the Medo-Persian monarchy, and fill so large a space in history. And every one is now familiar with the legend of om own king Arthur, revived as it has been by the Laureate: —

“No man knew from whence he came; But after tempest, when the long wave broke All down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss, There came a day as still as heaven, and then They found a naked child upon the sands Of wild Dundagil by the Cornish sea; And that was Arthur; and they fostered him Till he by miracle was appro ven king.”^

Conceding, however, that these tales are legends, — confused echoes, possibly, from the story now under consideration, — it is well to note how often in their precarious outset precious lives have been preserved from imminent danger, and sometimes by wdiat we deem a trivial circumstance. In the beginning of last century, in the house of a London tradesman, a babe was born wdio looked so inanimate and insignificant that it was taken for granted he was dead, when afterwards gazing at the tiny form an attendant noticed a gentle movement in the chest, and her efforts were rewarded by fostering into life

Like Moses, rb iraidiov juiya re /cat eieidh. — Herod, i. 112.

2 Tennyson’s Idylls, p. 240. For similar stories see Suetonii Augustus, c. 95, and the Tamul tale (referred to by Ewald) in B. Schmid’s Zerstreute Blatter (1843), st. 2.

the author of The Rise and Progress. Contemporary with Philip Doddridge there was growing up in a parsonage of Lincolnshire a hoy of great promise who had already reached his sixth summer, when the rectory took fire; all awoke in time and saved themselves, but the little boy was forgotten, or rather, it was left to God Himself to save him, and the “brand plucked from the burning” grew up to be the founder of English Methodism. A poor woman in the town of Stirling sprang up from her spinning-wheel with an impression on her mind that her child had fallen into a neighbouring well. She was just in time to snatch hold of a lint- white head which had not yet disappeared, but which was no child of her own but the minister’s son. Tommy Eandall, afterwards abundantly known as the benevolent and noble-minded Dr. Davidson of Edinburgh.

We forget it as regards ourselves, but we see and feel it in our children. Surely a special Providence superintends them, and in their hands angels bear them up, lest at any time they dash their foot against a stone. Playing with the cockatrice; putting their hand on the lion’s mane; making toys of edge-tools, and rolling down-hill live shells; scrambling up precipices, and falling out from open windows; swept a helpless bundle down the swollen torrent, or picked up from beneath the carriage-wheels; restored from desperate sickness or preserved amidst frigrhtful accidents, — what mother is there who, at some moment, has not felt like the Alpine peasant when she saw the eagle sailing overhead with her infant in its talons? Who that has not once and again shrieked out in helpless agony, and then wildly laughed or wept at the marvellous preservation? AVho is there that has a son grown up who does not acknowledge that he is the child of Providence? And who is there that has grown up himself but says with Addison: —

*’ When in the slipp’ry paths of yoiitli

With heedless steps I ran;
Thine arm, unseen, convey’d me safe,

And led me up to man: Through hidden dangers, toils, and deaths.

It gently clear’d my way;
And through the pleasing snares of vice,

More to be feared than they.”

Nobody knows the original name of Amram’s second son; the name his parents gave him became entirely superseded and absorbed in the name which the princess gave him. And so any prized possession which we have succeeded in acquiring, or in long retaining, has attached to it, usually speaking, some circumstance of wonder or surprise in its bestowment or restoration. From a thing so small as some earthly possession, up to a thing so great as the salvation of the soul, it is a salvage from the flames; like Joshua the high priest, “a brand plucked from the fire:” it is a gift from the flood, you name it Moses, and say, “Because I drew it out of the water.”

The time of Moses’ birth is one of the most instructive incidents in this history. “We have no reason to suppose that the exterminating edict of the king remained in force for any considerable period. It did not exist when Moses’ own brother was born, three or four years before, and if it had been in active operation for any length of time, it is utterly impossible that there could have been 600,000 grown-up males ready to accompany Moses in the march from Egypt. Much likelier is it that this was one of those frantic expedients to which despotism resorts in a moment of rage, and which after a while its myrmidons cease to execute, and are right in their calculation that it will not be renewed. Not improbably the decree became a dead letter soon after Moses was taken up and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, and there can be no doubt that it had only newly come forth when Moses was born. In any case, it was the most dismal moment in the history of Israel’s bondage — the very noon of Hebrew night; and it was the moment when the man was born who should put an end to it all. Israel’s extremity was God’s opportunity; and the wrath of Pharaoh wrought the purpose of Jehovah. But for B that bloodthirsty decree the son of Amram might have grown up a peasant and a bondsman, but this decree promoted him to the palace, and trained him to be the deliverer of his countrymen, the conqueror of Egypt, and the death of Pharaoh’s successor.

Such is God’s method. The darker the cloud, the more brilliant the rainbow; the wilder the storm, the more welcome the haven; the more desperate the danger, the more delightful is the sense of deliverance and the more rapturous the thanks of the rescued. And so in His wisdom the Most High sometimes allows His people to reach the sorest pass before He breaks the silence and makes bare His mighty arm. Not only does He allow the bottle to be spent, but the dying boy to be cast away beneath the bushes, before Hagar’s eyes are opened on the well. Not only does He allow Joseph to be sold into slavery, but to be flung into a dungeon and forgotten, before He calls him to the steps of the throne and the smiles of the raonarch. Not only does He suffer the Holy Land to be invaded, but Jerusalem to be hopelessly invested, before the angel of death spreads his wings and exterminates the host of Sennacherib.-^ Not only does He permit the plot against the Jews to mature, but the scaffold for Mordecai is erected, before God gives the signal,

Oosterzee, p. 10.

and on His people’s enemies executes vengeance. Not only does He permit a hostile king to take the crown, but He lets the bondage begin, and the brick-kilns glow fiercer, and the murderous edict come forth, before the knell of tyranny is rung, and Moses is born. And so, if you have a clear precept to start you off, and plain promises to keep you going, do not fear though the path should grow precarious and narrow, do not flinch though dangers should swarm and multiply. It is the valley of Achor, trouble in every step, and a wall of rock in front, — a rock which no agility can climb nor any strength can penetrate. But in faith and fearlessness go forward, and as you reach the barrier a door of hope will open, and usher you into an elysium of repose or a paradise of beauty. If you have a plain intimation of God’s will, you need be afraid of no king’s commandment, for that God in whom you trust will find means to protect His own; and when He has a purpose to fulfil He can make the Nile-monster a nursing mother, and for Pharaoh’s victims create a shield in Pharaoh’s daughter.

So we leave safely landed the little papyrus boat, the ark of bulrushes, — which grows mystic as we gaze, and makes us think of other arks which have gone God’s voyages, and, like the babe that sailed away from a bond-mother’s arms to the bosom of a princess, have carried their freight to a brilliant haven. And not so much that colossal ark, which from out of a cursed and God-forsaken world, and across the ferry of the Flood, carried Noah and his family into that new and more favoured world which God would curse no more, and on which, in the person of Incarnate Deity, unimagined blessing was destined to descend: not so much of it as of that other ark in which this great advent was effected — the manger which, not to Egyptian maids, but to Eastern sages, disclosed not Moses, but Messiah, that infant of days whose name should expand into “The Wonderful, the Counsellor, the mighty God;” and who, emerging from that manger, is ascended to the right hand of the Father, a Prince and a Saviour, and will return on His great white throne. And it makes us think of that papyrus ark to which infinite wisdom has intrusted the revelation of Himself — the parchment scroll, the paper book, the poor frail vehicle which, launched on the tide of Time, has had so many escapes from the chances of the stream, as well as the fury of its foes, but is now escaped from the house of bondage, and made a blessing to all nations. And as we see the mournful mother carrying

“Her babe, close cradled in her arms,
To Nile’s green sloping shore,”

and intrusting it to the unfriendly-looking flood, little witting of the surprise which in a few hours awaited her, so we think of the rapture that awaits many a Christian parent, who in tears has stood over that sorrowful ark, the cof&n of her child, and think of her joy and her wonder when the loved one, who in the earthly dwelling makes ‘’ a blank so large,” is recognised in the palace of Heaven’s own King.