Moses the Patriot

Take him for all in all, regard him not in one but many aspects, Moses is the greatest character in history, sacred or profane.

As a writer, for example, he takes precedence of the most venerable authors of antiquity. Consecrating, so to speak, the press, the first book types ever printed was a copy of the Holy Scriptures; and in beautiful harmony with that remarkable providence, it is more than probable that the first book pen ever wrote was one of the five of which Moses was the author. Certain it is that if his were not the first ever written — written long ages before Herodotus composed his history, or Homer sang his poems — his are the oldest books extant. Before all others in point of time, what author occupies himself with themes of such surpassing grandeur? Like one who had met God face to face within the cloudy curtains of the awful mount, he introduces us into the counsels of the Almighty; and records events which, receding into a past, and stretching forward into a future eternity, had God for their author, the world for their theatre, and for their end the everlasting destinies of mankind. Apart from the surpassing grandeur of his subjects, even in the very manner of handling them, the world’s oldest is its foremost writer. What other poet rises to heights or sus-

tains a flight so lofty as Moses — in his dying song, for instance, his parting words to the tribes of Israel, ere he ascended Nebo to wave them his last

farewell, and vanish forever from their wondering,

weeping gaze? The inimitable pathos of his style as illustrated in the story of Joseph, the tears and trembling voices of readers in all ages have acknowledged. In simple, tender, touching narrative no passages in any other book will compare with it; and yet so wide and varied is his range that the writings of Moses contain, infidels themselves being judges, the sublimest expressions man has spoken or penned. By universal consent, for example, no other book, ancient or modern, the production of the highest mind and of the most refined and cultivated age, contains a sentence so sublime as this: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.”

Again, as a divine, compared to his knowledge of the attributes and character of God, how gross the notions of the heathen; how puerile, dim, and distorted the speculations of their greatest sages! The wisest of them look like men with unsteady steps and outstretched arms, groping for truth in the dark. As to the mass of the people, they imputed crimes and vices to their gods which would now-a-days consign men to the gallows, or banish them from decent society. But how pure, and comprehensive also, Moses’ estimate of the Divine character — of what we are to believe concerning God, and what duty God requires of men! Since his day — removed from our own by almost four thousand years — science has made prodigious

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strides; but those who have discovered new elements, new forces, new worlds, new stars, new suns, have brought to light no new attribute of God, nor a single feature of his character with which Moses was not acquainted. During these long ages philosophers and divines have been studying morals, the duties men owe to God and to each other, the laws that bind society and hold its parts together; but they who have added a thousand truths to science and a thousand inventions to art, have not discovered any duties which Moses overlooked, or added so much as one law to his code of morals. Yet he had no Bible, as we have, whereby to acquaint himself with God: nor was he reared, like us, in a Christian land, but among those who, with all their boasted learning, worshipped the ox, and serpent, beasts of the field, fowls of the air, and creeping things — divinities so innumerable, that it was said there were more gods than men in Egypt. Let the character of his age, and the circumstances in which he lived, be taken into account, and he is the greatest of divines; nor does his sublime knowledge of God, of the mysteries of religion, and of the moralities of life, admit of any but one explanation. The glory of his writings and of his face are to be traced to the same source. He was admitted into the secret counsels of the Eternal; and spake, like other holy men of old, as he was moved by the Holy Ghost.

Again, as a leader and legislator Moses occupies a place no other man has approached, far less attained to. History records no such achievements as his who, without help from man, struck the fetters off a million and more of slaves; placing himself at their head, led them forth from the land of bondage; reducing them to order, controlled more turbulent and subdued more stubborn elements than any before or since have had to deal with; formed a great nation out of such base materials; and, casting into the shade the celebrated retreat of the ten thousand Greeks, conducted to a successful issue the longest and hardest march on record — a march continued for forty years in the face of formidable enemies, through howling wildernesses and desert sands. Then look at the sacred and secular polity which he established in Israel! That constitution which makes our country the envy of the world has been, like an oak, the slow growth of ages; and it was often only after long and sometimes bloody struggles that right here prevailed over might, and laws were established that render equal justice to all classes of the community. But, event unparalleled in any other age or country, Moses established in Israel a form of government and a code of laws which neither time nor experience has been able to improve. Like the goddess fabled to have sprung, full grown and full armed, from the head of Jupiter, or like those who never hung on mother’s breast, the man and woman whom Eden received to its blissful bowers, it was mature and perfect from the beginning. What a man was he who, in that rude and early age, inculcated laws that have formed, through all succeeding ages, the highest standard of morality! Since his long-distant day men have run to and fro and knowledge has been increased; the boundaries of science have been vastly extended, but not those of morality; nor has one new duty

MOSES THE PATRIOT. IIl

been added to those of the two tables he brought down from Sinai. A perfect code of morals, adapted to all ages, circumstances, and countries, time has neither altered nor added to the Ten Commandments.

The ten stones of the arch on which our domestic happiness, the purity of society, the security of life and property, and the prosperity of nations stand, it was these commandments the Son of God came from heaven, our substitute, to obey; with his blood, not to abrogate, but to enforce them; on his cross to exalt, not in his tomb to bury them; and, cementing the shattered arch with his precious blood, to lend to laws that had the highest authority of Sinai, the no less solemn and more affecting sanctions of Calvary.

As a legislator, besides moral, Moses established criminal and civil laws, which, unless in so far as they were specially adapted to the circumstances of the Israelites, our senators and magistrates would do well to copy. Inspired with the profoundest wisdom, they are patterns to all ages of equity and justice. For instance, how much kinder to the poor, and less burdensome to the community, than ours, are what may be called the “poor laws” of Moses! How much more wise than ours those that dealt with theft, — thus far that, requiring the thief to restore fourfold the value of what he had stolen, and work till he had done so, they assigned to that crime a punishment which at once secured reparation to the plundered and the reformation of the plunderer. Nor less wise, I may add, those sanitary laws of which, though long neglected, late years and bitter experience have been teaching us the importance. It is only now, with all our boasted progress in arts and science, that we are awaking to the value of such regulations as, securing cleanliness in the habits and in the homes of

the people, promote their health and preserve their lives, Anticipating the discoveries of the nineteenth century and the plans of our modern sanitary reformers, Moses was four thousand years ahead of his age. Judged, therefore, either by the civil or criminal code he enjoined, or by those Ten Commandments which lie at the foundation of all human justice, and shall continue the supreme standard of morals so long as time endures, Moses claims precedence over all the sovereigns, and senators, and legislators the world has seen. As a philosopher, notwithstanding the audacious attacks now making on his narrative of the Creation, I venture to say that Moses, as he was first in the point of time, is the first in point of rank. He fills in the temple of science that high-priestly office his brother held in the temple of religion. How sublime, for example, his account of Creation compared with the monstrous fables and puerile conceits current among pagan nations! I know, indeed, no greater contrast than that between the childish, monstrous, and often immodest mythologies of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and those opening pages of the Book of Genesis, where God appears on the scene — calling creation into being by his simple but almighty word; establishing order amid unimaginable confusion; evoking light out of primeval darkness; assigning their different offices to the elements of earth and the shining orbs of heaven; building up the grand pyramid of

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Nature, and on its lofty apex placing man, made ir his own image, and enthroned lord of all. Believe some, and this is all a fancy, a mere fable. Foiled at every point, and on every occasion, where they employed history, and mental or moral science to attack the Christian faith, compelled also to acknowledge that the most formidable sceptics of other days, Hobbes and Voltaire, David Hume and Tom Paine, — without followers now save among the dregs of society, — were ignominiously defeated, the infidels of our day have changed their plan of attack. Obliged to seek new weapons, they are now attempting to overthrow the authority of Moses by the authority of physical science; and ever as some old bone, some fragment of ancient pottery, some stone ax or arrowhead turns up which they fancy will serve their purpose, there is great shouting in the camp of the Philistines, and fear seizes some that ‘‘the ark of God is taken.” A bone in Samson’s hand, the jawbone even of an ass, once did great execution; as did also the piece of pottery which a woman from the beleaguered wall pitched on the head of Abimelech, smiting him to the ground. But the enemies of our faith, though using similar weapons, have not achieved equal success. Looking at the future in the light of the past, we can only wonder at the timidity of those who fear these assaults, and at the credulity of such as, however fond of novelties, allow such crude and silly arguments to seduce them from the faith.

For example, a few years since a human jawbone was paraded before the world. It was said to have been dug out of a gravel-bed in France of so great antiquity that the person to whom it belonged must have existed many thousand years antecedent to the period at which Moses places the first appearance of man on the earth. Well, this bone, whose vast age was to demolish the authority of the Bible, being sawn asunder, was examined: and with what result? Its internal condition demonstrated that, instead of being older than the age of Adam, it was but a few, even if a few, years older than those who were more the dupes of their own hatred to religion, than of the workmen that had stolen this fragment of mortality from a churchyard, and palmed it off on these credulous sceptics.

There is another and similar fact, much too instructive to be left in the oblivion to which mortified and defeated infidels would fain consign it. Years ago, a brick was found on the banks of the Nile, but many feet beneath their surface. These banks are formed of the slimy and fertile mud which each annual overflow deposits in the green valley of that famous river; and assuming — for all the theories opposed to Christianity are full of assumptions as the basis of their calculations — that these deposits have been of the same thickness, one year with another, from the most remote antiquity, such was the depth at which this brick was found, that it must have been made many thousand years before the time at which Moses fixes the creation of man. So infidels alleged and argued. How they told this in Gath, and published it in the streets of Ashkelon! With this brick they had inflicted a blow on the head of Moses, from which he could not possibly recover — with him not

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“Babylon the Great,” but the faith of Christendom had fallen. Well, the defenders of the faith were puzzled, and not a little perplexed. It was not easy to prove that the deposits of the Nile were irregular, and that the foundations, therefore, on which the attack rested were unsound. But, teaching us not to allow our confidence in the faith to be easily shaken by things which are at first, and even may continue, inexplicable, the problem was at length solved. The difficulty was finally and authoritatively removed. This famous brick fell into the hands of one familiar with the works of antiquity, and above all others expert in determining theirage. He examined it; and proved to demonstration that, however it got buried in the valley of the Nile, or whatever be the rate of increase in the river’s alluvial deposits, that brick did not carry us back to ages antecedent to Mosaic history. It was of Roman manufacture, and belonged to an age no older than the Czsars.

Christianity does not teach science, nor profess to teach it. It was for another and higher purpose that its pages were inspired. To serve its own proper and important end, it adapted its language to the times and the understandings of those it addressed. And though, in consequence of this, there were statements in the Bible which could not be reconciled with the modern discoveries of science, these should not have the weight of a feather against the historical, the external and internal, the miraculous and prophetical evidences on which its divinity stands, and has stood unshaken the assaults of two thousand years.

But, in truth, the greater the progress of science, the more manifest is the harmony between its revelations and those of the Word of God.

For instance, Moses represents the earth as having been, antecedent to the present epoch, without form and votd — an expression denoting a state of extreme and violent confusion, of death, and drear desolation. And how is his statement, not confuted, but corroborated by the remarkable discoveries of the nineteenth century? The very same story is written on the rocks, which we read in the book of Genesis. The solid strata above which we walk, build our houses, and reap our harvests, have been explored by the lights of science; and in their strange contortions, irregularities, and confusion, and those remains of innumerable and extinct creatures, that retaining the postures of a violent and sudden death, have been entombed within their stony sepulchres, they present a most remarkable commentary on Holy Writ.

Again in the last days, according to St. Peter,

there were scoffers to arise, asserting “that all

things remain as they were from the beginning of the creation.” So said David Hume; and so still say those who, in opposition to Moses and to the miracles of Scripture, take their stand on the uniform successions and invariable operations of the laws of Nature. But here the philosopher’s geology and our theology are at one. The most novel discoveries of our age are in harmony with the oldest statements of revelation. They prove that there have been no such invariable operations as would exclude the possibility or probability of miracles. They demonstrate what Moses asserts, that all things have not remained as they were from the beginning. They show causes even now at work sufficient in the course of time to bring about the grand catastrophe that, with a God in judgment and a world in flames, shall usher in a new era — ‘‘the new heavens, and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”

Again, the Bible teaches us that the world is “reserved unto fire,” and what it long ages ago revealed, is the conclusion to which the discoveries of science are now tending. In proof of that, see what one of our greatest modern philosophers, who has certainly never stood forth as a defender of the faith, says. He maintains that through the agency of volcanoes and other active causes, ‘the foundations of our earth shall be so weakened, that its crust, shaken and rent by reiterated convulsions, must in the course of time fall in.” “When we consider,” says Sir Charles Lyell, ‘the combustible nature of the elements of the earth: the facility with which their compounds may be decomposed and enter into new combinations: the quantity of heat which they evolve during these processes: when we recollect the expansive power of steam, and that water itself is composed of two gases which, by their union, produce intense heat; when we call to mind the number of explosive and detonating compounds, which have been already discovered; we may be allowed to share the astonishment of Pliny, that a single day should pass without a general conflagration: Excedit profecto, omnia miracula, ullum diem futsse, quo non cancta conflagrarent.”

Again, and to take one other example from Moses’ account of the Creation, he represents light as having been formed before the sun was hung in heaven to rule the day, or the moon to rule the night. According to him, ere day or night was, God sent forth the fiat, ‘‘ Let there be light, and there was light.” And taking their stand on an apparent impossibility, infidels have challenged the soundness of his philosophy; asking in tones of undisguised triumph, How could there be light before, and without, the sun? Well, this was a difficulty. Satisfied on other and impregnable grounds. of the truth of the sacred narrative, Christians felt confident that the objection admitted of an answer; but till science came to the rescue, such answers as they attempted were more ingenious than satisfactory. The difficulty, however, has vanished; and Moses’ account, no longer a subject for cavilling, is found to be in perfect harmony with the discoveries and the doctrines of modern science. Inspired of God, he anticipated our tardy discoveries. Relating that light was created before the sun appeared, he represents it as an element existing independently of that luminary. And so it does. This is now all but universally admitted — light being regarded as the effect of the undulations of an ether which, infinitely subtle and elastic, pervades all space, and finds but exciting causes in electricity and combustion, the sun and stars.

In taking leave of Moses as a philosopher, I have one more remark to make — one inexplicable, unless he were inspired. It was thousands of years before the telescope was invented and Galileo had turned it on the starry heavens, before Newton had discovered the laws of gravitation, before anatomists had studied the structure of a fossil bone, before geologists had explored the bowels and strata of our earth; it was long ages, in fact, before true science was born, that Moses lifted the veil from the mysteries of Creation — stating facts in regard to its order, and laws, and phenomena that are in perfect harmony with the greatest discoveries of our day. Surely, as he was the first, he is the greatest of philosophers; as well the greatest Philosopher as the greatest Writer, Divine, Leader, and Lawgiver, the world has seen.

Let us now regard him as a patriot. There are those who do not believe in patriotism; treating it as some of our popular novelists, whose works are appropriately called ‘‘ works of fiction,” do religion. Unable to understand religion, they can only caricature it. Whenever any of their characters, man or woman, is introduced as using the language of piety, or as belonging to what, borrowing an expression from the ribald words of Robert Burns, they call the wxco gude, that person they invariably represent as either a fool or a hypocrite, weak or wicked. If their defence is, that they, painting from life, have described religious people as they found them, we might reply they had been very unfortunate in their company; and that, as was likely to happen with men of their type, they must have been much more familiar with the dross than the gold of religious society. But their bad opinion of such as make a marked profession of piety may be otherwise accounted for. ‘Thou thoughtest,” says God to the wicked, “that I was altogether such an one as thyself:”

and feeling, with minds at enmity with God and averse from the practice of holiness and virtue, that they themselves should be hypocrites were they to assume a strict profession, they judge others by themselves. Nor are they singular in the use of so false a standard. Profligates and libertines do not believe in the existence of virtue — regarding it in others as a mere pretence, nothing else than the paint which hides the blotches on the face of vice. Neither do thieves, I may observe, believe in honesty. Nor do selfish men believe in generosity. Many politicians, the heads or tools of parties, though not steeped in such corruption as that minister of the last century who boasted that he knew the price of every member of the House of Commons, have only sought their own aggrandisement, when they talked loudest of their country, its liberties, its honor, and its interests. And no wonder that men without a spark of patriotism in their own breasts should doubt its existence in others!

Presenting a noble contrast to the proverb long common in Italy, Dolce far niente — “It is sweet to indulge in idleness,” the old Roman sang, Dulce et decorum pro patria mori — It is sweet and graceful to die for one’s country;” and one of these old Romans is said, when it was only by such a sacrifice that Rome could be spared, to have rode out of its gates full armed in sight of weeping thousands, and taking brave farewell of brothers, friends, and countrymen, to have spurred his steed into the gulf that closed its monstrous jaws on horse and rider. The lofty patriotism of the poet may be only the sentimentalism of song, and the hero of the gulf only such a fable as adorns traditionary lore. But Moses was a patriot of that type.

How we extolled the conduct of the Americans in China, when, though not bound to mingle in the bloody fray, they felt it impossible to look on mere spectators, where our flag was flying, and our guns were flashing, and our men were falling amid the smoke of battle? Hoisting their anchors, and spreading sail, they took their places beside us, saying, ‘Blood is thicker than water!” It was in such another act that Moses’ patriotism first burst out into flame. Neither his rank as the adopted son of Pharaoh’s daughter and probable successor to her father’s throne, nor his education as a prince of Egypt, nor the pride, and pomp, and pleasures of a palace had made him ashamed of his race, so indifferent to their cruel sufferings. His brave mother, in her assumed character of a nurse, had probably told her boy the story of his people, and of their wrongs; swearing him to fidelity, and sowing in his young heart the seeds of that piety and patriotism which afterwards determined his choice. Though apparently dormant for forty years, as has happened in cases of conversion, the seed a mother’s hand sowed at length sprang up. He began to feel and take a deep interest in his people. Their sufferings haunted his pillow by night, and engaged his anxious thoughts by day. The fire, so to speak, was laid; and it needed but a spark, the touch of a match, to kindle it — a purpose served by a sight he one day happened to see. Concealing his object, he had gone “out to his brethren to look on their burdens,” when it chanced that an Egyptian was smiting a Hebrew. He looked. He felt every blow that fell on the poor, crouching slave. The fated hour had come. Plucking off the mask which had for a while concealed his secret, he flung himself into the fray; and, bestriding his prostrate compatriot, with flashing eye faced the Egyptian, and smote him dead. Life he risks; safety, riches, honors, rank, and perhaps a crown he casts away — all to right the wrongs of a bleeding wretch, in whom his piety recognized a child of God, and his patriotism a countryman and a brother. In the words of St. Paul, “By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.”

This, if it could not be called his early, was now his only choice. Unlike many who, yielding to the generous impulses of youth, espouse the cause of the wronged, and fight their first battles under the flag of liberty, but in maturer years, or old age, live to desert it, Moses, henceforth, never swerved from the good part he had chosen. He pursued it onward to his grave with a pure, unselfish patriotism no time could weaken, nor injustice and ingratitude cool. If ever man was tempted to abandon a cause which he had undertaken, it was he. Why should he have entered on it, and left his happy household, and the quiet hills of Midian, to cast himself into a sea of troubles? Other actors have been hissed from the stage where they were once applauded; other benefactors have had to complain of public ingratitude; and under the impulse of a temporary madness, other nations have brought their truest patriots to the scaffold. But for forty long years what reward, else than abuse, murmurs, opposition, unjust suspicion, and repeated attempts on his life, did Moses receive from those for whom he had rejected the most splendid offers, on whose behalf he had made the costliest sacrifices? If patriotism is to be measured not only by the wrongs it bears, but by the sacrifices it makes, he stands far ahead of all whose deeds ’ grateful nations have commemorated in monumental marble, or poets have enshrined in song. Take for example the unselfish, for its gene. rosity and self-denial the matchless, part he acted at Sinai, when the idolatry of Israel had awoke all the terrors of the Mount, and God himself, provoked beyond all patience, was about to descend — to sweep man, woman, and child from the face of the earth. ‘Let me alone,” said Jehovah, addressing Moses, who, forgetting the wrongs he had suffered at their hands, had thrown himself between the people and an angry God, ‘Let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them” — nor was that all: “And I,” he added, “will make of thee a great nation.” A splendid offer! Yet one which, not on this only, but also on another occasion, Moses declined; turning twice from a crown to fall on his knees, and pour out his whole soul to God in earnest prayers for the guilty people. He did more — far more. Deeply as he abhorred their conduct towards Jehovah; keenly as he felt their ingratitude to himself, he returned from their camp to tell God that he could not, and did not wish to, outlive them. ‘Oh, this people,” he cried, “have sinned a great sin, and have made their gods of gold; yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin!” But what if God will not? — then with such patriotism as, with the exception of Paul’s, never burnt in human bosom, or burst from human lips, he exclaimed: “If not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book!” I will sink or swim with my people! If they are to perish, let me not live to see it.

It is no disparagement to Moses’ patriotism that we are told that he ‘‘had respect unto the recompense of the reward.” For what is that but in other words to say, that he walked by faith and not by sight: and, sacrificing a present for a much greater, though future, benefit, trode the path by which all goodness and greatness are attained. The ardent student who, stealing hours from sleep, bends his pallid face and lofty brow over the midnight lamp, and spends the time others give to youthful follies in holding converse with the mighty

dead, is in the honors and laurels that crown such toils looking for a recompense of reward. The soldier who leaves home for a foreign shore to hold his weary watch, while brothers and sisters are locked in the sweet arms of slumber; who, while plenty loads their table, endures hunger and thirst, and cold and nakedness; who carries his colors into the smoke of battle, or plants them on the summit of the deadly breach, is also, in the fame or fortune that reward such heroism, looking for a recompense of reward. Thus likewise do thousands who, to enjoy ease and a competency in the evening of their days, practise a rigid economy, denying themselves pleasures in which many others

+ Jvigc. Man, unlike the lower animals whose eyes aw naturally bent on the ground, with his noble an J upright form, is made to look upwards and forwaids; and there the student, the soldier, the prude.t man of business, looking beyond the present hour, apply to worldly matters the very principle that in the region of spiritual things raises a child of God above the world, and leads him to look beyond it. To what but to their allowing the present to dominate over the future, is the ruin of sinners in almost every instance to be traced? They sacrifice, to the gratification of a moment or an hour, their peace, their conscience, their purity, their souls, with a folly far beyond his who, selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, said: ‘ Behold! I am at the point to die, and what profit shall this birthright be to me?” Would to God men somewhat changed Esau’s question, and put it thus: — ““When I am at the point to die, what profit shall this pleasure yield to me? It looks charming now, how will it look then? It is pleasant to anticipate; how will it bear reflection- -another day, on another bed, in the hour of death, at the bar of judgment?” The pity is that men will not have regard to ‘the recompense of the reward,” and allow themselves to be influenced — for both man and God act from motives — by high and holy motives. Our Lord himself, for the joy set before Him, endured the cross, despising the shame. Nor does it detract from Moses’ piety and patriotism that, instead of acting from blind and ordinary impulses, he had regard to the ‘recompense of the reward.” Nothing could be further removed from selfishness than the ends he aimed at, and the reward he looked for. His was not the spirit of such as dre deterred from gross sins only by the fear of hell; who discover nothing in heaven to desire but the refuge it offers, nor in Jesus to love but the crown He bestows. Devoutest of men, he aimed at the glory of God; purest of patriots, he forgot his own interests in those of his people. These, the divine glory and the good of Israel, were his aims, and their attainment his sufficient reward — his motives as unselfish as the man’s who leaps into the boiling flood to save a drowning child; and whose reward is, not the plaudits of the crowd that watch him from the banks, as, buffeting the torrent with one hand, and holding up the dripping infant in the other, he regains the shore, but the satisfaction of having saved the perishing, and of seeing the mother, whose thanks he waits not to receive, clasping her living boy to her beating breast.

But a right estimate of Moses’ patriotism cannot be formed unless we take into account the circumstances in which he was reared. These were not less unfavorable to this virtue than are the gloom and foul vapors of a charnel-house to the growth and fragrance of a flower. It is not from castles so much as cabins, from princes so much as from among the people, that reformers and patriots

spring. Luther came out of a miner’s hut; and —

while the German boy sang in the streets for his bread, John Knox earned his by teaching. Wallace and William Tell, Hampden and George Washington embarked in the cause of freedom with little else but their lives to lose. The noblest sacrifices of piety and patriotism have been made by such as have not a drop of noble blood in their veins. Few histories are more illustrative of that fact than Scotland’s. Many of her nobles signed the Solemn League and Covenant, but with a very few, though illustrious, exceptions, it was her middle-classes and peasantry who suffered for it. It was their blood that dyed her scaffolds, and their strong arms that kept the banners flying on her moors and mountains; and it was they who, hoping against hope, never sheathed their swords till the tyrant fled, and those liberties, civil and sacred, were secured which have made our country the boast of Britons and envy of the world.

It is not commonly — and this makes Moses’ case the more remarkable — from among the enervating influences of wealth, and ease, and luxury, that men come forth to do grand things. It is with them as with birds. Those birds soar the highest that have had the hardest upbringing. Warm and soft the pretty nest where, under the covering of her wings, amid green leaves and golden tassels and the perfume of flowers, the mother-bird of sweet voice, but short and feeble flight, rears her tender brood. Not thus are eagles reared, as I have seen on scaling a dizzy crag. There, their cradle an open shelf, their nest a few rough sticks spread on the naked rock, the bright-eyed eaglets sat exposed to the rains that seamed the hill-sides, and every blast that howled through the glen. Such the hard nursing of birds that were thereafter to soar in sunny skies, or with strong wings cleave the clouds and ride upon the storm !. Even so, I thought, God usually nurses those amid difficulties and hardships who are destined to rise to eminence, and accomplish great deeds on earth.

Hence says Solomon, “‘It is good for man te bear the yoke in his youth.”

Hence, because he had had no such yoke to bear, the more honor to Moses, the more illustrious his patriotism. Bred ina palace, he espoused the cause of the people: nursed on the lap of luxury, he embraced adversity: reared in a school of despots, he became the brave champion of liberty: long associated with oppressors, he took the side of the oppressed: educated as her son, he forfeited the favor of a princess to maintain the rights of the poor: with a crown in prospect, he had the magnanimity to choose a cross; and for the sake of his God and Israel, abandoned ease, refinement, luxuries, and the highest earthly honors, to be a houseless wanderer; ‘‘ esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt,” and “choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.”

That decision was as pious as patriotic; and in Moses’ piety, let it be observed, we have that which was the true support and backbone of his patriotism. Nor in that did his case present, though an illustrious, a singular conjunction. Religious men have ever proved the truest patriots. The cause of freedom has owed more to them thar. to any other class. They have ever fought best and bravest in their country’s battles who sought another one; and strong in faith, at peace with God, and sustained by the hopes of immortality, were careless whether, as one of our martyrs expressed it, they rotted in the earth or in the air; died amid holy prayers, or the shouts of battle and the roar of cannon. The greatest patriots of our own country were not its worldlings, its profligates, its sceptics; but devout and holy men — men who slept with their Bibles as well as pistols by their pillow; who carried the sacred volume to battle in their bosoms as well as in their hearts; and whose tombstones, venerated by a pious peasantry, still stand on our moors and mountains, marked by the appropriate symbols of an open Bible and a naked sword. But never was the connection between true piety and true patriotism so eminently illustrated as in the case of Moses. He abandoned all worldly interests for those of religion and of his race. He preferred the reproach of Christ to the riches of Egypt. Though thereby claiming kindred with a race of slaves, he counted it a higher honor to be a child of Abraham than reckoned the son of Pharaoh’s daughter. He gallantly embarked in the cause of his brethren, resolved to sink or swim with them. Type of our divine Redeemer, he bore much for them, and bore also much from them. Offering the highest pattern of patriotism sustained by piety, with what meekness he met their’insolence; with what patience their provocations; with what forgiveness their unparalleled ingratitude and oft-repeated attempts upon his life! — and when God, provoked to cast them off, offered to make of him a great nation, with what noble generosity did he intercede on their behalf, refusing to build his own house on the ruins of theirs!

From him we may learn how to be patriots; and how patriotism, like all other virtues, has its true root in piety. He did not miss the recompense of reward. He enjoys its heaven. He had it on earth — accomplishing the grand object of his life, when, with victory and thanksgiving on his lips, his last gaze, ere he ascended to the heavenly Canaan, was fixed in dying raptures on the promised land; and though no nation with the tears of bitter grief and the pomp of public funeral followed their great leader to his grave, he was buried with higher honors — as some poet thus finely sings:

By Nebo’s lonely mountain,
On this side Jordan’s wave,
In a vale in the land of Moab,
There lies a lonely grave.
And no man dug the sepulchre,
And no man gave it air,
For the angels of God upturned the sod,
And laid the dead man there.

That was the grandest funeral
That ever passed on earth,
But no man heard the tramping
Or saw the train go forth.
For without sound of music,
Or voice of them that wept,
Silently down from the mountain’s crown
The great procession went?

Perchance the bald old eagle,
On gray Bethpeor’s height,
Out of his rocky eyerie,
Looked on the wondrous sight.
Perchance the lion stalking
Stills shuns that hallowed spot,
For beast and bird have seen and heard
That which man knoweth not.

But when the warrior dieth,
His comrades in the war,

With arms reversed and muffled drum,
Follow the funeral car.

They show the banners taken,
They tell his battles won:

And after him lead his masterless steed,
While peals the minute-gun.

Amid the noblest of the land
Men lay the sage to rest,

And give the bard an honored place,
With costly marbles drest.

In the great Minster transept
Where lights like glories fall,

And the choir sings, and the organ rings
Along the emblazoned wall.

This was the bravest warrior
That ever buckled sword,
This the most gifted poet
That ever breathed a word.
And never earth’s philosopher
Traced with his golden pen,
On the deathless page, truths half so sage
As he wrote down for men.

And had he not high honors — The hill-side for his pall,

To lie in state while angels wait
With stars for tapers tall;

And the dark rock pines with tossing plumes Over his bier to wave,

And God’s own hand in that mountain land
To lay him in the grave?

In that deep grave without a name,
Whence his uncoffined clay

Shall break again — most wondrous thought — Before the Judgment-day;

And stand with glory wrapped around
On the hills he never trode,

And speak of the strife that won our life
With the incarnate Son of God.

Oh, lonely tomb in Moab’s land!
Oh, dark Bethpeor’s hill!

Speak to these anxious hearts of ours
And teach them to be still.

God hath his mysteries of grace,
Ways that we cannot tell;

He hides them deep like the secret sleep
Of him He loved so well. *