Moses the Practical

As we pass from the Portrait of Joseph to the Portrait of Moses, we make the transition to a new phase of Semitic life. All the foregoing figures are those of idealists. They are all seeking something beyond the actual, something that would abolish the present order of things. Young Adam wants a transference of the Eden government, a transference which would make him lord of the whole Garden. Abel wants a form of sacrifice altogether in advance of his age. Enoch is aiming after a life which can only be realised in heaven. Noah is seeking a reform which must involve a renovation of the earth. Abraham is trying to establish in the world a kingdom of Divine righteousness. Jacob is in search of a ladder

between earth and heaven. Joseph is the representative of youth’s romantic dreams. They are all men of the future — men who seek the stones for their temple from scenes and circumstances not present to the eye. But, with the Portrait of Moses, we enter another world — the real world. Here for the first time we are confronted by a man who proposes to build the temple with the actual stones of the quarry. He says to his countrymen, ‘ You have been looking too far away to find the material for your Tower of Babel; this commandment is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart.’

Here is the advent of a new régime. Man has begun to contemplate the possibility of a palace which shall be reared out of earthly elements, a palace which shall rise from the daily work of ordinary human souls. Salvation by obedience to law, salvation by the performance of the hourly duty and the fulfilment of the habitual task, salvation by the adequate discharge of the common round of

earth’s requirements for the labouring man — ro)

that was the goal which glittered before the eyes of Moses. It is in the pursuit of this goal that Moses is distinguished from all his predecessors. His name has been associated with many things. It has been associated with the building of the tabernacle. It has been linked with the origin of the Jewish ritual. It has been connected with the deliverance from Egypt. It has been intertwined with the life of the desert. It has been identified with the discovery of the Promised Land. But none of these things is a@zstzuctive of Moses. You will find each of them foreshadowed in the previous figures. You will find an earlier tabernacle in Eden. You will see an earlier ritual in Abel. You will behold an anticipation of a promised land in Enoch. You’ will meet faith sustained amid a desert in Abraham. You will witness the provision for an Egyptian deliverance in the closing act of Joseph. But there is one sphere in which Moses stands alone, in which he is the first founder, the primitive inaugurator. It is in the

discovery that common life may be religious life. That God was in the Garden, men knew; that God was in the sanctuary, men knew; that God was -beside the altar, men knew. But that God should be in secular places, that the home should be itself a sanctuary, that the - household fire should be an altar fire, that the honouring of a human parent should be deemed an act of piety, that the observance of a neighbour’s rights should be esteemed one of the rites of worship — this was a new departure in the religious life of Man!

To Moses belongs the inauguration of this development. Our first impression is that the task set before him was a very easy one. It seems a simple thing to teach the common duties of life. If it were a creed that had to be taught, if it were a system of philosophy, or even an order of worship, we could appreciate the need for a great founder; but the most ordinary mind would seem adequate to the task of saying, ‘ All the duties of your life are to be counted velzgtous duties, Yet in truth this impression is entirely wrong. It was simply

the most difficult thing in the world for a man of that time to reach such a conclusion. It has not been particularly easy in any age. Religion has ever tended to present itself to the mind as the antithesis to the world. Grace has ever appeared as the opposite of nature, faith as the antagonist of sight. What St. James pronounces a completed development of the religious life — the visiting of the widows and the fatherless — would still be regarded by many as only an incipient Christianity. So foreign to the natural mind is the Mosaic idea, that men in all ages have required to grow into it. Moses required to grow into it. Did it ever strike you that, of all the lives depicted in the Gallery, he is the most tardy in entering on his mission. All the previous figures of the Gallery accept their vocation the moment it is presented to them. Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, move at once toward the beckoning light; even Jacob does, though his old nature struggles within him. But Moses holds back. He is long in accepting, slow in obeying, late in achieving. Do you think this is an accident in the Portrait of the Great Gallery! It is one of its most designed features. The painter of this figure knew that the sphere selected for it was not a natural sphere. Therefore he describes Moses, not as rushing into it, but as creeping into it. Let us follow the pencil of this inspired artist. He has revealed to us that process of development by which a man learns the religious value of practical morality. Let us stand in the Great Gallery and observe that process. Let us trace it; let us expound it; let us apply it to our daily lives.

There are four periods in the education of Moses — four stages through which he climbed into the place prepared for him. The first might be called his period of unconsciousness — the time when he was not a moral giver, but a moral recipient. We all begin with such a period. Our first lessons in morality are derived, not from the good we do, but from the good we receive. I am deeply impressed with the truth of this principle in human experience. Ido not think we get our earliest notions of morality from active service, but from passive recipiency. Where did you first learn the beauty of justice? Was it from doing a just action? No; it was from having a just action done to you. Where did you first learn the charm of sympathy? Was it from condoling with another’s distress? No; it was from being condoled with by another in your distress. Our original moral lessons do not come to us in the form of lessons, but in the form of benefits — kindness received, gifts bestowed, dangers averted, penalties remitted. It was these that wakened within us the impulse of generosity. It was these that stirred

within us the sense of beneficence. It was

these that set before us the ideals of chivalry.

It was these that roused in our hearts the love of mercy. The recognition of the law of conscience was in the beginning an unconscious recognition; it was produced by favours received.

Now, this was the first stage of the moral training of Moses. In early days he was

merely a recipient. He was more indebted to the goodness of others than was any man in the Gallery. The writer to the Hebrews naively says, ‘By faith Moses was hid three months.’ No doubt; but by the faith of whom? Not of Moses himself, but of kind friends who wanted to give him a chance in life. The civilisation of the day had determined to give him zo chance. It looked upon his infancy and said, ‘This is one of the children unfit to live; let him die; let him make room for other and stronger lives!’ And so, the culture of Egypt rejected the child Moses, cast him out to perish in the waters of the Nile. He was found by the hands of philanthropy; he was rescued by human compassion. He comes before us as a foundling, a child of charity. He is the first of that great company of waifs and strays whom human benevolence has gathered into the fold. He is cast upon the waters as one unfit to survive; he is rescued by way of experiment. Human charity gives him a chance — a chance to show his power of survival. He is taken

up by royal hands, Egyptian hands. He is planted in an Egyptian environment; he is trained in the culture of the Pharaohs; he is withdrawn from all the associations of his own people. Everything is done to make him forget — forget his Hebrew origin, forget the traditions of his race. He is educated in Egypt’s wisdom, nursed in Egypt’s ritual, stimulated by Egypt’s promises. If he will give his life to Egypt, the ball of fortune is already at his feet; he may, if he will, become the son of Pharaoh’s daughter.

Meantime, by that same Egypt his own people are being oppressed, enslaved. Every form of injustice is being practised upon them — extortion, violence, insult, treachery, contempt, scorn. The eye of young Moses sees that injustice. How has he come to see it? Simply by his own experience of the contrary. By her very kindness to himself, Egypt has taught him her wzkindness to his countrymen. She has put into his hands the mirror by which he sees and condemns her. And so, the first period closes and the second period begins. When next the scene opens, Moses is a young

aes ete man. He stands on the brow of life’s hill. There has come to him that period which comes to every man — the hour when he is called to make his choice between two roads in life. The writer to the Hebrews does not scruple to say that the choice presented to Moses was identical with the choice presented to Christ, ‘By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt.’ And is he not right! Was not the choice of Christ in the wilderness precisely the choice of Moses! The tempter said to the Son of Man, ‘ Which of the two will you have — royalty or rags?’ He offered Him on the one hand the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, on the other a life of privation for the good of humanity. The reproach of Christ was that He chose the latter. He lost favour in the eyes of men, because He preferred the life of humanitarian sacrifice to the life of gilded splendour. Even such was the choice of Moses. He selected that alternative which was afterwards Christ’s reproach. Two destinies lay before him — to be the son of Pharaoh’s daughter or to be a son of despised Israel — to bask in the sunshine of Egypt or to share the obloquy of the Hebrew race. Which should he take — the glitter or the gloom? Should he ascend into a position of worldly slory, or should he go down into a life of virtuous obscurity? It is a moment of crisis — that crisis which marks the transition from youth to manhood. Presently, his decision is made; he has chosen. He will go down.. He will take the lot of his people. He will forego his bright prospects, forego the glitter and the gold. He descends into the valley; and the world laughs loud and long. The hearing of that laugh is the bitterest part of the pain; it is the message of Egypt’s reproach. ‘What matter!’ says the writer to the Hebrews, ‘a greater than Moses is to bear the same reproach in the days to come; he may well endure a ridicule which has placed him on the path of the Son of Man!’

Here closes the second period. It is the period in which he abjures the world and withdraws from its temptations. Is it, then, the completion of his training? No; there is still a great gulf fixed between him and his goal. To abjure evil is much, but it is not all. It is only half of the process — the ascetic half. The task for which Moses was training was humanitarianism — the taking up of the burdens of Man. That which was required of him was no mere abjuration of the world; it was a reforming of the world. It was not simply a refusal to join in the oppression of his people; it was the effort to lift that oppression. Accordingly, when the third period of Moses opens, the impression we receive is one of disappointment. The youth has become a middle-aged man; the courtier of Egypt has become a shepherd in Midian. The ardour of his choice has not been supplemented by ardour of deed. Its only result has been asceticism. He has fled from the scene where his people were oppressed, but he has done nothing to relieve the oppression. He has been seemingly wasting his time. It would have been a real waste of time in any other sphere; but in the sphere of morality the example of Moses is to become a precedent. I am struck by the fact that between the age of moral choice and the period of outward action the Bible loves to interpose a time of rest. The Child-Jesus sees His mission at the age of twelve, but only enters upon it at the age of thirty. The man of Tarsus beholds a light from heaven and is eager at once to follow it; but he is sent for three years to ponder in the solitudes of Arabia. There is a time in moral history when a voice says to every man, ‘Come up into this desert place, and rest a while!’ It would seem as if the morning were not the test of a man, as if the hour of excitement were not the hour of surest promise. The Divine Voice says: ‘Go, and think over it. Do not yield at once to the impulse of the morning. Try how long it will survive. Test it by the circling of the hours. See if it will outlast the season of excitement. You can march to battle at the sound of trumpet and the beat of drum; can you be resolute for the

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struggle when there are no accompaniments of glory! Only then can you say that you have received your call.’

That is the meaning of a saying which is applied to Moses during this third period, ‘He endured as seeing Him who is invisible.’ It means that Moses kept his humanitarian impulse in the absence of human motives — kept it spite of silence and solitude, kept it when the sands of life were low. He had never ceased to hear that suppressed cry which from the days of his youth had sounded through the land of bondage — the cry of that enslaved Israel whose blood was his own. And now the probation is over, and the call comes. The fourth period opens. The scene is the desert of Horeb where Moses has gone to tend his flocks. It is a day of sweltering heat; the bushes seem on fire. The shepherd is weary — weary from the burden of the sun, weary from the burden at his heart. He lies down to rest. He fixes his eye on one of the seared and flaming bushes — a stability favourable to slumber. In that attitude he falls

O asleep. Hedreams. His dream is half from nature, half from God. God speaks to him through the environment he had himself chosen. He had fixed his waking eye on one flaming bush. That one bush remained in his dream. It seemed to burn perpetually, yet inconsumably. Then, from the midst of it, there came a voice — the voice of the Lord. And what it said was virtually this: ‘Moses, it is /that am burning. It is I that am on fire with the pain of humanity. It is I that am scorched with the heat of man’s day. It is time now you came to help Me. You have lived long enough in the sentzment; it is time you began to act. You have had the righteousness to abandon Egypt; but there awaits you a deeper righteousness. You must go back to Egypt once more — to bring out My treasures. You have pitied the burning bush; you must become part of that bush. You have refused — to conform to the fashion of Egypt; you must consent to lead the humanitarian band.’

For, be it observed that the call of Moses is a call to humanitarianism. There is nothing local about it, nothing national. He is not sent simply to break the bonds of a people. His ultimate mission is to gzve them bonds — bonds of a new kind — the bonds of human brotherhood. He is sent to put them under law in a region where before they were lawless. He is to bind each man by the rights of his brother — by the claims of justice, by the ties of sympathy, by the instincts of the heart. He is to introduce a restraining force, a force which will say, ‘Thou shalt not.’ Not the liberation from Egypt, but the binding of Mount Sinai, is the supreme object of the mission of Moses, He is’ wakened into humanitarianism that he may lead his countrymen into the service of Man.

For, remember that the law of Mount Sinai isa humanitarian law. It is not local, it is not temporal; itishuman. When Moses ascended the mount to commune with God, he ascended ‘above all principalities and powers.’ He went up to receive a law which was to be distinctive of no nation — which was to be

neither Jewish nor Egyptian nor Greek nor

Roman nor English, but the property of the whole world — of man as Man. And when he came down from the mount, it was such a law he drought with him — a law which broke the boundaries of separate lands, which rested the obligations of morality on things which were universal, which proclaimed the sacredness of the family and the value of life and the rights of personal possession and the solemnity of man’s word to man. And why was Moses thus successful in the framing of a universal law? I have no hesitation in saying it was because he had felt the needs of the lowest. The needs of men at the foot of the ladder are the needs of man universal. If Moses had only been trained in the wants of Egypt, he would only have been the lawgiver for the upper classes, for the men who possessed ‘the treasures. But when he was trained in the wants of the slave population, when he was confronted by the bush of life as it burned in the valley, he met with the wants of humanity itself. The sorrows of the valley are

cosmopolitan sorrows — they will be found on plain and mountain too. There are wants on plain and mountain that do not reach the vale; but the wants of the vale ascend to plain and mountain. He who has felt the fire of the bush in Midian is able to legislate for the world.

I believe the cosmopolitan character of the work of Moses is the thought which dominates the final scene with which the Great Gallery associates his name. That final scene is painted with dramatic boldness; Moses is buried in an unknown sepulchre by the hand of God alone. What is symbolised in the burial by the hand of God we need not inquire. Perhaps it is a metaphorical way of saying that he was buried by Nature, not by Man. Did he ascend the heights of Pisgah as an explorer of the Promised Land? Was he smitten on the summit by the winter cold; and did he, in returning, leave his body wrapped in wreaths of snow? We cannot tell. But, one thing is clear. In the thought of the artist, in the thought of the Great Gallery, the hiding of his burial-place is a designed thing. Whence this concealment? Lest his countrymen should reverence him too much? I think the meaning of the artist is the contrary. It was lest his countrymen should reverence him too little, should localise him, should say, ‘He is one of ours.’ In the concealment of the body of Moses the Divine Voice is represented as proclaiming: ‘I do not want this to be a local man. I do not want him to be the man ofa class or party. I do not want men to say that he is a Hebrew teacher, a Syrian teacher, an Egyptian teacher. I want him to belong to the world — in the length of it, in the breadth of it. I would have him claimed by no nation; I would have him associated with no soil; I would have him known as the property of Man.’

And has not Moses fulfilled that destiny! Has the first voice of Sinai ever lost its cosmopolitan ring! Have its commands ever become merely national! ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God ’ — is ziat national; is it not the voice to humanity! ‘Thou shalt not make any

graven image’ — is that national; is it not the ignoring of all physical limits! ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ — is that national; are not the ties of family universal! ‘Thou shalt not kill’ — is that national; is not life everywhere dear! ‘Thou shalt not steal’ — is that national; are not possessions everywhere precious! ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ — is that national; have not all lands sought the secret of truth! Even the command to keep a day of rest, seemingly the most local of all the Decalogue precepts, is based upon no national observance — no Jewish holiday, no patriotic anniversary, no commemoration of a people’s triumph. It is based upon the fact of creation, on the constitution of Nature itself, on that design of the world which makes all things one,‘ Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy, for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth. Such universalism is grand — in the old world it is unique. It can only belong to a race which has in it the consciousness and the conscience of humanity — a race which feels within its veins not merely its native blood, but the blood of all ages and the heart of all climes. Such a race had a right to its Messianic aspirations.

EVEAL to me, O Lord, that fire which
burns and yet does not consume — the

fire of love! My life will be consumed wzthout the burning of that: fire. It) is want #of enthusiasm that kills me, wears me away. My soul dies through lack of burning. I never really live unless I catch fire. The danger of my bush is not its heat, but its wilderness. It is the commonplace that consumes me. I am never so weary as when I am aimless, never so fatigued as when I have nothing to do. Set fire to my heart, O Lord! Kindle me into the love of humanity! Inflame me with the passion to make my brother glad! Give me a telepathic sense of others’ pain! Let me feel the sorrows of those to whom Egypt is a foreign land — who are not adapted to their life’s environment! Lay on my heart the burden of the bondsman, the troubles of the toiler, the

weights of the weary! Help me to live for a

MOSES THE PRACTICAL Zh ty

day, for an hour, yea, even for a moment, in the experience of human struggle! Call me up to the burning bush where Jhou dwellest, where Thou sufferest! Teach me that the burning bush is the Tree of Life in the midst of Thy Paradise! I speak of the fires of hell; teach me that there is a fire in heaven — a sense of sorrows not my own! Give me this Divine pain, 7zy pain, the pain of Calvary! When I have overcome my selfish heart I shall inherit Thy Tree of Life — that burning bush of sacrifice which is the glory of Thy Garden.