I say unto them?' It was an awful question; asked with deep awe: The Egyptians have their Ammon, their hidden God. They have other names for each power and object they worship. God of our fathers, by what name shall I dare to speak of Thee?" The answer came forth: 'And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said unto him, Thus shalt thou say to them, I AM hath sent me unto you.' Oh! that I could persuade you, brethren, and persuade the teachers of our land, not to try to make words of such deep and tremendous significance as these more intelligible by translating them into the dry philosophical formula of the self-existing Being.' Oh! that we could believe that the Scripture form of speech is the right form, that in it we have a living, life-giving substitute for our dead phrases, that when we cling to them we are in infinite danger of merging the person in a vague generality, the substance in a phantom. We should indeed be able and most ready to point out the connexion between Scripture forms of speech and all others, we should not suffer ourselves to be deceived by a mere repetition of the divine words, or give ourselves credit for entering into truths because we can quote glibly the texts which express them. But when we are most feeling the bondage of customary religious phrases and technicalities of theology, such sentences as these offer themselves to us as the greatest helps to our emancipation, as hints how language may be a ladder set upon earth and reaching to heaven, how the peasant

who knows no logic and can comprehend no abstractions, may rise to true and practical apprehensions of God, from which our logic and our abstractions are excluding us.

But further, I would beseech you to remember that Moses was called to be the deliverer and founder of a Nation. The more we read of that nation, the more we shall feel that it could not have for its basis any abstraction or logical formula. It stood upon no conception of the unity of God, it stood upon no denial of the Egyptian faith, or any other; it stood upon no scheme of making the speculations of priests or hierophants the property of the people. Either it stood upon this Name, or both it and all that has grown out of it are mockeries and lies from first to last; roots, branches, flowers, fruit, all are rotten, and all must be swept away. 'The Lord God of the Hebrews, the God of our nation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of our family, has established and upholds the order of human existence and of all nature,' this is the truth which Moses learnt at the bush, the only one which could encounter the tyranny of Pharaoh, or the tricks of the magician, the only one which could bring the Jews or any people out of slavery into manly freedom and true obedience.

We hear much from a certain school in our days of the intense nationality of the Mosaic Economy; especially we are reminded again and again that the God whom the Jews worshipped was the Lord God of the Hebrews. So far from suppressing

this fact I shall delight to bring it before you, to present it in all the aspects in which the Scripture presents it. I believe that there ceases to be any reality in the story if we explain away this fundamental characteristic of it; that the Jews, instead of having done more for the world than any other people, would have done nothing for it if they had not believed that the Lord was their God. But while you give all possible prominence to this assertion, while you remember that in the very passage of which I have been speaking Moses is told to say to the people, The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, hath sent me to you this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations,' do not let the remembrance of that other pass from your minds. Do not suppose that the deep hollow in the heart of the lonely shepherd could have been filled by the thought, all cheering and wonderful as that was, of one who cared for his fathers and chose them. Abraham in his intercession had said, 'Shall not the Judge of the whole earth do RIGHT?' His own discipline, the discovery of his own wrong, had led him to perceive a righteousness lying at the root of the universe. Faith in God's Righteousness was the source of his own righteousness. And now that Moses is going forth to encounter the unrighteousness of the world in its high places, now that the chosen people are called to this higher stage of their history, now that they are not only to witness for good in the earth but to fight with evil, that Name is proclaimed which

tells them that their calling is to struggle for that which is against that which is NOT; for the Absolute and Eternal Truth against every thing that is counterfeit and false. And this Truth is living, present, personal. He himself is the Lord of hosts, claiming the subjection and allegiance of every power upon earth; putting down every power which tries to be independent of Him, and to set up its own self-will. The vision of such a Power, working at every moment, near to every man, is appalling. And yet upon it rests all the security of the words, 'I have seen the affliction of my people, and heard their cry, and know their sorrows.' It was no partial sympathy, though particular men, actual creatures, were, as they needs must be, the objects of it. In all acts towards them, the sympathy of the divine nature with the sufferer, the hatred of the divine nature for the oppressor, would be gradually unfolding itself. Love would be seen to be the eternal twin of Truth, not a feeble creature of time pleading for the infraction of the laws upon which heaven and earth rest, seeking exemption for one and another from its universal obligations.

I have alluded already to those struggles in the mind of Moses himself, which are so strikingly brought out in the fourth chapter of Exodus, when he found that he was not eloquent, neither heretofore nor since the Lord had spoken to him; when he exclaimed, 'Oh my Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send.' I would not willingly destroy the force of such passages by

any elaborate comment upon them. You cannot fail to perceive, I think, how perfectly they are in harmony with that view of the Divine Education which forced itself upon us so strongly in the Book of Genesis. Throughout we see the divine Will treating men as voluntary, spiritual creatures; not crushing, but calling forth into lively consciousness, the will that is in them; allowing it to feel itself, to assert its own freedom; then teaching it slowly, gradually, wherein that freedom consists; what destroys it. But this discipline becomes now more distinct than before, because we have reached a time when we are to see how men are trained to be leaders and shepherds of a people, and how those processes which are to go on in the heart of a whole society are first transacted and experienced in their own hearts. One remark I would make in reference to this subject, which may not be without use hereafter. Moses, we are told in the fourth chapter, was assured of the reality of his commission by certain outward signs, which signs it was promised that he should be able to exhibit before Pharaoh. It was after he received this evidence that these doubts and internal conflicts occurred which made him wish to give up his task altogether. There was no charm then in these miracles. They had a deep meaning and purpose; they had not the power-they were not meant to have the power of overcoming the resistance of the human spirit to the will of its Creator.

Moses

But that resistance was overcome. went to the heads of the Hebrew tribes, and told