r himself into his hand. Try if you cannot walk in thought with
those two brothers, and the son, as they passed the outmost tents of
Israel, and turned, while yet the dew lay round about the camp,
towards the slopes of Mount Hor; talking together for the last time,
as step by step they felt the steeper rising of the rocks, and hour
after hour, beneath the ascending sun, the horizon grew broader as
they climbed, and all the folded hills of Idumea, one by one subdued,
showed, amidst their hollows in the haze of noon, the windings of that
long desert journey, now at last to close. But who shall enter into
the thoughts of the High Priest as his eye followed those paths of
ancient pilgrimage; and through the silence of the arid and endless
hills, stretching even to the dim peak of Sinai, the whole history of
those forty years was unfolded before him, and the mystery of his own
ministries revealed to him; and that other Holy of Holies, of which
the mountain peaks were the altars, and the mountain clouds the veil,
the firmament of his Father's dwelling, opened to him still more
brightly and infinitely as he drew nearer his death?--until at last,
on the shadeless summit, from him on whom sin was to be laid no more,
from him on whose heart the names of sinful nations were to press
their graven fire no longer, the brother and the son took breastplate
and ephod, and left him to his rest. There is indeed a secretness in
this calm faith, and deep restraint of sorrow, into which it is
difficult for us to enter; but the death of Moses himself is more
easily to be conceived, and had in it circumstances still more
touching as regards the influence of the external scene. For forty
years Moses had not been alone. The care and burden of all the people,
the weight of their woe, and guilt, and death, had been upon him
continually. The multitude had been laid upon him as if he had
conceived them; their tears had been his meat night and day, until he
had felt as if God had withdrawn His favour from him, and he had
prayed that he might be slain, and not see his wretchedness. And now
at last the command came, "Get thee up into this mountain." The weary
hands, that had been so long stayed up against the enemies of Israel,
might lean again upon the shepherd's staff, and fold themselves for
the shepherd's prayer--for the shepherd's slumber. Not strange to his
feet, though forty years unknown, the roughness of the bare mountain
path, as he climbed fr