om ledge to ledge of Abarim; not strange to his
aged eyes the scattered clusters of the mountain herbage, and the
broken shadows of the cliffs, indented far across the silence of
uninhabited ravines; scenes such as those among which, as now, with
none beside him but God, he had led his flocks so often; and which he
had left, how painfully! taking upon him the appointed power to make
of the fenced city a wilderness, and to fill the desert with songs of
deliverance. It was not to embitter the last hours of his life that
God restored to him for a day the beloved solitudes he had lost, and
breathed the peace of the perpetual hills around him, and cast the
world in which he had laboured, and sinned, far beneath his feet in
that mist of dying blue;--all sin, all wandering, soon to be forgotten
for ever. The Dead Sea--a type of God's anger understood by him, of
all men, most clearly, who had seen the earth open her mouth, and the
sea his depth, to overwhelm the companies of those who contended with
his Master--laid waveless beneath him; and beyond it the fair hills of
Judah, and the soft plains and banks of Jordan, purple in the evening
light as with the blood of redemption, and fading in their distant
fulness into mysteries of promise and of love. There, with his
unabated strength, his undimmed glance, lying down upon the utmost
rocks, with angels waiting near to contend for the spoils of his
spirit, he put off his earthly armour. We do deep reverence to his
companion prophet, for whom the chariot of fire came down from heaven;
but was his death less noble whom his Lord Himself buried in the vales
of Moab, keeping, in the secrets of the eternal counsels, the
knowledge of a sepulchre, from which he was to be called in the
fulness of time, to talk with that Lord upon Hermon of the death that
He should accomplish at Jerusalem?

And lastly, let us turn our thoughts for a few moments to the cause of
the resurrection of these two prophets. We are all of us too much in
the habit of passing it by, as a thing mystical and inconceivable,
taking place in the life of Christ for some purpose not by us to be
understood, or, at the best, merely as a manifestation of His divinity
by brightness of heavenly light, and the ministering of the spirits of
the dead, intended to strengthen the faith of His three chosen
apostles. And in this, as in many other events recorded by the
Evangelists, we lose half the meaning, and evade the practical power