received the best school training of his day, with all the peculiar
advantages of his position in the royal family.

Following meant more to Moses, in what he gave up of worldly advantage,
than to any other named in the Bible record. Egypt was the world empire of
that day. Moses was in the innermost imperial circles, and could easily
have become the dominant spirit of the court, if not the successor to the
Pharaoh's throne. But he heard the call. His mother helped train his ears.
He answered "Yes" to God, without knowing how much was involved. Following
meant giving up, then a long course of training in the university of the
desert, with the sheep and the stars and--God. It meant a repeated risking
of his life not only in his bold dealings with Pharaoh, but afterward with
the nation-mob, mob-nation, whose leader, and father and school-teacher,
and everything else, he had to be for forty years. And it meant much on
the other side, too.

"Had Moses failed to go, had God
Granted his prayer, there would have been
For him no leadership to win;
No pillared fire; no magic rod,
No smiting of the sea; no tears
Ecstatic, shed on Sinai's steep;
No Nebo, with a God to keep
His burial; only forty years
Of desert, watching with his sheep."

A Yet Deeper Meaning.

When we turn to the leaders of the latter years of the Kingdom time of
God's teacher-nation, the prophetic time, there is one thing that stands
out sharply in the men God used. It was this, a man's inner personal life
and experience were made use of to an unusual degree. It is as though the
sacred inner life were sacrificed. The holy privacies were laid bare to
the public gaze. The sweets of the inner holy of holies of the personal
life were given up. The people were so far God-hardened that only _acted_
preaching, _lived_ messages, that took it out of one's very life, with
pain in the taking, had any effect.

This is most markedly so in the case of _Hosea_, whose experience it seems
almost if not wholly impossible for us to take in.[114] It is true that
the Christianized West has conceptions of personal privacy to which the
East is a stranger. Yet, even so, the way in which these men were asked to
yield up their inner personal lives, must have been a most marked thing to
these Orientals. For God used it as the one thing apparently, the extreme
thing, to touch their hearts with His appeal.

_Isaiah_ had just such