erful and cruel, should remember the anger of God when Moses said,
"Send, I pray Thee, by whom Thou wilt send." The Lord is not
indifferent. Much less than other sufferers should those who know God be
terrified by their afflictions. Cyprian encouraged the Church of his
time to endure even unto martyrdom, by the words recorded of ancient
Israel, that the more they afflicted them, so much the more they became
greater and waxed stronger. And he was right. For all these things
happened to them for ensamples, and were written for our admonition.

It is further to be observed that the people were quite unconscious,
until Moses announced it afterwards, that they were heard by God. Yet
their deliverer had now been prepared by a long process for his work. We
are not to despair because relief does not immediately appear: though He
tarry, we are to wait for Him.

While this anguish was being endured in Egypt, Moses was maturing for
his destiny. Self-reliance, pride of place, hot and impulsive
aggressiveness, were dying in his bosom. To the education of the
courtier and scholar was now added that of the shepherd in the wilds,
amid the most solemn and awful scenes of nature, in solitude,
humiliation, disappointment, and, as we learn from the Epistle to the
Hebrews, in enduring faith. Wordsworth has a remarkable description of
the effect of a similar discipline upon the good Lord Clifford. He
tells--

"How he, long forced in humble paths to go,
Was softened into feeling, soothed and tamed.

"Love had he found in huts where poor men lie,
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

"In him the savage virtues of the race,
Revenge, and all ferocious thoughts, were dead;
Nor did he change, but kept in lofty place
The wisdom which adversity had bred."

There was also the education of advancing age, which teaches many
lessons, and among them two which are essential to leadership,--the
folly of a hasty blow, and of impulsive reliance upon the support of
mobs. Moses the man-slayer became exceeding meek; and he ceased to rely
upon the perception of his people that God by him would deliver them.
His distrust, indeed, became as excessive as his temerity had been, but
it was an error upon the safer side. "Behold, they will not believe me,"
he says, "nor hearken unto my voice."

It is an important truth tha