om the Exodus, and on the selfsame day (which
addition fixes the date precisely), the people reached the wilderness of
Sinai. This answers fairly to the date of Pentecost, which was
afterwards connected by tradition with the giving of the law. And
therefore Pentecost was the right time for the gift of the Holy Ghost,
bringing with Him the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, and
that freedom from servile Jewish obedience which is not attained by
violating law, but by being imbued in its spirit, by the love which is
the fulfilling of the law.

* * * * *

There is among the solemn solitudes of Sinai a wide amphitheatre,
reached by two converging valleys, and confronted by an enormous
perpendicular cliff, the Ras Sufsafeh--a "natural altar," before which
the nation had room to congregate, awed by the stern magnificence of the
approach, and by the intense loneliness and desolation of the
surrounding scene, and thus prepared for the unparalleled revelation
which awaited them.

It is the manner of God to speak through nature and the senses to the
soul. We cannot imagine the youth of the Baptist spent in Nazareth, nor
of Jesus in the desert. Elijah, too, was led into the wilderness to
receive the vision of God, and the agony of Jesus was endured at night,
and secluded by the olives from the paschal moon. It is by another
application of the same principle that the settled Jewish worship was
bright with music and splendid with gold and purple; and the notion that
the sublime and beautiful in nature and art cannot awaken the feelings
to which religion appeals, is as shallow as the notion that when these
feelings are awakened all is won.

What happens next is a protest against this latter extreme. Awe is one
thing: the submission of the will is another. And therefore Moses was
stopped when about to ascend the mountain, there to keep the solemn
appointment that was made when God said, "This shall be the token unto
thee that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out
of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain" (iii. 12). His own
sense of the greatness of the crisis perhaps needed to be deepened.
Certainly the nation had to be pledged, induced to make a deliberate
choice, now first, as often again, under Joshua and Samuel, and when
Elijah invoked Jehovah upon Carmel. (Josh. xxiv. 24; 1 Sam. xii. 14; 1
Kings xviii. 21, 39.)

It is easy to speak of pledges and formal de