losophical. It is not only the
saints who feel themselves to be the instruments of a Greater than they.
Cromwell and Bismarck, Columbus, Raleigh and Drake, William the Silent
and William the Third, felt it. Mr. Stanley has told us how the
consciousness that he was being used grew up in him, not through
fanaticism but by slow experience, groping his way through the gloom of
Central Africa.

But none will deny that one of the greatest factors in modern history is
its industrial development. Is there, then, no sacredness here?

The doctrine of Scripture is not that man is a tool, but that he is
responsible for vast gifts, which come directly from heaven--that every
good gift is from above, that it was God Himself Who planted in Paradise
the tree of knowledge.

Nor would anything do more to restrain the passions, to calm the
impulses and to elevate the self-respect of modern life, to call back
its energies from the base competition for gold, and make our industries
what dreamers persuade themselves that the mediaeval industries were,
than a quick and general perception of what is meant when faculty goes
by such names as talent, endowment, gift--of the glory of its use, the
tragedy of its defilement. Many persons, indeed, reject this doctrine
because they cannot believe that man has power to abase so high a thing
so sadly. But what, then, do they think of the human body?

What connection is there between all this and the reiteration of the law
of the Sabbath? Not merely that the moral law is now made a civic
statute as well, for this had been done already (xxiii. 12). But, as our
Lord has taught us that a Jew on the Sabbath was free to perform works
of mercy, it might easily be supposed lawful, and even meritorious, to
hasten forward the construction of the place where God would meet His
people. But He who said "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" said also
that to obey was better than sacrifice. Accordingly this caution closes
the long story of plans and preparations. And when Moses called the
people to the work, his first words were to repeat it (xxxv. 2).

Finally, there was given to Moses the deposit for which so noble a
shrine was planned--the two tables of the law, miraculously produced.

If any one, without supposing that they were literally written with a
literal finger, conceives that this was the meaning conveyed to a Hebrew
by the expression "written with the finger of God," he entirely misses
the Hebrew mo