ting in theory to an unrealised
atrocity, ignorant how imperiously their nature would forbid the crime,
not planning disobedience in advance, nor led to it by any reasoning
process. All is changed when the little one gazes at them with that
marvellous appeal in its unconscious eyes, which is known to every
parent, and helps him to be a better man. There is a great difference
between one's thought about an infant, and one's feeling towards the
actual baby. He was their child, their beautiful child; and this it was
that turned the scale. For him they would now dare anything, "because
they saw he was a goodly child, and they were not afraid of the king's
commandment." Now, impulse is often a great power for evil, as when
appetite or fear, suddenly taking visible shape, overwhelms the judgment
and plunges men into guilt. But good impulses may be the very voice of
God, stirring whatever is noble and generous within us. Nor are they
accidental: loving and brave emotions belong to warm and courageous
hearts; they come of themselves, like song birds, but they come surely
where sunshine and still groves invite them, not into clamour and foul
air. Thus arose in their bosoms the sublime thought of God as an active
power to be reckoned upon. For as certainly as every bad passion that we
harbour preaches atheism, so does all goodness tend to sustain itself by
the consciousness of a supreme Goodness in reserve. God had sent them
their beautiful child, and who was Pharaoh to forbid the gift? And so
religion and natural pity joined hands, their supreme convictions and
their yearning for their infant. "By faith Moses was hid ... because
they saw he was a goodly child, and they were not afraid of the king's
commandment."

Such, if we desire a real and actual salvation, is always the faith
which saves. Postpone salvation to an indefinite future; make it no more
than the escape from vaguely realised penalties for sins which do not
seem very hateful; and you may suppose that faith in theories can obtain
this indulgence; an opinion may weigh against a misgiving. But feel that
sin is not only likely to entail damnation, but is really and in itself
damnable meanwhile, and then there will be no deliverance possible, but
from the hand of a divine Friend, strong to sustain and willing to guide
the life. We read that Amram lived a hundred and thirty and seven years,
and of all that period we only know that he helped to save the deliverer
of his ra