om the kingdom
of heaven. He will be prepared to forfeit all that the world can give
him for the sake of Him in Whom truth eternally dwells in fulness and
perfection. Such a man was Moses. Had not his parents often told him,
when his mother was nourishing the child for Pharaoh's daughter, of the
wonderful story of their hiding him by faith and afterwards putting him
in an ark of bulrushes by the river's brim? Did not his mother bring him
up to be at once the son of Pharaoh's daughter and the deliverer of
Israel? Was the boy not living a double life? He was gradually coming to
understand that he was to be the heir of the throne, and that he would
or might be the destroyer of that throne. May we not, with profoundest
reverence, liken it to the twofold inner life of the Child Jesus when at
Nazareth He came to know that He, the Child of Mary, was the Son of the
Highest?

Stephen continues the story: "When he was well-nigh forty years old, it
came into his heart to visit his brethren the children of Israel." "He
went out unto his brethren," we are told in the narrative, "and looked
on their burdens."[286] But the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews
perceives in the act of Moses more than love of kindred. The slaves of
Pharaoh were, in the eyes of Moses, the people of God. The national
consecration had already taken place; he himself was already swayed by
the glorious hope of delivering his brethren, the covenant people of
God, from the hands of their oppressors. This is the explanation which
Stephen gives of his conduct in slaying the Egyptian. When he saw one of
the children of Israel suffer wrong, he defended him and smote the
Egyptian, supposing that his brethren understood how that God by his
hand was giving them deliverance. The deed was, in fact, intended to be
a call to united effort. He was throwing the gauntlet. He was
deliberately making it impossible for him to return to the former life
of pomp and courtly worship. He wished the Hebrews to understand his
decision, and accept at once his leadership. "But they understood not."

Our author pierces still deeper into the motives that swayed his spirit.
It was not a selfish ambition, nor merely a patriotic desire to put
himself at the head of a host of slaves bent on asserting their rights.
Simultaneous with the social movement there was a spiritual work
accomplished in the personal, inner life of Moses himself. All true,
heaven-inspired revolutions in society are acc