ompanied by a personal
discipline and trial of the leaders. This is the infallible test of the
movement itself. If the men who control it do not become themselves more
profound, more pure, more spiritual, they are counterfeit leaders, and
the movement they advocate is not of God. The writer of the Epistle
argues from the decision of Moses to deliver his brethren that his own
spiritual life was become deeper and holier. When he refused to be
called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, he also rejected the pleasures of
sin. He took his stand resolutely on the side of goodness. The example
of Joseph was before him, of whom the same words are said: "he refused"
to sin against God.

As the crisis in his own spiritual life fitted him to be the leader of a
great national movement, so also his conception of that movement became
a help to him to overcome the sinful temptations of Egypt. He saw that
the pleasures of sin were but for a season. It is easy to supply the
other side of this thought. The joy of delivering his brethren would
never pass away. He welcomed the undying joy of self-sacrifice, and
repudiated the momentary pleasures of self-gratification.

_Second_, he accounted the reproach of Christ greater riches than the
treasures of Egypt. Not only the people of God, but also the Christ of
God, determined his choice. An idea is not enough. It must rest on a
person, and that person must be greater than the idea. He may be himself
but an idea. But, even when it is so, he is the glorious thought in
which all the other hopes and imaginations of faith centre and merge. If
he is more than an idea, if it is a living person that controls the
man's thoughts and becomes the motive of his life, a new quality will
then enter into that life. Conscience will awake. The question of doing
what is right will control ambition, if it will not quite absorb it.
Treachery to the idea of life will now be felt to be a sin, if
conscience has pronounced that the idea itself is not immoral, but good
and noble. For, when conscience permits, faith will not lag behind, and
will proclaim that the moral is also spiritual, that the spiritual is an
ever-abiding possession.

Many expositors strive hard to make the words mean something else than
the reproach which Christ Himself suffered. It is marvellous that the
great doctrine of Christ's personal activity in the Church before His
incarnation should have so entirely escaped the notice of the older
school of