ith.

Let us place ourselves in his position. He refuses the selfish luxury
and worldly glory of Pharaoh's court, that he may rush to deliver his
brethren. He brings with him the consciousness of superiority, and at
once assumes the duty of composing their quarrels. Evidently he is a
believer in God, but a believer also in himself. Such men are not God's
instruments. He will have a man be the one thing or the other. If the
man is self-confident, conscious of his own prowess, oblivious of God or
a denier of Him, the Most High can use him to do His work, to his own
destruction. If the man has no confidence in the flesh, knows his utter
weakness and very nothingness, and yields himself to God's hand
entirely, with no by-ends to seek, him too God uses to do His work, to
the man's own salvation. But Moses strove to combine faith in God and in
himself. He was at once thwarted. His brethren taunted him, when he
expected to be trusted and honoured. Despondency takes possession of his
spirit. But his trepidation is on the surface. Beneath it is a great
deep of faith. What he now needs is discipline. God leads him to the
back of the wilderness. The courtier serves as a herdsman. Far removed
from the monumental literature of Egypt, he communes with himself, and
with nature's mighty visions. He gazes upon the dread and silent
mountain, hallowed of old as the habitation of God. He had already, in
Egypt, learned the faith of Joseph and of Jacob. Now, in Midian, he will
imbibe the faith of Isaac and of Abraham. Far from the busy haunts of
men, the din of cities, the stir of the market-place, he will learn how
to pray, how to divest himself of all confidence in the flesh, and how
to worship the Invisible alone. For "he endured as seeing Him Who is
invisible." Do not paraphrase it "the invisible _King_." That is too
narrow. It was not Pharaoh only that had vanished out of his sight and
out of his thoughts. Moses himself had disappeared. He had broken down
when he trusted himself. He now endures, because he sees nought but God.
Surely he was in the same blessed state of mind in which St. Paul was
when he said, "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." When Moses
and when Paul ceased to be anything, and God was to them everything,
they were strong to endure.[287]

4. Faith renders the work of life sacramental. The long period of
discipline has drawn to a close. The self-confidence of Moses has been
fully subdued. "He supposed that hi