t your forefathers
were. Look how you, their unworthy children, have fallen from their
faith and their virtue.'

This, I think, is what we should have been told if the Pentateuch
had been the invention of man. This is exactly what we are NOT
told; but, on the contrary, the very opposite.

What we are told is disappointing, sad, gloomy, full of dark fears
and warnings about what the Jews will be and what they will have to
endure. But it is far more true to human nature, and to the facts
which we see in the world about us, than any story of a good old
time would have been.

They are still wandering in the land of Moab, when the time draws
near when Moses must die. He is a hundred and twenty years old, but
hale and vigorous still. His eye is not dim, nor his natural force
abated. But the Lord has told him that his death is near. He gives
the command of the army of Israel to Joshua the son of Nun, and then
he speaks his last words.

Songs they are, dark and rugged, like all the higher Hebrew poetry;
but, like it, full of the very Spirit of God--the Spirit of wisdom
and understanding, the Spirit of faith and of the fear of the Lord.

There are three of these songs which seem to belong to those last
days of his.

The Prayer of Moses the man of God--which is our 90th Psalm, our
burial Psalm. We all know the sadness of that Psalm; its weariness,
as of one who had laboured long, and would fain be at rest; its
confession of man's frailty--fading away suddenly like the grass;
its confession of God's strength, God from everlasting, before the
mountains were brought forth; its eternal gospel of hope and
comfort, that the strength of God takes pity on the weakness of man,
'Lord, thou hast been our refuge, from one generation to another.'

Then comes the Song of the Rock--the song of which (it seems) the
Lord said to him, 'Write this song, and teach it the children of
Israel, that it may be a witness for me against them.'

And so Moses writes; and seemingly before all the congregation of
Israel, according to the custom of those times, he chants his death-
song, the Song of the Rock. It is such a song as we should expect
from him. God is the Rock. He was thinking, it may be, of the
everlasting rocks of Sinai, where God had appeared to him of old.
But God is the true, everlasting Rock, on which all things rest; the
Eternal, the Self-existent, the I Am, whom he was sent to preach to
men. But he is a good and righte