ot know. Enough
for them and for us to know that no dishonour was done to the grand
old man; that as he died far away on the lonely mountain top without
a child to close his eyes, his last look fixed upon the good land
and large which lay spread out below, of entering which he had been
dreaming for forty--it may be for more than forty--years. Enough
for us to know that the kindly earth received his body again into
her bosom, and that the true Moses--the immortal spirit of the man--
returned to God who created him, and inspired him, and sustained him
to be perhaps the greatest man--save One who was more than man--who
ever trod this earth.

So our human feelings, like those of the Jews, are satisfied. But
Moses is not to be worshipped by them or by us; no splendid temple
is to rise over his bones; no lamps are to burn, or priest to chant
round his shrine; no miracles are to be worked by his relics; no man
is to invoke his patronage and intercession in their prayers. The
people whom he has brought out of Egypt are to be free--free from
the slavery of the body, free from the more degrading slavery of the
soul.

And so they go on over Jordan to fulfil their strange destiny, to
fight their way into the promised land, to root out the Canaanite
tribes, whose iniquity was full, whose sins had made them a nuisance
not to be suffered on the earth of God. But do they go to establish
a golden age; to become a perfect people?

Nothing less. To become, according to the book of Judges, just what
Moses foretold--an ignorant, selfish, often profligate and
disorderly people, doing each what is right in his own eyes, falling
continually into idolatry, civil war, and slavery to the heathens
round about. Nothing more shows the truth of this history than its
humility, its continual confession of sin, its readiness to confess
the ugly truth that the Jews are a foolish, ignorant, unmanageable,
lawless, sensual race, stiffnecked and rebellious, always resisting
the Holy Spirit. The immense difference between the Old Testament
history and that of all other nations is, that it is a history not
of their virtues, but of their sins; and a history, on the other
hand, of God's punishments and mercies. God in the Old Testament is
all, and the Jews are nothing; and one may say that it differs from
all other histories in this, that it is not a history of the Jews
themselves at all, but a history of God's dealings with them.

If any man choo