that bloodthirsty decree the son of Amram might have grown up a peasant and a bondsman, but this decree promoted him to the palace, and trained him to be the deliverer of his countrymen, the conqueror of Egypt, and the death of Pharaoh's successor. Such is God's method. The darker the cloud, the more brilliant the rainbow; the wilder the storm, the more welcome the haven; the more desperate the danger, the more delightful is the sense of deliverance and the more rapturous the thanks of the rescued. And so in His wisdom the Most High sometimes allows His people to reach the sorest pass before He breaks the silence and makes bare His mighty arm. Not only does He allow the bottle to be spent, but the dying boy to be cast away beneath the bushes, before Hagar's eyes are opened on the well. Not only does He allow Joseph to be sold into slavery, but to be flung into a dungeon and forgotten, before He calls him to the steps of the throne and the smiles of the monarch. Not only does He suffer the Holy Land to be invaded, but Jerusalem to be hopelessly invested, before the angel of death spreads his wings and exterminates the host of Sennacherib.1 Not only does He permit the plot against the Jews to mature, but the scaffold for Mordecai is erected, before God gives the signal, 1 Oosterzee, p. 10. and on His people's enemies executes vengeance. Not only does He permit a hostile king to take the crown, but He lets the bondage begin, and the brickkilns glow fiercer, and the murderous edict come forth, before the knell of tyranny is rung, and Moses is born. And so, if you have a clear precept to start you off, and plain promises to keep you going, do not fear though the path should grow precarious and narrow, do not flinch though dangers should swarm and multiply. It is the valley of Achor, trouble in every step, and a wall of rock in front,a rock which no agility can climb nor any strength can penetrate. But in faith and fearlessness go forward, and as you reach the barrier a door of hope will open, and usher you into an elysium of repose or a paradise of beauty. If you have a plain intimation of God's will, you need be afraid of no king's commandment, for that God in whom you trust will find means to protect His own; and when He has a purpose to fulfil He can make the Nile-monster a nursing mother, and for Pharaoh's victims create a shield in Pharaoh's daughter. So we leave safely landed the little papyrus boat, the ark of bulrushes,-which grows mystic as we gaze, and makes us think of other arks which have gone God's voyages, and, like the babe that sailed away from a bond-mother's arms to the bosom of a princess, have carried their freight to a brilliant haven. And not so much that colossal ark, which from out of a cursed and God-forsaken world, and across the ferry of the Flood, carried Noah and his family into that new and more favoured world which God would curse no more, and on which, in the person of Incarnate Deity, unimagined blessing was destined to descend: not so much of it as of that other ark in which this great advent was effected the manger which, not to Egyptian maids, but to Eastern sages, disclosed not Moses, but Messiah, that infant of days whose name should expand into "The Wonderful, the Counsellor, the mighty God;" and who, emerging from that manger, is ascended to the right hand of the Father, a Prince and a Saviour, and will return on His great white throne. And it makes us think of that papyrus ark to which infinite wisdom has intrusted the revelation of Himself the parchment scroll, the paper book, the poor frail vehicle which, launched on the tide of Time, has had so many escapes from the chances of the stream, as well as the fury of its foes, but is now escaped from the house of bondage, and made a blessing to all nations. And as we see the mournful mother carrying "Her babe, close cradled in her arms, To Nile's green sloping shore," and intrusting it to the unfriendly-looking flood, little witting of the surprise which in a few hours awaited her, so we think of the rapture that awaits many a Christian parent, who in tears has stood over that sorrowful ark, the coffin of her child, and think of her joy and her wonder when the loved one, who in the earthly dwelling makes "a blank so large," is recognised in the palace of Heaven's own King. II. The Father of Chivalry. "Moses . . . was mighty in words and in deeds." A MAGNIFICENT land was the Egypt in the midst of which Moses grew up. With an atmosphere clear and dry, with a soil which no harvests could exhaust, with towns and temples at every bend of the river emerging from the midst of the great garden into which the surface had been carefully cultured, and with its bountiful Nile flowing on beneath the scented lotus, or spreading over the plain, with all the wealth of its far-travelled waters, nothing could be a more perfect symbol of prosperity and self-sufficing abundance, whilst a peculiar architecture imparted to it all an air of wonderful grandeur. That architecture was chiefly monuments and temples. The abodes of the living were sufficiently simple, but all the wealth and genius of the country were exerted to embody their ideas of immortality, and to do homage to the powers unseen. Already, in the days of Moses, the pyramid of Cheops had |