ning after quacks and impostors, spirit-rappers and table-turners, St. Simonians and Mormons, and false prophets of every kind, they will have nothing to say but This people which knoweth not 'the law is accursed.' While when they see anything like new truth, or new teaching from God appear, instead of welcoming the light, and going to meet the light, and accepting the light, they will say, 'What shall we do? For all men will ❝ believe on him, and then the powers of this world 'will come and take away our station and our ' order?' As if Christ could not take better care of his Church, for which he died, than they can in his stead! And so they will persecute God's servants, in the name of God, and call upon the law to put down by force the men whom they cannot put down by reason.

From ever falling into that state of stupid lipbelief, and outward religion, and loss of faith in the living God: good Lord deliver us!

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy; from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness: good Lord deliver us!

From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word and commandment: good Lord deliver us!

For if people ever fall into that frame of mind

(as did the Scribes and Pharisees), and the good Lord do not deliver them from it, it will surely happen to them as it is written in the Bible.

The powers of this world will come and take away their place, and their power, and their station: but meanwhile the truth which they think that they have stifled will rise again, for Christ who is the truth will raise it again; and it shall conquer, and leaven the hearts of men till all be leavened; and while the Scribes and Pharisees shall be cast into the outer darkness of discontented and hopeless bigotry, the kingdoms of the world, which they fancied were the devil's dominion, shall become the kingdoms of God and of his Christ, and be adopted into that holy and ever-growing Church of which it is written, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, for in it is the Spirit of God, to lead it into all truth.

To which blessed end may God bring us, and our children after us. Amen.

SERMON XVIII.

THE DEATH OF MOSES.

(First Sunday after Trinity.)

DEUT. XXXIV. 5, 6.

So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

SOME might regret that the last three chapters

of Deuteronomy are not read among our Sunday lessons. There was not, however, room for them; and I do not doubt that those who chose our lessons knew better than I what chapters they ought to choose. We may, however, read them for ourselves, not only in the daily lessons, but as often as we choose. And well worth reading they

are.

For I know no stronger proof of the truth of the book of Deuteronomy, and of the whole Pentateuch, than its ending so differently from what we should have expected, or indeed wished. If things went in this world, as they do in novels and fables, according to man's notion of what is right and

good, then Moses and his history would have had a very different ending.

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And if the story of Moses had been of man's invention, we should have heard-I think, from what we know of the fables, myths,' as they call them now, which nations have invented about themselves, and their own early history, we may guess fairly what we should have heard-how Moses brought the Jews into the land of Canaan, and established his laws, and reigned over them, and died in honour and great glory—if he died at all, and was not taken up into the skies, and changed into a star, or into a god;-and how he was buried with great pomp; and how his sepulchre did remain among the Jews until that day; and probably how men worshipped at it, and miracles were worked at it, and so forth.

Also, we should have heard how, as soon as the Israelites came into the land of Canaan, they began forthwith to serve the Lord with all their heart and soul, as they never did afterwards, and to keep Moses' law, while it was yet fresh in their minds, more exactly than ever they did afterwards; and, in short, we should have had one of those stories of a 'golden age,' a 'good old time,' a pattern-time of early purity and devotion, of which nations and churches, of all tongues and all creeds, have been so ready to dream in their

own case; and which they have used, not altogether ill, to rebuke vice in their own day, by saying, 'Look how perfect 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.