ral eye and with the vision of faith. The natural eye is now schooled to see more than he saw, for the starry canopy now reveals constellations of worlds, yet are the heavens the same. The vision of faith has been quite as much enlightened, and things then dark are now opened, yet is God the same. The two worlds thus unfold themselves as time goes on. God made them both, and his plan is perfected when the domain of nature is part of the empire of faith, and the things that are seen open into the things that are not seen. The city of God then beheld coming from heaven to bless the regenerated earth, will be but the fulfilment of the great hope which led the father of the faithful to the promised land. The God of Abraham be our God, and guide us to the better country! 2 II. MOSES AND THE LAW. THE Bible presents two dispensations of religion, in close connection with their founders. Moses, the Lawgiver, has in the Old Testament the prominence which Christ, the Saviour, has in the New. Under this broad generalization the eagle eye of St. John obviously viewed the history of Divine revelation: "The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." We would speak now of Moses the Lawgiver: first of his life and times, then of the man, the mission, and the message. The topic takes us at once to Egypt, that land peerless for stately tombs and magnificent temples, the land whose civilization was old and mature before other nations, since called to empire, had a name, -rich in arts and sciences ere Jerusalem, Tyre, Sidon, Athens, Rome, had a being, and therefore, of course, ere a single Phoenician ship parted the waters of the Mediterranean, or Solon taught, or Numa mused, or Homer sung. "Soldiers!" said Napoleon, in a crisis of his Egyptian campaign, " forty centuries look down upon you from these Pyramids." There was not a man in the army so dull as not to feel the power of this ma jestic association of ideas. But nobler far the association to the reverent student of history, who connects the monuments of antiquity with the august plans of Providence, and who deems it a far deeper inspiration that humbles man in devotion, than that which inflates him with pride. Forty centuries look down upon us from the Pyramids, and thus connect those piles of stone with all that has been most significant in the history of man. During the long interval from the first Egyptian monarch to the last, from Menes to Mohammed Ali, the leading men, nations, and events of the world have been intimately connected with Egypt. It is a stirring thought, that the hieroglyphics which the Champollions and Rosellini have lately interpreted after years of obscuration, were looked upon, probably, by the patriarch Abraham, when, at the head of his clan, he went to the rich country of the Nile to buy corn; afterwards by his great-grandson Joseph, who was brought as a slave to the land in which he ruled as minister of state; and afterwards, without doubt, by the illustrious man who was raised up to be the liberator of the people whose fathers had come to live in Egypt by invitation of Joseph, and had little dreamed of the bondage in store for their sons. The Hebrews became literally the slaves of the Egyptians, and were at last as degraded in character as in condition. The pleasant pastures of Goshen, in which they had been so long permitted to live, were taken from them; and they who had loved the free, open country, and the care of flocks and herds, were obliged by a new administration, alarmed at their increasing number and power, to drudge in the meanest of tasks and submit to the most crushing insults. It is very probable, however, that before their persecution they had fallen signally from the purity of the Abrahamic faith, and become tainted with the vices and superstitions of Egypt. Called to be guardians of the great truth of the unity of God, the children of Abraham were traitors to their high trust, and the sublime promises providentially made to the patriarch seemed destined to utter failure. That no gifted man should rise up among themselves, the king thought he took good care to insure, by ordering every male child to be put to death as soon as he found that oppression, however severe, did not thin the dreaded race, and that even in the quarry and the brick-yard, under a burning sun, they still continued to multiply. Where is the promise to Abraham, where the hope of Israel? Her own sons are powerless, and from the Egyptians no mercy was to be expected. Truth is stranger than fiction. The oppressed people were to be delivered by one in whom the Hebrew faith and the Egyptian civilization should combine their power. - What seemed to this man probably a mere accident first revealed him to himself. The Hebrews were scattered throughout Egypt, and employed chiefly in the more burdensome tasks upon those edifices which became at once monuments of Egyptian pride and Hebrew degradation. Frequent occasions must occur in which the ill-temper of the taskmasters would vent itself in personal abuse or violence. The slave overseer is not under any circumstances proverbially humane. Upon one occasion an Egyptian taskmaster cruelly beat one of his Hebrew workmen in sight of a member of Pharaoh's family, who chanced to come out of the palace as if to watch the progress of the work. He seems to be very singularly affected by the sight. As a member of the royal household and the adopted son of a princess, he might be expected to be indifferent to the familiar subject of persecution, or even to side with the persecutor. But no. A sudden fire, as if long pent up within him, flashed at once to his face, and looking about him to be sure of being unobserved, he dealt the Egyptian a mortal blow. The truth was now clear to him, if he had doubted it before. Henceforth ties of blood were stronger than ties of association. The heart that beat under that Egyptian costume was full of Hebrew fire. So far as the Scripture record is concerned, this is the first proof that Moses gave of indignation at the oppressors of his race. In the ardor of that moment we may justly believe that the leading events of his past life flashed before his mind. There was an emblem of terrible significance in the sight so lately seen. The Hebrew striving with the Egyptian presented two conflicting classes of associations. He thought of his Hebrew birth and Egyptian education. Now he sees before him in the Nile the token of his early exposure. He thinks of the frail basket in which he was exposed to avoid the death decreed by the king against the male children of the Hebrews. He remembers what had been told him of the sister who followed and the mother who from afar watched the little ark, and the cruel wrong done to himself and his nation rises afresh to his mind. How can he avoid thinking also of his |