II. God And Moses.
The true idea of God, and the faith in his effectual and continued providence, are the two great religious principles which the name of Abraham suggests. This is the beginning of the history of the Hebrews, and the origin of that ancient Covenant which, in passing from the Pentateuch to the Gospel, has become the new Covenant, the Christian Religion.
About five centuries later, we find the Hebrews settled in Egypt, in the land of Goshen, between the lower Nile, the Red Sea, and the Desert, in a condition very different from that in which they had first been when attracted to the court of Pharaoh by the prosperity of Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham. The new Pharaoh oppresses them cruelly; they are a prey to the miseries of slavery, the contagion of idolatry, to all the evils, all the perils, physical and moral, which can afflict a nation numerically weak, fallen under the yoke of one powerful and civilized. The Hebrews nevertheless persist in their religious faith, cling to their national reminiscences; they do not suffer their nationality to be lost in and confounded with that of their masters; they endure without offering any active resistance; they will not deliver themselves, but they have never ceased to believe in their God, and they await their Deliverer.
Moses has been saved from the waters of the Nile by Pharaoh's own daughter. He has been brought up at Heliopolis, in the midst of the pomp of the court, and instructed in the sciences of the Egyptian priests. He has served the sovereign of Egypt; he has commanded his troops and made war for him against the Æthiopians. He has received an Egyptian name, Osarsiph, or Tisithen. Everything seems to concur to make him an Egyptian. But he remains a faithful Israelite: true to the faith and to the fortunes of his brethren. Their oppression rouses his indignation; he avenges one of them by killing his oppressor. The victims of oppression, alarmed, disavow Moses, instead of supporting him. Moses flees from Egypt and takes refuge in the Desert, amongst a tribe of wandering Arabs, the Midianites, sprung, like himself, from Abraham. Their chief, the sheick of the tribe, Jethro, called also Hobab, receives him as a son, and gives him his daughter Zipporah in marriage. The proud Israelite, who has declined to remain an Egyptian, becomes an Arab, and leads, several years, the nomadic life of the hospitable tribe. It is now in the peninsula of Sinai that Moses wanders with the servants and flocks of his father-in-law. In the centre of that peninsula, of yore a province in the empire of the Pharaohs, but which had fallen into the possession of the pastoral Arabs, rises Sinai, a mount with which from time immemorial, among the neighbouring tribes, have been connected as many sacred traditions as have ever been assigned to Mount Ararat in Armenia, or the Himalayas in India. In this venerable spot, before a burning bush, Moses, with a heart full of faith, hears God calling him and commanding him to lead his people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt. Moses is humble, distrustful of himself, just as Abraham before him had been. "Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? … When I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? What shall I say unto them? And God said unto Moses I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you." [Footnote 44]
[Footnote 44: Exodus iii. 11, 13, 14.]
Moses receives his mission from Jehovah, and feels no other disquietude than arises from the desire to accomplish it.
In presence of such facts, with this association of God and man in the same work, the opponents of the Supernatural still clamour: "Why," ask they, "this confusion of divine action and of human action? Has God need of man's concurrence? Can He not, if He will, accomplish all his designs by himself, and through the fulness of his omnipotence?" In my turn, I would ask them if they know why God created man, and if God has put them into the secret of his intentions towards the instrument whom He employs for his designs? There precisely lies the privilege of humanity: man is God's associate, subject to Him, yet a free agent independent of Him; he intervenes by his proper action in plans of which only an infinitely small part is revealed to his intelligence and reserved for his execution. Western Asia and its history are full of the name of Moses: Jews, Christians, and Mahometans style him the First Prophet, the Great Lawgiver, the Great Theologian; everywhere, in the scene of the events themselves, the places retain a memory of him: the traveller meets there the Well of Moses, the Ravine of Moses, the Mountain of Moses, the Valley of Moses. In other countries and other ages, this name has been given as the most glorious that the saints could receive: St. Peter has been styled the Moses of the Christian Church; St. Benedict, the Moses of the Monastic Orders; Ulphilas, the Moses of the Goths. What did Moses do to obtain a renown so great and so enduring? He gained no battles; he conquered no territory; he founded no cities; he governed no state; he was not even a man in whom eloquence replaced other sources of influence and power: "And Moses said unto the Lord, my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue." [Footnote 45]
[Footnote 45: Exodus iv. 10.]
There is not in this whole history a single grand human action, a single grand event, proceeding from human agency; all, all is the work of God; and Moses is nothing on any occasion but the interpreter and instrument of God: to this mission he has consecrated soul and life; it is only by virtue of this title that he is powerful, and that he shares, as far as his capacity as a man permits, a work infinitely grander and more enduring than that accomplished by all the heroes and all the masters that the world ever acknowledged.