“Yes; meekness and spirit united. No man could have given more proofs of his courage than Moses. He slew the Egyptian who was killing one of his Hebrew brethren; he beat the Midianite shepherds though alone and unsupported: he boldly remonstrated with Pharaoh in his own court, and feared not all the power of Egypt; but more than all, when God commanded him to approach, he ventured amidst all the terrors of Sinai: and yet that spirit, which made and knew his heart, says ‘He was very meek above all men upon earth.’ Mildness and fortitude may well lodge together in one breast; it is not the fierce and cruel who are the most valiant.
“In the sedition of Miriam and Aaron, we see a beautiful example of his meekness, and of that true magnanimity which arises from it; and those very qualities are given as the reason why God avenged their ingratitude to Moses. Their trial must have been the more painful to him, because the enmity which he endured was from his own nearest relations. Yet he interceded for them, and God remitted the punishment which they had justly incurred. There, my children, is a pattern for you of that forbearance and generosity, which our Saviour afterwards so strongly commanded his disciples to exercise.
“If Moses himself excited the anger of the Lord at Meribah-Kadesh, by the distrust which induced him to strike the rock twice, as if doubtful of God’s omnipotence—if even he could be guilty of such weakness, or could be provoked by the people to ‘speak unadvisedly with his lips,’ how much more then do all of us require a continual watchfulness of our hearts, lest we give way to the same kind of ignorant and presumptuous scepticism!
“The punishment of Moses, by prohibiting him from leading his people into the promised land, was peculiarly mortifying; and afforded an exemplary lesson to all Israel of the necessity of obedience, faith, and humility, to secure the favour of God. How severely Moses felt this infliction, and how meekly he bore it, appears from his humble, and it would seem repeated supplications to the Lord to reverse the sentence; but it was reserved for a greater than Moses to teach His disciples how to pray on such an occasion: ‘O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.’
“I think I have noticed to you, on a former Sunday, the perfect candour of Moses; in the present case it is again conspicuous. His offence, his punishment, and his entreaties are frequently alluded to in the Pentateuch, but are totally omitted by Josephus. In the original narrative they are mentioned as if necessary to explain the whole truth—they are expressed in sorrow and humiliation;—and the ingenuousness with which both the crime and the disgrace are recorded by himself, form a striking contrast with the suppression of those facts by that cautious historian in describing the character of the great legislator, to whom he looked up with so much reverence.”
20th.—Several insects of different kinds appear now on the fruit trees, and are already beginning to do mischief to the little buds—some to those containing the leaf, and some to those of the blossom. When I heard this, I said, that if they could be picked off the blossoms, it would not signify much if some of the leaves were destroyed; but my uncle reminded me that the leaves are necessary to the nourishment of the fruit; for unless there are leaves to prepare the sap for that purpose, the fruit withers away.
It has been found, he says, by his friend Mr. Knight, that where a peach branch had only flower-buds on it, the grafting a leaf-bearing twig to its extremity, so as to produce leaves, was of great benefit to the young fruit. Mr. K. having also observed that a melon plant began to decline, which apparently had sufficient foliage for the nourishment of its fruit, he examined the plant more carefully, and discovered that a runner had grown out of the frame at one end, with an additional melon on it. He took this one off, and the rest of the fruit again flourished.
My uncle is going to try a new wash, which can do no injury, and which has been much recommended to him, for destroying the various grubs and insects that are so mischievous to the fruit-trees. He sent yesterday to Gloucester, for some of the water through which coal gas had been passed; and he had three gallons of it mixed up to-day with one pound of flower of brimstone—to this was added soft soap, enough to make it adhere when laid on with a painter’s brush. It was mixed over the fire, and it may be done so with perfect safety, he says, as it is not inflammable.
Many insects deposit their eggs in the bark, or in the young buds; and it is their larvæ or caterpillars that do the greatest mischief. The aphides injure all the varieties of plum; and there is a coccus sometimes in such quantities on those trees, that in summer every twig is thickly beaded with little red, half-round specks. In spring, the larvæ exhaust the trees by sucking out the rising sap. The grub of a little brown beetle destroys the blossom of the pear-trees; and a saw-fly injures the fruit so as to cause it to drop prematurely. In short, almost every kind of fruit tree has its peculiar family of grubs, which, in their larva state, prey on the sap, the leaves, or the flower-buds; and it is to prevent this that my uncle is going to destroy them by that gas wash.
Among various enemies of the apple-tree, he shewed me in particular the apple aphis, or American blight, which was not known in this country till the year 1787. It is a very minute insect, covered with a long, cotton-like wool; and fixes itself in the chinks and rough parts of the bark. It has spread throughout the kingdom, and about fifteen years ago destroyed such numbers of apple-trees in this country, that it was feared the making of cyder would be quite at an end, if some mode of banishing those insects was not discovered. Spirit of turpentine, or smearing the branches with oil, were found to be useful remedies: but Sir Joseph Banks has succeeded completely by the more simple process of taking off all the rugged old bark, and then scrubbing the trunk and branches with a hard brush. My uncle has found this insect infesting two of his apple-trees; so he will try each of those methods as a fair experiment.