en that one is afraid _not_ to teach in Sunday School, and
another dares not refuse a proffered district, and a third fears to
leave charitable tasks undone. To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth
it not, to him it is sin; and we hear too much about the terrible
responsibility of working for God, but too little about the still graver
responsibility of refusing to work for Him when called.

Moses indeed attained so much that we are scarcely conscious that he
might have been greater still. He had once presumed to go unsent, and
brought upon himself the exile of half a lifetime. Again he presumed
almost to say, I go not, and well-nigh to incur the guilt of Jonah when
sent to Nineveh, and in so doing he forfeited the fulness of his
vocation. But who reaches the level of his possibilities? Who is not
haunted by faces, "each one a murdered self," a nobler self, that might
have been, and is now impossible for ever? Only Jesus could say "I have
finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do." And it is notable that
while Jesus deals, in the parable of the labourers, with the problem of
equal faithfulness during longer and shorter periods of employment; and
in the parable of the pounds with that of equal endowment variously
improved; and yet again, in the parable of the talents, with the problem
of various endowments all doubled alike, He always draws a veil over the
treatment of five talents which earn but two or three besides.

A more cheerful reflection suggested by this narrative is the strange
power of human fellowship. Moses knew and was persuaded that God, Whose
presence was even then miraculously apparent in the bush, and Who had
invested him with superhuman powers, would go with him. There is no
trace of incredulity in his behaviour, but only of failure to rely, to
cast his shrinking and reluctant will upon the truth he recognised and
the God Whose presence he confessed. He held back, as many a one does,
who is honest when he repeats the Creed in church, yet fails to submit
his life to the easy yoke of Jesus. Nor is it from physical peril that
he recoils: at the bidding of God he has just grasped the serpent from
which he fled; and in confronting a tyrant with armies at his back, he
could hope for small assistance from his brother. But highly strung
spirits, in every great crisis, are aware of vague indefinite
apprehensions that are not cowardly but imaginative. Thus Caesar, when
defying the hosts of Pompey, is said to