are bidden to draw near with boldness unto the
Throne of Grace. There is no heart so lonely that it cannot commune with
the lofty and kind humanity of Jesus.

There is a homelier lesson to be learned. Moses was not only solaced by
human fellowship, but nerved and animated by the thought of his brother,
and the mention of his tribe. "Is not Aaron thy brother the Levite?"
They had not met for forty years. Vague rumours of deadly persecution
were doubtless all that had reached the fugitive, whose heart had
burned, in solitary communion with Nature in her sternest forms, as he
brooded over the wrongs of his family, of Aaron, and perhaps of Miriam.

And now his brother lived. The call which Moses would have put from him
was for the emancipation of his own flesh and blood, and for their
greatness. In that great hour, domestic affection did much to turn the
scale wherein the destinies of humanity were trembling. And his was
affection well returned. It might easily have been otherwise, for Aaron
had seen his younger brother called to a dazzling elevation, living in
enviable magnificence, and earning fame by "word and deed"; and then,
after a momentary fusion of sympathy and of condition, forty years had
poured between them a torrent of cares and joys estranging because
unshared. But it was promised that Aaron, when he saw him, should be
glad at heart; and the words throw a beam of exquisite light into the
depths of the mighty soul which God inspired to emancipate Israel and to
found His Church, by thoughts of his brother's joy on meeting him.

Let no man dream of attaining real greatness by stifling his affections.
The heart is more important than the intellect; and the brief story of
the Exodus has room for the yearning of Jochebed over her infant "when
she saw him that he was a goodly child," for the bold inspiration of the
young poetess, who "stood afar off to know what should be done to him,"
and now for the love of Aaron. So the Virgin, in the dread hour of her
reproach, went in haste to her cousin Elizabeth. So Andrew "findeth
first his own brother Simon." And so the Divine Sufferer, forsaken of
God, did not forsake His mother.

The Bible is full of domestic life. It is the theme of the greater part
of Genesis, which makes the family the seed-plot of the Church. It is
wisely recognised again at the moment when the larger pulse of the
nation begins to beat. For the life-blood in the heart of a nation must
be the blood i