n the hearts of men.

_MOSES OBEYS._

iv. 18-31.

Moses is now commissioned: he is to go to Egypt, and Aaron is coming
thence to meet him. Yet he first returns to Midian, to Jethro, who is
both his employer and the head of the family, and prays him to sanction
his visit to his own people.

There are duties which no family resistance can possibly cancel, and the
direct command of God made it plain that this was one of them. But there
are two ways of performing even the most imperative obligation, and
religious people have done irreparable mischief before now, by rudeness,
disregard to natural feeling and the rights of their fellow-men, under
the impression that they showed their allegiance to God by outraging
other ties. It is a theory for which no sanction can be found either in
Holy Scripture or in common sense.

When he asks permission to visit "his brethren" we cannot say whether he
ever had brothers besides Aaron, or uses the word in the same larger
national sense as when we read that, forty years before, he went out
unto his brethren and saw their burdens. What is to be observed is that
he is reticent with respect to his vast expectations and designs.

He does not argue that, because a Divine promise must needs be
fulfilled, he need not be discreet, wary and taciturn, any more than St.
Paul supposed, because the lives of his shipmates were promised to him,
that it mattered nothing whether the sailors remained on board.

The decrees of God have sometimes been used to justify the recklessness
of man, but never by His chosen followers. They have worked out their
own salvation the more earnestly because God worked in them. And every
good cause calls aloud for human energy and wisdom, all the more because
its consummation is the will of God, and sooner or later is assured.
Moses has unlearned his rashness.

When the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, "Go, return unto Egypt, for all
the men are dead which sought thy life," there is an almost verbal
resemblance to the words in which the infant Jesus is recalled from
exile. We shall have to consider the typical aspect of the whole
narrative, when a convenient stage is reached for pausing to survey it
in its completeness. But resemblances like this have been treated with
so much scorn, they have been so freely perverted into evidence of the
mythical nature of the later story, that some passing allusion appears
desirable. We must beware equally of both extremes. The