us people, with officers already provided. For,
when the supply of bricks came short, these officials were beaten, and,
as if no cause of the failure were palpable, they were asked, with a
malicious chuckle, "Wherefore have ye not fulfilled your task both
yesterday and to-day, as heretofore?" And when they explain to Pharaoh,
in words already expressive of their alienation, that the fault is with
"thine own people," they are repulsed with insult, and made to feel
themselves in evil case. For indeed they needed to be chastised for
their forgetfulness of God. How soon would their hearts have turned
back, how much more bitter yet would have been their complaints in the
desert, if it were not for this last experience! But if judgment began
with them, what should presently be the fate of their oppressors?

Their broken spirit shows itself by murmuring, not against Pharaoh, but
against Moses and Aaron, who at least had striven to help them. Here, as
in the whole story, there is not a trace of either the lofty spirit
which could have evolved the Mosaic law, or the hero-worship of a later
age.

It is written that Moses, hearing their reproaches, "returned unto the
Lord," although no visible shrine, no consecrated place of worship, can
be thought of.

What is involved is the consecration which the heart bestows upon any
place of privacy and prayer, where, in shutting out the world, the soul
is aware of the special nearness of its King. In one sense we never
leave Him, never return to Him. In another sense, by direct address of
the attention and the will, we enter into His presence; we find Him in
the midst of us, Who is everywhere. And all ceremonial consecrations do
their office by helping us to realise and act upon the presence of Him
in Whom, even when He is forgotten, we live and move and have our being.
Therefore in the deepest sense each man consecrates or desecrates for
himself his own place of prayer. There is a city where the Divine
presence saturates every consciousness with rapture. And the seer beheld
no temple therein, for the Lord God the Almighty, and the Lamb, are the
temple of it.

Startling to our notions of reverence are the words in which Moses
addresses God. "Lord, why hast Thou evil entreated this people? Why is
it that Thou hast sent me? for since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Thy
name, he hath evil entreated this people; neither hast Thou delivered
Thy people at all." It is almost as if his faith had