n towards
Paradise, and he is startled when "now for a season, if need be, he is
in heaviness through manifold temptations." Yet Christ prayed not that
we should be taken out of the world. We are bidden to endure hardness as
good soldiers, and to run with patience the race which is set before us;
and these phrases indicate our need of the very qualities wherein Israel
failed. As yet the people murmured not ostensibly against God, but only
against Moses. But the estrangement of their hearts is plain, since they
made no appeal to God for relief, but assailed His agent and
representative. Yet they had not because they asked not, and relief was
found when Moses cried unto the Lord. Their leader was "faithful in all
his house"; and instead of upbraiding his followers with their
ingratitude, or bewailing the hard lot of all leaders of the multitude,
whose popularity neither merit nor service can long preserve unclouded,
he was content to look for sympathy and help where we too may find it.

We read that the Lord showed him a tree, which when he had cast into the
waters, the waters were made sweet. In this we discern the same union of
Divine grace with human energy and use of means, as in all medicine, and
indeed all uses of the divinely enlightened intellect of man. It would
have been easy to argue that the waters could only be healed by miracle,
and if God wrought a miracle what need was there of human labour? There
was need of obedience, and of the co-operation of the human will with
the divine. We shall see, in the case of the artificers of the
tabernacle, that God inspires even handicraftsmen as well as
theologians--being indeed the universal Light, the Giver of all good,
not only of Bibles, but of rain and fruitful seasons. But the artisan
must labour, and the farmer improve the soil.

Shall we say with the fathers that the tree cast into the waters
represents the cross of Christ? At least it is a type of the sweetening
and assuaging influences of religion--a new element, entering life, and
as well fitted to combine with it as medicinal bark with water, making
all wholesome and refreshing to the disappointed wayfarer, who found it
so bitter hitherto.

The Lord was not content with removing the grievance of the hour; He
drew closer the bonds between His people and Himself, to guard them
against another transgression of the kind: "there He made for them a
statute and an ordinance, and there He proved them." It is pure
a