. The Lord tries fortunate men, whether
they will be grateful and obedient, trusting in Him and not in uncertain
riches, or whether they will forget Him who has done so great things for
them, and so perish in calm weather--

"Like ships that have gone down at sea
When heaven was all tranquillity."

There is an experiment being tried upon the soul, curious, slow,
little-suspected, but incessant, in the giving of daily bread.

In promising relief, God required of them obedience and self-control.
They were to respect the Sabbath, and make provision in advance for its
requirements. And this direction, given before the Mount of the Lord was
reached, has an important bearing upon the question whether the Fourth
Commandment was the first institution of a holy day--whether, except as
a Church ordinance, the duty of sabbath-keeping has no support beyond
the ceremonial law. "For that the Lord hath (already) given you the
Sabbath, therefore He giveth you on the sixth day the bread of two days"
(ver. 29).

While conveying the promise of relief, Moses and Aaron rebuked the
people, whose murmurs against them were in reality murmurs against God,
since they were but His agents, and He had been visibly their Leader.
And the same rebuke applies, for exactly the same reason, to many a
modern complaint against the weather, against what people call their
"luck," against a thousand provoking things in which the only possible
provocation must come directly from heaven. It is because our religion
is so shallow, and our consciousness of God in His world so dim and
rudimentary, that we utter such complaints idly, to relieve our
feelings, and hear them spoken without a shock.

Such dulness is not to be removed by sounder views of doctrine, but by a
more vivid realisation of God. The Israelites knew by what hand they
should have fallen if they had died in Egypt; yet in fact they forgot
their true Captain, and upbraided their mortal leaders. So do we confess
that afflictions arise not out of the ground, yet lose the impress of
divinity upon our daily lives, while we ought, like Moses, to "endure as
seeing Him who is invisible."

As our Lord was in the habit of asking for some confession, or demanding
some small co-operation from those He was about to bless, so the smoking
flax of Hebrew faith is tended: it is a promise, and not the actual
relief, which calms them. There is a curious difference in the manner of
the communications now