e long holiday, the pilgrimage an
excursion, when without are fightings and within fears, when they have
great sorrow and heaviness in their hearts.

Because God is not a Judge, but a Father, the murmurs of Israel do not
prevent Him from showing mercy. Accordingly, when Moses prays, he is
bidden to go on before the people, bringing certain of their elders
along with him for witnesses of the marvel that was to follow. Such is
the Divine method. As soon as unbelief and discontent estranged the Jews
of the New Testament from Christ, He would not vulgarise His miracles,
nor do many mighty works among the unbelieving. After His resurrection
He appeared not unto all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before.
And as the Jews were chosen to bear witness to Him among the nations, so
were these elders now to bear witness among the Jews, who might without
their testimony have fallen into some such rationalising theory as that
of Tacitus, who says that Moses discovered a fountain by examining a
spot where wild asses lay.

With these witnesses, he is bidden to go to a rock in Horeb (so nearly
had these murmurers approached the scene of the most awful of all
manifestations of Him whose presence they debated), and there God was to
stand before them upon the rock, making His universal presence a
localised consciousness in their experience.

A true religion is progressive: every stage of it leans on the past and
sustains the future; and so Moses must bring with him "the rod,
wherewith thou smotest the river." The dullest can see the fitness of
this allusion. Among all the wonders which the shepherd's wand had
wrought, the mastery over the Nile, the plague which inflicted an
unwonted thirst upon the inhabitants of that well-watered field of Zoan,
was most to the purpose now. To kill and to make alive are the functions
of the same Being, and He Who spoiled the Egyptian river will now
refresh His heritage that is weary. At the touch of the prophetic wand
the waters poured forth which thenceforth supplied them through all
their desert wanderings.

Reserving the symbolic meaning of this event for a future study, we have
to remember meanwhile the warning which the apostle here discovered. All
the people drank of the rock, yet with many of them God was not pleased.
Privilege is one thing--acceptance is quite another; and it shall be
more tolerable at last for Sodom and Gomorrah than for nations, churches
and men, who were content to res