he wife and husband meet? We are told
nothing of their interview, nor have we any reason to qualify the
unfavourable impression produced by the circumstances of their parting,
by the schismatic worship founded by their grandchildren, and by the
loneliness implied in the very names of Gershom and
Eliezer--"A-stranger-there," and "God-a-Help."

But the relations between Moses and Jethro are charming, whether we look
at the obeisance rendered to the official minister of God by him whom
God had honoured so specially, by the prosperous man to the friend of
his adversity, or at the interest felt by the priest of Midian in all
the details of the great deliverance of which he had heard already, or
his joy in a Divine manifestation, probably not in all respects
according to the prejudices of his race, or his praise of Jehovah as
"greater than all gods, yea, in the thing wherein they dealt proudly
against them" (ver. 11, R.V.). The meaning of this phrase is either that
the gods were plagued in their own domains, or that Jehovah had finally
vanquished the Egyptians by the very element in which they were most
oppressive, as when Moses himself had been exposed to drown.

There is another expression, in the first verse, which deserves to be
remarked. How do the friends of a successful man think of the scenes in
which he has borne a memorable part? They chiefly think of them in
connection with their own hero. And amid all the story of the Exodus, in
which so little honour is given to the human actor, the one trace of
personal exultation is where it is most natural and becoming; it is in
the heart of his relative: "When Jethro ... heard of all that the Lord
had done _for Moses_ and for Israel."

We are told, with marked emphasis, that this Midianite, a priest, and
accustomed to act as such with Moses in his family, "took a
burnt-offering and sacrifices for God; and Aaron came, and all the
elders of Israel, to eat bread with Moses' father-in-law before God."
Nor can we doubt that the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who laid
such stress upon the subordination of Abraham to Melchizedek, would have
discerned in the relative position of Jethro and Aaron another evidence
that the ascendency of the Aaronic priesthood was only temporary. We
shall hereafter see that priesthood is a function of redeemed humanity,
and that all limitations upon it were for a season, and due to human
shortcoming. But for this very reason (if there were no o