age there are special duties, and distinctive obligations, and we should try so to do them that we shall please God, and obtain "a good report." So the age in which we are now cast has, too, a great duty. A great duty of this age is contained in the words, "Earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints." But let not our hatred to our aggressing opponents dilute our love to precious souls. Let us be far more anxious to convert the victim of deadly error than to destroy that deadly error. Let us not be so excited against the cardinal's red hat as to forget that an immortal soul is beneath it. Let us not be more indignant as Britons than we are sorrowful as Christians. Let us be grieved for sin, rather than angry with sinners.

Nothing is more humbling than the mere "No Popery" shout, which leads to mischief; nothing is more precious than that hatred to error and protest against it which become a Christian. But deep compassion for poor perishing souls should blend grief with our anger, and should make us pray, when we contend for the faith, that thus we may win souls, and please God, and obtain by faith "a good report."

CHAPTER V.

BELIEVING PARENTS.

"Like warp and woof, all destinies
Are woven fast;

Locked in sympathy like the keys
Of an organ vast.

"Pluck one thread and the web ye mar;
Break but one

Of a thousand keys, and the paining jar
Through all will run.

"All which is real now remaineth,

And fadeth never ;

The hand which upholds now sustaineth

The soul forever."

"By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid three months of his parents, because they saw he was a proper child; and they were not afraid of the king's commandment."- HEBREWS 11: 23.

THE instance of faith presented in the sacred passage prefixed to this chapter is an extremely interesting and beautiful one. We shall best discover its actual meaning by reference to a very few verses of the first two chapters of the book of Exodus. In the first chapter of Exodus, at the seventh verse, we find that, after Joseph died, "The children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with them. Now, there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not,” that is, did not approve of, the family of "Joseph. And he

said unto his people, Behold the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we; come on, let us deal," as he called it, "wisely," that is, cunningly and wickedly, "with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass that when there falleth out any war they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land." After he had pursued this course of infanticide in the case of thousands upon thousands, we read in the second chapter of the book of Exodus, "And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi. And the woman conceived, and bare a son; and when she saw him that he was a goodly child," what is called a proper child in the text, "she hid him three months. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime," or bitumen, "and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink. And his sister," that is, Miriam, the sister of Moses, "stood afar off, to wit," that is, to know, "what would be done to him. And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash herself," or, rather, to perform sacred ablutions, "at the river, and her maidens walked along by the river's side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to fetch it. And when she had opened it, she saw the child: and, behold, the babe wept. And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one of the Hebrews' children. Then said his sister,” Miriam, the sister of Moses, "to Pharaoh's daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for thee? And Pharaoh's daughter said to her, Go. And the maid went and called the child's mother. And Pharaoh's daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it for me, and I will give thee thy wages. And the woman took the child, and nursed it. And the child grew, and she brought him unto Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son. And she

called his name Moses; and she said, Because I drew him out of the water."

We have in these words the simple history of the incident we now proceed to investigate. The point that presses first for inquiry is, in what sense it could be said that Jochebed the mother, and Amram the father, of Moses, by faith took him and hid him three months in the river. It could not have been merely natural affection that prompted them to do so, because that natural affection was balanced between two possible contingent calamities. She risked, by one plan, the loss of Moses; or, as she had other children, if she had been detected hiding one, which was the grossest violation of the commandment of the king, she would have encountered the contingency of the destruction of herself and all her family together. If, then, it had been left to a mother to determine which she should do,· allow the child to be nursed by herself, and be exposed like the rest of the children of Israel, possibly to escape, possibly to come under the wrath of the king, while her other children remained untouched, attempt the concealment of this child, and, in so doing, risk the destruction of the rest,-she would, no doubt, at the dictate of mere maternal instinct, have accepted the former alternative, however fearful, and lost the infant Moses to preserve his grown-up sister Miriam, and the rest of her family.

or to

It was surely no ordinary persecution in the land of Egypt, when that became an element of terror which, to a Jewish mother's heart, was the signal for the intensest joy; that persecution must have been intense that made the Jewish mother in Egypt not to rejoice-to use the beautiful language of Scripture that "a man-child was born in the world ;" and to feel what was the joy of former times only a calamity, and not a blessing.

What was the special faith that prompted Jochebed, the

mother of Moses, to hide him three months, as she did? Paul says, both the parents did it; the actual history is, that one of them, the mother only, did it. The parents are said, by St. Paul, by faith to have done it. The history is, that the mother did all that is recorded of the parents of Moses. But this is a case parallel with that recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, where it is said Peter and John went together healing the sick and preaching the Gospel, and that the people took notice of them, that they had been with Jesus. They saw that Peter and John were "ignorant men," and they marvelled at them, and inferred that they had been with Jesus. Throughout the whole, Peter was the speaker, John was silent, and yet both are said to have contributed to the ultimate effect. So both parents may have coöperated here; faith may have been as active in the father's silence as it was in the mother's energy, in his advice and plans as in her execution of them. Faith may be in the silence that waits and hopes, as well as in the energy that acts, and is crowned with brilliant and visible success., By faith the father may have stood still; by faith the mother may have prepared the ark and hid her child.

But what was the ground of this faith, which is declared to be "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen"? The mother of Moses simply had a promise for her faith to rest on; and this promise she heard sounding in her captivity in Egypt, "I am God, the God of thy father; fear not to go down into Egypt, for I will there make of thee a great nation; I will go down with thee into Egypt, and I will also surely bring thee up again." The mother of Moses knew the promise, and that the destruction of her people in Egypt was an impossibility; and the ground of that impossibility was not political calculation, but the simple pledge and promise of that God that cannot lie. She saw that, if every Hebrew child were slain, the chosen nation must disappear as