How wonderfully does God overrule the schemes, the passions, and the wickedness of man, to the furtherance of his own great ends! Pharaoh heard that a Hebrew child should dispossess him of his throne. Egyptian prophecies said so, — no doubt, the mere confused echoes of what was uttered in the oracles of God, but, at all events, it was what Pharaoh believed. His fears aroused him to action. He determined, lest the feared Hebrew babe should grow up, to murder every infant that should be born. All he did, however, only expedited the great purpose of Heaven; for his own daughter became the guardian of the child that was to overturn his throne, his own palace became the nursery of the very babe that he dreaded. It was not the power of Moses, but the sin of Pharaoh, that broke his sceptre, and swept away his kingdom. Truly, God restrains the wrath of man, and overrules the remainder of it to praise him.

We have here an evidence of God's perpetual presence with his church. The church was represented in Moses, and its existence was contingent on a babe's life. Yet God was there, just as he was in heaven. Jesus is no more with the portion of the church that is in heaven, than he is with the portion of the church that is on earth. "Go and preach the Gospel; I am with you always, to the end of the world." "When thou passest through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee." Crowns may withhold their splendor, wealth its contributions, genius its eloquence, all things may conspire against Christ's church, but it is founded upon a rock, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Persecution always fails in promoting the ends it has in view. Pharaoh used its weapons, and they proved a miserable mistake. It has been tried by other men, and it has equally failed. We never can put down a lie by persecution, we never can sustain a truth by injustice. Truth repudiates every assisting weapon that is not drawn from the armory of

heaven, and what is false shrinks from the aid of the pure and lofty in every age. Truth can only be supported by her own weapons; the weapons of her warfare are not carnal, and, because they are not carnal, they are necessarily and invariably mighty. Bless, and blessings will return upon you in a thousand forms. Curse, and the curse will return upon him that utters it. Wind a chain around the arm of a brother, and, by a great law, the other end of it will be wound about your own. He that unsheaths the sword in all probability will perish by the sword. We need to know this, and in the present day to act on it, more than ever. It may be that power will not be our protection, that high places will not be our shelter; but, blessed be God, if all power should cease to defend, and all law should be against us, the Bible remains, the God that wrote it remains; faith, hope, love, remain; and these are mighty, for to God they go, as from God they originally came.

CHAPTER VI.

THE CHOICE OF MOSES.

"Tears, what are tears? The babe weeps in its cot,
The mother singing; at her marriage bell
The bride weeps; and, before the oracle
Of high-famed hills, the poet hath forgot
That moisture on his cheeks.

"Albeit, as some have done,

Ye grope, tear-blinded, in a desert place,

And touch but tombs; look up, those tears will run

Soon in long rivers down the lifted face,

And leave the vision clear for stars and sun."

"Choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.”— HRBREWS 11: 25.

MOSES chose, not only in heart, or in principle, as we may do, but in fact, when the alternative was before him, affliction with the people of God; and rejected, personally and practically, all the pleasures of a palace, because sin was there. We have recorded in this passage what was presented to the choice of Moses, one of two states. There was sin under the roof of Pharaoh, and amid the pomp and grandeur of a palace; there was affliction in the company of a poor, persecuted body of slaves, laboring at brick-making, and crushed by a terrible tyranny; the one the prescription of his conscience, the other the enjoyment and delight of man's passions. On the one side Moses saw a path strewn with roses, fragrant with their per

fume; but underneath the roses, serpents and poisonous reptiles, that would sting the foot that trod them, and the hand that gathered them. On the other side, he saw nothing but a black road, and a dark and a miry way, but over it the sunshine of the face of his God, and at the end of it joys at his right hand, and real pleasures, not the pleasures of sin, forever. His choice was between sin, whose pleasures were momentary and external, and holiness, with its afflictions, which also are momentary and external.

It does not imply that with a palace there are always sins and pleasures, nor does it mean that with the people of God there are always afflictions. Men have been, and may be, in a palace, holy, prosperous and happy, in the profession-the heartfelt profession-of the Gospel of Jesus. It is always, and everywhere, the heart that makes the atmosphere about us, and not the circumstances that make the heart. A holy man must be a happy man everywhere. A man whose conscience is racked with a sense of sin must be miserable, place him where we will.

We see still before us two great elements, between which Moses was placed, -the one, sin with its supposed, imaginary real, and, when real, momentary pleasures; and the other, God's people, God's cause, and God's walk and way, with its contingent accompaniments, in his case actual accompaniments, afflictions.

What is sin? A word uttered in a moment, with a meaning inexhaustible forever. That monosyllable "sin" is the most awful, the most dreadful thing in the whole universe of God. It is essential evil. Disease is not evil, death is not evil, suffering is not evil; but sin is unmitigated, unrelieved, unmingled evil. It is what a discord is to the ear, what ugliness is to the eye, what disease is to the body, what death is to humanity; it is all these compressed into one. We cannot conceive fully what is in that monosyllable, sin. It rent

a happy world from God, it still rends man from his fellow. In the strong language of the most gifted and noble spirit of his age, the late Mr. Howels, "Sin is a homicide, and would be a deicide."

Sin, rejected by Moses, in spite of its pleasures, is neither from God nor of God. God did not make sin. Wherever it came from, — and we shall find that the infidel who rejects Revelation will be far more puzzled to explain its origin than he that believes Revelation, and for whatever reason it was allowed to interpolate its poison, God did not make it. God made the wild field-flower, and the overshadowing oak. He made the dew-drop that dances on the rose-leaf, and the great sea that girdles the earth with its bright zone. He made the youngest infant that prattles on its mother's knee, and the cherubim that stand before him, and cry "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts," continually. He made whatever in the depths the microscope detects, and he created whatever in the heights the telescope brings within the horizon of our view. But sin he did not create. It is neither of God, nor from God; nor on God rests the responsibility of sin, whose wages is death, whose issue is hell.

Sin, also, which God did not make, and for which God is not responsible, carries in its bosom always a curse. Man never can be happy in sin. He may have a pleasure which is external for a moment; but we know ourselves, when the sin that gave the momentary pleasure is gone, the long, lasting, gnawing pang known popularly by the name of remorse, a pang as sure an accompaniment of sin as the shadow that accompanies our body in the sunshine remains behind. Sin's wages, we are told, is death. The spirit that welcomes it is ever a wounded spirit. The progeny of sin is violence, fraud, murder, battle, death; and its history is written in tears; and bleeding hearts, and crushed affections, and