The LORD alone did lead him,

And there was no strange god with him.

He made him ride on the high places of the earth,

And he did eat the increase of the field;

And he made him to suck honey out of the rock,

And oil out of the flinty rock;

Butter of kine, and milk of sheep,

With fat of lambs,

And rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats,

With the fat of kidneys of wheat;

And of the blood of the grape thou drankest wine.

The joyousness of the song clouds over, as it tells how Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked, and moved the Lord to jealousy with new gods, that came up but yesterday, whom their fathers did not know. The fire of Divine anger burns as from the lowest pit, devouring the increase of the earth. Visions of mischiefs heaped upon the faithless people pass before us, of arrows spent upon them, wasting hunger, burning heat, teeth of beasts, poison of crawling things, without the Sword bereaving and terrors within : only short of entire destruction does the judgment stop, lest the adversary should misdeem, and think that their hand, and not Jehovah's wrath, had done all. And how blind and void of wisdom must the nation be not to see the meaning of it all, and that their Rock has forsaken them!

For their rock is not as our Rock,

Even our enemies themseives being judges.

And the imagery flows forth to paint the loathly gods to which Israel has given preference- things of rottenness like grapes of Sodom, bitter as clusters of gall, poisonous as wine of dragons:until, by a bold transition, the description is made to produce revulsion in the mind of God himself. He thinks with complacency of vengeance yet stored among his treasures, that he may use once more on his people's side: waiting till their strength is exhausted, and their last hope gone, and then raising himself in wrath to scorn their helpless idols, and recompense vengeance to

their adversaries. And so with the joy of Jehovah returned to his fallen people, this Song of the Rock of Israel concludes.

Then the end comes. The whole people understand it, and all are waiting to see their Leader set out on the mystic journey on The Passing of which none may accompany him. Heads of the Moses. xxxii. 48- tribes stand out from the masses of the people and line the route by which Moses must pass. The first sight of the whole nation, which he has ruled so long, seems to kindle in Moses a vision, which reaches us only dimly, in his words of Jehovah coming forth from amidst his holy ones, a fiery law at his right hand, the holy ones of the peoples sitting at his feet. Then, passing along the leaders of the tribes, he speaks last words to each: stirring words of past battle cries, or pregnant sayings destined to be watchwords in the future. Reuben, his men never few. Judah, sufficient of his hands. Levi

Who said of his father, and of his mother,

I have not seen him;

Neither did he acknowledge his brethren,
Nor knew his own children,

when he took sides with Jehovah at the waters of strife. Benjamin, beloved of the Lord, who dwelleth between his shoulders. Blessings on the princely Joseph.

Blessed of the LORD be his land:

For the precious things of heaven, for the dew,
And for the deep that coucheth beneath,

And for the precious things of the fruits of the sun,

And for the precious things of the growth of the moons,

And for the chief things of the ancient mountains,

And for the precious things of the everlasting hills,

And for the precious things of the earth and the fulness thereof,
And the good will of him that dwelt in the bush.

Zebulun, blessed in his going out over the seas, and Issachar in his tent life at home. Naphtali, with the blessings of the western sea and the sunny south; Asher, dipping his foot in the oil of his

own vineyards, shod with the iron and brass of his mines. The whole line of the tribes past, Moses lifts hands and voice in the final blessing.

There is none like unto God, O Jeshurun,
Who rideth upon the heaven for thy help,
And in his excellency on the skies.
The eternal God is thy dwelling-place,

And underneath are the everlasting arms.

From the height of lyric song we drop to simple, bare prose: fittest of forms to convey the solitary journey from which there is to be no return; the going up to the top of Pisgah, the long gaze over the land of promise; the lonely death; the burial in the sepulchre that no man knoweth. So the days of weeping in the mourning for Moses were ended.