Thus, the world will be under our feet, while God is over us, and heaven before us.

God calls us to leave this world, as far as it is sinful, just as he called upon Moses to leave Egypt. We are summoned to decide, and not halt between two opinions. If the world be your all, take it; but, if you are satisfied that there is a better and a brighter one, where Christ is, aspire to it. The only beings that can afford to be spectators are God and angels. We are not and cannot be spectators; we are on, not beside, that stream which rushes with ever-accumulating speed to the great ocean of eternity. Despise the riches of Egypt. Count all but loss for the excellency of him who has a throne that endureth forever, "seeing him who is invisible." Then will the voice of Moses prove to us a voice of power; and his dead speaking stir us as his living presence stirred the Israelites of old. Egypt will be surrendered for a better hope, and the things of sense will yield before the attractions of everlasting prospects.

CHAPTER XI.

THE GREAT DELIVERANCE.

When to the cross I turn mine eyes,

And rest on Calvary,

O Lamb of God, my sacrifice,

I must remember thee!

Through faith he " (Moses) "kept the passover, and the sprinkling of blood, lest he that destroyed the first-born should touch them." HEBREWS 11: 28

NOTHING magnanimous or noble is done on the earth that is not done through something out of self. There is nothing that gives glory to God, or lasting benefit to mankind, that is not, in some way, the child and the creation of faith.

By faith, the least things recorded by St. Paul, in Heb. 11, were done. By faith, the greatest things were not left undone. "Through faith, Moses kept the passover:" the word translated "kept" is rendered differently in other passages of Scripture. It is, literally, Moses "made the passover." It is translated, in another place, "ordained the passover." It is the same word that is employed by the evangelist, when he declares that "the Lord ordained twelve," or, literally translated, "made twelve." In Matthew 26: 18, the same word is rendered, "I will keep the passover; "it does not mean, therefore, that Moses invented the passover, but that by faith he kept what God had previously prescribed as an ordinance of his own.

Faith ascends to the highest, and descends to regulate and control the very lowliest things. It is a great mistake that only the grand things of Christian life are done by faith, and that the little things, so called, of Christian life, may be left to themselves. True religion, and the faith which is the exponent of that true religion, goes with the whole force and splendor of a celestial power into the commonest walks, and to adjust the most ordinary duties, of every-day Christian life. It is by faith a tradesman keeps his shop. It is by faith a Christian minister preaches his sermon. It has to go into the one, and make business religion. It has to go to the other, and make religion business. The business of this world, divorced from religion, becomes a selfish, ungodly, unsatisfactory scramble; and the religion of this world, divorced from business and every-day duty, becomes a revery, or quietism, or fanaticism. In the absence of religion, the Royal Exchange would become but a gambling-house, the House of Commons a place of personal rivalry and acrimonious dispute, and all our institutions mean, senseless, low; but, when entered by faith, and their duties done in faith,—that is, under the inspiration of the sense of a present God, and of responsibility to him,—the lowest duty of Christian life becomes lofty; for it shines in the lustre of him whose care extends to the minutest, and beyond whose control the greatest things are not. Real religion surely is not a thing for the Sunday, to be left behind us when we enter on the week. We come to the house of God on the Sunday to learn what religion is, and we go out from the house of God on the Monday to show in practice what religion does. The business is only begun when a sermon is preached: the practical part of it remains. The doctrinal part we hear from the pulpit: the practical part we are to carry into our every-day duties. True religion is not a Sunday, dress, which we are so careful of that we will not bring it into the dust of the world, lest it should be

defiled, or into the excitement and vortex of its trial, lest it should be rumpled. Our religion is not something upon us, but something in us; a principle, a power, a life, meant to go into the world, and to master the world, and in the world to enable us to glorify our Father who is in heaven. What does the apostle say? "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God." How completely does this disturb the creed of those who say it is very well to think of God's glory on the Sunday, and very proper to do things to the glory of God when we propose to send out a missionary to the ends of the earth! This passage teaches us that the very minutest and most ordinary employment of human life is to be inspired, elevated, ennobled, consecrated, by the power of real religion. By faith, then, we learn life's great things were done, and life's little things were not left undone. In short, true Christianity is not a pompous display to be made upon the first day of the week, while the remaining six days are left empty of it, just as the pews we occupy are for six days left empty too. We are to begin the week by learning grand truths; by receiving them into our heart and our conscience; and then to go forth clinging to those things, inseparable from them in heart, as our responsibility and our immortality, going down into life's lowly places, ascending into life's high places, and, in all and always, according to the measure of our strength, making the world to reflect the splendor of the skies, and the image of God to shine upon the brow of the very meanest of his creatures. The honor and reverence that Christ demands is not a splendid procession along the aisles of a beautiful cathedral; nor glorious banners and impressive rituals does Jesus ask as the greatest honor we can pay him. Poor man is so foolish that he thinks he is most honoring his Lord when he is accumulating splendor, and form, and pomp, and ceremony; but that is not the honor that Jesus requires of his true and his faithful

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worshippers. He asks us to leave the consecrated pavement and the cathedral aisle, and to come out into the dusty road of ordinary life with him, and to the common floor of everyday duty, and to show that the religion which we gather, like the manna, on the first day of the week, has virtue to feed our souls, and to sweeten life's bitter things, and sanctify life's sweet things; so that, in the by-nooks of every-day life, as well as in the broad walks of public life, the world may take notice of us, that we have been with Jesus, by his spirit, his temper, and his life, being reflected and shadowed forth from our own. Our religion, in one word, is not a thing confined to a place, or to a day, or to a form, or to a ceremony. one can read the eleventh chapter of Hebrews without seeing that, if by faith Moses kept the passover, it was by faith also that Abraham left his country; it was by faith that Rahab received the spies with peace; it was by faith that Samson exerted his energies; it was by faith that Samuel lived, and that the walls of Jericho fell, and that they passed through the Red Sea, and many other acts related of it in the same chapter. It is, in short, by faith, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,"—that is, the bringing of a divine power into human life, and of a higher life into the humblest sphere and province of human life,—that we make heroic sacrifices and bear domestic trials equally, and at the same time. Our religion is not, like the electric element, gathered into the church as that is gathered into a jar, there to sparkle and make a little noise as it leaps from point to point; but, like that great element out of which the jar is filled, which runs through all the universe, gives fertility to the soil, balance to the orbs in the sky, order and equilibrium to the earth on which we tread, felt by its constraining, gentle, but persistent power, not heard by noisy crackling, or loud profession, on one day of the week. In short, real religion consists, not merely in saying prayers, but in being righteous ;