Bible Commentaries
Hebrews 11

Verse 1

Faith

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.— Hebrews 11:1.

1. This is the only place in the Bible where we have what can be called a definition of faith. The text enjoys, indeed, the unique distinction of being the only approach to definition that we find in the Bible.

In the Revised Version there are two changes made in the translation, which perhaps make the meaning more clear than it is here: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the proving of things not seen.” The word translated “substance,” which the Revisers have translated “assurance,” would be more exactly translated by a word which is rather modern and would perhaps not be considered sufficiently dignified in such a place as this, namely, the word “realization.” Faith is the realization of things hoped for; it is a conviction that those things hoped for do exist and may be obtained, may be realized, by those who have the necessary faith. The word here translated “evidence,” and translated by the Revisers “proving,” means a conviction that will stand of itself, a conviction such as proves the thing of which it is itself the evidence.

2. The text, then, seeks to explain what faith is, in order that we may know it when we see it, discover its otherwise unsuspected presence and trace its hidden working. This faith is represented as having a double object—“things hoped for” and “things not seen.” “Things hoped for” are personal and concern personal being, whether in time or in eternity, whether incorporated in the individual or distributed through collective society—man, the Church, the State, the people. What we hope for is what we expect to achieve and to win, to possess and to enjoy. It is essentially a personal good so realized that it may belong to a particular individual or to all mankind. “Things not seen” are objective and universal. They move in the region of space, they lie without and above, they dwell behind the apparent; they are what we term the causes that produce the myriad effects which we describe as nature and man, especially the Supreme Being and the supreme cause we name the invisible God. Corresponding to the double object is a twofold function. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for”; that is, it underlies them, gives them reality, brings them to realization or fulfilment. And it is “the evidence,” or proof, “of things not seen”; that is, it authenticates them to the reason, it makes them visible to the intellect, it endues them with a body which thought can handle, and feel, and perceive. If, then, we were to paraphrase this definition, it would be in language somewhat like this: Faith is the energy by which we turn into reality the things we hope for; it is the eye by which the soul sees unseen things.

A freer, but on the whole a better translation would be: “Faith is the giving of substance to things hoped for, the putting to the test of things not seen.” Probably the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews did not intend us to look upon this as a full and complete definition of what faith is, but rather as a description of some of its functions. And a very good description it is, too, as far as it goes. If you are expecting something to happen which will be for your benefit, you give substance to it, as it were, in your thoughts; you do not regard it as a mere dream, a desirable thing, perhaps, but impossible of realization; you act altogether differently from what you would if you did not believe the specified event or events would take place. And, further, if you know that there are certain sources of help of which you can avail yourself in time of need; or if you are sure you are right in following a certain course, although others may differ from you and think you wrong; and if you are sure that time will vindicate your action, you can rightly be described as putting your confidence to the test when you draw upon your resources or are willing to take risks for the sake of your convictions. 1 [Note: E. J. Campbell, in The Christian Commonwealth, xxxiii. 305.]

I

The Realization op Things hoped for

1. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews has done for faith what St. Paul did for love in 1 Corinthians 13. He has not only given us a magnificent hymn in honour of faith; he has laid down for all time the essentials of Christian faith; he has shown us the roots of it and the fruits of it, how it begins and where it ends. Faith, he says, is that which gives substance to things hoped for; it makes our hopes real and actual to us. Faith is not merely assurance, as Luther taught: it is not only trust, not only moral assent, not only even the resolution to stand or fall by the noblest hypothesis. These are important, even essential, elements in faith; but behind all this activity of the will, and justifying it, there lies the profound conviction, deeply embedded in the core of personality, that the objects of faith are real, more real than the world we live in; that salvation is not a mere hope, for faith gives substance to it; that it is not a dream, for faith gives reality to it; for faith it is neither a hope nor a dream, but a present fact.

The word here rendered “substance” means properly the act of standing under something so as to support it. Thus in a philosophical sense it was applied to the essence which forms, as it were, the substratum of the attributes, the supposed absolute existence of thing or person, in which all the properties and qualities, as they say in metaphysical language, inhere, and have their consistence. In this way the word is once applied, and only once, in Holy Scripture, in the 3rd verse of the 1st chapter of this Epistle, where we read of the person, or rather the substance, of God Himself. The same word is applied to the essence of God, and the Divine Son is said to be “the express image of God’s person,” or, more exactly, the very impress of God’s essence. But there is another use of the word in which it meant the act of the mind in standing under so as to support or bear the weight of some statement or some communication making, as we say, a very heavy demand upon the faculty of believing, and thus it passed from the idea of substance into the idea of assurance or confidence. It is used by St. Paul in two passages of his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where he speaks of his confidence in the readiness of their almsgiving, and again of their confidence in his glorying, though in weakness, about himself. And so once again in the 3rd chapter of this Epistle to the Hebrews we find the expression—it is the same word again—“If we hold the beginning of our confidence firm unto the end.”

There can be no question as to the meaning of the word in the verse now before us. Faith is the assurance of, faith is confidence in, things hoped for; faith is that principle, that exercise of mind and soul, which has for its object things not seen but hoped for, and which, instead of sinking under them as too ponderous, whether from their difficulty or their uncertainty, stands firm under them, supports their pressure; in other words, is assured of them, confides in them, relies upon them. 1 [Note: C. J. Vaughan.]

2. Whatever the object in the future may be to which thought is directed, it is always faith that apprehends it. We are not speaking of Christian faith particularly; we are speaking of faith itself, the principle of faith. Now, the future in question may be a year hence, may be next week, may be to-morrow, may be one hour from this very moment; equally in all cases it is an act of faith to expect, to wait for it. We are not to suppose that it is the Christian only who lives by faith in this general sense of faith. Faith is no dreamy, imaginative, or mystical thing, which it is fanciful, if not fanatical, to talk of. The schoolboy who expects a holiday which is to be earned by his diligence, or forfeited by his misconduct, exercises faith in that expectation. The husbandman who expects the harvest, and begins long months before to make preparation for it by ploughing and sowing, is exercising that confidence in things hoped for which is faith; the parent who anticipates the manhood of his boy, and prepares for that distant maturity by the instruction and by the discipline of the nursery and the schoolroom, is an example of that walking by faith which only madmen and fools disparage or dispense with.

What is Faith? If I were to say that it is the absolute condition of all life, of all action, of all thought which goes beyond the limitations of our own minds, I should use no exaggeration. Faith is in every age, under all circumstances, that by which man lays hold on the realities which underlie the changeful appearances of things, and gives substance to hope, that by which he enters into actual communion with the powers of the unseen world and brings their manifestation to a sovereign test. It is the harmony of reason and feeling and purpose. It is, to say all briefly, thought illuminated by emotion and concentrated by will. Faith, as applied to our present life, is a principle of knowledge, a principle of power, a principle of action. It may be quickened and intensified; it may be dulled and neglected. As it is used so it will be fruitful; and we are severally responsible for the use which we make of it. 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, The Historic Faith.]

3. When Christ bids us to be men of faith, He is not contradicting nature, He is not even introducing into the world an entirely new principle of action; He is only applying a principle as old as nature herself in matters beyond and above nature, which it needed a new revelation from the God of nature to disclose and to prove to us. If this proof be given us, it becomes as reasonable, then, to anticipate and to prepare for eternity as it is reasonable to anticipate and to prepare for a holiday or a harvest, a wedding or a profession. Faith is this confidence in these things hoped for; and whether the expected future be a later day of this life or a day which shall close this life and usher in an everlasting existence, the principle which takes account of that future is one and the same, only debased or elevated, profaned or consecrated, by the nature of the vision and by the character of the object.

That all genuine Common Faith, or the common rational sense of mankind, is divinely trustworthy, because inspired by God, is a postulate on which science itself rests, in all its previsive inferences. Scientific verification is finally unconscious religious trust. It has been scientifically verified that the sun will rise to-morrow; but till the sun shall have actually risen, the assertion only expresses faith in the Divine natural order. All expectation, scientific or common, is so far a leap in the dark; it is taken without the light of sense. The expected event has not the proof afforded by felt perception till the event has happened. If sense were our only light, it would follow that we must remain in the darkness of doubt about every future event. To be practically consistent, if we insist that that only can be reasonable into which no ingredient of moral venture enters, we must cease to live; for life depends upon expectation, and expectation postulates faith in the Divine reasonableness of the universe, which implies that men will not be finally put to scientific confusion by reasonable submission to this moral faith. If they must, the universe would be undivine illusion. 1 [Note: A. C. Fraser, Philosophy of Theism, 312.]

4. In the highest region of conduct faith creates its facts. Life, beforehand, presents us with a whole circle of unrealized possibilities; they surround us on all sides with their clamorous invitation; each, good or bad, cries out to us, “Realize me, turn this supposition into an act; bring down that ideal which floats before you as a vision, and transform it into a reality.” And faith is what enables us to do this. We trust that we may do, we believe that we may ourselves become, what we believe in.

wish to show what to my knowledge has never been clearly pointed out, that belief (as measured by action) not only does and must continually outstrip scientific evidence, but that there is a certain class of truths of whose reality belief is a factor as well as a confessor; and that as regards this class of truths faith is not only licit and pertinent, but essential and indispensable. The truths cannot become true till our faith has made them so.

Suppose, for example, that I am climbing in the Alps, and have, had the ill-luck to work myself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Being without similar experience, I have no evidence of my ability to perform it successfully; but hope and confidence in myself make me sure I shall not miss my aim, and nerve my feet to execute what without those subjective emotions would perhaps have been impossible. But suppose that, on the contrary, the emotions of fear and mistrust preponderate; or suppose that, having just read the Ethics of Belief, I feel it would be sinful to act upon an assumption unverified by previous experience—why, then I shall hesitate so long that at last, exhausted and trembling, and launching myself in a moment of despair, I miss my foothold and roll into the abyss. In this case (and it is one of an immense class) the part of wisdom clearly is to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of the indispensable preliminary conditions of the realization of its object. There are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall again be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage. 2 [Note: W. James, The Will to Believe, 96.]

II

The Test of Things not seen

1. Faith is the proof or test of things not seen. Faith tries the spirits, as St. John says; that is to say, tests beliefs by living them and acting them; tries them until experiment becomes experience, proves them until faith wins its crown by passing into knowledge and into love.

Somewhere in his essays Huxley writes: “Theology claims that the just shall live by faith: science says the just shall live by verification.” Now here this acute thinker gives a clear proof that he did not in the least understand the meaning of this great New Testament word—Faith. He confounded it with credulity, that tendency by which we accept a thing on trust without making any attempt to find out if it is true. Faith, on the other hand, in the true sense, is the faculty by which we take a thing on trust in order to find out if it is true. It is the basis of all religious experiment, the background of all moral effort, the standing-place of the soul in its leap towards God. 1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones, Faith and Verification, 19.]

2. By faith we are able to rest in the assurance of the hope of everlasting life and happiness through Christ; we are able to experience proof in ourselves of an unseen God, an unseen Christ, an unseen Holy Spirit, an unseen world, and an unseen life. Of these things we are assured and positive. “Whatever doubts may agitate the minds of others, however old parchments and ancient inscriptions and the study of grammar may shake the foundations of other people’s belief, and cast them into a restless sea of perplexing opinions, the true Christian rests with a fixed heart and a calm mind in the assurance and proof of the living faith which is in his soul. This is indeed—to quote the words of St. John—this is indeed “the victory that overcometh the world,” the victory that overcometh philosophic doubts and scientific perplexities, as well as the forces of evil and of worldliness—“even our faith.”

That which is common to every great act of faith is that it lays hold upon some word of God and holds it against the world; through it, it transcends or overcomes the world, and inherits a promise of something above and beyond the world. The doer of such an act makes himself greater than the world, and though he lose it, in doing so he finds, or gains, or makes himself. 1 [Note: W. P. Du Bose, High Priesthood and Sacrifice.]

We may consider Christian faith as a supernatural gift of God to us, a “power of the world to come,” enabling us to live already in a higher world than that which is seen, a faculty for approaching God, touching God personally, possessing God Himself—the faculty by which every relation to God is realized and vitalized. As we begin to use this higher faculty, we find ourselves no longer imprisoned by circumstances from which there is no escape. The imprisoning circumstances remain, but there is no prisoner. Faith in Christ gave him secret access to another world, and he is free. There was no external change, nothing was seen to happen; the man prayed in secret, and the prayer of faith proved to be a working of the Holy Ghost in his mind, and heart, and will, and he became conscious of light and power within, enabling him to rise out of his own emptiness, folly, and sadness. 2 [Note: George Congreve, Christian Progress.]

3. Nor is this exercise of the principle of faith in the least incompatible with the fullest use of our intellectual faculties on the subject-matter of religion. The genuine believer will not, cannot, consistently hold back the tide of criticism from searching into the very foundations of his creed. Unwillingness to join in this process argues not faith, but a subtle doubt—doubt, that is, lest the realities of faith might dissolve and vanish into nothingness in the alembic of critical thought. Those who thus defend their faith against the principle of criticism thereby prove that at heart they are not believers but sceptics. It would be well if religious thinkers were to act with the same confidence as the scientific in their special departments. No attempt is made to hinder any one from inquiring to his fullest bent into the constitution of matter. Why? Because we know that no examination into the constituents and behaviour of the material world will endanger our sense of its practical reality. On the other hand, we all feel assured that the closest scrutiny of, the most laboured inquiry into, the character and behaviour of the physical universe will end not in the dissipation of matter, but in its better comprehension and its fuller mastery. Why should it be otherwise with the deeper realities that appeal to our spiritual nature? A true-hearted inquiry into the substance and core of religion cannot possibly result in dissolving its realities into mist and nothingness; it will result in their truer understanding, and in a surer realization of the distinction between what is absolute and relative, eternal and temporal. True, there are special perils in this process, but our mind should be directed not against the process itself, but against these perils that are involved in it.

What is needed perhaps more than anything else in theology to-day is a thorough criticism of the methods of criticism, so that the mind may be properly equipped for its special task and safeguarded from the many pitfalls, ethical and intellectual, that waylay the religious as distinguished from the physical inquirer. If the energies of those who still rail against all criticism as an essentially destructive process were directed to this question instead, it would greatly further the arrival of unity and progress in religious thought. And the first condition of so doing is a thorough and whole-hearted faith in the immovable realities on which faith rests and with which it has to do. The deeper our faith in our religion, the more eager we shall be to submit its experiences to the test and experiment of both criticism and life. 1 [Note: E. Griffith-Jones, Faith and Verification, 22.]

4. What is the influence of the unseen things upon us when thus verified by faith?

(1) The things unseen keep us separate from the world.—This separation is not merely a rending asunder at the outset, but a keeping asunder all the days of our life; a walk of separation from the world every day; even in those things which we have outwardly in common with the world, such as business and recreation—even in such things we walk by faith and not by sight. Our business, our amusements, our conversation, our reading, our employments, our family life, our private life, our public life—all are regulated by the things unseen. In all of these we manifest nonconformity with the world.

Spirituality, I should say, was perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of Dr. John Brown’s mental constitution. As an essence it pervaded his entire life and work. Although reserved on sacred subjects, it was frequently apparent to those most intimate with him that, even in states of sunny brightness and sparkling humour, a dark cloud of emotion overspread his countenance, revealing the workings of the inner man. In his later years he was often seen with his eyes closed, as if excluding the outer world from his thoughts, and giving himself up to devout contemplation. Divine reverence and human sympathy were as parts of himself. This was alike shown in a keen appreciation of nature—the glory of the heavens, and the grandeur and beauty of the earth; in his gentle and tender consideration for the feelings of others, and in sympathy with all sorrow and suffering. A near relative of his own [Professor Crum Brown], who knew him thoroughly, has truly said: “He was a sincere, humble, and devout Christian. His religion was not a thing that could be put off or on, or be mislaid or lost; it was in him, and he could no more leave it behind than he could leave his own body behind. It was in him a well of living water, not for himself so much as for all around him. And his purity, truth, goodness, and Christlike character were never more clearly seen than in those periods of darkness when they were hidden from his own sight. He very seldom spoke expressly of religion; he held ‘that the greater and the better, the inner-part of man is, and should be private—much of it more than private’; but he could not speak of anything without manifesting what manner of man he was.” 1 [Note: A. Peddie, Recollections of Dr. John Brown, 151.]

(2) The things unseen sanctify us and lift our affections above.—We need to be drawn upward, and the things unseen are all above; so that their influence is all upward. The unseen Christ, the unseen glory, the unseen inheritance, are all above: in realizing them we are lifted upward. And as we are lifted upward, so are we sanctified by the heavenly vision. Sin is made hateful; lusts and carnal feelings are more loosened from us and fall off. We become more unlike the men of earth, more like the citizens of heaven. The clearer these heavenly objects appear, the more influential, the more sanctifying, and the more elevating they are. In beholding them we are made like them; purified, changed into the same image from glory to glory.

Cultivate the Heaven-born instinct of spiritual insight; your nature-endowment to rend for you veils of time and sense, to dispel the illusion of outward seeming and fleeting fashion of world-allurement, to give to you the underlying realities of Hope’s fair dreams of future joy, the heart’s true intuition and clear vision of things close-veiled to outward sense: so that you become enamoured of the infinite and feel upon you the spell of the Eternal. Let your horizon be constantly receding, your outlook on life be increasingly luminous, your expectation from the future well-balanced and hopeful. The glory of the Son of Man breaks in suddenly, in wondrous wise, upon the drudgery and monotony of disappointed life, and lo! the commonplace becomes a Holy Mount. Beneath some seeming failure we see capacity for higher good; and dull, grey tints of hope-deferred life become rose-hued, or crimson-lit, in the wonder-change of the After-glow in which the Incarnation suffuses life. And if the brightness thereafter fade, yet life can never take such sombre hues again: for the Christ remains in the heart He has relieved, and the soul remembers that it is when earthly lights are paling that the glory lingers brightest and longest upon the Mountains of Hope. The glory passes, but memories abide, and the After-glow returns when evening skies pale. We feel ourselves better men for having seen the beauty and having realized how quickly God can alter the appearance of life. And we pass into the coming days with a truer and nobler conception of life, because we see the Transfiguration and the Beatific Vision where some see only the fading light and the gathering shade. The glory of the Incarnation lingers to keep the miracle-touch and the beauty-sheen on life, until He comes to bring back upon human nature all it erstwhile had lost. 1 [Note: A. Daintree, Studies in Hope, 6.]

(3) The things unseen strengthen us.—The feebleness, fadingness, vanity, poverty of things which we do see here are very enfeebling and disheartening; whereas the greatness, enduringness, glory, excellence of the things which we do not see strengthen, nerve, animate, invigorate us. These glorious invisibilities quicken our steps, kindle zeal and love, make us willing to endure hardness, to count labour, privation, suffering, poverty, as nothing. Thus we walk in strength, with erect heads, zealous, earnest, untiring, because of what faith shows us—the things within the veil.

One who was present in Christ Church Cathedral on New Year’s Day 1864, when Richard Chenevix Trench was consecrated Archbishop of Dublin, has vividly described the impression which the ceremony made upon him. The utter unself-consciousness, the deep humility, the intense devotion, and the almost divine spirituality of the new Archbishop was what struck this onlooker, who says, after catching a glimpse of Dr. Trench’s beautiful face lit up with a strange peace of joy, “From that one moment all things, eternal and unseen, seemed invested for me with a depth of reality they had never had before. Since then I have passed through many experiences of spirit and of heart. I have had flashes of doubt. “Who, in these days, of perhaps too great mental activity, has escaped them? I have had days and hours of sorrow and of joy. I have had hopes and fears. But I can truly say that the countenance of Archbishop Trench as I saw it during that one moment of my life, expressing, as it did, the deepest devotion and the most perfect realization of the Unseen, and rising, as it does, entirely unbidden before my mental vision, has dispelled doubts, soothed sorrows, sanctified joys, strengthened hope, and calmed fear, by leading me to realize for myself, as nothing else has ever done, the personal existence of that living God, whose power and Spirit were so vividly portrayed before me in that one moment of my life.” 1 [Note: Archbishop Trench: Letters and Memorials, ii. 3.]

(4) The things unseen comfort us.—Our walk here is not all smoothness and sunshine. Tribulation, weariness, pain, sickness, bereavement, throw their thick clouds over us. We take refuge in the future from the present. Our prospects, ever bright, ever glorious, cheer, sustain, and console us. Life is so brief; its sorrows will so soon be done; Christ will so soon be here; resurrection and glory and gladness will so soon dawn on us. We need not be over-burdened or over-sorrowful because of the present. Faith shows us the light beyond the darkness, and that comforts us. The eternal kingdom will make up for all.

As years go on, and the sadness of life comes home to us, we feel that we get comfort and strength nowhere else but in the reality of God and in a simple trust in Christ’s “Hereafter.” It is like a strong hand in the dark to believe that God our Father loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace. That is the infallible way of finding comfort for our hearts and stablishing them in every good work and word. The only way to make peace secure, and to save our work from futility and our lives from vanity, is the way of faith. Without faith in God and God’s love and God’s future for us, there cannot be for us any true and permanent comfort. Without it, we are open at every turn to any shock of chance and to every alarm of fate. But with such faith we can lift up our burden with serenity, and perform our tasks with peace, and find joy in our work, looking upon it simply and sweetly as service. And if, and when, the very worst comes, when all our activities are taken from us, we are not robbed of everything; nay, we are robbed of nothing; for our life is hid with Christ in God. True faith expands for every fresh need, and when the need comes the comfort comes also, and out of weakness men are made strong. When we are oppressed by the burden and overwhelmed by the spectacle of human misery, we must learn that there is a deeper thing than happiness, and that is peace; and eternal peace is only to be had in communion with the eternal God. 1 [Note: Hugh Black, Comfort, 24.]

O Love, the indwelling, by Thee are we shriven,

Ineffable Comforter, Lord of delight!

To those who are born of Thy Spirit, is given

The quickening of peace in the thick of the fight.

Thou comest, and swift, through the doorways of dulness,

Come joy and vitality, glory and grace!

Who loves Thee will serve Thee with life in its fulness,

Or die at his post with Thy joy on his face.

O Christ, the unconquered, how dimly we know Thee,

Thou Sun of the universe, Light of the world!

For all the sweet fire of our life that we owe Thee,

Thy heart took the anguish the enemy hurled!

O Thou who wast born of a brave human Mother,

Some kneel in Thy presence, some, worshipping, stand!

Life’s Symbol and Mystery! Master and Brother!

We grope in the darkness and feel for Thy hand. 2 [Note: Annie Matheson, Maytime Songs, 17.]

Faith

Literature

Blackie (J. S.), Lay Sermons, 113.

Calthrop (G.), The Lost Sheep Found, 197.

Collyer (R.), Nature and Life, 102.

Dawson (G.), Sermons on Daily Life and Duty, 264.

Dods (M.), Footsteps in the Path of Life, 88.

Doney (C. G.), The Throne-Room of the Soul, 141.

Greg (J.), The Life of Faith, 188.

Grenfell (W. T.), What Life means to Me, 35.

Griffith-Jones (E.), Faith and Verification, 1.

Hare (A. W.), Sermons, i. 119.

Hopkins (E. H.), Talks with Beginners, 1.

How (W. W.), Plain Words, i. 101.

Illingworth (J. R.), Sermons Preached in a College Chapel, 116.

Jefferson (C. E.), Things Fundamental, 1.

Lilley (A. L.), in Practical Questions, 17.

Macdonell (D. J.), Life and Work, 423.

McGarvey (J. W.), Sermons, 82.

Maxson (H. D.), Sermons of Religion and Life, 150.

Mylne (R. S.), The Ground of Faith, 77.

Newman (J. H.), Oxford University Sermons, 176.

Peake (A. S.), The Heroes and Martyrs of Faith, 1.

Robinson (C. S.), Studies in the New Testament, 143.

Shepherd (A.), Bible Studies in Living Subjects, 159.

Temple (F.), Rugby Sermons, i. 64.

Temple (W.), Repton School Sermons, 98.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), xix (1880), No. 1153; xxii. (1882), No. 1229.

Westcott (B. F.), The Historic Faith, 1, 171.

Woodward (H.), Sermons, 1.

British Congregationalist, Sept. 22, 1910 (W. D. Mackenzie).

Christian Commonwealth, xxxiii. (1913) 305 (R. J. Campbell).

Christian World Pulpit, viii. 286 (E. W. Shalders), 296 (C. J. Vaughan); xvi. 28 (H. W. Beecher); xviii. 248 (A. Mursell); xxi. 385 (G. MacDonald); xxxii. 139 (R. Balgarnie); liii. 56 (F. Temple); lvi. 123 (E. J. Hardy); lx. 296 (A. M. Fairbairn); lxii. 56 (J. Stalker); lxxv. 313 (W. R. Inge); lxxviii. 229 (W. H. Carr); lxxxii. 337 (R. Roberts), 346 (A. Hamilton).

Church of England Pulpit, lviii. 31 (G. R. Channer); lxi. 619 (A. C. Headlam).

Homiletic Review, xxxv. 316 (F. Temple).

Verses 24-26

The Choice of Moses

By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter; choosing rather to be evil entreated with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt: for he looked unto the recompense of reward.— Hebrews 11:24-26.

“When I turn,” says Dr. J. H. Jowett, “to this great Epistle to the Hebrews, I feel as though I were in the inspiring spaces of some great cathedral, as though I were moving about Westminster Abbey; in fact, I have ventured to call the Epistle to the Hebrews the Westminster Abbey of the Bible. There are some beautiful little side chapels, where a weary soul can bend in quiet and reverent prayer and praise; some most winsome light breaks through quite unexpected windows, as you move about in the august place; again and again you hear the sound of an anthem raising melodious songs of praise to the great God; and you are never allowed to get far away from Calvary and the cross. When I come to chapter 11, I always feel as though I were turning into the nave of the great cathedral, and I find it is occupied by monuments which have been erected to commemorate saintly men and women who were distinguished by their faith—a monument to Abraham, a monument to Isaac and Jacob, a monument to Sarah, one to Rahab. I stand now before a monument which commemorates an old patriarch statesman, and I ask why this man is commemorated in the abbey? What did Moses do to entitle him to a place in the nave?”

The answer to Dr. Jowett’s question is the whole life of Moses. But that which determined the life of Moses was the choice which he made when he reached manhood. That choice is our subject. We have it brought before us in the text in some fulness. We shall speak first of the Choice itself; next of the Faith which prompted it; and then of the Motive which inspired it.

I

The Choice

Viewing his situation from the outside, we might declare no one so unlikely as Moses to be confronted with a crucial decision. Egypt at that day boasted of an advanced civilization; and all its luxury, all its culture, were poured into his cup. He had been trained, they say, in the most famous college in the land, and had proved himself already a statesman and a soldier. His foot was on the step of the loftiest throne on earth; in the judgment of his peers there lay open before him a career of the most enviable brilliance. It seemed as if one success had but to follow another: to-morrow would be as yesterday, and much more abundant. And then came God—God, who had a plan of loving wisdom for this man, and was but biding His time.

The choice involved two things—a refusal and an acceptance.

i. The Refusal

One of the chief features of Moses’ character is here put before us: “Moses refused.” That implies a strong temptation, impelling him to accept—influences operating in such a way that it was by no means easy to the natural man to refuse. God was testing him, and by that test preparing him for higher service. Moses, by God’s grace, stood the test. His mind seems to have been thoroughly made up. He refused the prospect of princely magnificence—he rose superior to the temptation, and this, we are told, because he acted by faith.

1. The act of renunciation was itself an act of unusual keenness of perception, for there was so much that might have been urged on the other side. It is generally not difficult to find specious reasons for doing something which we very much want to do. It so often happens that the intellect is the slave of the will, and we can make out an excellent case for following the bent of our desires. And in the case of Moses the arguments against the course he adopted were really cogent. There was the general principle that it is usually best to stay where Providence has placed us. No doubt it often happens that this principle may be overruled by a higher, that there are exceptions which warrant a departure from this course. But in the case of Moses it might well have been argued that this was pre-eminently one of those cases where the rule held good. For what, it might plausibly have been urged, had Providence given him such a position except that he might use it? And to the plea that he was making the renunciation for the sake of his people, how very effective the reply would be: “If you wish to help your people, stay where you are. You have the opportunity, as the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, to do much in alleviating their lot and in making their life more tolerable; whereas by flinging away your position, you bring yourself down to their level and lose all power of effective assistance. Why sacrifice a fulcrum which gives you such a leverage and try to raise your people by a dead life?”

There is a general principle that we are bound to be more careful when the course of action we think of adopting is one that conduces to our own pleasure or advantage. We do not readily acknowledge these things to ourselves, and indeed it is very easy for us to be the victims of unconscious bias. No doubt it often happens that the right course of conduct is also the more agreeable, but in view of the peril I have mentioned we must take special precaution to be sure of our ground. 1 [Note: A. S. Peake, The Heroes and Martyrs of Faith, 104.]

Felicitas was a rich widow who with her seven sons was well known in Roman society. In a time of calamity certain pagan priests represented to the emperor that this woman by her deeds of Christian piety had brought down the anger of the gods upon the people; and by imperial command the prefect, Publius, was required to see that she and her sons sacrificed to the gods. The prefect endeavoured to persuade her to make the sacrifices; but she, declaring that the Holy Spirit would strengthen her against the evil one, said: “I am assured that while I live I shall be the victor in my contest with you, and if you cause me to be put to death I shall be still more a conqueror.” Publius replied: “Unhappy one, if it is pleasant for you to die, at least let your sons live.” “My sons,” said Felicitas, “will surely live if they do not consent to sacrifice to idols. But if they commit this crime of sacrificing they will die eternally.” The first attempt of the magistrate failed, and a public trial was ordered. At this trial, when urged to have pity on her sons, Felicitas addressed them saying: “Look up to heaven, where Christ with His saints is waiting for you, fight the good fight for your souls, and show yourselves faithful in the love of Christ.” The young men were questioned one by one. Januarius, the eldest, who was offered a rich reward if he sacrificed, and scourging if he refused, made answer: “The wisdom of the Lord will support me and enable me to endure all.” He was ordered to be scourged, and was led away. The second son also refused to sacrifice, saying: “We adore one God to whom we offer the sacrifice of prayers: never suppose that you will separate me or my brothers from the love of the Lord Jesus Christ; our faith will never be overcome or be changed by any of your threats.” The other brothers were no less faithful in their confessions, and at last, when the emperor had read the report of the trial, he ordered the accused to be executed. Felicitas and three of the sons were beheaded; three of the others were beaten to death with whips; the last was thrown down from a height that he might be killed. 1 [Note: J. Herkless, The Early Christian Martyrs, 46.]

2. It was necessary for Moses to make up his mind what he would do in those cases where loyalty to Israel was incompatible with loyalty to Egypt. His position was a very delicate one, and he was bound to be exceptionally careful. He might so easily be discredited by a false step, the cry might so readily be raised that he was traitorously sacrificing the interests entrusted to his care. And if he had tried to hold the balance even, he would have quickly learned that it is the fate of the moderate man to be stoned by the extremists on both sides. Moreover, as time went on his generous enthusiasms were likely to fade. The idealist would have degenerated into the practical man, and the official palliations of abuses and tyranny would have come glibly from his lips. It was better for Moses himself, better, too, we may be sure, for the cause he had at heart, that he should make a definite break with his past and devote himself whole-heartedly to his people. And that he saw this so clearly and steadily, that his judgment was not swayed by self-interest or led astray by sophistries, justifies the author of the Epistle when he finds in his renunciation the proof of his faith.

What did he refuse? Away out from the king’s palace on the plain there was a poor, downtrodden, oppressed, ill-used race, and this man, who was akin to them and belonged to them, was afraid lest, getting into the softness of retirement, the surroundings of leisure, the woolly softness might stop his ears, the very king’s palace become as it were a palace of wool, shutting out the wail of the oppressed, causing him to be indifferent to the cry of the downtrodden. He was afraid lest, if he got into the king’s palace, sat down at the feast of plenty, and had all the allurements of the king’s house, in leisure, ease, retirement, he should lose touch with his fellow-men, be benumbed and paralysed by the ease which lay within his choice. He refused leisure, and he refused pleasure.

What answers to this refusal for us? Our own conscience alone can make reply; but it may be one of many things. Perhaps there is a friendship on which we have set our heart, a friendship at war with loyalty to Christ. We must change its inner tone, or say farewell to it, if we are to choose the better part. Or it is possibly a means of gain as to which we have had gathering doubts, until now we know that unless it is renounced it will bar us out from the Kingdom of God. Or it may be some secret evil habit, sweet for the passing moment, but shameful in memory; if we do not cut the strands, and cast it off, something tells us that it will one day drag us down headlong into the pit. And yet do not let us ward off the thrust which, it may be, this passage is making at our heart by pleading that “the pleasures of sin” can refer only to gross self-indulgence and taking comfort in the thought that nothing of that kind is chargeable on us. What these pleasures meant for Moses was no base sensuality—he lived above all that—but a stage for his ambition, the intoxicating draught of personal influence and power. And many a man who would scorn to stoop to coarse wrongdoing finds, often to his own intense surprise, that the pursuit of the common ideals of success can rob him of eternal life quite as effectively.

This moment’s thine, thou never more may’st hear

The clarion-summons-call thus loud and clear;

What now thou buyest cheap may yet prove dear.

Part with thine all, spare not the needed cost;

That which thou partest with were better lost,

Thy selfish worldly schemes more wisely crossed.

Thy loss infinitesimal, thy gain

Endless, immense; thy momentary pain

The single step the boundless to attain.

These idol loves that gender loveless lust—

Weighed in the balances, whose scales are just,

With the bright hopes thou spurn’st—are breath-borne dust!

Eye hath not seen, man’s ear hath never heard,

Nor heart conceived—save some faint image blurred—

The bliss of those who keep the Christly word—-

Let go; my soul, let go! 1 [Note: William Hall.]

3. In another respect the faith of Moses is shown to be eminent in that he realized that the pleasures of sin could not last. If he enjoyed them, it could be but for a season. Now this brings before us the magic of sin. It is not easy for a man before he commits a sin to look at it from the point of view which he will adopt towards it after he has committed it. The illusion of sin is what gives it its fatal power. It casts a glamour over the eyes of the tempted, so that they cannot penetrate through the radiant appearance to the hideous and loathsome reality. It captures and inflames the imagination, muffles the conscience, and paralyses the will; it makes itself seem the most desirable of all things, the one beatitude needed to crown and complete the life. It is the man of faith whose vision strikes through all disguises to the truth. He is too sane to deny that the pleasures of sin are real; but he knows, nevertheless, that they bring no permanent satisfaction—indeed, he knows quite well that sweet gratification turns quickly to bitter remorse. And Moses had just that faculty steadily to look at the sin beforehand from the standpoint of the experienced gratification, and understand that the pleasure could not last. He knew quite well that, while he could reach the goal on which his ambition was set, and the advantages and enjoyments it would procure for him would be real and substantial, his pleasure in them would always be poisoned by the thought that a higher call had come to him, and he had made the great and irretrievable refusal.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. 1 [Note: George Eliot, Romola.]

ii. The Acceptance

1. What did Moses prefer? He “chose rather to suffer affliction with the people of God.” He chose the side of weakness and oppression against the side of unscrupulous might; a weak minority against an outrageous majority. He was willing to be one of the weak plus their pain, rather than be on the side of majestic and magnificent vice. There is no more splendid spectacle than this, the sight of a man who, if he likes, can have ease, leisure, pleasure, treasure, putting off his slippers, putting on his heavy boots, going out into the stormy night, battling with wind and rain because he has heard the cry of pain and servitude. Happily, the Christian centuries abound in men and women who have left ease, delight, luxurious home and wealth in the interest of the weak and oppressed.

If young women want to know what a woman can be, read Josephine Butler’s life of her husband and see how she mingles with it as one of, shall I say, the knight-errants of the Lord Christ? Josephine Butler, living in the ease and seclusion of a snug deanery, heard the cry of awfully oppressed womanhood. It shook her heart with pain and fear. She at once made up her mind to go out into the night, if she might be the means of lifting the burden from the oppressed womanhood of our realm. She knew what it meant—the contempt of the aristocracy, the loss of much social esteem and regard; she counted the cost. She made the confession to her husband: God had created the husband as splendid as the wife; he was willing that the sacrifice should be made. She tells how she made her purpose known to her husband: “I went to him one evening when he was alone, all the household having gone to rest, and I recollect the painful thoughts that seemed to throng that passage from my room to his study. I hesitated. I leaned my cheek against the closed door, and as I leaned I prayed. Then I went in, and I gave him something that I had written, and I left him. I did not see him until the next day. He looked very pale”—he had been in Gethsemane through that night—“and very troubled, and for some days he was very silent. And then I spoke to my husband of all that had passed in my mind, and I said: ‘I feel as if I must go out into the streets and cry aloud, or my heart will break,’ and that good and noble man, foreseeing what it meant both for me and for himself, never said, ‘What will the world say?’ He had pondered the matter, and looking straight”—I like that phrase—“as was his wont, he saw only a great wrong, and a woman who wanted to redress the wrong, and in loving and reverent response he said, ‘Go, and God be with you.’ ” Out into the night she went; she chose to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than dwell in the luxurious seclusion of a deanery, and I tell you that if the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews were to return, and were to enlarge his nave, and wanted to erect a memorial to some distinguished woman, Josephine Butler would find a place. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

2. “He esteemed the reproach of Christ”—put that in one hand: “greater than the treasures of Egypt”—put that in the other hand. He esteemed reproach, contumely, contempt, derision plus right, more than all the treasures of Egypt plus unrighteousness. He did not mind a scar; some scars are ornaments. Is there a more splendid word in all the supremely splendid Epistles of St. Paul than “I bear about in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”? “Do you see that?” he said; “I was stoned there”; and I think he pulled up his sleeve and said, “Do you see that? It is the mark of the scourge. If you could only see my back; I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”; he exhibited them as some men parade their degrees. His scars were his crown. So Moses refused, he turned his back upon majesty; he chose, he preferred oppression and weakness.

It is difficult for us to realize how daring such a faith was, for we look back across the intervening millenniums and see with what unique lustre Israel has shone, and how singularly it has justified Moses’ estimate. We think of all the splendid galaxy of saints and prophets, of sages and psalmists, who so gloriously vindicated Israel’s right to the title. But all this still lay in the future to Moses. He knew nothing of the lofty spiritual achievements which awaited his race. It was rather a mere horde of slaves, with all that this implies. For we know what slavery does for men, how it takes the pith out of their manhood and grinds them into abject submission, how it creates a degraded slave-morality of its own, underhand and obsequious.

There was a man called Benjamin Waugh who was enjoying the delights of some secluded ministry, all the enjoyment that comes to the studious life. He heard the wail of a little child, and he left his study and his books, went out into the night, and encountered the tempest, antagonisms on every side. He only wanted to protect the ill-used child against the heavy, brutal hand of oppression, but he was opposed and antagonized, confronted on every hand by opposition. The police, especially the chief constables of the country, ranged themselves in opposition to him. He had to fight and fight and fight; and now to-day we have a great and popular society for the protection of ill-used little children, which must be traced to the majestic outgoing of a man who said: “I will despise ease, leisure, pleasure, treasure: I choose to be one with the ill-used children rather than to enjoy the pleasures of luxurious seclusion, even for a season.” 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,

Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ’tis prosperous to be just;

Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,

Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,

And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o’er earth’s chosen heroes,—they were souls that stood alone,

While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,

By one man’s plain truth to manhood and to God’s supreme design. 2 [Note: James Russell Lowell, The Present Crisis.]

II

The Power

“By faith.”—While the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says but little of the faith displayed by Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, he has much more to say concerning the faith of Moses. And this was natural. No patriotic Hebrew who looked back with love and pride on the early history of his race could fail to accord a pre-eminent place to Moses. To him, across the intervening centuries, a grateful nation looked back as the founder of its political existence and the revealer of its law. But the author includes Moses in his list, not merely because he was too great a man to be omitted, but because his career was so singularly marked by the quality of religious insight and lofty self-renouncing heroism.

1. God had chosen Moses, but now the time had come when Moses must choose God. We are not told how the crisis came about; we know only the outcome, and that the power that enabled him to act was faith. Faith in his mother’s God, for Jochebed must have taught her boy of Him in whom she trusted. A faith that came from calm and quiet consideration, for we are told he “looked unto the recompense of the reward”; literally “he looked beyond,” or “away from that which was before his eyes.” He was brought to consider his position in the light of eternity, and to make a choice as to whether he would live for the present or for future gain.

2. “Now faith is the giving substance to things hoped for, the test of things not seen” ( Hebrews 11:1, R.V., margin). Faith puts to the proof the statements of God by acting upon them, and in the acting finds their substance and reality. Faith tests the unseen things, and translates them into real experience. This was strikingly true in the case of Moses. By faith he looked beyond the things before his eyes, he deliberately chose to refuse all the “pleasures” and “treasures” of the present, and faith tested, proved, or gave substance to his hopes. He was led step by step away from things seen, into a fellowship and communion with the unseen God, of which he had no conception when he made his choice in Egypt.

3. The faith that is the “proving of things not seen” demands direct communication with God. Souls have often been shipwrecked here. They have rested their faith upon the written word spoken by others, rather than upon God Himself in His Word. The “faith” that can act as Moses did must have the word of the Living God as its basis—the word of the Living God in His written Word, but by the Holy Spirit applied as His direct word to the soul. When God speaks, His commands are His enablings. By the faith wrought in us by God, and the assurance of the reward of knowing Him “face to face,” we too can refuse to be of the world, and declare plainly that we seek a better country, that is, a heavenly; we too can refuse the pleasures of sin and self-pleasing, and choose the way of the cross: we too can hold lightly the “treasures” that others clasp to their breasts, and account reproach with Christ as greater riches than them all.

4. “Faith” is the key to all the treasuries of God. The gospel is practically God’s statement of what is in the spiritual world. Faith is simply believing God’s word, however contrary it may appear to the things of sense and sight. Faith in God’s statement to us is proved by action. We act according to what is told us by God, which we believe, and must of necessity obey. Living faith involves action; without action it may be said to be dead, for a mental assent to the truths of God will never give them substance in our lives. If we do believe God’s word, we shall act according to that word.

He who walks by sight only walks in a blind alley. He who does not know the freedom and joy of reverent, loving speculation wastes his life in a gloomy cell of the mouldiest of prisons. Even in matters that are not distinctively religious faith will be found to be the inspiration and strength of the most useful life. It is faith that does the great work of the world. It is faith that sends men in search of unknown coasts. It is faith that re-trims the lamp of inquiry when sight is weary of the flame. It is faith that unfastens the cable and gives men the liberty of the seas. It is faith that inspires the greatest works in civilization. So we cannot get rid of religion unless we first get rid of faith, and when we get rid of faith we give up our birthright and go into slavery for ever. 1 [Note: Joseph Parker.]

O God! the scholar and the sage

Into Thy mysteries peer,

And strive by Reason’s subtle art

To make their meaning clear.

But my bewildered heart rejects

The puzzling paths they lay,

And seeks to gain the Eternal Heart

By some directer way.

Lord, draw me as the sun in spring

Draws the awakening vine,

And up some lattice of Thy love

Bid my affections twine!

So when my grasp on Reason fails,

Faith-led, I still may go,

And all the mystery shall melt

As melts the April snow.

III

The Motive

What was the motive which inspired the choice of Moses? In other words, What form did his faith take? How did it express itself? The answer is, “He looked unto the recompense of reward.”

1. When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that Moses “looked unto the recompense of reward,” he seems to spoil what has gone before. Our impulse is at once to retort, “Oh, then, Moses was self-seeking after all, only he made much cleverer calculations than other people would have done. Faith was just the cooler, keener insight which enabled him to make a better bargain than his fellows. He was good because it paid him better.” The writer does not, it is true, tell us precisely what he had in mind, but we can, at any rate, rest assured that we should wrong Moses himself by such a criticism. For what we may call the higher doctrine of the future life emerged in the religion of Israel at a comparatively late period, and therefore the founder of the religion may reasonably be regarded as untouched by this as regards motive. So far as he was concerned he did his duty and made his sacrifice without thought of reward in that sense. If, then, we give to the author’s words a meaning which shall harmonize with history, we shall speak of Moses as contemplating a reward only in the sense in which we speak of virtue as its own reward. He had peace of conscience and the assurance that, at all costs, he had followed the path of duty. He had the privilege of knowing that his sacrifice had meant the redemption of his people. Above all, he was happy in the sense of God’s approval. We may all desire that our own actions may be prompted by such disinterested anticipations of reward.

To labour in a righteous cause with the assurance that some day the right will be justified is to manifest the disposition of faith. Is it not a beautiful word in the Psalmist: “He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light”? A man said to me last week in Birmingham, only a working man, “We don’t seem to make much headway there in the slums; it is like trying to clean them with a spoon, but I am doing my best, and I am trusting God.” It came to me to quote “thy righteousness”—only like a little candle in a dark place, but if thou art faithful to it—“He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light,” and even when thou art working, as with a candle amidst surrounding blackness, work thou as a child of the noon. Oh, that is the meaning; when we are working in the twilight, when the darkness envelops and oppresses us, to work as children of the noon. Is that not what our Master meant when He said, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”? 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

2. And yet it was possible for Moses to see a definite though distant reward. We read of the Saviour Himself: “Who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame.” “He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.” What do those words mean? They mean far more than we can comprehend. They, however, at least teach us that the salvation of those for whom He died will be His recompense. His reward will be the satisfaction which the presence of the redeemed, which no man can number, will give to the love that brought Him from His heaven to die for them. Such a reward in a humbler measure and in a different sense was the reward of Moses.

(1) First of all, with regard to the very people to whom he was to become deliverer, his reward consisted in being permitted, though not to enter Canaan itself, to stand on the summit of the mountain and see the land they would so soon enter. The recompense of his toil, the reward of all his suffering, was to b permitted to know that they were not in vain, but that the people for whom he in his best hours was prepared to die were finally delivered from bondage and placed in possession of the Promised Land.

(2) But that is only a type of the deeper and more spiritual joy which fell to the lot of Moses, namely, the recompense of the reward in finding that every self-denial could be made sweet, and every cross could be converted into a crown. The greatest recompense we can have for any self-denying service is to lose the sense of the self-denial in the ecstasy of the joy and privilege of it; to feel that though we may have to suffer, the suffering itself becomes a channel of joy to us in that we are permitted to suffer for the Master’s sake. The recompense of the reward is to be so transformed and transfigured by the service we render to Christ and for humanity that we shall become like our Lord, and find our greatest joy in being permitted to bless those who need our help.

In Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau Browning gives a striking picture of the inadequacy of the judgments that are passed from an imperfect seizure of the facts of the case. It will serve to illustrate the inadequacy of the world’s judgments of things that are outside of its province.

An artist in Rome covered all the accessories in the Laocoön group, leaving exposed only the central figure of the father, “with neither sons nor serpents to denote the purpose of his gesture.” Then he stood by to hear the people’s comments. What would they make of the tremendous energy of those legs and arms, and of the eyeballs starting from their sockets? With one exception the uninitiated multitude decided that it was “a yawn of sheer fatigue subsiding to repose,” and the subject of the statue must surely be “Somnolency”! Only one spectator seized upon the truth—

I think the gesture strives

Against some obstacle we cannot see!

When Moses gave up his bright prospects at the Egyptian court and set out for the wilderness, there were many that thought him mad. But they did not see all the elements of the group; they did not see what Moses saw. They failed to take into account his devotion to his God and to his people, and his grounds for faith in the promises that were his people’s heritage. And did he not choose wisely? As one of a line of Pharaohs he could not have failed of having his name and his fame written down on some of the clay tablets of his period, and we might have been digging them up to-day. But as the Leader of Israel and as the Schoolmaster of Christendom, his name and his fame are written in golden letters in the language of almost every people and nation and tribe under heaven. 1 [Note: J. B. Maclean, The Secret of the Stream, 162.]

Beloved, yield thy time to God, for He

Will make eternity thy recompense;

Give all thy substance for His love, and be

Beatified past earth’s experience.

Serve Him in bonds, until He set thee free;

Serve Him in dust, until He lift thee thence;

Till death be swallowed up in victory

When the great trumpet sounds to bid thee hence.

Shall setting day win day that will not set?

Poor price wert thou to spend thyself for Christ,

Had not His wealth thy poverty sufficed:

Yet since He makes His garden of thy clod,

Water thy lily, rose, or violet,

And offer up thy sweetness unto God. 2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 17.]

The Choice of Moses

Literature

Banks (L. A.), On the Trail of Moses, 12.

Bell (C. D.), The Roll-Call of Faith, 178.

Brandt (J. L.), Soul-Saving, 219.

Brown (C.), The Birth of a Nation, 95.

Brown (J.), Sermons with Memoir, 159.

Carroll (B. H.), Sermons, 126.

Chadwick (G. A.), The Book of Exodus , 34.

Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, v. 365.

Dewey (O.), Works, 716.

Hopkins (E. H.), Hidden yet Possessed, 53, 60.

Mackintosh (H. R.), Life on God’s Plan, 15.

Meyer (F. B.), Moses the Servant of God, 17.

Neville (W. G.), Sermons, 290.

Norton (J. N.), Golden Truths, 341.

Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 133.

Peake (A. S.), The Heroes and Martyrs of Faith, 99.

Penn-Lewis (Mrs.), Face to Face, 25.

Plumptre (E. H.), Theology and Life, 147.

Punshon (W. M.), Sermons, ii. 42.

Ramsey (D. M.), in The Southern Baptist Pulpit, 314.

Rawlinson (G.), Moses: His Life and Times, 51.

Ryle (J. C), Faith’s Choice, 1.

Selby (T. G.), The God of the Patriarchs, 163.

Smith (J.), The Permanent Message of the Exodus , 16.

Whitehead (H.), Sermons, 73.

Cambridge Review, ix. Supplement No. 216 (E. H. Bickersteth).

Christian World Pulpit, xxxix. 225 (F. W. Farrar).

Contemporary Pulpit, 2nd Ser., vi. 309 (F. W. Farrar).

Homiletic Review, xlvi. 33 (J. H. Jowett); lvi. 229 (G. E. Reed).

Verse 27

Seeing the Invisible

He endured, as seeing him who is invisible.— Hebrews 11:27.

1. The reference of these striking words is to the lawgiver Moses, who has his place in the great procession of spiritual heroes by title of the faith which he exhibited when, as a young man, he chose rather to be evil entreated with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. According to the popular belief, Moses had an assured position in the court of Egypt, where he was the adopted son of the princess and the favourite of the Pharaoh. This assured position, however, depended upon his acceptance of one condition, which might have seemed easy enough to most men, but which threw into revolt the best elements of this young man’s character. Would he repudiate his ancestral race and disclaim for himself any interest in its mysterious hopes? Would he consent to be an Egyptian, in order to enjoy the future which the romantic circumstances of his childhood had brought within his reach? There was much to induce him to take this course. Scripture represents him as owing much, even his preservation from death, to the kindly interest of the Egyptian princess; he had grown to manhood in the society of Egypt; his link with his own people was the slightest conceivable, although upon it everything depended. Moses, however, had not been so distant from his nation as not to have learned the sacred secret of its religious hope; he had received from his mother when, as nurse, she had reared him for Pharaoh’s daughter, such a training as made it impossible for him to mistake the religious meaning of the decision which in due course he had to take. That decision is expressed in the words of the text, “By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing him who is invisible.”

2. Moses saw something that was invisible to most men—something that was more important than the splendours of the Egyptian Empire. The first thing he saw was his love for his own people—a sort of patriotism, though the Hebrews were then, as now, a nation without a country. There was the call of the blood surging in the ears of Moses. And that was more persuasive than the call of a foreign luxury. But the next thing he saw was more powerful still, just as it was invisible in an even deeper sense than this call of the blood. This second thing was not a thing at all, but a Being—Moses saw God. And the splendours even of Pharaoh shrivelled into nothing in the presence of God. This is what we have, then, in the text: the most impressive and magnificent things upon the surface of life are not really the most important or the most powerful. When an alien empire is pitted against a slave people that is ours, a slave people wins. It is, after all, the stronger, and the more important. And when luxury and wealth are pitted against God, God wins. He is more real and more powerful than armies, and trusts, and all pleasures. That is, the things that shine and shout upon the surface are not the real or important things of life; the things that lie deep, and are silent and invisible—these are the real and important things. Now, it is well that we should understand and believe this. For to-day, as at all times, the things on the surface do shine and shout. They seem supremely attractive. They appeal to the mind and the imagination, as well as to the eye and ear. Empire, wealth, pleasure, success—every man can feel their glamour at once. But God, forgiveness, right, heaven—these are invisible. They cannot compete with the other things in the markets of the world. They fill very little space in our newspapers. They do not figure largely in Parliamentary debates. They are not on the surface. They are not seen at first sight. They are invisible. But they are the great things, the important things, the eternal things.

3. In the life of Moses, then, the secret which explains all else was just the sight of the invisible. Faith, when it is directed upon this object, has the attribute of sight. For such belief is, indeed, a second sight; it is the operation of a new sense opened upon another and invisible world. Moses saw God. This clear sight of a living Being who did not meet the eye of sense is a different sort of motive from that which has always governed, and still does govern, the greater and the lesser rulers of mankind. The sight of the Invisible means an addition to knowledge which itself is power—power of a very high order, considering who the Invisible is. They who discern beyond the narrow limits of this present existence the outline of an eternal and imperishable world, and Him in whom that world centres—these men see, or hear, in true proportion. They hope for nothing, they are surprised at nothing: they are sure that all will be right in the end. They pass, one after another, before us, and away from us, endowed with a calm and majestic strength—a strength which this high vision bestows—having their eyes fixed on the invisible.

The text is in two parts—

I. The Secret of Moses’ Greatness—“He endured.”

II. The Secret of Moses’ Endurance—“As seeing him who is invisible.”

I

The Secret of Moses’ Greatness

“He endured.”

1. It is not by any accident of rhetoric that the word “endured” is linked with the name of Moses in the text, for, of all the characters in the Bible, or in all biography for that matter, none more fitly illustrates the moral quality of endurance. There may have been men more brave and more eloquent; but in this homely virtue no man stands nearer the summit of moral greatness. He came there not by chance. He was not swept there by fortunate circumstances. He aimed at it by deliberate choice; he attained to it by earnest striving; he maintained it by prolonged effort. If he had chosen to take life easy few had better opportunity. If he had been content to go with the drift of circumstance he might have possessed the treasures of Egypt and filled the throne of the Pharaohs. He could easily have reached the summit of that kind of greatness, and instead of filling an unknown grave in the wilderness of Moab he might have been an embalmed mummy in the museum of Cairo, the object of the pilgrimage of the learned and the curious. But when he came to maturity of thought and moral responsibility, he weighed all these material things, and over against them and above them he saw a moral duty, a moral ideal, something better worth living for.

What do you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we must deal with them. In all important transactions of life we have to take a leap in the dark. If we decide to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is a choice; but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? “Be strong and of a good courage.” Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. 1 [Note: J. Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 353.]

2. The choice of Moses was a moral duty. Having made it, he strove to make it good. Often weakened by his own natural timidity, and praying God to relieve him and send a stronger man to the task, he yet endured. Tempted by wealth and by position, he yet resisted and endured. Threatened by royal power, banished from the royal presence, a fugitive from royal wrath, he endured. Tried by the clamour of men and by the solitude of the wilderness for forty years, he yet endured. Bowed down by the pusillanimity and ingratitude of those for whom he made the sacrifice, he yet rose again, and again resolved, determined, and endured until he led his people to the threshold of assured liberty and saw the promised land of his dreams and of his choice. So much can a man in earnest do. Next in power to the spirit of God is the spirit of a sincere, determined, enduring man. “He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.” “Behold, we count them happy which endure.” Abraham, “after he had patiently endured obtained the promise.” Endurance, then, has more of stress in it, more of value, more of character in it, than any word in our language. Endurance is the crowning virtue of character.

Then she turned to the Crimea, described the sufferings and the endurance of the troops, and drew her moral: “Upon those who watched, week after week and month after month, this enduring courage, this unalterable patience, simplicity, and good strength, this voiceless strength to suffer and be still, it has made an impression never to be forgotten. The Anglo-Saxon on the Crimean heights has won for himself a greater name than the Spartan at Thermopylæ, as the six months’ struggle to endure was a greater proof of what man can do than the six hours’ struggle to fight. The traces of the name and sacrifice of Iphigeneia may still be seen in Taurus: but a greater sacrifice has been there accomplished by a ‘handful’ of brave men who defended that fatal position, even to the death. And if Inkerman now bears a name like that of Thermopylæ, so is the story of those terrible trenches, through which these men patiently and deliberately, and week after week, went, till they returned no more, greater than that of Inkerman. Truly were the Sebastopol trenches, to our men, like the gate of the Infernal Regions—‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate.’ And yet these men would refuse to report themselves sick, lest they should throw more labour on their comrades. They would draw their blankets over their heads and die without a word. Well may it be said that there is hardly an example in history to compare with this long and silent fortitude.” 1 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 316.]

I peered within, and saw a world of sin;

Upward, and saw a world of righteousness,

Downward, and saw darkness and flame begin

Which no man can express.

I girt me up, I gat me up to flee

From face of darkness and devouring flame:

And fled I had, but guilt is loading me

With dust of death and shame.

Yet still the light of righteousness beams pure,

Beams to me from the world of far-off day:—

Lord, who hast called them happy that endure,

Lord, make me such as they. 1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 193.]

II

The Secret of Moses’ Endurance

“As seeing him who is invisible.”

The faculty of faith, which is the power of endurance under circumstances of alarm and peril, might be analysed into the two qualities of insight and foresight. By it Moses was enabled to divine the actual relative importance of the facts of experience, to look beyond the present, and to see the ultimate destiny of things. Pharaoh’s wrath was no doubt at the moment very formidable, but to one who had realized that Pharaoh was opposing himself to the Divine purpose, and who could therefore see the king’s final overthrow as an assured event, his wrath, however fierce, was stripped of terror. The wretched bondsmen of Israel were to all outward appearance a forlorn and undone people, with whom it would be perilous to be associated, but to one who could see through that miserable aspect to the intrinsic and undying superiority which Israel possessed in the covenant relationship with the God of Abraham, all this external weakness counted for nothing. What St. John says of the Christian faith might be said of all faith in some sense and measure. It is “the victory which overcometh the world.”

1. In nature, as in religion, it is the invisible that is most important and real. We live in a world that appeals at once to our senses—a world of light, of sound, of touch, and of taste; a world of sun and sky, of sweeping horizons and flowing rivers, of trees, and thunderstorms, and fire; a world of hunger, and disease, and death. But the most important things in all this natural world are not the things that we can see. What is the secret of the growing corn? Take a grain from the ear. A learned man could tell you all about its various parts—the little

rootlet tucked away, the little leaflet folded up, each ready to open out if the grain should be let fall into the earth. And then there is the little bag of food attached which would then go to build up the new plant, at the beginning of its life. This is the bag of food which we take to make our flour and bread. But when you have seen these things you have not seen the chief thing. The chief thing is invisible. It is neither the leaf nor the root. It is not even the little mass of food. It is the life. Put that seed under the microscope, and you will not see the life. Test it chemically, and you cannot find it. Burn it, and it neither goes up in the smoke nor remains behind in the ash. The chief thing, the most important thing, is the life, and that is invisible.

Let me here quote a noble sentence, which has often given me much-needed help, and served to remind me that thought is after all as real a thing as matter, when I have been tempted to feel otherwise. It was written by a very wise and tender philosopher, William James, who was never betrayed by his own severe standard of truth and reality into despising the common dreams and aspirations of simpler men. He wrote: “I find it preposterous to suppose that if there be a feeling of unseen reality, shared by numbers of the best men in their best moments, responded to by other men in their deep moments, good to live by, strength-giving—I find it preposterous, I say, to suppose that the goodness of that feeling for living purposes should be held to carry no objective significance, and especially preposterous if it combines harmoniously with an otherwise grounded philosophy of objective truth.” That is a very large and tolerant utterance, both in its suspension of impatient certainties and in its beautiful sympathy with all ardent visions that cannot clearly and convincingly find logical utterance. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Joyous Gard (1913), 160.]

2. Science and the mastery of nature progress as men are able to see the invisible beneath the surface of the visible. The natural man, or savage, sees the obvious. The civilized or scientific man sees the invisible. Science does not really invent; it discovers. There were just as many natural forces in the garden of Eden as there are in Kensington Gardens. But in Kensington Gardens there are motor-cars. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic he had about him all the forces necessary not only to discover America, but to send wireless telegrams. But we had to wait four hundred years before men learnt to send the telegrams. Never let it be said, then, that religion is an unnatural and foolish affair because it attends to the invisible, and says that God and heaven are more important than Parliaments and this world. The religious man seeks the invisible; so does the scientist. The prophets and apostles say that the invisible is the most important; so does every manufacturer who understands his own business.

In overcast days they could tell the snowy ice-fields far ahead that they could not see, by their reflection on the clouds, and in the same way they can see where open water is by its dark shadow on the heavens in contrast with the white reflection of the snows. 1 [Note: Captain R. F. Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery, i. 121.]

Any religion would be a calamity which quenched this sense of the great human adventure in the unknown. There is no certainty which could be other than dull, hard, and materialistic, compared with the infinite hopes and possibilities of this spiritual quest. Only stupid people sneer at the man who says “Credo quia impossibile.” To have faith in the impossible is precisely the function of religion. 2 [Note: J. A. Spender, The Comments of Bagshot.]

Clive was in a painfully anxious situation. He could place no confidence in the sincerity or in the courage of his confederate: and whatever confidence he might place in his own military talents, and in the valour and discipline of his troops, it was no light thing to engage an army twenty times as numerous as his own. Before him lay a river over which it was easy to advance, but over which, if things went ill, not one of his little band would ever return. On this occasion, for the first and for the last time, his dauntless spirit, during a few hours, shrank from the fearful responsibility of making a decision. He called a council of war. The majority pronounced against fighting; and Clive declared his concurrence with the majority. Long afterwards, he said that he had never called but one council of war, and that, if he had taken the advice of that council, the British would never have been masters of Bengal. But scarcely had the meeting broken up when he was himself again. He retired alone under the shade of some trees, and passed near an hour there in thought. He came back determined to put every thing to the hazard, and gave orders that all should be in readiness for passing the river on the morrow. 3 [Note: Macaulay, Essays Historical and Critical.]

3. It was this truth that received such signal illustration in the career of him to whom the Lord spake face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend; and as each of the three stages of his life called for a different manifestation of the endurance which characterized it all through, we may take these in ordar to show that the vision of God is the secret of endurance (1) amid the temptations of society; (2) amid the temptations of solitude; and (3) amid the temptations of active work.

(1) The vision of God is the secret of endurance amid the temptations of society.—Moses made the great renunciation of his life. For better, for worse, he chose to identify himself with the fallen fortunes of his people, and to work for their release. A mighty purpose, therefore, now fired his soul, and, amid such temptations as Egypt still presented, he endured, as seeing Him who is invisible. And it is the vision of God that is the secret of endurance amid similar temptations in every age. Their form may change, but neither their number nor their power. At a thousand points, consciously or unconsciously, directly or indirectly, casually or permanently, for good or for evil, we are touched by the influences of our environment. If these are openly and aggressively hostile to good, or, as is more likely to be the case, subtly and secretly suggestive of evil, it is vain to hope that common sense, superior education, æsthetic taste, regard for the opinions of others, strength of will, or even moral grit, will under all circumstances suffice to counteract them. These may all be more or less helpful; but for the complete conquest of such temptations as society growingly presents to individual weakness and folly and the inherent love of sin, for the successful subjugation of the world, the flesh and the devil, there is needed the strength which is generated by the clear and constant vision of God. The youth who leaves the country to face the complex life of the city without the help of parental example and restraint, the public official or mercantile pioneer who goes to lands beyond the sea where the prevailing social standard is lower and looser than at home, every man conscious of tendencies within him which a daily crucifixion of self alone can subdue—all need the vision of God if they are to maintain their endurance and their manhood amid the manifold perplexities in which they may find themselves. For this alone has power enough to dispel all moral darkness, and make clear the path which must be trod, if life is to be crowned with victory alike for self and for God.

The world is in many ways, and in mysterious ways, a strong world—a world that demands a store of gracious strength to bear up against it, or to match it. Under so fell a pressure of outward atmosphere, there is call for fulness of inward atmosphere, if yielding or collapse is to make no part of our experience. It were wise to warn ourselves that the heart of all unbelief around us is a heart of opposition to the root and branch of our Christian vitality. We shall often let this vitality suffer unless we ourselves are ready to suffer, to deny ourselves, to hold our own at the cost of pain—the best of our own, which is God’s and Christ’s. And we must hold up and hold on, too, amid the bristling enmities and thick-coming cajoleries with as much of superiority to weak impatience and unholy wrath, to world-like temper and smallness of spirit, as God’s grace can empower us to display. Christ would have us to be magnanimous in the world’s hands as Faithful in Vanity Fair was; and for that we need, most of all, just the faith which was his. There is nothing which more impresses the unbelieving with the sublime sacredness of that which they are withstanding in us, than the firm yet patient and large-hearted endurance of all which they are pleased to lay upon us as those who claim a citizenship in heaven—an endurance which faith at once supports and sweetens. At every turn, it is still this which is “the victory” that gives us the conquest of “the world.” 1 [Note: J. A. Ken-Bain, The People of the Pilgrimage, i. 186.]

(2) The vision of God is the secret of endurance amid the temptations of solitude.—“As seeing him who is invisible,” Moses fled into Midian. There for the next forty years he exchanged the temptations of wealth and high position for those of comparative poverty and all but unbroken solitude. As he made effort to penetrate the secret of the inscrutable experience through which he had passed, there would be comfort in the reflection that, whatever else might be lacking in Midian, the artificiality of Egyptian society at least was left far behind. He was free from the incubus of false philosophy and false religion and from other abominations which his soul abhorred. But the ultimate experience of not a few has been that solitude too often belies its promise and develops temptations peculiar to itself; and there are many sad chapters in the history of monasticism that might be cited in proof. There is a world within as well as a world without a man, and no withdrawal from the latter will secure against encroachments on the former. “Out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man.” So said He who was holy, harmless, and undefiled; and it remains eternally true that the real seat of the evil which proves man’s undoing is not in his circumstances but in himself. And that Moses did not succumb to the temptations of his Midian isolation was due to the fact that, during his long sojourn, he never wholly lost the vision of God.

I have learnt by experience that it is not good to be much alone, but I have not learnt not to enjoy solitude. It is a sweet cup enough, but a subtle poison lurks in its pale beaded amber transparency. It is mischievous, because in solitude the mind runs its own busy race unchecked. To have to mix with other people, to find things that interest them, to humour them, to watch their glances and gestures, is to a person like myself, who is constrained, less even by sympathy than by courtesy, to try to be agreeable, a real and wholesome discipline. I do not want to make myself out as unselfish or genial; but it is a pain to me if any one in whose company I am is discontented or displeased, and I am consequently obliged, for my own comfort ultimately, to keep other people in a good humour. But whether it is altruism or courtesy or mere self-interest matters little. Left to itself, my mind develops a sort of mechanical current, plods along a beaten track, sets itself one way like a flag in a steady wind, and the result is a sort of stupor which is enervating and morbid. It becomes stagnant, and just as stagnant water gives a chance for all sorts of slimy, coiling, flaccid things, half-animal, half-plant, to breed and huddle in the dim warm liquid, so it is with the mind; while the touch of life freshens and enlivens it, like a pool through which a stream flows and ripples. 1 [Note: A. C. Benson, Thy Rod and Thy Staff, 200.]

(3) The vision of God is the secret of endurance amid the temptations of active work.—The extreme diffidence with which Moses entered upon his mighty task is in singular contrast with the self-confidence which characterized him forty years before. Then he had thought that his human equipment was enough; now he doubts his sufficiency even with the help of the Divine. Ah, when God has a specially difficult and delicate work for any man to do, He makes him serve a long apprenticeship; but when it is done, it is work against which even the gates of hell cannot prevail. His pride humbled by past failure, and himself made somewhat timid by long isolation from his fellows, it was only a man who saw God, and whose magnificent faith enabled others to see Him, that could do what Moses did. What but this vision could have nerved him to withstand Pharaoh and all the might of Egypt as he did, and at last to lead the people forth into the freedom for which they had prayed and hoped so long? And what but this vision could have enabled him to bear as he did with the frequent backslidings and murmurings and petulances of the demoralized and fickle horde during their long experiences of the wilderness—experiences which were as necessary in their case as they had been in his own if they were to unlearn the evil of Egypt and become a holy nation, a peculiar people to Jehovah?

In these fiercely competitive days, work and temptation are all but convertible terms. As one of our wisest teachers has said: “It is a strange thing how business dulls the sharpness of the spiritual affections. It is strange how the harass of perpetual occupation shuts out God. It is strange how much mingling with the world, politics, and those things which belong to advancing civilization—things which are very often in the way of our duty—deaden the delicate sense of right and wrong.” And in this connexion it is somewhat startling to reflect that the same rule holds good in regard to work for God. Not because we are engaged in work for Him are we beyond the reach of temptation. In earnest, active service, it is true, we are as far removed from the grosser forms of it as it is possible to be in this world; but there are temptations which assail the higher nature as well as the lower, and from these not even the most devoted Christian worker is wholly free. At Meribah Moses gave not God the glory, but spake unadvisedly with his lips; and the temptation which overbore his endurance there is our temptation too. 1 [Note: W. H. Macfarlane, Redemptive Service, 51.]

One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,

One lesson which in every wind is blown,

One lesson of two duties kept at one

Though the loud world proclaim their enmity—

Of toil unsever’d from tranquillity;

Of labour, that in lasting fruit outgrows

Far noisier schemes, accomplish’d in repose,

Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.

Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring,

Man’s fitful uproar mingling with his toil,

Still do thy sleepless ministers move on,

Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting;

Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil,

Labourers that shall not fail, when man is gone. 1 [Note: Matthew Arnold.]

Seeing the Invisible

Literature

Drysdale (A. H.), Christ Invisible Our Gain, 303.

Gunsaulus (F. W.), Paths to Power, 35.

Henson (H. H.), Godly Union and Concord, 113.

Koven (J. de), Sermons, 155.

Macfarlane (W. H.), Redemptive Service, 37.

Mackenzie (R.), The Loom of Providence, 88.

Williams (H. C.), Christ the Centre, 87.

Wright (D.), The Power of an Endless Life, 30.

Christian World Pulpit, lxvii. 294 (H. H. Henson); lxxi. 185 (N. H. Marshall).