In the Mount.
1. Mountains. — It is perhaps impossible to estimate the influence which mountains have on the thought and imagination of a religious mind. There is a solemn grandeur about mountain scenery which projects an impress upon life and character. The summit of a mountain is instinctively connected in the human mind with thoughts of God and an approach to the Infinite. Throughout the Bible there is abundant illustration of this mountain influence. The ancient Hebrew poets dwelt among the mountains. Mountains filled their imagination and inspired their songs. Nature taught them to love the mountains and to find in them a meeting-place with God.
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^ Both in the life of Moses and in the life of Christ, mountains were the scene of many of the most signal events of their histories. Like two rivers, the secrets of their power are up among the silent hills. Horeb, with its flaming bush, Sinai's rugged peaks, invested with dark clouds of the Divine glory, Pisgah, commanding the extended landscape of Canaan's fertile valleys and fruitful slopes, and Nebo, where he went up to die, are mountains that correspond in the life of Moses to Hattin and Hermon, the lowly Calvary and beautiful Olivet, in the life of Christ. It was on those meeting-places of earth and heaven, far above all noise and din of men, that Moses so often spoke with Grod, and received strength for his arduous mission, and it was in the solitude of the hills — not rugged, fire-coloured, beetling cliffs like those of the desert, but hills mantled with foliage, around whose breast the vine threw her tendrils, and on whose brow the olive and the pine held the harp of their branches to the winds — it was in the solitude of such hills that the Son of Man wrestled in His nightly prayer, and held those deep communings with His Father which renewed His strength. God has dignified those grand temples, eloquent in silence, with events far more sublime than their own majesty, and far more awe- inspiring than their own stupendous forms.
We lingered long, for dearer
Than home were the mountain places
Where God from the stars dropt nearer Our pale, dreamy faces.
Our very hearts from beating
We stilled in awed delight. For spirit and children were meeting
In the purple, ample night.^
2. Moses a man of prayer. — ^To a man who trusts in God responsibility must always be an impetus to prayer. And so it was in the life of Moses. We cannot read the story in the early books of the Bible without having the truth brought very closely home that Moses was a man of prayer. He never forgot the need of supplication, of asking God to help him in every hour of his difficulties as he led the children of Israel through the many trials of the wilderness. He never forgot that he was in God's hands. He did not think of how he himself could gain
' A. E., The Divine Vision, 66.
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honour, but he remembered that we must seek first the honour and glory of God. And so throughout his life he was one who spent much time in God's presence, and all this had an effect upon his character.
3. Moses in commimion vnth God. — Prayer, in its most perfect form, is communion with God. It is in communion with God that every soul finds satisfaction for its highest needs, and there is also a sense in which all who are called upon to lead Christ's flock must experience a greater need than those who are led. How keenly this need is sometimes felt by us may be fitly expressed in the words of Longfellow —
0 blessed Lord! how much I need Thy light to guide me on my way! So many hands, that, without heed.
Still touch thy wounds, and make them bleed! So many feet, that, day by day, Still wander from thy fold astray! Unless thou fill me with thy light,
1 cannot lead thy flock aright; Nor, without thy support, can bear The burden of so great a care, But am myself a castaway.
4. Having come down from the Mount, Moses stands before us in the glory of a spiritual transfiguration. What transfigured him? In the answer to this question lies the grand secret of his life. Communion with God: that was what transfigured him, and gave him power. Aa Moses stands before us with his shining face, he is a spiritual and refined image of the highest dream of aspiring humanity.
T When Michael Angelo had finished his famous colossal statue of David, " the Giant," many of his friends who had not seen him during the years when he was working upon it in Florence declared with great surprise that he was changed; his face was changed. And as they looked at the statue, and then at the skilful chiseller, it was seen that he had carved his con- ception of David, not only into the beautiful whifie stone, but also, all unconsciously, into the lines of his own beautified, ennobled face.^
* 8. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Bcme IdeaiLy 25.
324 UNCONSCIOUS GLORY
IL
Hb wist not.
1. "When Moses camo down from the Mount, he wist not that the skin of his face shone by reason of God's speaking with him." It is strange that while the multitude recognized the intense spiritual emotion which shone through his flesh — a reflex of the radiance of the face of God — Moses himself was un- conscious of it. " He wist not that the skin of his face shone." Few and simple as those words are, there could be none grander written to the memory of a hero. The noblest and loftiest character is assuredly that of the man who is so absorbed in the divine nature of his calling, and so conscious of the need of those for whom he labours, that he becomes forgetful of the beauty in his character which others recognize, and almost un- conscious that he is himself the worker. And so we picture Moses, descending from the Mount into the midst of the people, beautiful with the divine beauty of holiness — the glory of God shining through his features — yet all unconscious of his beauty.