3. Balaam envied the prospects of the dying Hebrew ; but when we consider the blessedness of those who die " in the Lord," we feel that his old prayer is truer than ever. The earliest recorded example is that of St. Stephen. At his trial his enemies gnashed upon him with their teeth, but his Friend in heaven brought instant help.
^ A minister of the gospel died at the early age of thirty-seven. Some days before the end, his wife asked him how he was, and he replied that he felt very ill, " but unspeakably happy in ray dear Lord Jesus." The last day he lived, his wife repeated the familiar lines from Dr. Watts —
"Jesus can make a dying bed Feel soft as downy pillows are."
The dying man replied, " Yes, He can. He does. I feel it." «
' J. W. Coleuso, » J. A. Clapperton.
424 THE DEATH TO DIE
^ Ou the thirtieth of January, 1646, Father Anne de Noue set out from Three Rivers to go to the fort built by the French at the mouth of the river Eichelieu, where he was to say mass and hear confessions. De Noue was sixty-three years old, and had come to Canada in 1625. As an indiflerent memory disabled him from mastering the Indian languages, he devoted himself to the spiritual charge of the French, and of the Indians about the forts within reach of an interpreter. For the rest, he attended the sick, and in times of scarcity fished in the river, or dug roots in the woods for the subsistence of his flock. In short, though sprung from a noble family of Champagne, he shrank from no toil, how- ever humble, to which his idea of duty or his vow of obedience called him. The old missionary had for companions two soldiers and a Huron Indian. They wandered from their course, and at evening encamped on the shore of the island of St. Ignace. At daybreak parties went out to search. The two soldiers were readily found, but they looked in vain for the missionary. All day they were ranging the ice, firing their guns and shouting; but to no avail, and they returned disconsolate. There was a converted Indian, whom the French called Charles, at the fort, one of four who were spending the winter there. On the next morning, the second of February, he and one of his companions, together with Baron, a French soldier, resumed the search; and, guided by the slight depressions in the snow which had fallen on the wanderer's footprints, the quick-eyed savages traced him through all his windings, found his camp by the shore of the island, and thence followed him beyond the fort. He had passed near without discovering it — perhaps weakness had dimmed his sight — stopped to rest at a point a league above, and thence made his way about three leagues farther. Here they found him. He had dug a circular excavation in the snow, and was kneeling in it on the earth. His head was bare, his eyes open and turned upwards, and his hands clasped on his breast. His hat and his snow-shoes lay at his side. The body was leaning slightly forward, resting against the bank of snow before it, and frozen to the hardness of marble. Thus, in an act of kindness and charity, died the first martyr of the Canadian mission.'
Oh, safe for evermore,
With never a weird to dree: Is any burden sore
When one's beloved goes free ? Come pain, come woe to me, My well-beloved goes free !
' Francis Parkman, TTi^-: Jesuits in North America, li. 76.
NUMBERS XXIII. lo 425
You are so far away,
And yet have come so near: On many a heavy day
I think of you, my dear, Safe in your shelter there, Christ's hand upon your hair.^
IV.
The Death of Balaam.
1. " Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his ! " Was ever prayer more beautiful than this ? Was ever answer to prayer sadder ? Falstaff " babbling 0' green fields," the old backslider trying to grope his way in the dark to the green pasture of the 23rd Psalm, is a less tragic sight than Balaam's headless form huddled among the heap of Midian's dead.
2. Foiled in his attempt to procure a curse on Israel by means of sacrifices and incantations, Balaam, as we are told in the Apocalypse, tried to effect his end by indirect and yet more devilish means. Purity of mind and body, and freedom from idolatry, were the very conditions on which Israel enjoyed the Divine favour. If they could be tempted to anything at variance with these, their doom was sealed. So reasoned the prophet, and applying his very knowledge of God to the service of the devil, he taught Balak his vile secret. If he could seduce the Israelites to commit fornication, and to join in the unhallowed sacrifices of the lewd god of Peor, they might still be ruined. The 25th chapter of Numbers shows the partial success of this infernal artifice. And when we take it in connexion with the brief notice in a subsequent passage, that in warring with Moab they slew Balaam also, the son of Beor, with the sword, we are driven to suppose that, after returning home to Pethor unsuccessful in the first instance, Balaam had actually gone back to Balak, to induce him to try seduction on those against whom magic had been powerless ; that he had awaited there the issue of his vile suggestions, and had at length died in arms, fighting against the nation whose only offence against him had been that God had not allowed him