^W. L. Watkinson.
22 REMEMBER ALL THE WAY
angiy seas upon which we have been tossed and the dark entries through which we have groped our uncertain way ?
IT I was sailing down the St. John Eiver, Canada, which is the Rhine and the Hudson commingled in one scene of beauty and grandeur, and while I was on the deck of the steamer a gentleman pointed out to me the places of interest, and he said, "All this is interval land, and it is the richest land in all the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia." "What," said I, " do you mean by interval land ? " " Well," he said, " this land is submerged for a part of the year ; spring freshets come down, and all these plains are overflowed with the water ; the water leaves a rich deposit, and when the waters are gone the crop springs up, and there is the grandest harvest that was ever reaped." And I instantly thought, " It is not the heights of the Church and it is not the heights of this world that are the scene of the greatest prosperity ; it is the soul over which the floods of sorrow have gone„ the soul over which the freshets of tribulation have torn their way, that yields the greatest fruits of righteous- ness, and the largest harvest for time, and the richest harvest for eternity." Bless God that your soul is interval land.^
All around I heard the whispering larches
Swinging to the low-lipped wind; God, they piped, is lilting in our arches,
For He loveth leafen kind.
Ferns I heard, unfolding from their slumber,
Say confiding to the reed: God well knoweth us. Who loves to number
Us and all our fairy seed.
Voices hummed as of a multitude
Crowding from their lowly sod; 'Twas the stricken daisies where I stood,
Crying to the daisies' God.^
% I read the other day of some travellers who were going through Asia, and who came to a very dismal valley; it was filled with the bones of men and animals that had been killed on the heights, and been carried down by the torrents. It was a dreary and desolate place, and they said, "We will call this ' The Valley of Dry Bones.' " But the next morning, when they got to the top, they saw a rare butterfly, a most beautiful thing, fluttering in the pleasant sunshine. One of then) caught it, and
» T. de Witt Talmage. * Shane Leslie.
DEUTERONOMY vm. 2 23
they were all filled with admiratiou and wonder at the beauty of its wings, and they said, " We will not call this valley ' The Valley of Dry Bones ' ; we will call it ' The Butterfly Pass.' " ^
IV.
Eemember the Pueposb of God.
1. These chapters of Deuteronomy purport to be a kind of valedictory or compendious summing up by Moses of the salient points of Hebrew history since the days of the Exodus. They had been casting about in the frightful desert of Sin, a tract lying south of Palestine, into which desolate region they entered after leaving the Eed Sea. Their apparently aimless wanderings had consumed forty years, and towards the close of that period, and as his own end drew nigh, Moses is reported to have de- livered this farewell discourse. He reminds his people of the battles they had fought with the Canaanitish tribes, the diffi- culties that blocked their advance, and the discouragements that appalled them. He also states the conditions upon which their future prosperity and permanence depend, that they must re- member Mount Horeb and the Decalogue ; and he intimates the reason why, instead of marching directly up out of Egypt into the promised possession, they had been led by such a toilsome, circuitous route. It was not because they could not have reached their inheritance by a shorter cut ; indeed, ninety days at the utmost would have sufficed to bring them, bag and baggage, man and beast, into the land of milk and honey. But, says their great leader, remember that it has required forty years to ac- complish this march, and this in order to put you under con- ditions that should test the qualities of your disposition, and to ascertain whether or not you were made of stern stuff and were fit for your new responsibihties.
Such, then, appears to be the theory of Moses concerning the Hebrew Exodus ; it was virtually an examination into character, an investigation into the national propensities and tastes. The Divine idea was not to carry them all safe to Canaan, and land them punctually, according to a pre-arranged schedule, but rather, by a winnowing process, to discover who were fit to
» J. M. Gibbon.
24 REMEMBER ALL THE WAY
arrive, and who among them would make the best material for the new political structure. Hence they traversed the wilder- ness of Paran, marching and countermarching, hithering and thithering, now camping, now all afoot again, for forty tedious years, when a fraction of the period would have set a term to their pilgrimage, if done in a concerted, rapid manner, and if the question had been simply a geographical one. But, as a matter of fact, it was a moral question, and this made a vast difference.