Death comes to set thee free; Oh, meet him cheerily
As thy true friend. And all thy fears shall cease, And in eternal peace
Thy penance end.^
^ De la Motte FonquiJ.
DEUTERONOMY xxxiv. 5, 6 b;
iv. Death less than Life.
1. Scripture speaks much of life and little of the manner of dying. Men imagine that the hour of death is the greatest test of faith in God, and thus they are not satisfied unless they know that in the last hours of a great and good man that faith shone out with unusual splendour. The Bible speaks of the battle of life as the real test of faith ; and having told us that its heroes fought that battle faithfully, it does not stay to tell us whether their faith flashed out brightly in the end. Men think of death as a dark and awful mystery to be undergone with all possible heroism, and thus they inquire eagerly after death-bed experi- ences, and delight to dwell on triumphant departures. The Bible speaks of the death of the good as of the entrance into the blessed presence of Him whom they had served here; and having told us that His servants served Him, having spoken of their Divine heroism in living and doing, it seldom describes the close of their course, leaving us to feel that God took care of them then. Thus we have no long description of the death of Moses. The book, indeed, does record his last words to the people, but in them he speaks not of his own feelings, but of God ; he does not attract their attention to his experience, but shows them how God had guided every step of their way. And thus, in speaking of a man whom it describes as one of the greatest prophets of all time, God's Book says with sublime simplicity, "So Moses died, and the Lord buried him."
If Jewish, Mussulman, and Christian traditions crowd in to fill up the blank. " Amidst the tears of the people, the women beating their breasts and the children giving way to uncontrolled wailing, he withdrew. At a certain point in his ascent he made a sign to the weeping multitude to advance no farther, taking with him only the elders, the high priest Eliezer, and the general Joshua. At the top of the mountain he dismissed the elders, and then, as he was embracing Eliezer and Joshua, and still speaking to them, a cloud suddenly stood over him, and he vanished in a deep valley." So spoke the tradition as preserved in the language, here unusually pathetic, of Josephus. Other wilder stories told of the Divine kiss which drew forth his expiring spirit ; others of the " Ascension of Moses " amidst the contention of good and evil spirits over his body. The Mussul- mans, regardless of the actual scene of his death, have raised to
88 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES
him a tomb on the western side of the Jordan, frequented by thousands of Mussulman devotees. But the silence of the sacred narrative refuses to be broken. " In " that strange land, " the land of Moab, Moses the servant of the Lord died, according to the word of the Lord." " He buried him in ' a ravine ' in the land of Moab, over against the idol temple of Peor." Apart from his countrymen, honoured by no funeral obsequies, visited by no grateful pilgrimages, "no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day."^
^ The Bible is the book of life. Its pages teem with biography; they contain but scant memorials of death. The only death they describe at length is that of Him who in dying slew death. The very minuteness of the description there shows how unique and all-important it was. Men make more of death than of life as a gauge of character. A few pious sentences spoken then will go far to efface the memory of years of incon- sistency. God makes most of life.^
"Are saints Enskied," I asked, "so linked with living men?" "The brightest lily of the Lenten woods," He said "arrayed in livery of the sun, Depends upon a buried bulb; the bulb Depends on mediating leaves that bring The breath of Heaven to the dust of earth; And so the Church in glory, rest and war Has triune life or none. Can clouds exist Without the sun or sea ? Would light and sound Survive if air were dead ? All things that are Interdepend eternally. Herein Consists the awfulness of human life, That no man knows the confines of a sin, The generations of a virtuous deed; And hence the obligation to entreat All men with tender charity, since al. Are victims if offenders too; and oft The fractures of the wicked are derived From flaws of saints. And since one perfect Life Can leaven all, perhaps one sinning soul Can stay the bliss of all the Church of God."^
2. But was Moses' life so profound a failure ? The history before us gives us the answer. The purpose that Moses might
' A. P. Stanley, History of the Jeioish Church, i. 178.
^ V. B. Meyer. ' Anna Bunston, The Porch of Paradite, 32.
, DEUTERONOMY xxxiv. 5. 6 89
not carry out was to be accomplished by Joshua, his successor. His life, therefore, had not failed ; the hope he had thought to realize was yet to be realized in another way — for his labour had inspired a man who had caught his spirit, and was to finish the work he had begun. In that knowledge Moses might rest. There is a spiritual connexion between men. One race is united by spiritual ties of influence to the succeeding race ; age is joined by bonds of influence to age, Man is this bond for ever to future generations. He dies, and the spirit of his life is caught by his successors — so even here he " fulfils his course." Therefore no life is ever lost, no holy purpose ever really fails. The life of Stephen, the first martyr, seemed like a hurried dream ; he had just entered God's army when in the first conflict he died. Men might say "he died before his time." The Church made great lamentation over him. Its strongest soldier had gone. His life seemed vain. But his spirit entered the soul of St. Paul ! So with the martyrs of the first ages. Their spirit lives yet. The mantles of departing prophets fall on other men, and clothe these with power to accomplish the work they had to leave unfinished.