^ To labour and not to see the end of our labours ; to sow and not to reap; to be removed from this earthly scene before our work has been appreciated, and when it will be carried on not by ourselves, but by others — is a law so common in the highest characters of history, that none can be said to be altogether exempt from its operation. It is true in intellectual matters as well as in spiritual ; and one of the finest applications of any passage in the Mosaic history is that first made by Cowley, and enlarged by Lord Macaulay, to the great English philosopher, who
Did on the very border stand
Of the blessed Promised Land;
And from the mountain's top of his exalted wit
Saw it himself, and show'd us it;
But life did never to one man allow
Time to discover worlds and conquer too.^
Each generation, however much it may seem to be absorbed in its own interests, works, not really for itself, but for a generation to come. That sense of incompleteness, of disappointment, which
» A. P. Stanley.
90 THE DEATH AND BURIAL OF MOSES
so often hangs like a cloud over the best work — work which has conscience, enthusiasm, and duty in it — is not final, it is only the veil which hides the land of promise from the gaze of the tired worker. Moses had to lay down his life's work and forgo his own reward just as it seemed within his grasp, hut yet he found his vindication in the greatness of a people whom, more than anyone, he had striven to make. He had to let go all the vital interests with which his life was bound up, as it were before his time, and yet time proved that he was right.
^ When we have done, as Moses did, what we have power and wisdom for, God, in the order of the world, takes the work out of our hands and gives it to another who will do the rest better than we could do it. If we lived on, the work would then be unfinished. It is by our death that it comes to a finish, in the hands of another. A porcelain cup passes, in a great manufactory, from hand to hand till it is completed. A young hand, seeing the cup taken from him without the handle, might think, "Alas, why may I not finish ? My work is spoiled." He does not know that another man in the next room will put on the handle better than he.^
We are to die; but even I perceive
'Tis not a very hard thing so to die.
My cousin of the pale-blue tearful eyes,
Poor Cesca, suffers more from one day's life
With the stern husband; Tisbe's heart goes forth
Each evening after that wild son of hers,
To track his thoughtless footstep through the streets :
How easy for them both to die like this !
I am not sure that I could live as they.^
II.
Death, in the Desekt.
Moses' time had come. But he was none the less with God. And when he felt the time draw near, he went to the top of a high mountain whence he could see the land of Israel's heritage. Many have wished — it is especially a prophet's wish — to be alone in death, alone in the silence of nature, high up, nearer the stars, where one may be able, in the absence of the noise of earth, to
1 S. A. Broolce.
^ Browning, A Soxd'i Tragedy.
DEUTERONOMY xxxiv. 5, 6 91
realize the nearness of the invisible Spirit. So he was carried to the top of Pisgah, and left in solitude on that peak of Pisgah which is called Nebo ; and from thence he saw the country- promised to his fathers. It is a mighty landscape, and there is scarcely a point in it which did not afterwards become a memory in the history of the Jewish people, scarcely a name which has not some significance in the spiritual history of mankind. There, to the north, lay Gilead and the mountain plateau divided by the ford of Jabbok, rocky plains, hill pastures, forests of oak and pine ; and beyond, Gennesaret and Merom, all the wild land on either side of Jordan, crowned by the eternal snows of Hermon ; and Lebanon spread its cedars far away ; and towards the Great Sea, he saw the cornfields of Esdraelon, the mount of Carmel, Gilboa, and the broken highlands where Ephraim was soon to couch like a lion in his den. Nearer at hand, more to the west, was the plain of Judah, and nearer still the dry limestone rocks of Judah, where, years afterwards, Israel's Jerusalem uprose, even more than Eome, the centre of the imagination of the world. And below, right at his feet, lay the Dead Sea, in its crater-cup of hills, and Jericho in its pastures, and the mountain pass that led to the hill that men afterwards called Zion.
This was the land which the Lord had promised to the fathers, for which he had been yearning, and to which all his work had been directed ail these years ; and now he is to die, as the text puts it, with such pathetic emphasis, " there in Moab," and to have no part in the fair inheritance.