2. The choice of Moses was a moral duty. Having made it, he strove to make it good. Often weakened by his own natural timidity, and praying God to relieve him and send a stronger man to the task, he yet endured. Tempted by wealth and by position, he yet resisted and endured. Threatened by royal power, banished from the royal presence, a fugitive from royal wrath, he endured. Tried by the clamour of men and by the solitude of the wilderness for forty years, he yet endured. Bowed down by the pusillanimity and ingratitude of those for whom he made the sacrifice, he yet rose again, and again resolved, determined, and endured until he led his people to the threshold of assured liberty and saw the promised land of his dreams and of his choice. So much can a man in earnest do. Next in power to the spirit of God is the
^ J. Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, 353.
HEBREWS XI. 27 447
spirit of a sincere, determined, enduring man. "He that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved." " Behold, we count them happy which endure." Abraham, " after he had patiently endured obtained the promise." Endurance, then, has more of stress in it, more of value, more of character in it, than any word in our language. Endurance is the crowning virtue of character.
^ Then she turned to the Crimea, described the sufferings and the endurance of the troops, and drew her moral : " Upon those who watched, week after week and month after month, this enduring courage, this unalterable patience, simplicity, and good strength, this voiceless strength to suffer and be still, it has made an impression never to be forgotten. The Anglo-Saxon on the Crimean heights has won for himself a greater name than the Spartan at Thermopylae, as the six months' struggle to endure was a greater proof of what man can do than the six hours' struggle to fight. The traces of the name and sacrifice of Iphigeneia may still be seen in Taurus : but a greater sacrifice has been there accomplished by a ' handful ' of brave men who defended that fatal position, even to the death. And if Inkerman now bears a name like that of Thermopylae, so is the story of those terrible trenches, through which these men patiently and deliberately, and week after week, went, till they returned no more, greater than that of Inkerman. Truly were the Sebastopol trenches, to our men, like the gate of the Infernal Regions — ' Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch' entrate.' And yet these men would refuse to report themselves sick, lest they should throw more labour on their comrades. They would draw their blankets over their heads and die without a word. Well may it be said that there is hardly an example in history to compare with this long and silent fortitude."!
I peered within, and saw a world of sin ;
Upward, and saw a world of righteousness. Downward, and saw darkness and flame begin Which no man can express.
I girt me up, I gat me up to flee
From face of darkness and devouring flame : And fled I had, but guilt is loading me With dust of death and shame,
* Sir Edward Cook, Tlie Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 316.
448 SEEING THE INVISIBLE
Yet still the light of righteousness beams pure,
Beams to me from the world of far-off day : — Lord, who hast called them happy that endure, Lord, make me such as they.^
II.
The Secret of Moses' Endurance.
" As seeing him who is invisible."
The faculty of faith, which is the power of endurance under circumstances of alarm and peril, might be analysed into the two qualities of insight and foresight. By it Moses was enabled to divine the actual relative importance of the facts of experience, to look beyond the present, and to see the ultimate destiny of things. Pharaoh's wrath was no doubt at the moment very formidable, but to one who had realized that Pharaoh was opposing himself to the Divine purpose, and who could therefore see the king's final overthrow as an assured event, his wrath, however fierce, was stripped of terror. The wretched bondsmen of Israel were to all outward appearance a forlorn and undone people, with whom it would be perilous to be associated, but to one who could see through that miserable aspect to the intrinsic and undying superiority which Israel possessed in the covenant relationship with the God of Abraham, all this external weakness counted for nothing. What St. John says of the Christian faith might be said of all faith in some sense and measure. It is " the victory which overcometh the world."
1. In nature, as in religion, it is the invisible that is most important and real. We live in a world that appeals at once to our senses — a world of light, of sound, of touch, and of taste; a world of sun and sky, of sweeping horizons and flowing rivers, of trees, and thunderstorms, and fire ; a world of hunger, and disease, and death. But the most important things in all this natural world are not the things that we can see. What is the secret of the growing corn ? Take a grain from the ear. A learned man could tell you all about its various parts — the little ^ Christiua G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 193.