Heb. xi. 27. He endured, as seeing him who is itivisible.
NOT any one of all the catalogue of worthies in the Old Testament, not even Abraham himself, stands higher than Moses ; who, when possessed of all that rank and affluence could confer on man, abandoned
it all, that he might participate the lot of his op- pressed and persecuted brethren. He was assured, indeed, that God would compensate to him all the losses which he sustained ; and " he had respect to the recompence of that reward." But he would not have been able to maintain his stand as he did, if he had not found a p?'ese?it support from God. On his first attempt to deliver Israel, about forty years be- fore, he had failed, partly through precipitation, in killing the Egyptian, and partly through fear, in flee- ing from the grasp of his enraged enemies. But now he maintained his steadfastness, and executed his commission with undaunted courage ; because he saw, by faith, that God who is invisible to the eye of sense : '' he endured, as seeing Him who is invisible."
This remarkable expression will lead me to shew,
I. The peculiar faculty with which believers are endowed — By nature, they possess no other faculty than is common to the unregenerate world : and to repre- sent piety as proceeding from, or as indicative of, a new sense, is to open a way for the grossest enthu- siasm, or rather for the entire exculpation of all who do not possess it : for, a man who never possessed the sense of seeing or hearing could contract no cri- minality whatever by acting as one who was blind or deaf. Yet, if I may be allowed to follow the para- doxical expression of my text, the believer has a faculty peculiar to himself, a faculty of " seeing" an object that is invisible, even " God himself, who is invisible."
Behevers do see the invisible God —
[God, it is true, is, in his essence, invisible : " he dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto ; and no man hath seen him, or can see." Yet does faith bring him so powerfully before the mind of believers, that they may be said to " see " him ; because they are as much assured of his presence, as if they beheld him with their bodily eyes. We all know the effect of glasses of different forms ; either as magnifying an object, so as to make it visible, notwithstanding