sight be bad inaugurated a policy which was sufficiently clever but decidedly unwise; be had hatched the very enmity he dreaded, by ma.king those whom he feared miserable. Nevertheless, be, personally, does not seem to have been the loser in this life. He left a legacy of trouble for his successor, but probably to the 11!.St he was feared and honoured. Such lives were to the Egyptians, and must still be, suggestive of immor- tality. If evil ca.n thus ·prosper in the person of a king, life must indeed be 11, moral che.os if it end with death and there be no hereafter. "'l'he king of Egypt died:" what about the King of Heaven and Earth? II. 'l'HE PEOPLE'S CRY. The inherit&noe of an evil policy accepted and endorsed by the new king. Results upon an oppressed people :-1. Misery finds a voice. "They sighe,d "--a. half-stifled cry, which however gathers strength; "they cried." Forty years of silent endurance seeks at length relief in utterance. 'l'he king's death brings the Jawn of hope; the first feeling after liberty is the cry of anguish which cannot be suppressed. Such a cry, an inarticulate prayer which needed no interpreter to trans- late it-a.n honest and heartfelt prayer of which God could t&ke cognizance. 2. The voia of misery fin<ls a listener. The cry was a cry with wings to it--it "came up unto God." Too many so-called prayers have w wings, or at most clipped wings. They grovel on the earth like barn-yard fowls, and if they chance to pick up solace, it is, like themselves, of the earth earthy. Winged prayers, even when winged by sorrow, go UP. and for a time seem lost, but they reach heaven and find harbour there. III. Gon's RESPONSE. 1. .Attention secured and the covenant remembered. God ha.d not been deaf before,. nor ha.d he been forgetful of his promise. For practical memory, however, there must be a practical claim upon that which is remembered. So long as the people are indifferent, their indifference suspends the fulfilment of the covenant. All the while God, by permitting the tyranny, ha.d been stirring up their memory that they might stir up his. When they a.re aroused, he shows at once that he is mindful. 2. The children of the covenant behdd, an<l respect paid to their necessities. So far, God had looked upon a people of slaves, trying hard to make themselves content with servitude. Now that misery has a.roused them to remember who and what they are, he sees once more the children of .lsrael---offspring of the wrestling Prince. People have to come to themselves before God ca.n effectually look upon them. Content with servitude, he sees them slaves. Mindful of the covenant, he sees them as children. God is ready to help them directly they are ready to claim and to receive help from God. .Application :-Evil in this world often seems to triumph, because men submit to it, and try to make the best of it, instead of resisting it. The general _will not fight the foe sino-le-handed; in the interest of those who should be his soldiers, he must have them "ready to fight under him. When we realise our true position, then God is readv at once to recornise it. Indifference, forgetfulness, delay, all really due to ma.n. ·God the deli,erer ~nly seems to be that which man the sufferer is.-G.
SECTION Il.-CHAPTERS III. IV. THE CALL AND MlsSION OF MOSES.
EXPOSITION. "called him" ( ver. 4), and gave him a definite CIIAPTER ill mission. The present ehapter is intimately Vers. 1-22.-TRE MIBl!ION OF MosEB. After connected with the next. Together, they forty years of monotonous pastoral life, afford- contain an account of that extraordinary and ing abundant opportunity for meditation, and indeed miraculous interchange of thought and for spiritnal communion with God, and when speech between Moses and God himself, by he had attained to the great age of eighty which the so11 of Amram Wll.'l induced to years, and the hot blood of youth had given undertake the difficult o.nd dangerous task of place to the calm serenity of advanced life, freeing his people, delivering them from their God at last revee.led Himself to Moses bondage in Egypt, and conducting them CH. III, 1-22.] THE DOOK OF EXODUS.