Australiasian Signs of the Times, Vol. 35, No. 25. (6/21/1920)

Australiasian Signs of the Times

Jun 21, 1920

Signs Publishing Co. · Melbourne, Victoria · Jun 21, 1920

Righteous by Resolution

THERE are movements in progress in various parts of the world at the present time whose purpose it is to make men religious by force of civil enactment. Under the pretence of making it hard for men to do wrong and easy for them to do right, laws are passed which deal specifically with man's relation to God.

Pathe Photo
H.R.H. PRINCE OF WALES LANDING AT ST. KILDA,
MELBOURNE, ON MAY 26, 1920 — Pathe Photo H.R.H. PRINCE OF WALES LANDING AT ST. KILDA, MELBOURNE, ON MAY 26, 1920

In the days when it was dangerous to be a Christian, the world saw the staunchest Christians in the world. In those days the Church was purer than it has ever been since. But when Christianity became popular, the dry rot of formalism and the gangrene of hypocrisy came in to do their deadly work. With the Reformation new life came into the rapidly deteriorating body; but even the new organisation would not release its grip upon the consciences of men and women. The battle for the freedom of the soul has been a long one; and that emancipation is still delayed, except as individuals declare their independence of the spiritual dominance of other men or organisations.

The movements now in progress in the world look to and are working toward a strengthening of the grip of formal religion upon the consciences and religious activities of mankind.

Various Churches are working toward a closer organic control of their own affairs that with the increased power and increased organisation they may ultimately gain control of the affairs of others. Churches that have been long and distinctively separated are planning union, and even the greater religious divisions of Christendom are looking about to find some basis of union.

THE argument for this union is that “in union there is strength”; that the Church is weak because of her divisions, and thus unable to accomplish what she might otherwise do. So through union with the human she seeks for power over the world, power to make her wishes dominant and to ensure acquiescence in all her demands. She forgets that when the Church was strongest in the things of this world

she was farthest from fulfilling the purpose of her Master, farthest from Him, and weakest in her power to uplift humanity and to exemplify the character of Jesus Christ in her dealings with men. In the Dark Ages the “Church” had the world in the palm of her hand; but she made it a torture chamber for true religion, a dungeon for conscience and a hot-bed for immorality. Out of the bedlam the Reformation rescued the scattered and beaten remnant of the true Church.

TODAY the great formal bodies of Christendom are yearning for power again, and are reaching out the hand in every direction in the hope of grasping some pillar of potentiality that will enable them to climb into the throne of universal power again. When Rome had that power, the world had its midnight of horror and persecution. When the power-coveting Church secures that power again, we may write “Ichabod” over the temple of soul freedom, and expect soon to see the sword of Jehovah cleaving the heavens to usher in the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. The rack and thumbscrew, the wheel and the fiery stake, have taken through the long centuries a fearful toll of conscientious followers of Jesus Christ; and Heaven looked on in sorrow. But when Christendom unites again to make men offenders for conscience' sake, to whip, and to scourge, and to drive unwilling souls under penalty of persecution, Heaven itself will call a halt to the pitiless work, and they who have made a covenant with God by sacrifice (Ps. 50:5) will receive the eternal reward.

IT is of that grand culmination the psalmist speaks in these words:—

Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence: a fire shall devour before Him, and it shall be very tempestuous round about Him. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that He may judge His people. Gather My saints together unto Me; those that have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice. And the heavens shall declare His righteousness: for God is judge Himself. Ps. 50:3-6.

It is of that same time and of the same faithful people that He is speaking (verse 15) when He says: “Call upon Me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.” Of the culmination of that same movement the Revelator speaks these words:—

He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints. And I beheld another beast [or power] coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon. And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast [or power] before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. . . . And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed. Rev. 13:10-15.

There is faithfully portrayed by the pen of Inspiration the organisation of another great religious system that has grasped the power of human law to force the consciences of men and put every non-conformist under interdict and sentence of death. It is an “image of the beast,” an image in that respect of the organisation which did that very work when a power-coveting religious organisation grasped the reins of the world, and drove it toward the precipice of ruin. The hand of the God-ordained Reformation checked its disastrous career in that day; the hand of Jehovah Himself will stop it in our day. It was never God’s intention that men should be scourged by other men to make them patterns of the divine purpose. The strongest power He uses or permits others to use in His cause is the power of love. When that fails to win men’s hearts, the armoury of heaven is exhausted, and men must be left to reap the results of their own choosing—life or death. Men cannot be made righteous by human law, nor driven into God’s kingdom with the lash of persecution.

The Deceitful Spirit

SIR HENRY LUNN, at a Brotherhood meeting in Kingsway Hall, London, has given a very pungent criticism of the attitude of Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle toward the subject of Spiritism. Sir Henry stated that he had been often in the company of Mr. W. T. Stead when the latter entered upon the study of what he called “spooks.” The following summary of Sir Henry’s address we quote from a Melbourne daily:—

When Mr. Stead was about to publish his daily paper which was such a disastrous failure, and nearly ruined his career, he was informed by the medium that the paper would be a most triumphant success. Encouraged by the medium, he plunged into the colossal speculation, which ended in disastrous failure. “One

would have thought,” Sir Henry commented, “that would have shaken his faith in mediums, but it did not.”

On another occasion the medium informed him of the exact number of Liberals, Unionists, Home Rulers, and Labour men who would be returned at a general election, but that forecast was on a par with the forecast about the success of his daily paper.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a member of the medical profession, but he had told them in his recent book that every woman was an undeveloped medium, and suggested that all women should try their hands at automatic writing. “I say as a medical man that Sir Arthur ought never to have penned those words,” Sir Henry declared; “he ought never to have said it to a lot of girls full of nerves and possibly full of hysterics. As a man who cares for the girls of England, I say we don’t want a lot of highly strung, sensitive, and overworked girls leaving their hard work in London offices to spend their evenings with a planchette and the deadly experiments which often overthrow the reason.”

Anciently the test of a true prophet, a follower of God, was the truthfulness of his predictions. If the prophet prophesied and the thing did not come to pass, that was an indication that he was a false prophet. In His admonition to His people in the days of Jeremiah, God, speaking of their false prophets, said: “For they prophesy falsely unto you in My name: I have not sent them, saith the Lord.” Jer. 29:9. These men who have given themselves up to spiritist phenomena and are basing all their hopes upon what Spiritism can bring them from the realm of the dead, have had to admit again and again that the things spoken to them through mediums have proven false; and yet they continue to build their hopes upon the teachings of these self-proved deceivers just as if all their predictions had come to pass. God alone is able correctly to foretell the future. He has given the prophecies of His Word for the very purpose of convincing the world that divinity is speaking in the Bible. But the professed spirits of dead men claim the ability to duplicate this divine function in order that they may deceive the souls of men and women. As surely as the power to make true predictions of future events demonstrates the presence and power of God in prophecy, so does the inability of the professed spirits of dead men to do that same thing demonstrate that they are the enemies of God and men and the deceivers of the world. It is difficult to comprehend how men and women who have been deceived and lied to again and again by these revolted spirits will still seek after them, trust in them, and encourage others also to have faith in their deceptive teachings and predictions. This anomaly was never so marked and never so prevalent in the world as it is at the present time. Millions are following the ignus fatuus of Spiritism to the certain ruin of their souls, and that too in spite of the plainest declarations of the Word of God to the effect that the dead know not anything and have no part in anything that is done under the sun.

“Pictures” and Missions

By F.

ONE of the saddest results of attendance at the “moving pictures” is the effect it has on the plastic but unformed mind of the youth of this generation.

These results are specially manifest in the Children’s Police Courts.

There is another phase of the question, however, which is not so patent to the average person, and that is the effect which the “movies” are having in lands where Christian missionaries are endeavouring to teach true morality. Said Miss Constance Bromley, manager of a large picture theatre in Calcutta, India, recently:—

The white woman in India realises that she is receiving less respect from the native than before, and a great deal of this is due to the indiscriminate showing of films on social and marriage problems. . . . They think of their own treatment of women and the rigid laws of custom they have to obey. If the women go to the picture theatre, they have to sit apart in a well curtained box. The European women, too, are careful in their conduct and are not seen in evening dress in public. And then comes the great contrast of the film, where the natives see white women in all sorts of garbs; on one occasion they saw the heroine of a long film, mainly garbed in bathing costume. They see white wives on the screen in compromising situations, and the result is that they get a low opinion of European morals.

Harmful as such scenes are to the morals of the “civilised” world, they are infinitely more harmful to the heathen in lands such as India, for the picture theatres are fast becoming real opponents of the work of Christian missions in heathen lands. The gospel of Christ aims at the regeneration of the heathen, while the moving picture theatres are doing a degenerating work for those same people already far sunk in the mire of sin.

Reaping the Whirlwind

By F.

WHILE recently travelling in Europe, Mr. Henry P. Davison, head of the American Red Cross, cabled a most vivid description of the terrible results of the deadly typhus in Russia and the Balkans, stating further that the disease is threatening all Europe and America through the hordes of refugees fleeing from the smitten districts. Commenting on the cable, the San Francisco Examiner of March 26, 1920, declares:—

Dr. Hugh S. Cumming, surgeon-general, said today that he believed Davison’s warning in many respects was rather understated than exaggerated. Dr. Cumming recently returned to Washington, after a two years’ first-hand study of the plague situation in central Europe and confirmed Davison’s report that it was the “greatest danger since the Deluge.” . . .

It was learned today that plague conditions exist in many of the Mediterranean ports from which ships are constantly sailing for the United States. Palermo, Naples, and Genoa, in Italy, Marseilles in France, and Barcelona, Spain, all have cases of bubonic plague or typhus.

Modern science is finding itself totally unable to cope with the terrible epidemics that are sweeping over the world, a situation which reminds us of the declaration of the Christ that “pestilences” in “divers places” would be a sign of His coming. Again, Mr. Davison describes these days as being filled with “the greatest danger since the Deluge,” leaving us with but one honest conclusion when we read another declaration of the Christ that “as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it also be in the days of the Son of man.” Luke 17:26.

For centuries this world has been sowing to the winds its seeds of sin and immorality; now it is reaping the whirlwind. F.

An Inspiring Romance

By F.

IN these days when new inventions are crowded upon us thick and fast, we have but little time to enquire into what we might term the romance of invention. Yet in the causes that lie behind the discovery of a new process or a new machine there is many an inspiring story. One such story has just come to our notice in the March 27 issue of the Scientific American. To quote:

There have been few more picturesque stories published in this or any other publication than that one which is concerned with the establishment of a giant industry, the making of an epochal discovery, and the very probable conservation of millions of horse-power, untold tons of coal and barrels of oil, through the interpretation of a verse in the Bible which had had only a parable-like translation in the mouths of [some of] those whose work it is to interpret the Word.

This discovery-producing verse is a familiar one and reads thus:—

So the people were scattered abroad throughout all the land of Egypt to gather stubble instead of straw. Ex. 5:12.

After reading this verse, Dr. Acheson, the “father of the lubrication of the future,” reasoned this way: Neither straw nor stubble could act as binders of the clay, for neither has any strength of its own; yet one or the other was essential for the manufacture of those Egyptian bricks. Therefore, argued the scientist, it was something in the straw and stubble that produced the good bricks. Thereafter followed many experiments and much thinking, with the result that a new natural process, called deflocculation, was discovered and a new method of lubrication, by means of deflocculated graphite, given to the world of machinery. Fully to explain this wonder would make too long a story for these columns; Our object is to show that once again the Bible has proved itself a mighty asset to the scientific world. And he who will accept it as a spiritual guide will also find it of incalculable value in the walk—or battle—of life. F.

God’s Challenge

PREACHING recently at the anniversary of the Albert Park Methodist Church on the text, “Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for Me?” (Jer. 32:27) the Reverend J. H. Cain said that the challenge which God addressed to the prophet in the days of old was the challenge which still met us in our modern life. The God of infinite resources, he said, was always appealing to the faith, courage, and expectancy of His people. This is a ‘note which we are glad to see struck in these times when so many are pinning their faith to human speculation rather than to the prophecies and promises and power contained in the Word of God. He continued:—

The tendency among many was to limit the interference of God in human affairs. But experience taught us that in individual and national life God was always doing the impossible on our behalf. Men and women who seemed to be beyond the pale of salvation were constantly being redeemed by the grace of God. Difficulties which appeared to be insurmountable were

taken out of our pathway; problems which looked unsolvable found their interpretation; social evils which were our despair were beginning to disappear in answer to Christian faith and effort. A new vision of the all-sufficiency of God on the part of Christian men would transform the world. The age of moral miracles was not yet past, but would shine upon the world in all its glory when we saw God in all His beneficent fullness. The man who would listen to and believe in God would find that the resources of God never failed and his simple unshaken faith will never be put to shame.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God today, and His power is no whit less than in the days when He liberated an enslaved nation, opened the waters of the Red Sea, led His millions of Israelites through the uninhabited waste and wilderness of Arabia for forty years, stayed the waters of the Jordan, flung down the walls of Jericho, closed the mouths of lions, quenched the heat of the fiery furnace, and performed a myriad other miracles which none but the Almighty God could do. It is in such a God and in His power and love and beneficence and fatherly care we place our trust for time and eternity. The God who unrolled the history of the future to His prophet Daniel, writing in advance the details of history which have never needed to be revised, has told us in His infallible Word that the day of His coming is near at hand. We have passed waymark after waymark, and are rapidly nearing the end of the wonderful journey. Soon, in harmony with the revelations of His blessed Book, we shall see Him coming in the clouds of heaven with His mighty hosts of angel attendants in all the glory of heaven to redeem His faithful people and to put an end to the tragedy of sin. In that blessed hope we trust and rest. And may the glad day soon come when the fruition of that hope shall be realised by all His waiting servants.

A. L. KING

By A. L. King

How Sunday Supplanted the Sabbath—No. 1

A. L. KING

A QUESTION that is securing world-wide prominence, and bids fair to become the greatest religious question of the day, is that of the Sabbath and Sunday. It is a striking fact that although the Bible applies the title of Sabbath to the seventh day and the seventh day alone, yet Sunday, the first day of the week, has come to be very generally observed as the Sabbath day. How came this about? By what process did the “day of the sun,” the first day of the week, come to supplant that sacred seventh day, which at creation God rested upon and blessed and sanctified, and which He later proclaimed with His own voice amidst an unparalleled display of divine majesty and power? This question this series of articles will essay to answer.

As we read and re-read the Sacred Oracles, certain facts stand out in increasingly bold relief. Never once in the Scriptures is Sunday (the first day of the week) called the Sabbath, nor man ever enjoined to keep it. In not one text are we told of the change of the Sabbath from the seventh day to Sunday. Never once is labour on Sunday declared to be sinful, or anything else, for that matter, that would be right and proper on Monday or Thursday or any other of the ordinary week-days. Nor can a case be shown where Christ ever mentioned the first day of the week during His life on earth. Clearly and consistently, the Old Testament and the New reserve the title of Sabbath for the seventh day alone, the day corresponding to our Saturday, the day the Jews still keep. In scriptural language, Sunday is “the first day of the week,” and one of “the six working days.” Eze. 46:1.

Significant Scriptural Silence

This striking silence of the Scriptures concerning any Sunday sacredness at once divests Sunday of any Sabbatic holiness or other sacred attributes that man has imputed to it. Naked and bare, it stands out in its true and original character as one of the six working days. Surely, had God ever wished man to keep Sunday sacred, would He not have plainly told us so in His Holy Word? With those awe-inspiring scenes of Sinai rising before us, when earth was shaken and nature convulsed at the Divine presence, and the Deity spoke His will in awful and commanding majesty—with all the dread admonitions in the Scriptures ringing in our ears to do exactly what the Lord has bidden us, to beware of adding to what He has written or taking away anything from its force,—is it not natural and right to expect that clear and express instructions would have been given us had the Lord designed to change the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday? “Surely the Lord God will do nothing, but He revealeth His secret unto His servants the prophets.” Amos 3:7. “If it were not so,” said Christ on one occasion, “I would have told you” (John 14:1), thus giving tangible expression to the divine practice of informing His people fully on points of faith and duty. For the Sabbath, baptism, (immersion), the Lord’s supper, etc., we have plain and express instruction; but for the Sunday-Sabbath none whatever. That Sunday lacks divine ordination and authority should be sufficient for us. This background of divine silence is sufficient to indicate that the Sunday-Sabbath is the work of some alien hand.

The Position in a Nutshell

But some naturally wish to know how the change was brought about. In brief, Sunday, the day the heathen venerated as “the day of the sun,” began with the spread of apostasy to creep into the Church in the second century. It was then only a working and recreation day, those Christians who observed it merely holding a meeting in the early morning and then returning to their ordinary labours and recreations. Proof of this will be adduced in these articles. Sunday crept in gradually, and it took centuries for the change to be accomplished fully.

Pathe Photo. THE PRINCE WATCHING THE CATTLE PARADE AT THE ROYAL SHOW IN MELBOURNE

The Book of Acts shows that the apostles

as well as the Jewish and Gentile believers observed the seventh-day Sabbath. See Acts 13:14, 42-44; etc. No fewer than eighty-four Sabbath meetings are recorded in the Book of Acts. And history witnesses to the fact that the true Sabbath was observed widely for many centuries after Bible times, proof of which will be adduced later. As the proverbial camel that first thrust its head into its master’s tent, advancing by degrees its whole body till it stood completely within, and as a climax turned its owner out, so Sunday crept in gradually, first as a recreation day, or holiday, and then a day to memorialise the resurrection, till at length it shared equal honours with the Sabbath, and finally the Sunday-Sabbath was generally enforced and the true Sabbath suppressed except among Christians in isolated parts. That in brief is the story of the change. Let us now consider with more detail some of the phases of and steps in the exaltation of Sunday.

When and How Sunday Came to Be Called “Lord’s Day”

To-day Sunday is frequently called the Lord’s day. For this there is no scriptural authority. Sometimes Rev. 1:10 is cited, but with no force whatever. This text reads, “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.” To say that this day was Sunday, however, is merely to assume what has to be proved. The only day ever claimed by Jehovah as His own particular day is the Sabbath, the seventh day. “The seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God” (Ex. 20:10); while in Isaiah the Sabbath is called “My holy day” (Isa. 58:13, 14), and Christ declared Himself to be Lord of the Sabbath day. The Lord’s day of Scripture is therefore indisputably the Sabbath. It is well to remember, too, that John wrote his Gospel subsequent to the Revelation, and in his Gospel he never calls Sunday the Lord’s day, but always and consistently by its secular name, “the first day of the week.” Were the Lord’s day the new name for Sunday, the latter would surely have been so termed in the Gospel of John.

Sometimes garbled versions of a statement of Ignatius of Antioch and one from the work “Didache” are adduced to show that Sunday was called the Lord’s day at the close of the first century of our era. But to do this, words have to be put into the original that are not there, a method which cannot commend itself to any honest mind. The fact remains and is impregnable, that the very first instance that can be found of the appellation of “Lord’s day” being applied to Sunday, is that of the Latin Church Father Tertullian, in A.D. 200. But Tertullian is perfectly frank about the lack of scriptural authority for Sunday. What small measure of Sunday observance there was, he associates with offerings for the dead and the use of the sign of the cross on the forehead, and then adds: “If for these and other such rules, you insist upon having positive Scripture injunction, you will find none.”—De Corona, sections 3 and 4.

In the fourth century, Sylvester, who was

Bishop of Rome when the heathen Roman emperor Constantine was nominally converted to Christianity (A.D. 323), subsequently officially gave Sunday the title of Lord’s day. My authority for this is the second edition of the “Magdeburg Centuries” edited by Lucium (Cent. 4). The “Magdeburg Centuries” was the first general history of the Church written from the Protestant viewpoint, and is termed by the “Encyclopædia Britannica” “a remarkable monument to the scholarship of its authors.”

Prior to A.D. 386 all legal documents used the heathen designation “day of the sun,” or Sunday. But owing to the religious agitation on the part of various Catholic clerics the designation “Lord’s day” was substituted. As a consequence of this agitation, in the Roman countries, where the Latin Church was predominant, the term adopted for Sunday was Dominicum, which is Domenica in the Italian, Domingo in the Spanish and Portuguese, and Dimanche in the French. The Teutonic races, however, retained the ancient name Sunday, as in the German Sonntag and the Scandinavian Söndag; while in the Slavonic, Sunday is called Voskresinje, “resurrection day.”

The next article will furnish proof that when Sunday began to creep into the Christian Church and for nearly two centuries afterwards, it was only a working and recreation day.

The Victory of Moses

By W. R. Carswell

The Conflict of the Ages—No. 4

The Victory of Moses

W. R. CARSWELL

By faith Moses, when he was come to years, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season; esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt: for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward." Heb. II:24-26.

The choice made by Moses was a remarkable one. Living in a world in which, generally speaking, riches and honour were coveted above all else, Moses deliberately chose the side of those who were in bondage, poverty, and contempt. He who was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” and was “mighty in words and in deeds” (Acts 7:22), yet chose to renounce his heirship to the throne, with all the riches and honour rendered to the heir-apparent, in order that he might champion the cause of the poor and oppressed people from whom he sprang. What was the source of this resolution which indicated a spirit of self-abnegation typical of the unselfish love of Christ?

Faith in the Word of God

caused Moses to take the noble stand for righteousness and truth, which necessitated forsaking his riches and honour as heir of the throne of Egypt. Taught by his godly mother in the fear of God and faith in His Word, Moses never forgot the requirements of the divine law. He refused to bow down in worship to images, the work of men's hands, and amidst the corrupting worship of the Egyptian court continued to render pure worship to Jehovah.

Moses “had respect to the recompense of the reward” promised in God's Word to Abraham and his seed. He knew that all who, like Abraham, were faithful and obedient to God's commands would enjoy eternal life and an eternal inheritance; and weighing the invisible, but eternal, reward against the visible, but temporary, one, he chose the former. Having once made the choice, Moses never went back on his act of consecration to God. Truly a noble example for all young men to follow, and a wonderful example of faithfulness to emulate!

Mistake of Moses

Infidel writers are fond of descanting on “the mistakes of Moses.” Usually the mistake is in themselves, viz; the mistake of “not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God,” like the Sadducees, when Jesus dwelt with men. Matt. 22:29. But one mistake Moses did make. Knowing by

revelation that he was to deliver Israel from bondage, he essayed to do the work before he had received the divine equipment. He thought by force of arms to deliver those whom God was to be honoured in delivering. He attempted to do the work without the preliminary training. After forty years in God's school in the wilderness of Midian he was ready, but by that time felt his unfitness for the great work committed to him. Like another of God's instruments in later times, he was taught the lesson that “when I am weak [and realise it], then am I strong.” 2 Cor. 12:10.

Living by the Word

After Moses had entered upon his great work of leading Israel from Egypt to Canaan his whole life was an example of what it means to live by the word of God. His faith in God and obedience to Him were an object lesson to all Israel. The very lesson that God designed to teach them was thus taught in the flesh. Their wilderness sojourn was intended to impress upon their minds the important truth that “man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.” Deut. 8:3. This was the same truth which Jesus taught in His earthly sojourn, saying, “The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.” John 6:63.

Living by the word of God, Moses stretched out his rod and opened the Red Sea; with the same rod, at God's command, he smote the rock and gave rivers of water to quench the thirst of the hosts of Israel, with their flocks and herds; and in the time of the rebellion of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, his word caused the earth to open and swallow up the adversaries of God and his servant. See Ex. 14:21-28; 17:6; Num. 16:30-32. It was by faith in the word of God that Moses interceded again and again for a rebellious people. Twice tested by the Lord to see if there remained in Moses any remnants of selfish ambition, God found His servant absolutely free from selfishness. His one ambition was to see all men give glory to God, his longing desire was to see the rebellious people saved.

Moses Twice Tested

The first test came to Moses while alone on the mount with the Lord. His divine Companion revealed to him the apostasy of Israel, who were at that moment bowing down to a golden calf, and suggested destroying the idolaters and making of Moses' descendants a great nation. But Moses had no worldly ambition remaining. Having forsaken Egyptian honours, he desired none that earth could give. But with holy boldness he reminded the Lord that if He should destroy His people, the Egyptians would say He had brought them out of Egypt for that purpose. He also reminded the Lord of His word pledged to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give their descendants the land of Canaan. His earnest petition was accepted and Israel spared.

Again, when on the borders of the promised land the people of Israel, discouraged by the false spies, rebelled against Moses, and chose another leader to take them back to Egypt, the servant of God was again tested. When the rebels sought to stone the two faithful spies, the glory of the Lord was seen, and the suggestion was made to Moses that the rebellious nation should be smitten with pestilence and disinherited, while from Moses a greater nation should spring. But still with the honour of God in view, Moses pled with God to turn from this purpose, recalling the revelation of God's character which had been made to him. “The Lord is merciful and gracious, forgiving His people's transgressions,” was the substance of his plea; and the nations must not have it in their power to say that God could not bring His people into the land of promise. Pleading that God would again pardon His people, in accordance with His forgiving nature, this man of mighty faith and love again received that which he sought. Num. 14: 11-21.

Although himself shut out of the earthly Canaan by death, Moses had the privilege of leading his beloved people to the borders of the land; and, raised from death he was transported to the heavenly Canaan, afterwards to appear as a comforter of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Luke 9: 28-30. In the great conflict with the adversary of souls, he was victorious because he trusted implicitly in God's promises, believing that they could not fail.

May we, dear reader, triumph likewise through faith; like Moses enduring trial as seeing Him who is invisible. Heb. 11:27. Thus will it be with all who believe and obey in the strength of Christ.

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