for forty years towards a land which he was not to enter. Not a single precept is, in the proper sense of the word, intelligible, if you consider it as a precept, without remembering that it came out of the mind and heart of the Teacher, and was charged with all his experience, his sympathy, his sorrow, and his hope.

If any one should say, 'But these are divine words; why need we think of the mere human agent who was appointed to deliver them?' I answer him, You will never know what divine words mean, if you strive to separate what God has joined together. They will become mere letters to you, which you may worship as you may worship a stock or a stone, but they will not be God's words to that generation or any other. If you would think of Him as a Person, if you would believe that He can and does speak to men, then let Him explain to you the nature and method of His own speech. Look at the sympathy and the love and the sorrow, as well as at the hope and foresight of the prophet, as expressing to you feebly but most really, the mind of Him whose servant he was, whom he was representing whenever he truly fulfilled his office as a guide and lawgiver of the people. I do not say that a person may not derive very great blessings from a book, who overlooks the accidents and circumstances of it, or only hears some of its sentences apart from their context. The wind bloweth cannot tell whence it cometh,

where it listeth; you

or whither it goeth.'

God's voice may speak to a

man's heart through any phrase or symbol. But if we profess to study a book, we must follow the course it points out, not take one of our own. And the loss is very great if through dread of being too human in our thoughts and feelings, we learn to think that all human thoughts and feelings have not their original in God.

I. I call heaven and earth to record against you,' says Moses. This was no idle rhetorical formula. The open sky was over his head, the same sky which was over Abraham when he left his father's house not knowing whither he went; the same to which he looked up that he might know by the multitude of the stars what his seed should be; the same under which Jacob had slept when he saw the ladder; the same which had been over his descendents when they were making the bricks in the land of bondage; the same which had looked down upon them in the hot day, in the clear night, all the time they had been journeying through the desert; the same which their children's children would behold in the land of promise. It was the witness and pledge of permanence, the sign that in the midst of perpetual change there is that which abides.

And the earth was at their feet; the earth which received its heat, light, quickening power, from that heaven; the earth which might be a garden such as Egypt was, or a wilderness such as they were passing through; the earth which might be changed from the one to the other; the earth which needed something else than sun or

shower, which asked for some hand to put the seeds within it, and for some hand to destroy the thorns and thistles that grew upon it; the earth which was given to man that he might dress it and keep it, and bring food for his race out of it. Moses then could call heaven and earth equally to testify to his words. The one said to man, Thou art meant to look above thyself. Only in doing so canst thou find endurance, illumination, life. The other said, Thou art meant to work here. Thou must put forth an energy which is not in me, or I shall not yield thee my fruits. The one said, The sun, moon, stars, are shining upon thee; but if thou askest sympathy from them thou wilt not find it; if thou askest power from them thou wilt learn that what thou receivest from them is not what thou needest; it is not akin to thy own. To find help from them thou must suppose each of them to be ruled by some Person. And that is a pledge and proof that there is a Person ruling over them who is claiming thy obedience, who is desiring that thou shouldest know Him. The earth says to thee, If thou wouldest govern me and subdue me, work with Him who is governing thee and seeking to subdue thee; for my Creator is thy Lord and King. He who understands all my secrets, and can make thee understand them, is the same who knows the secrets of thy spirit, and would make thee know them.

II. But he says, 'I have set before thee life and death, blessing and cursing.' You have heard how he had done this. There is not one exhorta

tion in this book, as I said before, which would lead an Israelite to think that he was to aim at obtaining a life which had not been freely given him, or to avoid a curse from which he had not been already delivered. He is warned in the most fearful language of forgetting the things which his eyes had seen, of not believing that the Lord God had really taken His fathers and him, his brethren and his children, to be a people of inheritance to Himself; he is told what misery will come upon him if he goes after the gods of the nations, or makes them for himself out of the things above or beneath. There is no hint given him upon which he can build a dream of security; the past is invoked to remind him of his temptation to faithlessness and murmuring; he is not encouraged to expect that any circumstances will diminish that temptation-that it will assail him less in the promised land than in the wilderness. But all the terrible warnings and prophecies of what he and his descendants may do hereafter imply that he is in a blessed condition and that they will be; the condition of men whom God has claimed to be his servants and to know Him, the condition of men who may trust him to the very utmost to uphold them, bless them, protect them against their enemies.

III. And therefore he goes on: Choose life,' 'Say distinctly, deliberately to thyself, I do not mean to give up the ground on which I am standing. I do not believe that there is any power in earth or hell which can compel me to

give it up. God has placed me on it; all which is contrary to God may say it is not mine; but all that is contrary to God will not prevail against God, and therefore need not prevail against me.' This steadfast resolution each Israelite would find it needful to make, and having made it, continually to repeat. For death would come in the form of life, the curse would put on all the attractions of a blessing. Earth would fill her lap with pleasures to draw away her master from his dominion, and make him lose himself in her embraces. He would be tempted to become a slave by the hope of independence; and when once he had tasted the cup and been transformed, not only those who had presented it, but those who should raise him, would conspire to tell him that his rights as a man were gone; that he was no longer in any relation to God; that he must thenceforth count himself one of the creatures into the likeness of which he was reduced. This 30th chapter of Deuteronomy is especially an answer to that lie. It presumes the Israelite to have fallen; to have incurred the deepest curse which this book pronounces. still it addresses him as a child of the covenant; still it bids him act on the assurance that God has not forgotten it, and is at hand to lift him out of the abyss of unbelief and falsehood into which he has sunk. Choose life' is still the command at all times; is still a command which at all times could be obeyed; because it is not in the power of man to convert his own falsehood into a truth, or to convert God's truth into a falsehood.

And