The Book of
Exodus
|
Chapter 4
|
MOSES HESITATES.
Exo 4:1-17.
Holy Scripture is impartial, even towards its
heroes. The sin of David is recorded, and the failure of Peter. And
so is the reluctance of Moses to accept his commission, even after a
miracle had been vouchsafed to him for encouragement. The absolute
sinlessness of Jesus is the more significant because it is found in
the records of a creed which knows of no idealised humanity.
In Josephus, the refusal of Moses is softened down.
Even the modest words, "Lord, I am still in doubt how I, a private
man and of no abilities, should persuade my countrymen or Pharaoh,"
are not spoken after the sign is given. Nor is there any mention of
the transfer to Aaron of a part of his commission, nor of their
joint offence at Meribah, nor of its penalty, which in Scripture is
bewailed so often. And Josephus is equally tender about the misdeeds
of the nation. We hear nothing of their murmurs against Moses and
Aaron when their burdens are increased, or of their making the
golden calf. Whereas it is remarkable and natural that the fear of
Moses is less anxious about his reception by the tyrant than by his
own people: "Behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my
voice; for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee."
This is very unlike the invention of a later period, glorifying the
beginnings of the nation; but it is absolutely true to life. Great
men do not fear the wrath of enemies if they can be secured against
the indifference and contempt of friends; and Moses in particular
was at last persuaded to undertake his mission by the promise of the
support of Aaron. His hesitation is therefore the earliest example
of what has been so often since observed--the discouragement of
heroes, reformers and messengers from God, less by fear of the
attacks of the world than of the contemptuous scepticism of the
people of God. We often sigh for the appearing, in our degenerate
days, of
"A man with heart, head, hand, Like some of the
simple great ones gone."
Yet who shall say that the want of them is not our
own fault? The critical apathy and incredulity, not of the world but
of the Church, is what freezes the fountains of Christian daring and
the warmth of Christian zeal.
For the help of the faith of his people, Moses is
commissioned to work two miracles; and he is caused to rehearse
them, for his own.
Strange tales were told among the later Jews about
his wonder-working rod. It was cut by Adam before leaving Paradise,
was brought by Noah into the ark, passed into Egypt with Joseph, and
was recovered by Moses while he enjoyed the favour of the court.
These legends arose from downright moral inability to receive the
true lesson of the incident, which is the confronting of the sceptre
of Egypt with the simple staff of the shepherd, the choosing of the
weak things of earth to confound the strong, the power of God to
work His miracles by the most puny and inadequate means. Anything
was more credible than that He who led His people like sheep did
indeed guide them with a common shepherd's crook. And yet this was
precisely the lesson meant for us to learn--the glorification of
poor resources in the grasp of faith.
Both miracles were of a menacing kind. First the rod
became a serpent, to declare that at God's bidding enemies would
rise up against the oppressor, even where all seemed innocuous, as
in truth the waters of the river and the dust of the furnace and the
winds of heaven conspired against him. Then, in the grasp of Moses,
the serpent from which he fled became a rod again, to intimate that
these avenging forces were subject to the servant of Jehovah.
Again, his hand became leprous in his bosom, and was
presently restored to health again--a declaration that he carried
with him the power of death, in its most dreadful form; and perhaps
a still more solemn admonition to those who remember what leprosy
betokens, and how every approach of God to man brings first the
knowledge of sin, to be followed by the assurance that He has
cleansed it.[7]
If the people would not hearken to the voice of the
first sign, they should believe the second; but at the worst, and if
they were still unconvinced, they would believe when they saw the
water of the Nile, the pride and glory of their oppressors, turned
into blood before their eyes. That was an omen which needs no
interpretation. What follows is curious. Moses objects that he has
not hitherto been eloquent, nor does he experience any improvement
"since Thou hast spoken unto Thy servant" (a graphic touch!), and he
seems to suppose that the popular choice between liberty and slavery
would depend less upon the evidence of a Divine power than upon
sleight of tongue, as if he were in modern England.
But let it be observed that the self-consciousness
which wears the mask of humility while refusing to submit its
judgment to that of God, is a form of selfishness--self-absorption
blinding one to other considerations beyond himself--as real, though
not as hateful, as greed and avarice and lust.
How can Moses call himself slow of speech and of a
slow tongue, when Stephen distinctly declares that he was mighty in
word as well as deed? (Act 7:22). Perhaps it is enough to answer
that many years of solitude in a strange land had robbed him of his
fluency. Perhaps Stephen had in mind the words of the Book of
Wisdom, that "Wisdom entered into the soul of the servant of the
Lord, and withstood dreadful kings in wonders and signs.... For
Wisdom opened the mouth of the dumb, and made the tongues of them
that cannot speak eloquent" (Wisdom x. 16, 21).
To his scruple the answer was returned, "Who hath
made man's mouth?... Have not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I
will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say." The
same encouragement belongs to every one who truly executes a mandate
from above: "Lo, I am with you alway." For surely this encouragement
is the same. Surely Jesus did not mean to offer His own
presence as a substitute for that of God, but as being in very truth
Divine, when He bade His disciples, in reliance upon Him, to go
forth and convert the world.
And this is the true test which divides faith from
presumption, and unbelief from prudence: do we go because God is
with us in Christ, or because we ourselves are strong and wise? Do
we hold back because we are not sure of His commission, or
only because we distrust ourselves? "Humility without faith is too
timorous; faith without humility is too hasty." The phrase explains
the conduct of Moses both now and forty years before.
Moses, however, still entreats that any one may be
chosen rather than himself: "Send, I pray Thee, by the hand of him
whom Thou wilt send."
And thereupon the anger of the Lord was kindled
against him, although at the moment his only visible punishment was
the partial granting of his prayer--the association with him in his
commission of Aaron, who could speak well, the forfeiting of a
certain part of his vocation, and with it of a certain part of its
reward. The words, "Is not Aaron thy brother the Levite?" have been
used to insinuate that the tribal arrangement was not perfected when
they were written, and so to discredit the narrative. But when so
interpreted they yield no adequate sense, they do not reinforce the
argument; while they are perfectly intelligible as implying that
Aaron is already the leader of his tribe, and therefore sure to
obtain the hearing of which Moses despaired. But the arrangement
involved grave consequences sure to be developed in due time: among
others, the reliance of Israel upon a feebler will, which could be
forced by their clamour to make them a calf of gold. Moses was yet
to learn that lesson which our century knows nothing of,--that a
speaker and a leader of nations are not the same. When he cried to
Aaron, in the bitterness of his soul, "What did this people to thee,
that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them?" did he remember by
whose unfaithfulness Aaron had been thrust into the office, the
responsibilities of which he had betrayed?
Now, it is the duty of every man, to whom a special
vocation presents itself, to set opposite each other two
considerations. Dare I undertake this task? is a solemn question,
but so is this: Dare I let this task go past me? Am I prepared for
the responsibility of allowing it to drift into weaker hands? These
are days when the Church of Christ is calling for the help of every
one capable of aiding her, and we ought to hear it said more often
that one is afraid not to teach in Sunday School, and another
dares not refuse a proffered district, and a third fears to leave
charitable tasks undone. To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth
it not, to him it is sin; and we hear too much about the terrible
responsibility of working for God, but too little about the still
graver responsibility of refusing to work for Him when called.
Moses indeed attained so much that we are scarcely
conscious that he might have been greater still. He had once
presumed to go unsent, and brought upon himself the exile of half a
lifetime. Again he presumed almost to say, I go not, and well-nigh
to incur the guilt of Jonah when sent to Nineveh, and in so doing he
forfeited the fulness of his vocation. But who reaches the level of
his possibilities? Who is not haunted by faces, "each one a murdered
self," a nobler self, that might have been, and is now impossible
for ever? Only Jesus could say "I have finished the work which Thou
gavest Me to do." And it is notable that while Jesus deals, in the
parable of the labourers, with the problem of equal faithfulness
during longer and shorter periods of employment; and in the parable
of the pounds with that of equal endowment variously improved; and
yet again, in the parable of the talents, with the problem of
various endowments all doubled alike, He always draws a veil over
the treatment of five talents which earn but two or three besides.
A more cheerful reflection suggested by this
narrative is the strange power of human fellowship. Moses knew and
was persuaded that God, Whose presence was even then miraculously
apparent in the bush, and Who had invested him with superhuman
powers, would go with him. There is no trace of incredulity in his
behaviour, but only of failure to rely, to cast his shrinking and
reluctant will upon the truth he recognised and the God Whose
presence he confessed. He held back, as many a one does, who is
honest when he repeats the Creed in church, yet fails to submit his
life to the easy yoke of Jesus. Nor is it from physical peril that
he recoils: at the bidding of God he has just grasped the serpent
from which he fled; and in confronting a tyrant with armies at his
back, he could hope for small assistance from his brother. But
highly strung spirits, in every great crisis, are aware of vague
indefinite apprehensions that are not cowardly but imaginative. Thus
C Êsar,
when defying the hosts of Pompey, is said to have been disturbed by
an apparition. It is vain to put these apprehensions into logical
form, and argue them down: the slowness of speech of Moses was
surely refuted by the presence of God, Who makes the mouth and
inspires the utterance; but such fears lie deeper than the reasons
they assign, and when argument fails, will yet stubbornly repeat
their cry: "Send, I pray Thee, by the hand of him whom Thou wilt
send." Now this shrinking, which is not craven, is dispelled by
nothing so effectually as by the touch of a human hand. It is like
the voice of a friend to one beset by ghostly terrors: he does not
expect his comrade to exorcise a spirit, and yet his apprehensions
are dispelled. Thus Moses cannot summon up courage from the
protection of God, but when assured of the companionship of his
brother he will not only venture to return to Egypt, but will bring
with him his wife and children. Thus, also, He Who knew what was in
men's hearts sent forth His missionaries, both the Twelve and the
Seventy (as we have yet to learn the true economy of sending ours),
"by two and two" (Mar 6:7; Luk 10:1).
This is the principle which underlies the
institution of the Church of Christ, and the conception that
Christians are brothers, among whom the strong must help the weak.
Such help from their fellow-mortals would perhaps decide the choice
of many hesitating souls, upon the verge of the divine life,
recoiling from its unknown and dread experiences, but longing for a
sympathising comrade. Alas for the unkindly and unsympathetic
religion of men whose faith has never warmed a human heart, and of
congregations in which emotion is a misdemeanour!
There is no stronger force, among all that make for
the abuses of priestcraft, than this same yearning for human help
becomes when robbed of its proper nourishment, which is the
communion of saints, and the pastoral care of souls. Has it no
further nourishment than these? This instinctive craving for a
Brother to help as well as a Father to direct and govern,--this
social instinct, which banished the fears of Moses and made him set
out for Egypt long before Aaron came in sight, content when assured
of Aaron's co-operation,--is there nothing in God Himself to respond
to it? He Who is not ashamed to call us brethren has profoundly
modified the Church's conception of Jehovah, the Eternal, Absolute
and Unconditioned. It is because He can be touched with the feeling
of our infirmities, that we are bidden to draw near with boldness
unto the Throne of Grace. There is no heart so lonely that it cannot
commune with the lofty and kind humanity of Jesus.
There is a homelier lesson to be learned. Moses was
not only solaced by human fellowship, but nerved and animated by the
thought of his brother, and the mention of his tribe. "Is not Aaron
thy brother the Levite?" They had not met for forty years. Vague
rumours of deadly persecution were doubtless all that had reached
the fugitive, whose heart had burned, in solitary communion with
Nature in her sternest forms, as he brooded over the wrongs of his
family, of Aaron, and perhaps of Miriam.
And now his brother lived. The call which Moses
would have put from him was for the emancipation of his own flesh
and blood, and for their greatness. In that great hour, domestic
affection did much to turn the scale wherein the destinies of
humanity were trembling. And his was affection well returned. It
might easily have been otherwise, for Aaron had seen his younger
brother called to a dazzling elevation, living in enviable
magnificence, and earning fame by "word and deed"; and then, after a
momentary fusion of sympathy and of condition, forty years had
poured between them a torrent of cares and joys estranging because
unshared. But it was promised that Aaron, when he saw him, should be
glad at heart; and the words throw a beam of exquisite light into
the depths of the mighty soul which God inspired to emancipate
Israel and to found His Church, by thoughts of his brother's joy on
meeting him.
Let no man dream of attaining real greatness by
stifling his affections. The heart is more important than the
intellect; and the brief story of the Exodus has room for the
yearning of Jochebed over her infant "when she saw him that he was a
goodly child," for the bold inspiration of the young poetess, who
"stood afar off to know what should be done to him," and now for the
love of Aaron. So the Virgin, in the dread hour of her reproach,
went in haste to her cousin Elizabeth. So Andrew "findeth first his
own brother Simon." And so the Divine Sufferer, forsaken of God, did
not forsake His mother.
The Bible is full of domestic life. It is the theme
of the greater part of Genesis, which makes the family the seed-plot
of the Church. It is wisely recognised again at the moment when the
larger pulse of the nation begins to beat. For the life-blood in the
heart of a nation must be the blood in the hearts of men.
MOSES OBEYS.
Exo 4:18-31.
Moses is now commissioned: he is to go to Egypt, and
Aaron is coming thence to meet him. Yet he first returns to Midian,
to Jethro, who is both his employer and the head of the family, and
prays him to sanction his visit to his own people.
There are duties which no family resistance can
possibly cancel, and the direct command of God made it plain that
this was one of them. But there are two ways of performing even the
most imperative obligation, and religious people have done
irreparable mischief before now, by rudeness, disregard to natural
feeling and the rights of their fellow-men, under the impression
that they showed their allegiance to God by outraging other ties. It
is a theory for which no sanction can be found either in Holy
Scripture or in common sense.
When he asks permission to visit "his brethren" we
cannot say whether he ever had brothers besides Aaron, or uses the
word in the same larger national sense as when we read that, forty
years before, he went out unto his brethren and saw their burdens.
What is to be observed is that he is reticent with respect to his
vast expectations and designs.
He does not argue that, because a Divine promise
must needs be fulfilled, he need not be discreet, wary and taciturn,
any more than St. Paul supposed, because the lives of his shipmates
were promised to him, that it mattered nothing whether the sailors
remained on board.
The decrees of God have sometimes been used to
justify the recklessness of man, but never by His chosen followers.
They have worked out their own salvation the more earnestly because
God worked in them. And every good cause calls aloud for human
energy and wisdom, all the more because its consummation is the will
of God, and sooner or later is assured. Moses has unlearned his
rashness.
When the Lord said unto Moses in Midian, "Go, return
unto Egypt, for all the men are dead which sought thy life," there
is an almost verbal resemblance to the words in which the infant
Jesus is recalled from exile. We shall have to consider the typical
aspect of the whole narrative, when a convenient stage is reached
for pausing to survey it in its completeness. But resemblances like
this have been treated with so much scorn, they have been so freely
perverted into evidence of the mythical nature of the later story,
that some passing allusion appears desirable. We must beware equally
of both extremes. The Old Testament is tortured, and genuine
prophecies are made no better than coincidences, when coincidences
are exalted to all the dignity of express predictions. One can
scarcely venture to speak of the death of Herod when Jesus was to
return from Egypt, as being deliberately typified in the death of
those who sought the life of Moses. But it is quite clear that the
words in St. Matthew do intentionally point the reader back to this
narrative. For, indeed, under both, there are to be recognised the
same principles: that God does not thrust His servants into needless
or excessive peril; and that when the life of a tyrant has really
become not only a trial but a barrier, it will be removed by the
King of kings. God is prudent for His heroes.
Moreover, we must recognise the lofty fitness of
what is very visible in the Gospels--the coming to a head in Christ
of the various experiences of the people of God; and at the
recurrence, in His story, of events already known elsewhere, we need
not be disquieted, as if the suspicion of a myth were now become
difficult to refute; rather should we recognise the fulness of the
supreme life, and its points of contact with all lives, which are
but portions of its vast completeness. Who does not feel that in the
world's greatest events a certain harmony and correspondence are as
charming as they are in music? There is a sort of counterpoint in
history. And to this answering of deep unto deep, this
responsiveness of the story of Jesus to all history, our attention
is silently beckoned by St. Matthew, when, without asserting any
closer link between the incidents, he borrows this phrase so aptly.
A much deeper meaning underlies the profound
expression which God now commands Moses to employ; and although it
must await consideration at a future time, the progressive education
of Moses himself is meantime to be observed. At first he is taught
that the Lord is the God of their fathers, in whose descendants He
is therefore interested. Then the present Israel is His people, and
valued for its own sake. Now he hears, and is bidden to repeat to
Pharaoh, the amazing phrase, "Israel is My son, even My firstborn:
let My son go that he may serve Me; and if thou refuse to let him
go, behold I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn." Thus it is that
infant faith is led from height to height. And assuredly there never
was an utterance better fitted than this to prepare human minds, in
the fulness of time, for a still clearer revelation of the nearness
of God to man, and for the possibility of an absolute union between
the Creator and His creature.
It was on his way into Egypt, with his wife and
children, that a mysterious interposition forced Zipporah
reluctantly and tardily to circumcise her son.
The meaning of this strange episode lies perhaps
below the surface, but very near it. Danger in some form, probably
that of sickness, pressed Moses hard, and he recognised in it the
displeasure of his God. The form of the narrative leads us to
suppose that he had no previous consciousness of guilt, and had now
to infer the nature of his offence without any explicit
announcement, just as we infer it from what follows.
If so, he discerned his transgression when trouble
awoke his conscience; and so did his wife Zipporah. Yet her
resistance to the circumcision of their younger son was so
tenacious, with such difficulty was it overcome by her husband's
peril or by his command, that her tardy performance of the rite was
accompanied by an insulting action and a bitter taunt. As she
submitted, the Lord "let him go"; but we may perhaps conclude that
the grievance continued to rankle, from the repetition of her gibe,
"So she said, A bridegroom of blood art thou because of the
circumcision." The words mean, "We are betrothed again in blood,"
and might of themselves admit a gentler, and even a tender
significance; as if, in the sacrifice of a strong prejudice for her
husband's sake, she felt a revival of "the kindness of her youth,
the love of her espousals." For nothing removes the film from the
surface of a true affection, and makes the heart aware how bright it
is, so well as a great sacrifice, frankly offered for the sake of
love.
But such a rendering is excluded by the action which
went with her words, and they must be explained as meaning, This is
the kind of husband I have wedded: these are our espousals. With
such an utterance she fades almost entirely out of the story: it
does not even tell how she drew back to her father; and thenceforth
all we know of her is that she rejoined Moses only when the fame of
his victory over Amalek had gone abroad.
Their union seems to have been an ill-assorted or at
least an unprosperous one. In the tender hour when their firstborn
was to be named, the bitter sense of loneliness had continued to be
nearer to the heart of Moses than the glad new consciousness of
paternity, and he said, "I am a stranger in a strange land."
Different indeed had been the experience of Joseph, who called his
"firstborn Manasseh, for God, said he, hath made me forget all my
toil, and all my father's house" (Gen 41:51). The home-life of Moses
had not made him forget that he was an exile. Even the removal of
imminent death from her husband could not hush these selfish
complaints of Zipporah, not because he was a father of blood to her
little one, but because he was a bridegroom of blood to her own
shrinking sensibilities. It is Miriam the sister, not Zipporah the
wife, who gives lyrical and passionate voice to his triumph, and is
mourned by the nation when she dies. Both what we read of her and
what we do not read goes far to explain the insignificance of their
children in history, and the more startling fact that the grandson
of Moses became the venal instrument of the Danites in their
schismatic worship (Jdg 18:30, R.V.).
Domestic unhappiness is a palliation, but not a
justification, for an unserviceable life. It is a great advantage to
come into action with the dew and freshness of affection upon the
soul. Yet it is not once nor twice that men have carried the message
of God back from the barren desert and the lonely ways of their
unhappiness to the not too happy race of man.
Now, who can fail to discern real history in all
this? Is it in such a way that myth or legend would have dealt with
the wife of the great deliverer? Still less conceivable is it that
these should have treated Moses himself as the narrative hitherto
has consistently done. At every step he is made to stumble. His
first attempt was homicidal, and brought upon him forty years of
exile. When the Divine commission came he drew back wilfully, as he
had formerly pressed forward unsent. There is not even any
suggestion offered us of Stephen's apology for his violent
deed--namely, that he supposed his brethren understood how that God
by his hand was giving them deliverance (Act 7:25). There is nothing
that resembles the eulogium of the Epistle to the Hebrews upon the
faith which glorified his precipitancy, like the rainbow in a
torrent, because that rash blow committed him to share the
affliction of the people of God, and renounced the rank of a grand
son of the Pharaoh (Heb 11:24-25). All this is very natural, if
Moses himself be in any degree responsible for the narrative. It is
incredible, if the narrative were put together after the Captivity,
to claim the sanction of so great a name for a newly forged
hierarchical system. Such a theory could scarcely be refuted more
completely, if the narrative before us were invented with the
deliberate aim to overthrow it.
But in truth the failures of the good and great are
written for our admonition, teaching us how inconsistent are even
the best of mortals, and how weak the most resolute. Rather than
forfeit his own place among the chosen people, Moses had forsaken a
palace and become a proscribed fugitive; yet he had neglected to
claim for his child its rightful share in the covenant, its
recognition among the sons of Abraham. Perhaps procrastination,
perhaps domestic opposition, more potent than a king's wrath to
shake his purpose, perhaps the insidious notion that one who had
sacrificed so much might be at ease about slight negligences,--some
such influence had left the commandment unobserved. And now, when
the dream of his life was being realised at last, and he found
himself the chosen instrument of God for the rebuke of one nation
and the making of another, how pardonable it must have seemed to
leave an unpleasant small domestic duty over until a more convenient
season! How natural it still seems to merge the petty task in the
high vocation, to excuse small lapses in pursuit of lofty aims! But
this was the very time when God, hitherto forbearing, took him
sternly to task for his neglect, because men who are especially
honoured should be more obedient and reverential than their fellows.
Let young men who dream of a vast career, and meanwhile indulge
themselves in small obliquities, let all who cast out demons in the
name of Christ, and yet work iniquity, reflect upon this chosen and
long-trained, self-sacrificing and ardent servant of the Lord, whom
Jehovah seeks to kill because he wilfully disobeys even a purely
ceremonial precept.
Moses was not only religious, but "a man of
destiny," one upon whom vast interests depended. Now, such men have
often reckoned themselves exempt from the ordinary laws of
conduct.[8]
It is not a light thing, therefore, to find God's
indignant protest against the faintest shadow of a doctrine so
insidious and so deadly, set in the forefront of sacred history, at
the very point where national concerns and those of religion begin
to touch. If our politics are to be kept pure and clean, we must
learn to exact a higher fidelity, and not a relaxed morality, from
those who propose to sway the destinies of nations.
And now the brothers meet, embrace, and exchange
confidences. As Andrew, the first disciple who brought another to
Jesus, found first his own brother Simon, so was Aaron the earliest
convert to the mission of Moses. And that happened which so often
puts our faithlessness to shame. It had seemed very hard to break
his strange tidings to the people: it was in fact very easy to
address one whose love had not grown cold during their severance,
who probably retained faith in the Divine purpose for which the
beautiful child of the family had been so strangely preserved, and
who had passed through trial and discipline unknown to us in the
stern intervening years.
And when they told their marvellous story to the
elders of the people, and displayed the signs, they believed; and
when they heard that God had visited them in their affliction, then
they bowed their heads and worshipped.
This was their preparation for the wonders that
should follow: it resembled Christ's appeal, "Believest thou that I
am able to do this?" or Peter's word to the impotent man, "Look on
us."
For the moment the announcement had the desired
effect, although too soon the early promise was succeeded by
faithlessness and discontent. In this, again, the teaching of the
earliest political movement on record is as fresh as if it were a
tale of yesterday. The offer of emancipation stirs all hearts; the
romance of liberty is beautiful beside the Nile as in the streets of
Paris; but the cost has to be gradually learned; the losses displace
the gains in the popular attention; the labour, the self-denial and
the self-control grow wearisome, and Israel murmurs for the
flesh-pots of Egypt, much as the modern revolution reverts to a
despotism. It is one thing to admire abstract freedom, but a very
different thing to accept the austere conditions of the life of
genuine freemen. And surely the same is true of the soul. The gospel
gladdens the young convert: he bows his head and worships; but he
little dreams of his long discipline, as in the forty desert years,
of the solitary places through which his soul must wander, the
drought, the Amalekite, the absent leader, and the temptations of
the flesh. In mercy, the long future is concealed; it is enough
that, like the apostles, we should consent to follow; gradually we
shall obtain the courage to which the task may be revealed.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] Tertullian appealed to the second of these
miracles to illustrate the possibility of the resurrection. "The
hand of Moses is changed and becomes like that of the dead,
bloodless, colourless, and stiff with cold. But on the recovery of
heat and restoration of its natural colour, it is the same flesh and
blood.... So will changes, conversions and reformation be needed to
bring about the resurrection, yet the substance will be preserved
safe." (De Res., lv.) It is far wiser to be content with the
declaration of St. Paul that the identity of the body does not
depend on that of its corporeal atoms. "Thou sowest not that body
that shall be, but a naked grain.... But God giveth ... to every
seed his own body" (1Co 15:37-38).
[8] "I am not an ordinary man," Napoleon used to
say, "and the laws of morals and of custom were never made for
me."--Memoirs of Madame de R Èmusat,
i. 91. |
|
|