ISRAEL. 
5 
the especial son of promise, died like him, a pilgrim, yet confiding in the future kingdom. 
Jacob began his career a fugitive and ended it an exile, yet with his last breath uttering 
a memorable prediction of the ample fulfilment of the divine words. The discipline 
extended to the nation. The Israelites were not only forced .to abandon Palestine, but 
they were thrown into the power of a great and despotic kingdom, which gradually 
changed protection into tyranny; and, by actual bondage, threatened to raise a perpetual 
barrier against their return. 
Yet faith survived. Neither the famine which drove them into Egypt, nor the violence 
which retained them there, could overcome their conviction. Joseph, the first minister, 
the monarch in all but name, refused to die an Egyptian, and enjoined that his remains 
should be borne away with his people on the day of their future march to Palestine. 
Even when they were fettered, generation after generation, to the soil, and a deepening 
slavery of two hundred years, must have seemed to set the seal to their exclusion, the 
principle sacredly survived. The parents of Moses preserved the infant, in the strength of 
a supernatural hope. Moses himself, when his fame and his genius had grown to maturity, 
“ mighty in words and deeds,” the statesman and the soldier, with all the temptations of 
royal rank and opulence before him, refused to abandon his hope in the promise; “ refused 
to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the 
people of God .” 1 
But, his individual trial was to grow still more severe. In an attempt to arouse 
the spirit of his countrymen he failed, and made the bitter discovery, that they had lost all 
the feelings essential to freedom. He was pursued by the vengeance of the king, fled 
into the desert, and there, relinquishing for ever the hopes and habits of a life of distinction 
and command, took the staff of the shepherd. 
Yet, from this period, the supremacy of Providence only ascends with broader splendour 
Means, the most utterly below human calculation, produce effects the most utterly above it; 
all is inadequacy on the part of man. To raise a nation of slaves into a nation of freemen, 
proverbially a task requiring the most extraordinary union of ability and ambition, is the 
task laid upon a man eighty years old, and still more disqualified by circumstances than 
by age; a fugitive in the desert, sunk into the monotonous life of a keeper of sheep, 
totally cut off from the country of his birth, and calmed into “ the meekest man on earth.” 
Even when the divine call comes to him, he exhibits reluctance, pleads personal inability, 
and finally yields only to miracle. 
But the conditions of this great achievement place it still more beyond the range of 
human faculties. In the face of the most civilised and powerful kingdom of their time, 
the deliverance of the Israelites was to be effected, without the sword. The slave-born 
was to be rescued from the slave-master by an act of public will; and not merely to 
obtain his freedom, but a portion of that master’s wealth, as a compensation for his slavery. 
The deliverance was not to be an escape, but a triumph. The people were to march out 
in the open day; with the king, the nobles, and the troops of Egypt looking on, yet not 
daring to lift a weapon against the most helpless of all multitudes, a moving nation. 
Hebrews, xi. 24, 25. 
