to serve the Lord their God among mountain ranges of wild and awful grandeur. Eye-witnesses have thus described them. "I stand," says one traveller, "upon one of the peaks of Sinai, where Moses stood when he talked with the Almighty. Can this naked rock have been indeed the witness of that great interview between man and his Creator, on the morning that was ushered in with terrible thunders and lightnings, with the thick clouds resting on the mountain's brow? Yes! This is the holy mountain; and no fitter place on all the earth could have been chosen, for the manifestation of Divine power. I have stood on the summit of the giant Etna, and looked over the clouds floating beneath it,-upon the bold scenery of Sicily. I have climbed Vesuvius, and looked down upon the waves of lava, and the ruined and half-recovered cities at its foot: but these are nothing compared to the terrific solitude and bleak majesty of Sinai. It is a perfect sea of desolation. Not a tree, or shrub, or blade of grass is to be seen upon the bare and rugged sides of innumerable mountains, heaving their naked summits to the skies; while the crumbling masses of granite around, and the distant view of the Syrian desert, with its boundless waste of sands, form the wildest and most dreary, the most terrific and desolate picture the imagination can conceive." Other travellers describe the view from the summit of Serbal as the grandest, though the most desolate, to be found upon the earth's surface. The easternmost and highest peak is ascended by a mighty flight of rock stairs which wind round its shoulder. THE TIMES WHEN THE PENTATEUCH BEGAN TO BE WRITTEN. FROM EGYPT TO SINAI. Ir is well for us who can look back upon the life of MOSES from the heights of the New Testament days. The last time he is named in Scripture is more than 1500 years after his death, in the Revelation of Jesus Christ unto the Apostle John. The song of Moses, "the servant of God," is sung on the "sea of glass," to "harps of gold," with a yet greater song, "the song of the Lamb," "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." The song is thus summed up in the book of Revelation (xv. 3, 4): "Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints. Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy: all nations shall come and worship before thee; for thy judgments are made manifest." This is also the spirit of the song in Exodus xv., when God's judgments were made manifest on Egypt, and when "all nations" were Moab and Edom, and Canaan and Assyria. Those who sing the song of Moses must be the children of Israel. (See Rev. xiv. 3; and vii. 4.) Let us now go back to his first song. We have seen how the Israelites entered the Red Sea as a nation of slaves, and emerged from it as free men, for their oppressors lay all "dead on the sea shore," and we must now follow them in their pilgrimage, after their song of triumph in the 15th chapter of Exodus. We hear but of three songs in the wilderness: the song after crossing the Red Sea, the song of the well at Beer-sheba, and the song before the ascent of Nebo. There are thirty-nine years between the first and the last song of praise. We complain, as "the people" did, oftener than we give thanks, during the process of our training in the wilderness, and while the Egyptian in our characters is dying out under God's discipline; but when the lesson is taught us to say in all things, "Not our will, but thine be done," we are near to the Promised Land. We have to learn to draw water from the wells of salvation, and the way to do this is to betake ourselves diligently to the study of God's holy Word. We must dig into that well, from whence all the streams of truth flow. It is not enough to know from the Scriptures merely the way of life. They must be searched for those truths that lie deeper beneath their surface. Their Have we not observed that Christians whose minds are occupied by the study of God's Word, and who are patiently digging into it, are the happiest and most fruitful Christians? "hearts are enlarged," they will seldom be offended or perplexed about their own frames and feelings; they are drinking of the living water that springs up as they dig. Most of the evils within us and around us, arise from our PARTIAL knowledge of the Word of God. We must realize "the people" as a whole nation encamped on the Egyptian side of the Red Sea, in Wady Tarawik, or "The Valley of the Nocturnal Travellers." Here is commemorated by its Arabic |