JOSEPH AND CHRIST.

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hopes never to be fulfilled,-if I did not think that in the fulness of the time He was manifested whose goings forth had been of old, from everlasting, whose life had been in all ages the Light of men; that He was separated from His brethren through their sin; that He was sent before them to preserve life and to build up a family on earth and in heaven; so that God, and not Caiaphas or Pontius Pilate, was the author of His death and His resurrection; by which death and resurrection He has proved Himself to be the Head of His Church, the Brother of every man, the Ruler and Deliverer of the Nations.

SERMON VIII.

THE MISSION OF MOSES.

(Lincoln's Inn, Fifth Sunday in Lent, April 6, 1851.)
Lessons for the day, Exodus III. and v.

EXODUS V. 22, 23.

And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, Lord, wherefore hast thou so evil entreated this people? why is it that thou hast sent me? For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in thy name, he hath done evil to this people; neither hast thou delivered thy people at all.

No one doubts that the History in the book of Exodus is the history of a deliverance. The most superficial reader would say, that the subject of it is the redemption of a people out of slavery. The Church has adopted this view of it so completely, that we do not break the ordinary course of our reading on Palm Sunday and Easter Day. The chapters respecting the plagues which were sent to Pharaoh, respecting the Passover, and the passage of the Red Sea, are our lessons on the Passion and the Resurrection. The Law of Redemption (so the Church teaches) is asserted in the Old Testament facts; is evolved and fulfilled in the facts of the New. We are not taught to look upon one as belonging to an earthly, the other to a spiritual economy; the one as merely a figure of the other. The Jewish Redemption is nothing except as it has a spiritual foundation.

The Christian Redemption is nothing if its results do not affect the earth. Neither is figurative; both are

substantial.

At the close of the book of Genesis we found the records of the Hebrew family becoming interwoven with those of the Egyptian monarchy. There was no confusion between them. The family remained a family surrounded with all its patriarchal traditions, marked out by the sign of a divine covenant. The kingdom of the Pharaohs was already existing. Joseph subverted nothing which he found. He merely taught kings, priests, and people, that they were different parts of an order established by God; that there were relations between them, and obligations due from each to the other. He never for a moment forgot his own peculiar position. Only by remembering it, could he help a people which did not share it with him. If he had ceased to look upon himself as a chosen witness for the unseen God, he would have lost his power of serving the king and nation of Egypt.

This is the connexion between the inhabitants of Goshen and the natives of Egypt, when the curtain falls upon the first act of this divine drama. Before it rises again, they are changed. Another Pharaoh, perhaps another dynasty, is ruling. The stranger race is multiplied, it has become dangerous and suspected. They are still no part of the Egyptian nation, but are distinguished from it by race, occupation, the covenant. It is reasonable to suppose that they are also distinguished by want of organization; by ignorance of the arts in which Egypt was beginning to excel; by greater grossness and barbarism. The patriarchal family had grown into a horde; it must have lost its domestic character, yet it was attached to no polity. The

low habits which the sacred historian attributed to the sons of Jacob would assuredly be perpetuated and diffused among their descendants,―settled in a rich country, with a considerable command of material enjoyments, still practising pasturage,-though surrounded by men who had made much progress in tillage.

A people in this state was ripe for slavery. It only required a monarch with some ordinary notions of policy, and some ambition of making himself illustrious by great works, to conceive the plan of using such a set of readymade tools to build tombs or treasure-houses. The Scripture narrative brings a monarch of the kind before us, with magicians as his advisers. It scarcely requires the commonest and oldest information we possess respecting Egyptian wisdom, though the latest may be very serviceable, to explain what kind of advisers these must have been. They must have possessed a knowledge of nature beyond that of their countrymen, who had sufficient experience of the utility of such knowledge to reverence teachers endued with any rare portion of it. The magicians must have considered this knowledge as divine; and have come more and more to regard the different powers of nature and the different objects in which these powers were exhibited, as themselves divine. They will have been politicians as well as naturalists, ready to employ their lore and the mastery which it gave them over the things of the earth, to uphold the authority of the monarch, or to promote his plans. They will therefore have fallen into a scheme of trick and dissimulation, which would have been ineffectual and impossible, if there had not been some truths lying at the root of it; and some real assurance in their own minds both of those truths and of their own

capacities. It is this mixture of faith with insincerity,— of actual knowledge with the assumption of knowledge, of genuine power with the desire to make the power felt and worshipped, a readiness therefore to abuse it to low grovelling purposes,—which we have to recognise in the impostures of all subsequent ages, and to which we are here introduced in one of its primitive manifestations. It was most natural for a politic monarch to wish that a body of strangers, who were doing little good in a certain portion of his land, should be made slaves, and so become agents in carrying out what seemed to him magnificent projects. It was most natural that a body of politic priests,-disliking these strangers, for the traditions and customs which separated them from their influence, should readily cooperate with him in that plan, or should be the first suggesters of it. It was equally natural that his Egyptian subjects should sympathise with the design, and should feel that they were raised in the degradation of another race. But it was impossible that king, priests, and people, should effect this seemingly sage and national purpose, without forging new chains for themselves, without losing some perceptions of a moral order in the world and a moral Ruler of it, which had been implied in their government and worship, and which Joseph's arrangements had drawn out; it was impossible but that with the loss of this feeling, they should sink further and further into natural and animal worship.

These remarks I believe are quite needful for the understanding of the life of Moses, upon which we entered this morning. That life is encompassed, in the Antiquities of Josephus, with a multitude of incidents, all tending to glorify the great Lawgiver of the nation, and to show what