Remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee. Deuteronomy 8:1, 2 Remembering and forgetting S. H. Howe, D. D. (with Philippians 3:13 ): — Thou shalt remember, and thou shalt forget. We need a good memory and a good forgettery. I. FIRST, THEN, THE PAST; WE ARE TO REMEMBER IT. The old lawgiver sought to make the nation's great history sacramental. Much might well be forgotten. The old rebellions, the old murmurings, their lapses from loyalty, and the heavy, hard work they had made for their great spiritual leader — they had better break with much of this unsavoury record. But they must remember the lessons of history. Unfortunate is the man or the nation without the memories of great providences, that has never known the discipline of heaven. We are never to forget the past: the fact that we are the product of the past, that the ground on which we stand is made soil; that if you sink your pick into it you cut into the layer of forty or fifty centuries; that all our sowing is upon the prepared ground and top dressing contributed by all the older periods. God has been working and good men have been building at all the sub. structures that are the foundations on which we start the work we have in hand. Providence is not the mintage of yesterday, and God has not been waiting for us to appear on the scene before He set His plough in the furrow. We had better not be too ready to quit with the past. Foundations have been made for us; we are ourselves the creations of the past, and most of the instruments with which we work are contributions from the past. We may easily exaggerate our abilities and resources, especially our originality. We are a little inflated just now with our physical resources. The greatest moulders of men, the greatest teachers of the world are not any of them above ground, when we come to think of it. The mightiest forces that reach forth their transforming energies to mould human life come to us from sources back of all contemporary history. For our greatest literature, for the most truly constructive, forces for shaping history, and for our religion we must go to the past. The history of the great peoples of the world is a veritable mine of wealth if we could better afford to throw all our gold into the sea than to lose our past and the past of the divinely led nations among whom God has been so visibly working. We had better remember all the way the Lord hath led us, — remember it because it has made us what we are, and because God's footprints are visible upon it. God has been here before us; has been forehanded with us; has wrought at the basis of all our individual and national life. II. THE FIRST WORD IS REMEMBER, THE SECOND IS FORGET. We are to remember the past and we are to forget it. The made soil on which we sow is an inheritance from the past, but we are to add a new layer of soil on which others are to sow. Our best use of the past, Phillips Brooks tells us, is to get a great future out of it. Many people and many nations overwork their past, give themselves in excess to retrospection, build the sepulchres of the fathers, and give themselves to criticism of their own age and time. They behold God and nature through older eyes alone, forgetting the individual relation of each personal soul. "Why," asks Emerson, "should we not enjoy our original relation to the universe and demand our own works, laws, and worship? The past is for us, but the sole terms on which it can become ours are its subordination to the present." And so one way of forgetting the past and leaving the things that are behind is to go and do better things. Good precedents are good, but we ought to improve on them. We ought to swing clear of the mistakes of predecessors, and do a better work than they did. We need in the interests of personal growth to forget many things which we insist on loading ourselves with. It is very human to blunder, but it is a Divine thing in imperfect people not to repeat blunders. Past sins too, if repented of, are good things to forget. And old sorrows we had better leave with the dead yesterdays: the tomorrow of hope is already kindling in the east. Even old successes had better be left with the past, if we are making them the limit of responsibility and the end of duty. The future should be reserved in all cases for constructive work: for new undertakings, for larger tasks, for better fidelities. Learn new things; do new things every week you live. Our life stagnates when poised on the older standards of duty or achievement. ( S. H. Howe, D. D. ) Looking backward W. L. Watkinson. I. THE DIVINELY GOVERNED LIFE. "Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness." Now, it is not difficult for us to believe in the Divine government when we look up into the midnight sky. Ten thousand times ten thousand stars moving in their orbits, and pursuing from age to age their march of light, compel us to believe that this is a divinely governed cosmos. It is also easy to believe in the government of God when we look upon this world in which we live. This planet is evidently a rational and ordered sphere. The form of the argument for design may change, but the conviction of design persists in the consciousness of mankind. They feel that at the back of earth and sea is an Architect building with a plan; an Artist working out a distinct ideal and purpose; a Dramatist fitting perfectly each act of the drama. Looking on the beautiful world, it is easy to believe this, it is almost impossible to disbelieve it. Again, it is not difficult to believe in the Divine government when you consider the history of the human race. It is as difficult to resist the idea of order, progress, purpose in contemplating the course of human history as it is to resist that idea in surveying nature. There is a doctrine known as the doctrine of purposelessness, a doctrine that maintains the inconsequence and irrationality of nature and history, but it has found few defenders. And, once more, it is not difficult to believe in a Divine government when we mark the career of extraordinary men. When we consider Cyrus and Caesar, St. Paul and Luther, it is easy to believe in the divinity that shapes men's ends. The real difficulty of believing in a supernatural order arises when we begin to think of a Divine government ordering the individual lives of such obscure and mediocre beings as we are. Any unbelief here is fatal indeed. We must believe that the same infinite knowledge and power which shape the destinies of orbs, races, and heroes, shape the life history of the lowliest man and woman on the face of the earth. What did our Lord teach us on this very matter? "If God so clothe the grass of the field, shall He not much more clothe you?" And certainly the science of the day helps us to the same conclusion. The world is built upon the atom; the microbe in many ways teaches the grandeur of insignificance. We may be very obscure and ordinary people, but it is our joy to remember that we are certainly embraced by the government of God, and that He ever seeks to lead us and guide us as a shepherd guides his sheep. And have we not many of us a very vivid consciousness of this overshadowing Providence? Do you say, "I am the architect of my own fortune"? If you are, you are the architect of a precious jerry building. If your life is really rich and successful, ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building. And if God has blessed us marvellously, has He not also wonderfully kept us amid the temptations and perils of the pilgrimage? The man who congratulates himself upon his character and standing, and imputes all to his own strength, and caution, and skill, is strangely blind and forgetful. What would you think if an ocean liner were to flatter itself because it had found its way from New York to Liverpool? "How cautiously I crept through that fog; how skilfully I kept clear of those icebergs; how cleverly I piloted myself past those sandbanks; what a wide berth I gave those rocks; how delicately I threaded my way along the Mersey!" Forgetting all the time the captain on the bridge. We must not forget the Captain on the bridge, the Captain of our salvation. How wonderfully God has disappointed our fears and misgivings! We have often looked forward with solicitude and even anguish to impending, threatening trials, and yet God has brought us safely through. God has been with us through all the years, filling us with good things, delivering us in the evil day, scattering our fears, bringing us onward to the appointed rest. II. THE DIVINE PURPOSE IN OUR LIFE. "To humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no." The moral idea is the grand end to which God governs the race, the nation, and governs us. God seeks to bring men to the knowledge of Himself, to purify them from false love and lusts, to teach them obedience, to make them fit for their great and holy inheritance. The Egyptian historian, the Greek historian, the Roman historian simply gave a series of grand pictures of kings, cities, marches, battles won and lost, and ended with such pictures; but the Jewish lawgivers and prophets grasped the fact of the moral character and aim of the Divine government. The aim of God's government is not the material enrichment of men. The great symbols of His final purpose are not L.S.D. He does not rule the world to create rich nations or individuals. He has not led you for forty years that you might make a big pile, and get at length an embroidered shroud. And the final idea of God is not intellectual. He is not satisfied with genius, scholarship, taste. Some seem to think that the ultimate purpose of the governing Power of the universe is to produce a sensual race with a magnificent environment of palaces and pictures, like Victor Hugo's devil fish in the enchanted cave. The great end of God's government is stated in the text. For forty years God disciplined Israel in the wilderness, that they might pass from being a nation of coarse slaves into a nation of saints, losing their sensuality and wilfulness, being weaned from idols, growing into righteousness and spirituality; and it is precisely for the same great end that God disciplines us today. He anticipates, disposes, adjusts, rules, and overrules, so that we may taste His love, keep His law, reflect His beauty, and be prepared to see His face. How far has this great end been answered in us? God has greatly blessed us, humbled us; what is the result? How do we bear the moral test? Some of us are in many worldly respects far worse off than we were forty years ago. Life is a wonderful process for spoiling dreams and frustrating hopes, and some of you feel that your life has not been the success you expected, that you have been sorely disappointed, that life ends in frustration, if not in a general breakdown. Are you at last humble, spiritual, godly, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life? Then glorify God with all your ransomed powers. Blessed humiliation! You are no failure. You are a splendid, Divine, eternal success. ( W. L. Watkinson. ) Looking backward Sidney Pitt. Memory is said to be sometimes quickened to an unusual activity at the end of life. The dying, and especially the drowning, are said to have set before them in swift panorama view the varied experiences of the life which is hurrying to a close. "Son, remember" — is the thrilling admonition — "that thou, in thy lifetime, receivedst thy good things." It is in a more merciful and hopeful way that we are called upon to exercise our memory today. While we still live and the result of our life may be influenced, we are required to pass it in review. Occasionally circumstances arise which seem to set us upon this duty in an altogether special way. You pass along a road where you have not been for fifteen or twenty years. You see a face that you have not seen since you were a child, or you meet a man that was your friend in youth. Or perhaps it is some particular crisis in life, or the return of some birthday, that sets the past in review. Life is here regarded as a discipline, and we have set before us first of all — I. THE AGENT OF THIS DISCIPLINE. "The Lord thy God." Think of the multitude of influences to which these Israelites were exposed in their great migration. Moses to lead them, Korah, Dathan, and Abiram to mislead them, Aaron to do sometimes the one and sometimes the other; the Red Sea to bar their way at the beginning of their journey, and the Jordan at the end; famine and pestilence, quails and manna; Caleb and Joshua to encourage, the unfaithful spies to discourage, the Egyptians to drive them, Moabites, Amorites, and the rest to harass and hinder them. Yet as they look back they are taught to see One Hand at work, and that the hand of the Lord their God. The great lesson which this old Hebrew history has to teach us is the clear recognition of God in everything. There is no lesson, surely, which our strained and worried modern life more urgently requires than this. If our lives, and lives dearer to us than our own, are to be the sport of every malign influence, and every wilful or foolish person; if we are at the mercy of all those varied calamities and deaths which ride upon the breeze and lurk in the dust and lie in wait at every point, we may well be driven to distraction. II. THE SPHERE OF THIS DISCIPLINE. "In the wilderness." The place in which the discipline was conducted was not without its bearing on the result. It was a place in which the influence of things seen was as weak almost as it could be upon the earth. If you wish to teach a child a specially important lesson you will take him into some quiet room, where he shall not be interrupted, and where in the room itself there shall be as little as possible to distract attention. Such a school room was this desert place, where God took the nation to Himself, and taught them the great lessons in regard to His nature and character which, through them, in after ages have been taught to the world. Our life, as a whole, is not a wilderness; it is rather a garden, which ever tends to become richer and more fruitful as generation after generation toils upon it. Yet there is in many of our lives what may be termed a wilderness experience — a time of affliction, bereavement, disappointment, perplexity; in which God is doing for us in a briefer period what He did for the Israelites during this long forty years. If God does give us a taste of the wilderness life, let us remember that He is not doing it without a purpose. III. THE DEFINITE TERM OF THIS DISCIPLINE. "These forty years." The Israelites were not to be on trial forever. At the end of forty years a result had been arrived at and ascertained which would not now be materially altered. There is a loose idea, only too common nowadays, that probation is to be extended indefinitely into the future. People allow themselves to think that if a man does not come right at first he is to be kept on with till he does come right, so that the drunkard, the Pharisee, and the miser, though they grow worse and worse, and pass out of this life drunken, pharisaic, or miserly, are yet by some unexplained process in the indefinite future to become saints. Now, such an idea not only sets itself squarely against the main body of Scripture teaching, but altogether fails to commend itself to common sense. Indeed, a wide observation will lead us to this, that even within this life character tends to final permanence, so that forty years, for example, do not pass without leaving a mark, and setting character into a form. Professor Drummond has said that a man cannot alter his collar after he is forty, much less his character. IV. THE PURPOSE OF THIS DISCIPLINE "To humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep His commandments or no." It was to humble them, that is, to bring them by means of privation and distress to feel their need of His help, and their dependence upon Him. To prove them, to put them, that is, in such positions as would drive them to show what was in them. Times come to us also when we are obliged to speak out, and to take our stand, and to do distinctly either right or wrong. Young people at the beginning commonly regard life mainly or chiefly as a sphere or opportunity of enjoyment. And we must not be unsympathetic. It is natural, and perhaps unavoidable, that they should take this view at first. This aspect of life, however, very soon turns out to be utterly unsatisfactory. Then, after the thought of enjoyment there often comes with earnest young people the higher and better thought of achievement. They say: I will accomplish something; I will make a mark; I will get to the top of the tree. But the top of the tree is so hard to reach, so few can reach it, those who do reach it have to pay such a heavy price, and find it, after all, such a barren and comfortless elevation, that this view of life frequently ends in disappointment too. Then it is that the Divine view of life comes to our rescue. Enjoyment is not left out of the account. It comes in, not as the object of life, but as the divinely given accompaniment of service. Achievement also finds its proper place. The faithful servant shall have the "Well done." But above the thought either of enjoyment or achievement there rises the thought of discipline. In forming our estimate of a man we ask, What has he done? God asks, What has he become? There is no subject on which greater mistakes are made than in the matter of getting on in the world. We all want to get on, and for our children to get on, but few have the right idea of what getting on really is. A man thinks he is getting on when his business prospers, and everything turns to gold in his hands. Not necessarily. He may be losing ground all that time. No! When he can stand in the presence of temptation without yielding to it; when he can bear humiliation and disappointment without murmuring; when he can see the unscrupulous competitor go in front of him, and yet refuse to be unscrupulous himself, and let the best bargain he ever saw in his life go past him, rather than secure it by doing or saying that which is unworthy; when he can toil all day and accomplish very little, and go home at night and neither scold the wife nor be angry with the children, that's when he is getting on. When we get into such a position that our word is always listened to with respect and deference, and "when we ope our lips no dog durst bark," we think we are getting on. No! When we can bear hard and cruel speech, and not resent or retaliate; when we can give the soft answer that turneth away wrath, or even be reviled and not revile again, that's when we are getting on. A woman thinks she is getting on when she is moving into a bigger house, when her drawing room is splendid and crowded, and she a gay and brilliant queen in the midst of it. But it is quite possible that she may be suffering loss at such a time as that. No! When she can move into a smaller house, and make every corner of it radiant with her smile; when she can work in narrowed circumstances without becoming soured, or meet affliction and distress and bear it like a heroine, that is when she's getting on. ( Sidney Pitt. ) The power of memory J. R. Hargreaves. I. THE AGENCY OF MEMORY AND ITS ATTENDANT FACULTY RECOLLECTION IN THE WORK OF SPIRITUAL ADVANCEMENT. 1. Among the faculties with which God has beneficently endowed man, memory ranks with the most important. It is a gallery lined with the pictures of past events, and with scenes on which we have gazed — a gallery sometimes vocal with sounds that fill the heart with gladness, or pierce it with keenest pain. It is memory that makes the record to which conscience points when it speaks in tones of menace. It is in memory that there is stored up the treasures knowledge has patiently amassed, and it is with memory we take counsel when we would investigate, or must decide.(1) If the record is so perfect, how necessary to avoid sin! One of the greatest blessings a man can possess is an unspotted memory. How many of us are humbled at the record of our memory!(2) The indestructibility suggests one pain of perdition. He who passes into hell with a record of sin, and of opportunities wasted, will carry with him his own chamber of torture. There is an attendant faculty called recollection. The curator at a museum or library searches for the object you want. So recollection. 2. Illustrate the influence on spiritual work. These are not merely intellectual faculties. These have a moral work to do. It may be illustrated in the aid given to convince Joseph's brethren ( Genesis 42:21 ). It ever presents to us the teachings of God's dealings with us. To lead to avoid past errors, and to show that the purpose was to do us good at our latter end. II. THE ISRAELITE WHO THUS REMEMBERED WOULD PERCEIVE THAT GOD'S PURPOSE HAD BEEN TO HUMBLE. III. TO PROVE THEE, TO KNOW WHAT WAS IN THINE HEART. Not to show God, but to show us our faults. The great gun is taken to a proof house, and tried with the great charge, and if some crack is revealed men say it was well it did not burst and spread dismay at some crisis of the fight. The anchor and chain is tested link by link, to see if any flaw should be revealed. If it had gone untested, how great the peril! ( J. R. Hargreaves. ) The advantages of a devout review of the Divine dispensat James Stark. ions : — I. EXPLAIN THE SOLEMN CHARGE. 1. The object of remembrance is extensive: the way — all the way which the Lord our God has led us; that is, the whole tenor of the Divine dispensations toward us — their nature, means, seasons, relatives, tendencies, and actual effects. 2. It supposes that this exercise, interesting and beneficial as it is, we are prone to neglect II. ENFORCE OBEDIENCE TO THE CHARGE. 1. An enlightened and devout retrospect of the dispensations of God to you will present you with many impressive displays of His glory. 2. This devout retrospection will supply us with many affecting displays of our own corruption. 3. This remembrance will supply the saints with pleasing discoveries of the sanctified tendencies of their souls. 4. This remembrance will confirm our faith in the Scriptures as the Word of God, and improve all our practical views both of things seen and unseen. ( James Stark. ) Remembrance of God's dealings T. Webster, B. D. I. ON THE DUTY OF REMEMBERING THE DEALINGS OF GOD TOWARDS US. Look back to the earliest period of your history — the time and place of your birth — the varied circumstances of your education — the business or the profession in which you have been engaged — the measure of prosperity or adversity you have experienced — the various connections and engagements you have formed — the sicknesses, accidents, and dangers you have encountered, and the merciful deliverances which you have received; — all these come under the general idea of the dealings of God with you, which it becomes you to remember. But this review of the providential dispensations of Almighty God should lead us to contemplate also that grace and mercy with which we have been favoured. Ever let us remember that we were not born in Egyptian darkness, or consigned from our birth to a waste, howling wilderness. We were born in a highly favoured land, brought by Christian parents and pious friends to the house of God; early baptized in the Saviour's name; accustomed to worship God in His house. And has not God graciously vouchsafed to meet with and bless us in His house, and under those ordinances which through His mercy have been administered among us? II. THE MEANS TO BE ADOPTED IN ORDER TO REMEMBER THE DIVINE DEALINGS TOWARDS US. We are prone to forget the God of our mercies, to lose sight of His dispensations, to sink into carelessness and neglect, to regard passing events as matters of course, not calling for any special recollection or acknowledgment. Now, to guard against this forgetful disposition it becomes us ofttimes to stir up ourselves, and all with whom we are connected, to record and remember God's mercies; and especially to improve those times and seasons which He hath set apart for this purpose. And while we carefully observe seasons which are especially set apart in commemoration of the Divine dispensations, we should also diligently improve the ordinances which are appointed for the same important end. III. THE END WHICH THIS REMEMBRANCE OF THE DIVINE DISPENSATIONS IS CALCULATED TO PRODUCE: — Namely, "to humble us, to prove us, to show what is in our hearts." When we observe the conduct of Israel in the wilderness we are compelled to feel how foolish, perverse, and ungrateful that people were; but when we review our own conduct, must we not too often pronounce the same sentence upon ourselves? The remembrance, therefore, of the dealings of God with us should deeply humble us under a sense of our unprofitableness and ingratitude. When duly considered, it will show us what has been in our hearts, how foolish, how vain, how deceitful they are, and how often our own conduct has been inconsistent with our profession, and what need we therefore have of pardon. It will teach us the fallacy of many of those excuses which we have made for the neglect of duty, and evince that God has been merciful and gracious to us all our journey through. This remembrance of God's dealings with us is especially calculated to bring us afresh, as sinners, to our gracious and merciful Saviour. ( T. Webster, B. D. ) A protecting providence A. P. Peabody. This is emphatically a day of remembrance. Parted families meet, and recount the course of providence since they were last together. The monuments of Divine love are crowded so closely together that we are prone to pass them by unnoticed. The experience of all of us is so much alike that we cease to marvel at it. I. In helping you in the performance of this duty, I would first ask you TO REFLECT ON THE AMOUNT OF HAPPINESS WHICH YOU AS AN ASSEMBLY REPRESENT. There is probably not one of you to whom, in the sight of God, this is not a happy day; not one whose glad do not outnumber his regretful thoughts. How many sources of happiness flow for us! In a thousand ways must an incessant providence watch, guard, and guide, avert peril, and bestow aid, in each of our households, with every new day, to make health the rule, disease and death the rare exception, — joy the current, grief the transient ripple on its surface. I have spoken of common blessings. Have we not each special mercies which we would own with devout gratitude, — mercies adapted to our peculiar wants, as distinctly marked, so to speak, with our names, as keepsakes from a friend might be? How often have we received the very favours which we most needed, and dared not anticipate, sent in at the only moment and in the only mode in which they could have been availing! In this connection it is well for us to consider how little we can do for ourselves. We are too prone to feel as if our own industry, energy, and forethought could accomplish much. But think how many sources of joy must all flow together, how many departments of nature and of being must all be brought into harmony, in order for us to pass a single hour in comfort. II. WHAT ARE THE DUTIES TO WHICH THIS REVIEW CALLS US? Does it not make the gratitude of the most thankful seem cold? What but unceasing praise can worthily respond to this incessant flow of mercy? And yet, do not some of us live without thanksgiving? Oh, that every soul might feel the love in which it is embosomed, and might send heavenward the blended anthem of all its powers and affections, "Bless the Lord, and forget not all His benefits!" In these mercies, hear we not also the voice of religious exhortation, "My son, give Me thy heart"? ( A. P. Peabody. ) The common levels of life J. B. Brown, B. A. The forty years' wanderings! What remains of them? A list of unknown names, no more. The dust of time has settled on the stations; and the events, big at the time with interests to millions, are without a note in history. What weary years of plodding marches through a dark, unheavenly country; what dreads and dangers, what wants and distresses, what keen agonies and fierce complaints, that oblivious silence covers! They are all there, days of fighting, nights of weeping, years of trudging. They seemed at the moment as if they were burning an indelible mark deep into life records; but they are already behind us, dim in the distance, a softening veil has fallen over the whole pilgrimage; a broad sense of pain conquered, shame endured, duty done; the consciousness that we have come out of the wanderings richer, braver, stronger, more earnest, but sadder, than when we entered the desert, is all that is left to us. In order that we may better understand the method of God in ordering our wilderness marches let us consider — I. THE REASON OF "THE WANDERINGS." Why is so large a portion of our years spent under the yoke of undistinguished duties, leaving no record but "the wanderings" behind? Briefly, because a few critical experiences do not make a character; a few impassioned, enthusiastic moments do not make a life. The inevitable falling off of the common hours and experiences seems to me to be the great teaching of this passage of Israel's history. It is a broad fact in the history of every life; in a measure, of every day's life, for the great cycles repeat themselves in little, as the organs of the body are present potentially in every part. But these narratives gather up the scattered incidents of our moral life into one grand incident, and show us with a large dramatic point and emphasis what we are daily doing under the eye of the great Leader, which makes these long, dry, unnoted wanderings inevitable; what it is which compels Him to impose what I have called the yoke of undistinguished duty, and to lead us up and down in the wilderness, that we may, if we will yield ourselves to His hand, work the sublime lessons, which we cannot learn and practise in a moment, into the common daily texture of life, that is, of eternity. II. THE PURPOSE OF THE WANDERINGS. Briefly, again, to work godly principles of action into the common texture of our daily lives. To make it a matter of perpetual, quiet choice and habit to square every action by the rule of the mind of God. III. THE "WANDERINGS," IN VIEW OF THEIR ETERNAL RESULTS. They, obscure and unprofitable as they may seem are the builders for eternity. The quiet, undistinguished years decide the matter for the moments when the election is finally and openly made. It takes years to give a form and bent to a character. Temperament we are born with, character we have to make; and that not in the grand moments, when the eyes of men or of angels are visibly upon us, but in the daily quiet paths of pilgrimage, when the work is being done within in secret, which will be revealed in the daylight of eternity. Habits, like paths, are the result of constant actions. It is the multitude of daily footsteps which go to and fro which shapes them. Let it light up your daily wanderings to know that there — in the quiet bracing of the soul to uncongenial duty, the patient bearing of unwelcome burdens, the loving acceptance of unlovely companionship — and not on the grand occasions, you are making your eternal future. ( J. B. Brown, B. A. ) The journey of life Homilist. I. LIFE IS A JOURNEY. "All the way." 1. Intricate. Perplexities and difficulties in every stage and turn. 2. Eventful. Changes in every step. All is shifting. 3. Unretraceable. 4. Perilous. Poisonous streams, noxious herbs, venomous serpents. 5. Solemn. Leads body to grave and spirit to heaven or hell. II. LIFE'S JOURNEY HAS A GUIDE. "The Lord thy God led thee." 1. The guide thoroughly understands the way. 2. The guide has resources equal to all possible emergencies. III. LIFE'S JOURNEY CAN NEVER BE FORGOTTEN. "Thou shalt remember." 1. Some memory of it is a matter of necessity. 2. A right memory is a matter of obligation.Remember it so as to awaken contrition for past sins, gratitude for past mercies, resolutions for improved conduct. ( Homilist. ) Human life Homilist. I. A DIVINE SUPERINTENDENCE of human life. 1. The fact of this superintendence. "The way of man is not in himself." 2. The purpose of this superintendence. Moral discipline. II. A SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION of human life. Morally, we are all in a wilderness, intricate, perilous, privational. It is only as we get the true manna from heaven that we can live spiritual

Benson Commentary Deuteronomy 8:1 All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers. Deuteronomy 8:1 . That ye may live — Comfortably and prosperously, for life, in the Scripture phrase, signifies more than bare life, namely, happiness and prosperity, Genesis 17:18 ; 1 Samuel 25:6 ; Leviticus 25:36 ; 1 Thessalonians 3:8 . On the other hand, afflictions and calamities are called death, Exodus 10:17 , and 2 Corinthians 11:23 . Deuteronomy 8:2 And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no. Deuteronomy 8:2 . Thou shalt remember — Call to mind and meditate upon the wisdom and goodness of God toward thee, and the power exerted on thy behalf. All the way which the Lord led thee — All the events which befell thee in the way, the miraculous protections, deliverances, provisions, instructions, which God gave thee; and withal, the severe punishments of thy disobedience. To know what was in thy heart — That thou mightest discover thyself, and manifest to others, the infidelity, inconstancy, hypocrisy, and perverseness which lay hid in thy heart; the discovery and manifestation whereof God saw would be of peculiar use, both to them and to his church in all succeeding ages. It is well for us, likewise, to remember all the ways both of God’s providence and grace, by which he has hitherto led, and still leads us through the wilderness, that we may trust in him, and cheerfully serve him. Deuteronomy 8:3 And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live. Deuteronomy 8:3 . By every word of the Lord doth man live — By every, or any thing which God appoints and blesses for this end, how unlikely soever it may seem to be for the support and nourishment of the human frame. For it is not the creature, without God, that is sufficient for the support of life; it is only his command and blessing that makes it sufficient. We ought not, therefore, to fix our dependance, as we are prone to do, on natural causes, but to remember that we depend, absolutely, entirely, and immediately, on him for life and all things. Deuteronomy 8:4 Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years. Deuteronomy 8:4 . Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee — The common interpretation of these words is, that, by a constant miracle, their clothes did not so much as decay, nor their foot swell, or, as some render it, grow callous, by so long travelling in hot and stony places. But Le Clerc thinks “it is hardly to be imagined that Moses, whose principal intention was to record the miracles which God wrought for the Israelites in the wilderness, should have mentioned this so transiently, and, as it were, by the by, if it really had been wrought to that extent, especially as it would have been one of the greatest of them. For there must indeed have been as many miracles wrought as there were persons in the camp, and that not only once, but daily, and for the space of forty years. And if we add to this, that their clothes grew in proportion to their stature, as in that case they must have done, unless they had more coats than one apiece, a greater miracle can hardly be conceived. He observes further, that God is never wont to work miracles unless they be quite necessary; yet here is one of the greatest miracles without any necessity at all. For, as the Israelites had flocks of sheep and goats in the wilderness, and certainly were not ignorant of the art of weaving, as appears from the curious work of the tabernacle, and as nothing hindered them from trafficking with their Arabian neighbours, it is evident they might have been supplied with clothes in the common way, either by making or purchasing them. This being the case, is it not as reasonable to believe that God would have fed the Israelites with manna, after their settlement in Canaan, as that he would have preserved their clothes from decay, during their abode in the wilderness, when there was no necessity for their being thus clothed by a miracle?” He therefore explains Moses’s words thus: Thy raiment waxed not old — That is, “Providence has been so liberal in supplying your wants in this desert land, that you have never been under the necessity of letting your clothes grow old upon your backs, but have always been supplied with new before the old were worn out. Nor did your feet swell — Namely, for want of shoes to defend them.” Agreeably to this interpretation, in Deuteronomy 29:5 , instead of Thy foot did not swell, it is, Thy shoe did not wax old upon thy feet; that is, “You were not reduced, through poverty, to wear shoes till they were grown so old and torn that they could not defend your feet against tumours, and other inconveniences, arising from heat and rugged ways.” This interpretation, it must be observed, is not peculiar to Le Clerc; Spanheim, Burman, Bynæus, Budæus, Calmet, and many others have adopted it. Deuteronomy 8:5 Thou shalt also consider in thine heart, that, as a man chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee. Deuteronomy 8:5 . As a man chasteneth his son — That is, unwillingly, being constrained by necessity; moderately, in judgment remembering mercy; and for his reformation, not his destruction. Deuteronomy 8:6 Therefore thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, to walk in his ways, and to fear him. Deuteronomy 8:7 For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills; Deuteronomy 8:7-9 . Depths — Deep wells, or springs, or lakes, which were numerous and large. Whose stones are iron — Where iron mines are as plentiful as quarries of stone are in other places. Thou mayest dig brass — That is, copper, of which brass is made. Deuteronomy 8:8 A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey; Deuteronomy 8:9 A land wherein thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, thou shalt not lack any thing in it; a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills thou mayest dig brass. Deuteronomy 8:10 When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Deuteronomy 8:10 . Bless the Lord — Solemnly praise him for thy food; which is a debt both of gratitude and justice, because it is from his providence and favour that thou receivest both thy food and refreshment, and strength by it. The more unworthy and absurd is that too common profaneness of them, who, professing to believe in God, from whom all their comforts come, grudge to own him at their meals, either by desiring his blessing before them, or by offering due praise to God after them. Deuteronomy 8:11 Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God, in not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes, which I command thee this day: Deuteronomy 8:12 Lest when thou hast eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein ; Deuteronomy 8:13 And when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; Deuteronomy 8:14 Then thine heart be lifted up, and thou forget the LORD thy God, which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; Deuteronomy 8:14 . Lifted up — As if thou didst receive and enjoy these things, either by thy own wisdom, and valour, and industry, or by thy own merit. Deuteronomy 8:15 Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; Deuteronomy 8:16 Who fed thee in the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might humble thee, and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy latter end; Deuteronomy 8:16 . That he might humble thee — By keeping thee in constant dependance upon himself for every day’s food, and convincing thee what an impotent, helpless creature thou art, having nothing whereon to subsist, and being supported wholly by the alms of divine goodness from day to day. The mercies of God, if duly considered, are as powerful a means to humble us as the greatest afflictions, because they increase our debts to God, and manifest our dependance upon him, and by making God great, they make us little in our own eyes. To do thee good — That is, that after he hath purged and prepared thee by afflictions, thou mayest receive and enjoy his blessings with less disadvantage, while by the remembrance of former afflictions thou art made thankful for those blessings, and more cautious not to abuse them. Deuteronomy 8:17 And thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me this wealth. Deuteronomy 8:18 But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day. Deuteronomy 8:19 And it shall be, if thou do at all forget the LORD thy God, and walk after other gods, and serve them, and worship them, I testify against you this day that ye shall surely perish. Deuteronomy 8:20 As the nations which the LORD destroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish; because ye would not be obedient unto the voice of the LORD your God. Deuteronomy 8:20 . So shall ye perish — Assure yourselves, if you apostatize from the worship and service of God, and relapse into idolatry, irreligion, or vice, your nation will be involved in the same ruin and destruction that you are now going to execute upon the Canaanites for the like national sins. These cautions and exhortations which Moses here so forcibly and pathetically gives to the Israelites ought to be well observed and laid to heart by us all, to every one of whom they are equally necessary. Benson Commentary on the Old and New Testaments Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com . Used by Permission.

Expositor's Bible Commentary Deuteronomy 8:1 All the commandments which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live, and multiply, and go in and possess the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers. THE BREAD OF THE SOUL Deuteronomy 8:1-20 IN the chapters which follow, viz . 8., 9., and Deuteronomy 10:1-2 , we have an appeal to history as a motive for fulfilling the fundamental duty of loving God and keeping His commandments. In its main points it is substantially the same appeal which is made in chapters 1-3, is, in fact, a continuation of it. Its main characteristics, therefore, have already been dealt with; but there are details here which deserve more minute study. Coming after Yahweh’s great demand for the love of His people, the references to the Divine action in the past assume a deeper and more affectionate character than when they were mere general exhortations to obedience and submission. They become inducements to the highest efforts of love; and the first appeal is naturally made to the gracious and fatherly dealing of Yahweh with His people in their journey through the wilderness. Of all the traditions or reminiscences of Israel, this of the wilderness was the most constantly present to the popular mind, and it is always referred to as the most certain, the most impressive, and the most touching of all Israel’s historic experiences. Yet Stade and others push the whole episode aside, saying, if any Israelites came out of Egypt, we do not know who they were. Such a mode of dealing with clear, coherent, and in themselves not improbable historical memories, is too arbitrary to have much effect, and the wilderness journey remains, and is likely to remain, one of the indubitable facts which modern critical research has established rather than shaken. To this, then, our author turns, and he deals with it in a somewhat unusual way. As we have seen, the prevalent notion that piety and righteousness are rewarded with material prosperity is firmly rooted in his mind. But he did not feel himself limited to that as the solitary right way of regarding the providence of God. Men’s minds are never quite so simple and direct in their action as many students and critics are tempted to suppose. Every great conception which holds the minds of men produces its effects, even from the first moment it is grasped, by all that is in it. Implications and developments which are made explicit, or are called out into visibility, only by the friction of new environments, have been there from the beginning; and minds have been secretly molded by them though they were not conscious of them. Hard and fast lines, then, are not to be drawn between the stages of a great development, so that one should say that before such and such a moment, when a new aspect of the old truth has emerged into consciousness, that aspect was not effective in any wise. The outburst of waters from a reservoir is indubitable evidence of steady, persistent pressure from within in that direction before the overflow. Similarly, in the region of thought and feeling the emergence of a new aspect of truth is of itself a proof that the holders of the root conception were already swayed in that direction. The history of Christianity affords proof of this. It is a commonplace today that the world is only beginning to do justice to some aspects of the teaching of our Lord. But the teaching, always present, always exerted its influence, and was felt before it could be explained. In the Old Testament development the same thing was most emphatically true. Individual responsibility to God was not, so far as we can now see, distinctly present in Israelite religious thought till the time of Jeremiah, but it would be absurd to say that any mind that accepted the religion of Yahweh had ever been without that feeling. So with the doctrine of God’s providence over men: we are not to say that before the Book of Job the explanation of suffering as testing discipline had been entirely hid from Israel, by the view that material prosperity and adversity were regulated in the main according to moral and religious life. Consequently, notwithstanding previous strong assertions of the latter view which we find in Deuteronomy, we need not be in the least surprised to find that here the hardships of the wilderness journey are regarded, not as a punishment for Israel’s sins, but simply as a trial or test to see what their heart was towards Him. This is essentially the point of view of the Book of Job, the only difference being that here it is applied to the nation, there to the individual. But our chapter rises even above that, for the first verses of it plainly teach that the experiences of the wilderness were made to be what they were, in order that the people might learn to know the spiritual forces of the world to be the essential forces, and that they might be induced to throw themselves back upon them as that which is alone enduring. In the words of Deuteronomy 8:3 , they were taught by this training that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds from the mouth of God. These two then, that hardship was testing discipline for Israel, and that it was also intended to be the means of revealing spirit as the supreme force even in the material world, are the main lessons of the eighth chapter. Of these the last is by far the most important. Casting back his eye upon the past, the author of Deuteronomy teaches that the trials and the victories, the wonders and the terrors of their wilderness time were meant to humble them, to empty them of their own conceits, and to make them know beyond all doubting that God alone was their portion, and that apart from Him they had no certainty of continuance in the future and no sustainment in the present. "All the commandment which I command thee this day shall ye observe to do, that ye may live," is the fundamental note, and the physical needs and trials of the time are cited as an object-lesson to that effect. "He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna which thou knewest not; that He might make thee to know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of Yahweh doth man live." Of course the first reference of the "everything that proceedeth" is to the creative word of Yahweh. The meaning is that the sending of the manna was proof that the ordinary means of living, i.e. , bread, could be dispensed with when Yahweh chose to make use of His creative power. Many commentators think that this exhausts the meaning of the passage, and they regard our Lord’s use of these words in the Temptation as limited in the same fashion. But both here and in the New Testament more must be intended. Here we have the statement in the first verse that Israel is to keep the commandments, which certainly are a part of "all that proceeds" from the mouth of God, that they may live. This implies that the mere possession of material sustenance is not enough for even earthly life. Impalpable spiritual elements must be mingled with "bread" if life is not to decay. This, our chapter goes on to say, would be plain to them if they would carefully consider God’s dealing with them in the wilderness, for the sending of the manna was meant to emphasize and bring home to them that very truth. It was meant, in short, to convey a double lesson-the direct one above referred to, and the more remote but deeper one which had been asserted in the first verse. In the Temptation narrative the same deeper meaning is surely implied. The temptation suggested to Jesus was that He should use the miraculous powers given to Him for special purposes to make stones into bread for Himself. Now that would have been precisely an instance of the literal primary meaning of our passage; it would have been a case of supplying the absence of bread by the use of the creative word of God. To meet that temptation and to put it-aside our Lord uses these words: "It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." Thereupon He was no more importuned to supply the place of bread by a creative word. The implication is that the life of the Son of God found sustenance in spiritual strength derived from His Father. In other words, the passage is really parallel to John 4:31 if: "In the mean while the disciples prayed Him, saying, Rabbi, eat. But He said unto them, I have meat to eat that ye know not. The disciples therefore said one to another, Hath any man brought Him to eat? Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to accomplish His work." Understanding it thus, the Temptation passage is entirely in accord with that from which it is quoted, if the first and third verses be taken together. Both teach that abundance of material resources, all that visibly sustains the material life, is not sufficient for the life of such a creature as man. Not only his inner life, but his outer life, is dependent for its permanence upon the inflow of spiritual sustenance from the spiritual God. For animals, bread might be enough; but man holds of both the spiritual and the material as animals do not. It is not mere mythical dreaming when man is said to be made in the image of God; it expresses the essential fact of his being. Consequently, without in-breathings from the spiritual, even his physical life pines and dies. But how wonderful is this insight in a writer so ancient, belonging to so obscure a people as the Jews! How can we account for it? There was nothing in their character or destiny as a people to explain it, apart from the supernatural link that binds them and their thoughts at all times to the coming Christ, and draws them, notwithstanding all aberrations, even when they know it not, towards Him. How great an attainment it is we may see, if we reflect for a moment upon the state of Christian Europe at the present day. Nowhere among the masses of the most cultured nations is this deeply simple truth accepted by the vast majority of men. Nowhere do we find that history has succeeded in bringing it home to the conscience as a commonplace. The rich or well-to-do cling to riches, the means of material enjoyment, as if their life did consist in the abundance of things they possess. They strive and struggle for them with an industry, a forethought, a perseverance, which would be justified only if man could live by bread alone. That is largely the condition of those who have bread in abundance or hope to gain it abundantly. With those who do not have it the case is perhaps even worse. Worn and fretted by the hopeless struggle against poverty, driven wild by the exigencies of a daily life so near starvation point that a strike, a fall in prices, a month’s sickness, bring them face to face with misery, the toiling masses in Europe have turned with a kind of wolfish impatience upon those who talk of God to them, and demand "bread." As a German Socialist mother said publicly some years ago, "He has never given me a mouthful of bread, or means to gain it: what have I to do with your God?" Their only hope for the future is that they may eat and be full; and of this they have made a political and religious ideal which is attracting the European working classes with most portentous power. In all countries men are passionately asserting that man can live by bread alone, and that he will. For this dreadful creed increasing numbers are prepared.to sacrifice all that humanity thought it had gained, and shut their ears to any who warn them that, if they had all they seek, earth might be still more of a Pandemonium than they think it at present. But they have much excuse. They have never had wealth so as to know how very little it can do for the deepest needs of men; and their faith in it, their belief that if they were assured of a comfortable maintenance all would be right with the world, is pathetic in its simplicity. Yet the secret that is hid today from the mass of men was known among the small Israelite people two thousand five hundred years ago. Since then it has formed the very keynote of the teaching of our Lord; but save by the generations of Christians who have found in it the key to much of the riddle of the world it has been learned by nobody. Yet history has never wearied in proclaiming the same truth. Israel, as we have seen, had verified it in the history of the pre-Canaanite races whose disappearance is recorded in the first section of our book, and in the doom which was impending over the Canaanites. But to our wider experience, enriched by the changes of more than two thousand years, and by the still more striking vicissitudes of ancient days revealed by archaeology, the fact that intelligence of the highest kind, practical skill, and the courage of conquerors cannot secure "life," is only more impressively brought home. If we go back to the pre-Semitic empire of Mesopotamia, to what is called the Akkadian time, we find that, before the days of Abraham, a great civilization had arisen, flourished for more than one thousand years, and then decayed so utterly that the very language in which its records were written had to be dealt with by the Semites, who inherited the former culture, as we deal with Latin. Yet these early people had made a most astonishing advance into the ocean of unknown truth. They had invented writing; they had elaborate systems of law and social life: they had in other directions made remarkable discoveries in science, especially in mathematical and astronomical science, and had built great cities in which the refinement and art of modern times was in many directions anticipated. In all ways they stood far higher above neighboring peoples than any civilized nation of Europe stands now in comparison with its neighbors. But if they were at all inclined to put their trust in the immortality of science, if they ever valued themselves, as we do, on the strength of the advances they had made, time has had them in derision. Very much of what they knew had to be rediscovered painfully in later times. Their very name perished out of the earth; and it has been discovered now to make them an object of abiding interest only to the few who make ethnology their study. Neither material wealth and comfort nor assiduous culture of the mind could save them. For their religion and morals were, amid all this material success, of the lowest type. They heard little of what issues from the mouth of God in the specially Divine sphere of morality, and did not give heed to that little, and they perished. For man does not live by bread alone, but by that also, and neglect of it is fatal. It may be said that they flourished for more than a thousand years, and neglect of the Divine word, if it be a poison, must (as Fenelon said of coffee) be a very slow one, so far as nations are concerned. But it has always been a snare to men to mistake the Divine patience for Divine indifference and inaction. The movement, though to us creatures of a day it seems slow, is as continuous, as crushing, and as relentless as the movement of a glacier. "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small," and all along the ages they have thrown out the crushed and scattered fragments of the powers that were deaf to the Divine voice. So persistently has this appeared that it would by this time have passed beyond the region of faith into that of sight, were it not always possible to ignore the moral cause and substitute for it something mechanical and secondary. The great world-empires of Egypt and Assyria passed away, primarily owing to neglect of the higher life. Secondarily, no doubt, the ebbs and flows of their power, and their final extinction, were influenced by the course of the Indian trade; and many wise men think they do well to stop there. But in truth we do not solve the difficulty by resting in this secondary cause; we only shift it a step backwards. For the question immediately arises, why did the trade change its course from Assyria to Egypt, and back again from Egypt to Assyria? Why did a rivulet of it flow through the land of Israel in Solomon’s day and afterwards cease? The answer must be that it was when the character of these various nations rose in vigor by foresight and moral self-restraint that they drew to themselves this source of power. They "lived," in fact, by giving heed to some word of God. Nor does the history of Greek supremacy in Europe and Asia, or the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, contradict that view. The modern historian, whatever his faith or unfaith may be, is driven to find the motive power which wrought in these stupendous movements in the moral and spiritual sphere. This transforms history from being merely secular into a Bible, as Mommsen finely says, "And if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her she too will be able to bear with and to requite them both." She utters her voice in the streets, and in the end makes her meaning clear. For she gives us ever new examples. Probably her grandest object-lesson at present is the wasting and paralysis that is slowly withering up all Mohammedan states. Where they have been left to themselves, as in Morocco and Persia, depopulation and the breakup of society has come upon them, and where Muslim populations are really prospering it is under the influence of Christian Powers. And the reason is plain. Islam is a revolt from, and a rejection of, the higher principles of life contained in Christianity, and a return to Judaism. But the Judaism to which it returned had already lost its finest bloom. All that was left to it of tenderness or power of expansion Islam rejected, and of the driest husks of Old Testament religion it made its sole food. Naturally and necessarily, therefore, it has been found inadequate. It cannot permanently live under present conditions, and it is capable of no renewal. Here and there, especially in India attempts to break out of the prison house which this system builds around its votaries are being made, but in the opinion of experts like Mr. Sell they cannot succeed. "Such a movement," he tells us, "may elevate individuals and purify the family life of many, but it will, like all reform movements of the past, have very little real effect on Islam as a polity and as a religion." If he be right, we learn from a Mohammedan whom he quotes, the Naual Mulisin-ul-Mulk, what alone can be looked for. "To me it seems," he says, "that as a nation and a religion we are dying out; our day is past, and we have little hope of the future." More conspicuously and deliberately perhaps than any one did Mohammed choose to go back from the best light that shone in the world of his day. Some at least of his contemporaries knew what a spiritual religion meant. He was guilty, therefore, of the "great refusal"; and his work, great as it was, seems to some even of his own disciples to be hastening to its end. Material success, bread in all senses, the kingdoms founded by him and his successors had in abundance, and still might have. But man cannot live by that alone, and the absence of the higher element has taken even that away. In Christendom, too, the same lesson is being taught. Of all European countries France perhaps is that where the corroding power of materialistic thought has been most severely felt. Yet few countries are so rich in material wealth, and if bread was all that "life" demanded, no country should be so full of it. But if is in no sense so. Even its intellectual life is drooping, and its population, if not decreasing, is standing still. This, all serious writers deplore; and the dawn of what may perhaps be a new era is seen in the earnestness with which the sources of this evil are sought out and discussed. Men like the Vicomte de Vogue depict the new generation as weary of negations, sick of the material positivism of their immediate predecessors, disgusted with "realism," which, as another recent writer defines it, "in thought is mere provincialism, in affection absolute egoism, in politics the deification of brute force; in the higher grades of society tyranny; in the lower, unbridled license." And the only cure is faith and moral idealism. "Society can apply to itself today," says De Vogue, "the beautiful image of Plotinus; it resembles those travelers lost in the night, seated in silence on the shore of the sea, waiting for the sun to rise above the billows." In Germany similar conditions have produced similar though much mitigated results. Yet even there, Lange, the historian of materialism, tells us that there runs through all our modern culture a tendency to materialism, which carries away every one who has not found somewhere a sure anchor. "The ideal has no currency; all that cannot prove its claim on the basis of natural science and history is condemned to destruction, though a thousand joys and refreshments of the masses depend upon it." He concludes by saying-that "ideas and sacrifices may still save our civilization, and change the path of destructive revolution into a path of beneficent reforms." Through all history, then, and loudest in our own day, the cry of our passage goes up; and where the path marked out by the faith of Israel, and carried to its goal by Jesus Christ, has been forsaken, the peoples are resting in hungry expectation. Words from the mouth of God can alone save them; and if the Churches cannot make them hear, and no new voice brings it home to them there would seem to be nothing before them but a slower or quicker descent into death. But it may be that the nations are deaf to the Churches’ voice because these have not learned thoroughly that life for them too is conditioned in the same fashion. They can live truly, fully, triumphantly only when they take up and absorb "everything that issues from the mouth of God." All Christians must admit this; but most proceed at once to annul what they have stated by the limitations of meaning they impose upon it. An older generation vehemently affirmed this faith, meaning by it every word and letter which Scripture contained. We do not find fault with what they assert, for the first necessity of spiritual life is the study and love of the Holy Scriptures. No one who knows what the higher life in Christ is, needs to be told that the very bread of life is in the Bible. Neglect it, or, what is perhaps worse, study it only from the scientific and intellectual point of view, and life will slowly ebb away from you, and your religion will bring you none of the joy of living. Bring your thoughts, your hopes, your fears, and your aspirations into daily contact with it, and you will feel a vigor in your spiritual nature which will make you "lords over circumstance." Every part of it contributes to this effect when it is properly understood, for experience proves the vanity of the attempt to distinguish between the Bible and the word of God. As it stands, wrought into one whole by labors the strenuousness, the multiplicity, the skill, and the religious spirit of which we are only now coming to understand, it is the word of God; it has issued from His mouth, and from it, searched out and understood, the most satisfying "bread" of the soul must come. Only by use of it can the Christian soul live. But though the Bible is the word of God par excellence, it is not the only word that issues from the mouth of God to man. Because the Church has often too much refused to listen to any other word of God, those who are without are "sitting looking out over the sea towards the west for the rising of the sun which is behind them." For if it is death to the spirit to turn away from Scripture, it means sickness and disease to refuse to learn the other lessons which are set for us by the God of truth. All true science must contain a revelation of Him, for it is an exposition of the manner of His working. History too is a Bible, which has been confirming with trumpet tongue the truths of Scripture as we have seen. Nay, it is a commentary upon the special revelation given to us through Israel, set for our study by the Author of that revelation. Further, we may say that the progress of our Christian centuries has shown us heights and depths of wisdom in the revelation mankind has received in Christ which, without its light, we should not have known. The spirit of Christ in regard to slavery, for instance, was made manifest fully only in our day. The true relations of men to each other, as conceived by our blessed Lord, are evidently about to be forced home upon the world by the turmoils, the strikes, and the outrages, by the wild demands, and the wilder hopes which are the characteristic of our epoch. In the future, too, there must be experiences which will make manifest to men the brand which the spirit of Christ puts upon war, with its savagery and its folly. These are only noteworthy instances of the explanation of revelation by the developments of the Divine purpose in the world. But in countless ways the same process is going on, and the Church which refuses to regard it is preparing a decay of its own life. For man lives by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, and every such word missed means a loss of vitality. The Christian Church, therefore, if it is to be true to its calling, should be seriously watchful lest any Divinely sent experience should be lost to it. It cannot be indifferent, much less hostile, to discoveries in physical science; it cannot ignore any fact or lesson which history reveals; it cannot sit apart from social experiments, as if holding no form of creed in such things, without seriously impairing its chances of life. For all these things are pregnant with most precious indications of the mind of God, and to turn from them is to sit in darkness and the shadow of death. In the most subtle and multifarious way, the inner spiritual life of man is being modified by the discoveries of scientists, historians, philologists, archaeologists, and critics, and by the new attention which is being given to the foundations of society and social life. All the truth that is in these discoveries issues from the mouth of God. They too are a Bible, as Mommsen says, and if the Christian Church cannot "hinder the fool from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting them," it can itself listen with open ear to these teachings, and work them into coherent unity with the great spiritual Revelation. This is the perennial task which awaits the Church at every stage of its career, for on no other terms can it live a healthy life. Here we find the answer to timid Christians who address petulant complaints to those who are called to attempt this work. If, say they, these new thoughts are not essential to faith, if in the forms to which we have been accustomed the essence of true religion has been preserved, why do you disturb the minds of believers by outside questions? The reply is that we dare not refuse the teaching which God is sending us in these ways. To refuse light is to blaspheme light. Though we might save our generation some trouble by turning our back upon this light, though we might even save some from manifest shipwreck of faith, we should pay for that by sacrificing all the future, and by rendering faith impossible perhaps for greater multitudes of our successors. Yet this does not imply that the Church is to be driven about by every wind of doctrine. Some men of science demand, apparently, that every new discovery, in its first crude form, should be at once adopted by the Church, and that all the inferences unfavorable to received views of religion, which occur to men accustomed to think only truths that can be demonstrated by experiment, should be registered in its teachings. But such a demand is mere folly. The Church has in its possession a body of truth which, if not verifiable by experiment, has been verified by experience as no other body of truth has been. Even its enemies being judges, no other system of a moral or spiritual kind has risen above the horizon which can for a moment be compared with Christianity as the guide of men for life and death. Through all changes of secular thought, and amid all the lessons which the world has taught the Church, the fundamental doctrines have remained in essence the same, and by them the whole life of man, social, political, and scientific, has ultimately been guided. Immense practical interests have therefore been committed to the Church’s keeping, the interests primarily of the poor and the obscure. She ought never to be tempted, consequently, to think that she is moving and acting in a vacuum, or manage her affairs after the manner of a debating society. It is no doubt a fault to move too slowly; but in circumstances like that of the Church, it can never be so destructive to the best interests of mankind as to move with wanton instability. Her true attitude must be to prohibit no lines of inquiry, to open her mind seriously to all the demonstrated truths of science with gladness, to be tolerant of all loyal effort to reform Christian thought in accordance with the new light, when that has become at all possible. For her true food is everything that issues from the mouth of God; and only when she receives with gratitude her daily bread in this way also, can her life be as vigorous and as elevated as it ought to be. The Expositor's Bible Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com . Used by Permission.