anoint their eyes with eye-salve, that they may see themselves for once as they are.

But what does this story teach us concerning God? For remember, as I tell you every Sunday, that each fresh story in the Pentateuch reveals to us something fresh about the character of God. What does Balaam's story reveal? Balaam himself tells us in the text:

'God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent. Hath he said, ' and shall he not do it?'

Yes. Fancy not that any wishes or prayers of yours can persuade God to alter his everlasting laws of right and wrong. If he has commanded a thing, he has commanded it because it is according to his everlasting laws, which cannot change, because they are made in his eternal image and likeness. Therefore if God has commanded you a thing, do it, heartily, fully, without arguing or complaining. If you begin arguing with God's law, excusing yourself from it, inventing reasons why you need not obey it in this particular instance, though every one else ought, then you will end, like Balaam, in disobeying the law, and it will grind you to powder.

But if you obey God's law honestly, with a single eye and a whole heart, you will find in it a blessing, and peace, and strength, and everlasting life.

SERMON XV.

DEUTERONOMY.

(Third Sunday after Easter.)

DEUT. iv. 39, 40.

Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the Lord he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath there is none else. Thou shalt keep therefore his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth, which the Lord thy God giveth thee, for ever.

L

EARNED men have argued much of late as to who wrote the book of Deuteronomy. After having read a good deal on the subject, I can only say that I see no reason why we should not believe the ancient account which the Jews give, that it was written, or at least spoken, by Moses.

No doubt, there are difficulties in the book. If there had not been, there would never have been any dispute about the matter; but the plain, broad, common-sense case is this

The book of Deuteronomy is made up of several great orations or sermons, delivered, says the work itself, by Moses to the whole people of the

Jews, before they left the wilderness and entered into the land of Canaan; wherefore it is called Deuteronomy, or the second law. In it some small matters of the law are altered, as was to be expected, when the Jews were going to change their place, and their whole way of life. But the whole teaching and meaning of the book is exactly that of Exodus and Leviticus. Moreover, it is, if possible, the grandest and deepest book of the whole Old Testament. Its depth and wisdom are unequalled. I hold it to be the sum and substance of all political philosophy and morality, of the true life of a nation. The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, grand as they are, are, as it were, its children; growths out of the root which Deuteronomy reveals.

Now, if Moses did not write it, who did?

As for the style of it being different from that of Exodus and Leviticus, the simple answer isWhy not? They are books of history and of laws. This is a book of sermons or orations, spoken first, and not written, which, of course, would be in a different style. Besides, why should not Moses have spoken differently at the end of forty years' such experience as never man had before or since? Every one who thinks, writes, or speaks in public, knows how his style alters, as fresh knowledge and experience come to him. Are you

to suppose that Moses gained nothing by his experience?

As for a few texts in it being like Isaiah or Jeremiah, they are likely enough to be so; for if (as I believe) Deuteronomy was written long before those books, what more likely than that Isaiah and Jeremiah should have studied it, and taken some of its words to themselves when they were preaching to the Jews just what Deuteronomy preaches?

As for any one else having written it in Moses' name, hundreds of years after his death, I cannot believe it. If there had been in Israel a prophet great and wise enough to write Deuteronomy, we must have heard more about him; for he must have been famous at the time when he did live; while, if he were great enough to write Deuteronomy, he would have surely written in his own name, as Isaiah and all the other prophets wrote, instead of writing under a feigned name, and putting words into Moses' mouth which he did not speak, and laws he did not give. Good men are not in the habit of telling lies: much less prophets of God. Men do not begin to play cowardly tricks of that kind till after they have lost faith in the living God, and got to believe that God was with their forefathers, but is not with them. A Jew of the time of the Apocrypha,

or of the time of our Lord, might have done such a thing, because he had lost faith in the living God: but then his work would have been of a very different kind from this noble and heart-stirring book. For the pith and marrow, the essence and life of Deuteronomy is, that it is full of faith in the living God; and for that very reason I am going to speak of it to you to-day.

For the rest, whether Moses wrote the book down, and put it together in the shape in which we now have it, we shall never be able to tell. The several orations may have been put together into one book. Alterations may have crept in by the carelessness of copiers; sentences may have been added to it by later prophets-as, of course, the grand account of Moses' death, which probably was, at first, the beginning of the book of Joshua. And beyond that we need know nothing even if we need know that.

There the book is; and people, if they be wise, will, instead of trying to pick it to pieces, read and study it in fear and trembling, that the curses pronounced in it may not come, and the blessings pronounced in it may come, upon this English land.

Now these Jews were to worship and obey Jehovah, the one true God, and him only.

And why?