And that "Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the likeness of Adam's transgression." In Adam all die, and if death reigned, we know that sin reigned, not only for the sake of Adam's sin, but from the transgression by corruption and violence, of a law of purity and mercy originally written in their hearts, when they were created in the image of God. We are sure that these prinoiples were well understood and witnessed unto, by the sons of God, and especially by the line of Seth. Though not preserved to us in any written code, the patriarchs, the father-rulers, must have announced them to their households, and sin was the transgression of that law. We will now try and imagine from inspired description, the scene of the Law-giving from heaven to the people of Israel, one of the most awfully sublime in the annals of the world. King David refers to it 500 years afterwards, in his Psalm lxviii. 17: "The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thousands of angel: the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in the holy place." Moses alludes, as we have seen, to the presence of "ten thousand of saints" (Deut. xxxiii.), who must have been the redeemed of the patriarchal age. He had brought the people forth out of the camp to meet with God (xix. 17). They had departed from Rephidim, or Wady Feiran, and were "camped before the mount in the desert of Sinai (xix. 2), which was probably," (says Dr. Stewart,)"all the desert to the south of Wady Feiran." He adds, "The two things required to fix this locality are a mountain sufficiently lofty and isolated to be seen from the region lying round its base; and secondly, a valley or valleys among the mountains large enough to contain the tents of Israel, and visible through all their extent from the mountain top. Serbal alone is such a mountain; and Wady Aleyat and Wady Rimm run up to its very base." Wady Aleyat being four miles in length, and Serbal towering 2000 feet above it, with no projecting spurs to hide his summits, is preeminently the mount that might be touched," as St. Paul calls it (Heb. xii. 18), and that required "bounds to be set all roundabout": for the Lord said, "Whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death. There shall not an hand touch it, but he shall surely be stoned, or shot through; whether it be beast or man, it shall not live" (Ex. xix. 13). The people "stood therefore at the nether part of the mount" (ver. 17), and it is not now the "bush," but the mountain itself that burns with the presence of the Lord. "The Lord descended upon it in fire" (ver. 18), with thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount; and the voice of a trumpet sounding long, and waxing louder and louder and the smoke of Mount Sinai ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly, as the chaos of ruins in Wady Aleyat still testify. Dr. Stewart declares that words are too feeble to portray a thunderstorm which he experienced in that region; the "thunderbolts whose echoes were bandied from craig to craig as they rushed along the Wady, while they swept like a whirlwind among the mighty peaks above, and burst again with undiminished violence through some yawning cleft till the ground trembled with the concussion. It seemed as if all the mountains of the peninsula were answering one another. Ever and anon a flash of lightning dispelled the pitchy darkness; then again, the crashing thunder-peals scattered their echoes to the four quarters of the heavens, and overpowered the loud howlings of the wind." This was the very scene of the "blackness and darkness and tempest," which was so terrible that it made Moses say, "I exceedingly fear and quake" (Heb. xii. 21). And now to the sound of the trumpet was added "the voice of words," of which Moses said, "Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as thou hast heard, and lived ?" (Deut iv. 33.) "The Lord talketh with you face to face in the mount out of the midst of the fire. "And I stood between the Lord and you at that time, to shew you the word of the Lord: for ye were afraid by reason of the fire." (Deut. v. 4.) The utterance of this word was by angels, according to St. Paul in Hebrews ii. 2, and in Acts vii. 53, Stephen tells his persecutors that "their "fathers received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it." The law was ordained by angels, in the hand of a Mediator, and so awful was each myriad-spoken tone (Gal. iii. 19), that the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was (Ex. xx. 21). The name of Moses is linked for ever with the giving of the Law. We hear in Scripture of the "law of Moses," though the children of Israel are never called the children of Moses, but the children of Abraham. Moses is the man who was led into a closer communication with the invisible and spirit world, than was vouchsafed to any other man in the Old Testa ment dispensation. He was what was he not? leader and prophet, priest and king, law-giver and poet. There are three eras in his life of forty years :His first forty, in the land of Egypt. The second forty, as a shepherd in Midian. The third forty, as a leader of the people. And the last forty years may again have three divisions : The six weeks' march from Egypt to Sinai, and the year at its base. The thirty-eight years' wanderings from Sinai to Kadesh. The last year of conquest of Eastern Palestine. During all this last forty years, Moses was preserved in intimate communion with God. He knew God, not as any other prophet in a vision and a dream: "My servant Moses is not so," says the Lord (Numbers xii. 7), "with him will I speak mouth to mouth, even apparently, and not in dark speeches; and the similitude of the Lord shall he behold." The Mussulman to this day calls him El Kelim Allah: "The spoken to by God." This Divine speech or revelation happened, as we have seen, in four ways. 1. In the burning bush. 2. In the thick dark thunder-cloud. 3. In the mount, on the two occasions of his forty days' fasting. 4. In the tabernacle between the Cherubim. The book of Exodus may be divided into two parts the historical and the legislative. The historical is comprised in the first eighteen chap ters. The law is given from the 19th to the 50th The first nineteen chapters relate to- The birth of Moses, and his education. The Passover, and flight of the people. Records of Marah and Rephidim, of Amalek The second portion records The institution of the Theocracy, or government He proclaims a nation of slaves, now redeemed and set apart, as representatives of the whole human race, for the service of God and as heirs of the covenant made with Abraham. This covenant contained the spiritual promise of the Messiah: who would come to redeem all nations from their sins-of which Israel lost sight, and forgot it in their national pride and vain glory. Alas! the same book of Exodus shews ere its conclusion, that the first use to which both the people and Moses too put this law of God, was to break it; the people, by idolatry and licentiousness even while Moses was in the mount; and he, in indignation and haste, which it requires yet forty days more in the Divine presence, spent doubtless in utter seclusion and humiliation (but concerning |