Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/211

 in His works and in His word; and when men are wiser than they are now; when they have climbed higher, and dug deeper, and looked abroad more widely; then will it be made manifest that the two Revelations are in harmony; that there is a perfect accord between that which came by holy men of old, who were moved by the Holy Ghost, and that which God has written with His own finger on tables of stone.

The mountains are older than Moses, but there is One who is older than the mountains, to whom Moses himself, perhaps while passing through these very mountains, lifted up heart and voice in that majestic psalm: "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God." This explains everything. Admit the Divine existence, and all mysteries are resolved. With God there is no reckoning of time. "A thousand years in Thy sight," continues Moses in this sublime ode, "are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night." Even the geological epochs — though they should be to our measurements of time what the inter-planetary spaces are to the distances on our globe — what are they to Him whose existence is from eternity to eternity, from the illimitable past to the illimitable future?

But apart from any geological question, these mountains attract the eye by their grandeur. When they were upheaved by forces from beneath, they were thrown into the wildest forms. Sometimes they stand off at a distance in lonely majesty, and sometimes they enclose us in a narrow pass. In such a pass we rested to-day at noon, by a rock shaped somewhat like a chair, which is pointed out as the seat of Moses when he tended the flocks of Jethro, so that as we took our places in it, we