One whom the wind and sea obeyed had
given him His aid. Behind him stood One higher than he, whose
spirit wrought in him and whose arm wrought for him,--not for his
personal aggrandisement indeed, but for the weal of the nation.
It was Jehovah. Alike what was done by the deliberate purpose of
Moses and what was done without any human contrivance by nature
and by accident came to be regarded in one great totality as the
doing of Jehovah for Israel. Jehovah it was who had directed each
step in that process through which these so diverse elements,
brought together by the pressure of necessity, had been caused to
pass, and in the course of which the first beginnings of a feeling
of national unity had been made to grow.
This feeling Moses was the first to elicit; he it was also who
maintained it in life and cherished its growth. The extraordinary
set of circumstances which had first occasioned the new national
movement continued to subsist, though in a less degree, throughout
the sojourn of the people in the wilderness, and it was under
their pressure that Israel continued to be moulded. To Moses, who
had been the means of so brilliantly helping out of their first
straits the Hebrews who had accompanied him out of Egypt, they
naturally turned in all subsequent difficulties; before him they
brought all affairs with which they were not themselves able to
cope.
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