and a completer sense of the love of God which it in-
volved. He looks into the past, and all the mercy that
had come in between,--all the miraculous food, and
the wonderful victories, and the parted waters, and the
constant guidance,--he sees now were all certainly
involved in that first summons of God which he had
once obeyed so blindly; and when he wants to give his
people the benediction that represents to him the most
complete and comprehensive love, it is touching to hear
the old man go back and invoke "The good will of Him
that dwelt in the bush."

Religion delights both in reminiscence and in an-
ticipation. Being full of the sense of God, it finds
a unity in life which no atheistic thought can dis-
cover. The identity of God's eternal being stretches
under, and gives consistence to, our fragmentary lives.
God's eternity makes our time coherent. And so it
was God in the old bush that made it still visible
to Moses across the eventful interval. He saw that
bush when all the other bushes of Egypt had faded
out of sight, because that bush was on fire with God.
And as Christianity is the most vivid of all religions,
with its personally manifested God, there is a more per-
fect unity in a Christian life than in any other. It
keeps all its parts, and from its consummations looks
back with gratitude and love to its beginnings. The
crown that it casts before the throne at last is the same
that it felt trembling on its brow in the first ecstatic
sense of Christ's forgiveness, and that has been steadily
glowing into greater clearness as perfecting love has
more and more completely cast out fear. The feet that
go up to God into the mountain, at the end, are the

-40-