22 that we shall. God seems to be treating us as he treated Israel—because of their unbelief and cowardice, keeping them marching backward and forward forty years in a desert, which a band of Bedouin cavalry would have crossed in a month. It looks like this now. We are surely as yet perplexed in the Exodus; there is a wild howling wilderness around; and the water of our springs runs bitter ; and enemies fierce and strong are encamped in our path ; and there are among the tribes mean men, like Achan, that would turn back our march for gold ; and traitorous men, like Korah, who rejoice in our discomfiture; and timid men, like the spies of evil counsel, who whisper with pale lips of walled cities, and armed giants ; and between us and the longed-for rest rolls a dark deep river, and as yet we have not found our Joshua with the rod of God in his hand. And it may be God's purpose of judgment, that not a man of ours, as of that old generation, shall pass the Jordan in tfiumph. But it shall be passed! Ifnot we, yet our children shall go over dry-shod and exulting and in the morning light. And when, in the serene calm of that sure future, the philosophic and Christian historian shall write up the record, and from that Canaan—that fair land of the promises and the covenants and the glory—reached at last wayworn and with weary feet, through wild deserts and armed foemen and dark and angry floods, shall review the strangely chequered past—all that weary way which the Lord God led us in the wilderness to humble us
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