And the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. - Ex. 3:2.

XI

THE VISION IN THE BUSH

The Bible is full of visions. If we ask ourselves what visions are, we shall have to come to the recognition that they were "times of extraordinary elevation of thought and feeling, times therefore of illumination." These visions were not general, but special. They are confined to men of a certain great order, Moses, Elijah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and others, who stood out from average men as employed by God in national crises and for special purposes. Whatever we may think about visions, these men to whom they came must have regarded them as specialized communications to them, for they acted on the revelations which came through them. Their lives were lifted by them on to a higher plane. The vision was an introduction to an invitation to a new obedience and a new service. As in Saul's case on the way to Damascus, the vision changed all his thought and feeling and therefore all his life.

If we were to say that a vision was a truth pictorially imaged to the imagination we should probably commend ourselves to the modern tendency to reduce everything to the level of the experience of common men. But I don't know that we should

gain anything in the process. Indeed, may we not lose a great deal? I love to think that in all generations God has some men to whom he can speak more intimately than to others. This attempt to reduce all men to a dead level of spiritual susceptibility is a miserable business. Trades unionism for mutual helpfulness is good and worthy, but when it tries to drag the most capable and competent men down to the level of the most indolent and inefficient it seems to me a kind of conspiracy against that which is most regal in our human nature. That which we ought to recognize is that every man of great endowments is a great servant, a leader and deliverer of men out of servitude, as in the case of Moses. And such men, when they hear the call of God, must be at liberty to serve God. Of all kinds of liberty this is the most necessary for men and should be jealously guarded above all others. This is the liberty for which our Pilgrim Fathers left land and home, that they might have "freedom to worship God."

I don't know of anything more interesting, more instructive, more stimulating, than to look upon a man at the moment when he recognizes that there is in him a call to some high duty, some great service, to which he is impelled, yet from which he shrinks. This vision gives us a great moment in the life of this great man. He had long been brooding over the condition of his people in Egypt, humiliated, enslaved. God had been preparing him for this great moment, this crisis hour in his life-preparing him by that wonderful deliverance of his from drowning in the

Nile, preparing him by making the enslavers of his people the custodians and tutors of the man who was to be their deliverer, preparing him by that burst of holy and irrepressible indignation in which he had slain an oppressor of his people— the event which separated him from the seductions and fascinations of the Egyptian court-preparing him by a long period of pastoral meditation on the sheepstrewn plains of Horeb. Divine Providence had never let go of this man. It was with him as with Paul. After his decision for Christ's service, Paul saw that God had been preparing him for his apostleship from the first hour of life, so that he could write: "When it was the good pleasure of God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles." So, likewise, God revealed to Cyrus, the great Persian leader: "I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me." So is it. We can never explore the deeps of that Divine Providence in which we are all held.

Moses was fitted to receive this vision and to interpret it. You and I might never have seen the vision, or heard the voice, or been able to interpret the event. Men don't see with their eyes, they see with the mind and much more with their spiritual nature. It was the divine in Moses which recognized the divine out of him. That bush represented the nation to which he belonged as it was in the fiery furnace of persecution. It also spoke of the divine care for the nation, notwithstanding its en

slavement. And yet further, it spoke of the divine care for this very man whose earlier life was failure. He had the greatest of opportunities in the royal court of Egypt, but he could not make the most of them, because his heart was with his oppressed people. He was drawn in contrary directions. The selfish part of him was drawn Egyptward, the noble part of him was drawn toward his own nation.

When, forty years before this vision, the nobler impulses controlled him, his people made no responses. Slavery takes the heart even out of the best. And so Moses had sunken in his own estimate to the level of a mere useless agitator, a sort of Jack Cade, and in disgust he went into the quietude of Midian and there, for the long space of forty years, mused and meditated in the loneliness of pastoral life until old age seemed creeping on and the mystery of it all probably became oppressive. Maybe he was saying within himself: "God hath forsaken me, my God hath forgotten me."

It was then that the call came, then that the desert became once more aflame with God, then that a common bush began to burn with a new radiance, a bush burned into a sanctuary! And this great soul had the revelation in a form in which he could not misunderstand it, that God had not forsaken his people and he had not forgotten his Moses, and that all the past experience of his life, which seemed to have been thrown away upon him, began to count. Is it not by studying carefully and prayerfully the