As the reader sits in his swinging hammock beneath the wide-spreading branches of some great oak and pronounces these words to a listening friend, they may sound light and trifling. But if he could stand here where I am, and lift his eyes from the sacred page and let them fall at once upon the surrounding hills and valleys, methinks these words would then each _weigh a pound_. I have never studied the life of any mortal man with the same degree of interest that I now study the life and character of Moses. Probably it is all the more enjoyable because I have been down in Egypt where Moses was born. I have been sailing up and down the Nile where Moses once floated in the ark of bulrushes. As I sat in a boat on the broad bosom of that majestic river, and looked out upon its banks, I half-way imagined that I could see Moses’s mother weaving the ark. Reader, would you know how that ark was made? Well, it was on this wise. Moses’s mother took a bulrush, and a prayer, and faith, and a tear, and plaited them together. Then more faith, and tears, and bulrushes, and prayers, and plaited them together. When a mother has thus woven an ark, she can trustingly launch her babe upon any waters! And I am persuaded that if we, in our Christian work, would use more faith and tears and prayers and less bulrushes, it would be far better for our Redeemer’s Kingdom. I repeat that I have been in Egypt where Moses was born; on the Nile where he floated; to Pharaoh’s court where he was educated; I have been out on the desert where Moses killed an Egyptian because he imposed upon a Hebrew. I then climbed to the top of the regal pyramid, and looked out over the land of Goshen where Israel served four hundred years in bondage. I followed Moses down to the Red Sea where he led Israel across. I looked up to the frowning brow of Sinai where Moses met God face to face, and talked with him as man to man; where he reached up and received from the hand of God the tables of stone on which were written the Ten Commandments.