“God raised up Moses and laid his spirit upon him. After the command of Pharaoh for the murder of the male infants, he was exposed by his parents among the reeds of the Nile, and rescued in a wonderful manner by the king’s own daughter. At the royal court, where he was brought up, he became acquainted with all the wisdom of the Egyptians. When forty years of age, hurried away by sympathy for his suffering countrymen, whom even at Pharaoh’s court he had not forgotten, he slew an Egyptian who was committing an outrage upon an Israelite, and was compelled to flee. He took refuge in the wilderness, and by a pastoral life of forty years formed his mind in solitude and amidst the sublimities of nature, where only a faint remembrance of the world remained to him, and thoughts of God filled his soul. Here God appeared to him in mount Horeb, in a bush that burned with fire and yet was not consumed. ‘And Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses, and he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground. Moreover he said, I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And Moses hid his face. And the Lord said, I have seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters. I know their sorrows, and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land unto a good land and a large, a land flowing with milk and honey. Come now, therefore, I will send thee to Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt.’[29] Footnote 29: Exod. iii. 2.