Our range of vision is so narrow, and our knowledge of even the past so limited and so full of inaccuracies, that we can do little more than guess at the manifold unrolling of the divine intentions. We know enough to fill us with hope as to the ultimate destination of all creation, and of ourselves as the children of God. We know not the future, save faintly as faith reveals it. Even of the past we know but dimly and in broken lines. To one only of the children of men, so far as the Holy Scripture informs us, was the past fully and entirely made known, so far as that was possible to a mortal man supernaturally sustained to bear it. How many in the hallowed, bold, and rash moments of inarticulate prayer have ventured in their lesser degree to say with Moses, “Show me thy glory”! As the thought grows upon us of God’s wonderful ways and of his unutterable love and beneficence, we too long to know with certain knowledge something of that Glory which the great lawgiver intuitively felt would be at once the knowledge of all and the consummation of every desire. “Show me thy glory.” Hear the answer: “Thou canst not see my face: for man shall not see me, and live. Thou shalt stand upon the rock. And when my glory shall pass, I will set thee in a hole in the rock, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face thou canst not see.”[67] And thus Moses saw the back parts of Him who is from all eternity, through the aperture of time. He had revealed to him the far-off intention of creation. He looked back, in God, to the time before time “when he had not yet made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world; when Wisdom was with him forming all things, playing before him at all times, playing in the world, and whose delights were to be with the children of men.”[68] The back parts were beheld by him, and even this he could not have endured in his feeble flesh had not the Eternal “right hand protected him.” All that the past could teach him in the flash of one moment was then made known to him. What floods of light, knowledge, and divine hope and expectation must that wonderful backward view have imparted to Moses, the man singled out of all mankind to read the past! But even with the strength which knowledge such as that must have conferred upon him, still he could not see the face of God and live. We are using weak human words, because they alone are given us. It was the forward look of God which Moses could not see and live. It was the unutterable Glory that is prepared for us in the future, with and through Jesus, that not even the man who had conversed with God as man speaks with his fellow-man, face to face, could see and live. Its stupendous and exceeding brightness, would have shattered his being as the flash of lightning shatters the oak; even as our Lord revealed to one of his chosen saints that, could she perfectly realize his immense love for the souls of men, that moment of intense joy would snap the