Afterward Hezekiah asked of Isaiah how he was to know that the Lord would keep his word and give him fifteen additional years of life. Isaiah told him that the shadow should go back ten degrees on the dial. And Isaiah “cried unto the Lord,” and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward “by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.” [Footnote: 2 Kings xx, 11.] And yet this man Hezekiah, who could believe in this marvellous cure of Isaiah, repudiated with scorn the brazen serpent as an insult to credulity. The contrast between Moses, who hesitated not to take all risks in matters of disease with which he felt himself competent to cope, and his timidity and hesitation in matters of war, is astounding. But it is a common phenomenon with the worker of miracles and indicates the limit of faith at which the saint or prophet has always betrayed the impostor. For example: Saint Bernard, when he preached in 1146 the Second Crusade, made miraculous cures by the thousand, so much so that there was danger of being killed in the crowds which pressed upon him. And yet this same saint, when chosen by the crusaders four years later, in 1150, to lead them because of his power to constrain victory by the intervention of God, wrote, after the crusaders’ defeat, in terror to the pope to protect him, because he was unfit to take such responsibility. But even with this reservation Moses could not gain the complete confidence of the congregation and the insecurity of his position finally broke him down. At this same place of Kadesh, Miriam died, “and the people chode with Moses because there was no water for the congregation.” [Footnote: Numbers xx, 8.] Moses thereupon withdrew and, as usual, received a revelation. And the Lord directed him to take his rod, “and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes; and it shall give forth his water.” And Moses gathered the congregation and said unto them, “Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?” “And he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly.” But Moses felt that he had offended God, “Because ye believed me not, to sanctify me in the eyes of the children of Israel, therefore ye shall not bring this congregation into the land which I have given them.”