of all was in his direct communication with God.  He was peculiarly a man of prayer.  Everything was referred to God, and he declared that everything—­laws, organization, worship, plans—­came to him from God.  In national emergencies where moral catastrophe was threatened he petitioned God and the plans were changed in accordance with his request.  He makes personal requests and they are granted.  He was peculiarly a man who dealt directly with God about every sort of thing, national and personal, simple and complex.  The record commonly credited to him puts prayer as the simple profound explanation of his stupendous career and achievements.  He prayed.  God worked along the line of his prayer.  The great things recorded are the result.  That is the simple inferential summary.

Now there is one exception to all this in Moses’ life.  It stands out the more strikingly that it is an exception; the one exception of a very long line.  Moses asked repeatedly for one thing.  It was not given him.  God is not capricious nor arbitrary.  There must be a reason. There is. And it is fairly luminous with light.

Here are the facts.  These freed men of Egypt are a hard lot to lead and to live with.  Slow, sensuous, petty, ignorant, narrow, impulsive, strangers to self-control, critical, exasperating—­what an undertaking God had to make a nation, the nation of history, about which centred His deep reaching, far-seeing love ambition for redeeming a world out of such stuff!  Only paralleled by the church being built upon such men as these Galilean peasants!  What victories these!  What a God to do such things!  Only a God could do either and both!  What immense patience it required to shape this people.  What patience God has.  Moses had learned much of patience in the desert sands with his sheep; for he had learned much of God.  But the finishing touches were supplied by the grindstone of friction with the fickle temper of this mob of ex-slaves.

Here are the immediate circumstances.  They lacked water.  They grew very thirsty.  It was a serious matter in those desert sands with human lives, and young children, and the stock.  No, it was not serious:  really a very small matter, for God was along, and the enterprise was of His starting.  It was His affair, all this strange journey.  And they knew Him quite well enough in their brief experience to be expecting something fully equal to all needs with a margin thrown in.  There was that series of stupendous things before leaving Egypt.  There was the Red Sea, and fresh food daily delivered at every man’s tent door, and game, juicy birds, brought down within arms’ reach, yes, and—­surely this alone were enough—­there was living, cool water gushing abundantly, gladly out of the very heart of a flinty rock—­if such a thing can be said to have a heart!  Oh, yes it was a very small matter to be lacking anything with such a lavish God along.

But they forgot. Their noses were keener than their memories.  They had better stomachs than hearts.  The odorous onions of Egypt made more lasting impressions than this tender, patient, planning God.  Yet here even their stomachs forgot those rock-freed waters.  These people must be kinsfolk of ours.  They seem to have some of the same family traits.