Moses, as the embodiment of justice, is known to us all. His summary judgment upon the Egyptian taskmaster, the rebuking of his quarreling brethren, his effort to secure fair treatment for Jethro's daughters,—these incidents show him in the form of an avenging justice. But Moses as the meekest man on the face of the earth, as he is described in the book of Numbers, rather defies the modeling clay in an attempt at mental sculpture.
The marvelous impressionism of the word-portraits of the Biblical characters tends to eliminate the infinitesimal detail which went to make up the prominent features of the originals. In these terse biographies no hint do we get of those deeper tones which the painter, experience, began to add to the mental canvas of Moses, from the first night when he became a hopeless fugitive. Yet the transition from sumptuousness to severity, swift as the change from day to night in that Eastern clime, would have made shadows of relief upon even a less impressionable temperament than the high-spirited Levite. The unresisting sands beneath his toiling feet told him of the transitory resisting power of aggression. No stubborn effort endured!
What, then, was the secret of endurance? In some such way as this he must have begun his mental journey from trust in material strength to reliance upon omnipotent Spirit. When his indignation flamed out once more in mountainous Midian, the memory of the smitten Egyptian and of those unresisting tracts may have loomed up again. One may not definitely say; but may these not have set in motion the first dim ponderings which prepared him for the full revelation that God is the "I am that I am"? The lesson of nonresistance of those yellow plains probably furnished the basis of the primal glimmerings of that divine quality of meekness or pliancy which afterwards rose to full-orbed glory, mastering the envy and jealousy of Aaron and Miriam.
