23. What further fictions can the futile
folly of insane blasphemy devise? Do you still persist in your
nightly sowing of tares, predestined to be burnt, among the pure wheat,
when the knowledge of all the Patriarchs contradicts you? Nay
more: if you believed Moses, you would believe also in God, the
Son of God; unless perchance you deny that it was of Him that Moses
spoke. If you propose to deny that, you must listen to the words
of God:—For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed Me
also, for he wrote of Me St. John v. 46.. Moses,
indeed, will refute you with the whole volume of the Law, ordained
through angels, which he received by the hand of the Mediator.
Enquire whether He, Who gave the Law, were not true God; for the
Mediator was the Giver. And was it not to meet God that Moses led
out the people to the Mount? Was it not God Who came down into
the Mount? Or was it, perhaps, only by a fiction or an adoption,
and not by right of nature, that He, Who did all this, bore the name of
God? Mark the blare of the trumpets, the flashing of the
torches, the clouds of
smoke, as from a furnace, rolling over the mountain, the terror of
conscious impotence on the part of man in the presence of God, the
confession of the people, when they prayed Moses to be their spokesman,
that at the voice of God they would die. Is He, in your judgment,
not true God, when simple dread lest He should speak filled Israel with
the fear of death? He Whose voice could not be borne by human
weakness? In your eyes is He not God, because He addressed you
through the weak faculties of a man, that you might hear, and
live Reading
viveres.? Moses entered the Mount; in forty
days and nights he gained the knowledge of the mysteries of heaven, and
set it all in order according to the vision of the truth which was
revealed to him there. From intercourse with God, Who spoke with
him, he received the reflected splendour of that glory on which none
may gaze? his corruptible countenance was transfigured into the
likeness of the unapproachable light of Him, with Whom he was
dwelling. Of this God he bears witness, of this God he speaks; he
summons the angels of God to come and worship Him amid the gladness of
the Gentiles, and prays that the blessings which please Him may descend
upon the head of Joseph. In face of such evidence as this, dare
any man say that He has nothing but the name of God, and deny His true
Divinity?