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that we shall. God seems to be treating us as he
treated Israel—because of their unbelief and coward¬
ice, keeping them marching backward and forward
forty years in a desert, which a band of Bedouin
cavalry would have crossed in a month. It looks
like this now. We are surely as yet perplexed in
the Exodus; there is a wild howling wilderness
around; and the water of our springs runs bitter; and
enemies fierce and strong are encamped in our path;
and there are among the tribes mean men, like Achan,
that would turn back our march for gold; and trait¬
orous men, like Korah, who rejoice in our discomfit¬
ure; and timid men, like the spies of evil counsel,
who whisper with pale lips of walled cities, and armed
giants; and between us and the longed-for rest rolls
a dark deep river, and as yet we have not found our
Joshua with the rod of God in his hand. And it
may be God's purpose of judgment, that not a man
of ours, as of that old generation, shall pass the Jor¬
dan in triumph. But it shall be passed! If not we, yet
our children shall go over dry-shod and exulting and
in the morning light. And when, in the serene calm
of that sure future, the philosophic and Christian
historian shall write up the record, and from that
Canaan—that fair land of the promises and the cove¬
nants and the glory—reached at last wayworn and
with weary feet, through wild deserts and armed
foemen and dark and angry floods, shall review the
strangely chequered past—all that weary way which
the Lord God led us in the wilderness to humble us
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