1. It seems a trifling discrepancy of conduct-to strike instead of speaking. Moses was exasperated almost beyond endurance. We marvel, indeed, that he did not smite some of the inglorious faces raised towards his own. Modern criminal courts often refuse to find a verdict against a prisoner whose provocation has been less great than was Moses' that day. Under the circumstances we could excuse him for almost anything. “No soul is saved for a single excellence or damned for a single sin.” Yet because of the particular faults of which Moses was guilty that day-his disobedience and temper-he was shut out of Canaan. The only glimpse he ever got of the land of milk and honey, to lead towards which had been the vast achievement of his life, was from the heights of Pisgah.
As a bird stayed with a little string, or a strong man in swimming held back by a small twig, so a little sin stayeth this great captain (Moses) that he cannot come within the land of Canaan.2 [Note: Henry Smith.]
2. But there are no trifles in God's thought. Long tales may ordinarily be compressed into nutshells.
The massive gates of circumstance
Are turned about the smallest hinge.
So a trifling deviation from the right course of human life may make all the difference between ultimate safe harbour and disaster on the rocks. With such delicate balance is the universe constructed. Some one says that if one of the stars were deflected a quarter of an inch from its orbit the whole system of worlds would rush to chaos. There are no trifles. When Moses departed from God's rule at Meribah he was guilty of a blunder which the years could not rectify.
Some few years ago a certain merchant vessel drove on the rocks. There was no adequate excuse, apparently. The night was neither dark nor stormy. The commander was the most experienced and trusted on the line. For a time the mystery went unexplained. Then, in the binnacle, they found a bit of steel, broken, obviously, from the knife of the man who had cleaned the binnacle. The cleaner himself had scarcely missed the fragment. Lying unobserved beneath the needle, that bit of steel had as surely defeated the purpose of the compass as if it had weighed a thousand pounds. It was not a quarter of an inch in length, yet long enough to wreck a ship of more than three hundred feet. The whole knife from which the fragment was broken cost perhaps a half dollar, yet that tiny fragment caused a loss of half a million.1 [Note: G. C. Peck, Old Sins in New Clothes, 169.]
Indifference to moral trifles is a source of danger. A little matter may be fatal, if the strain of some terrible temptation should come upon the weak spot. When the famous fight took place between the Merrimac and the Monitor, and the Federal forces in the American Civil War gained supremacy at sea, it might easily have been a reverse instead of a victory. There were some critical moments. Time was lost and risk invited by a very small defect, not found out until the season of trial. During the passage from New York, the engineer of the Monitor had omitted to clean and oil properly the working gear of the revolving turret. The plan was all right. Failure was in the drudgery behind-in inattention to details. Salt water had touched portions of the machinery, with the result that rust appeared. As the action opened, the turret refused to move. It was anxious work to repair the mischief. It is thus with moral or intellectual negligence. The rust will come, and the defect, and the peril. There are no trifles in morals. The grains make the mountains of honour or reproach.1 [Note: W. J. Lacey, Masters of To-morrow, 86.]
3. It is but a single blot in the career of the prophet, and it is but slightly touched by the sacred narrative. Still it was thought sufficiently important for Josephus, after his manner, to suppress all mention of it; and it just reveals that shade of weakness in the character of Moses which adds so much to our impression of its general strength.
Three of the principal rivers of Scotland rise from the same hill-side. Only a very small space of ground separates the sources of the Annan, the Tweed, and the Clyde from each other. At a place called Wolf Clyde not far from the spot where the Clyde begins to flow, a very strange thing may sometimes be seen. The valley through which the stream of the Biggar runs, at this point stretches between the Clyde and the Tweed; and, as its level is only a little higher than the bed of the Clyde, during a high flood part of the water of the Clyde overflows its channel and runs into the Biggar stream, and is carried by it into the Tweed. This happens once, perhaps, in three or four years. And you can understand how very easy it would be to send the Clyde to Berwick instead of to Glasgow, to the German Ocean instead of to the Atlantic, and so alter the whole character and history both of the east and of the west of Scotland.
Now this is an apt illustration of what sometimes happens in human life. You will have noticed that it is during a high flood that some of the water of the Clyde overflows into the channel of a stream that carries it away in a direction altogether different from that of the river of which it had previously formed a part. And so it is often during a high flood of passion that the stream of human life is turned from its usual course, and made to flow in an entirely opposite direction. A moment of anger, of pride or unbelief, of strong temptation, may so swell the current of life as to cause it to overflow its banks, and completely change its whole future destiny.2 [Note: H. Macmillan, The Daisies of Nazareth, 204.]
