The Lord had said that Moses’s death was now, now to be met — and that with the very grievous remembrance of his past fault, and with a penalty annexed: [namely] that he should not enter the desired land, longed-for through so many years. And yet Moses himself seems touched by no feeling of these [things]: he dreads nothing at death; he acknowledges his sin, and does not seek to be so often approved [exonerated]; he does not press that he may either live longer, or be allowed to enter the promised land. But his whole mind and thought sticks fixed on a successor: about this one thing he is anxious; this one thing he asks and demands of the Lord. What, I ask, is the cause? Truly indeed, as is excellently observed in Philo (at the beginning of the book On Charity), [it was] his supreme love toward the people once committed to him by God. For this [love] made him take, for the future, so great a care and solicitude for its advantages and profits also. He had been, living, a father to them all; he wishes, dying too, to be a father. To those his wards he wishes the best guardians and curators to be set over [them]. He leaves them the best and amplest inheritance, the land promised by God: lest the little children,—
(col. 182)
—by any folly and fickleness, desert it, or, by the crime and wrong of others, lose it, he thinks provision must be made by every means in his power. But nothing has more weight toward this than if the parents leave [them] the best guardian and moderator of [their] labor. But this love of Moses toward the people flowed, in turn, from another love — namely, that whereby he most greatly and chiefly loved God, the Best and Greatest. For therefore he says, a little after, so tenderly: “lest the people of the Lord [be as sheep without a shepherd].” For because he knew that people had been chosen by Him [God] out of all nations — so that He led and named it, as it were, His own peculiar possession (Exod. 19, v. 5) — and again, because in this people the true religion, chaste doctrine, [and] ceremonies by which God Himself is worshipped had fixed their holy seat, and thereafter, when they should have reached the desired land, and raised in it a most magnificent temple, were to be fixed [there] as deeply and for as long a time as possible: therefore he desires that this people should flourish, and therefore that it should have as skilled as possible a leader, by whom they may be led, taught, and kept in [their] duty. For without this, never has any city, commonwealth, [or] people flourished, worshipped the divine Godhead as it ought, [or] abounded in peace and the ornaments of peace and in the resources of human life. An excellent example, therefore, was here left by Moses to all who sit at the helms of the Church and the Commonwealth — how they ought to love the peoples subject to them, [and] to wish this for them most of all and, as much as in them lies, [even when] dying, to procure [it]. And that thing the Poet excellently expressed, in verses, in that pilot of Aeneas’s fleet:
For, before all, the chief, Palinurus, was leading the dense column; toward him the others were bidden to press their course… But when sleep and needy repose [seized] him… ——— with part of the stern torn away, and when [the rudder-post], with the rudder, cast him headlong into the liquid waves, the wretch was drowned, [and] sought the shades below.
When Aeneas had found him there, what [said] he himself to this man?
——— “By the rough seas I swear,” he says, “that I took no such great fear for myself, as [I did] lest thy [ship], despoiled of its gear [armis], its master shaken out, should fail amid such swelling waves that rose.”
Some Princes have sometimes imitated this — but, out of the greatest number, very few.