We can better persuade proud men to do what is useful if we say that their setting out will profit us rather than them, or if we say that improvement will profit us rather than them and ask that the cost be on our account, not theirs. For pride is easily turned to good if it can be adapted to the profit of others. Thus Moses, with God guiding him, advanced through the desert with a column of cloud going before him. When he wished to draw his relative Hobab away from his life with the Gentiles and subject him to the lordship of almighty God, he said, We are going to the place that the Lord will give us. Come with us, so that we can do you good, for the Lord has promised good to Israel. When Hobab answered, I will not go with you but will return to my land, where I was born,^[1] Moses added, Do not leave us. You know where we should make camp in the desert, and you will be our guide.^[2] Moses’ mind was not limited by ignorance of the route. For knowledge of the Deity had made him familiar with prophecy. The column had gone before him. Familiar speech had taught him about all things interiorly, through careful conversation with God. But this prudent man, speaking to a proud listener, asked Hobab to give him help. Moses needed Hobab as a guide along the way, so that he could be Hobab’s guide in life. So Moses acted so that the proud listener, as he urged the better way on him, would become more devoted to him if he were thought to be indispensable. He thought he outranked Moses, who asked him for help, and thus yielded to Moses’ words as Moses entreated him.

The people in the desert deserved to be reprimanded, not because they desired meat but because they murmured against the Lord as a result of this desire for meat.

Do we not see that the Israelites got to their own hurt what their guilty lusting craved? For while manna was raining down on them from heaven, they desired to have meat to eat.^[1] They disdained what they had, and they shamelessly sought what they had not, as if it were not better for them to have asked not that their unbecoming desires be gratified with food that was wanting, but that their own dislike be removed, and that they be made to receive rightly the food that was provided. For when evil becomes our delight and good the opposite, we ought to entreat God to win us back to the love of the good rather than to grant us the evil.

Prosperity has a way of bringing about the downfall and complete dissolution of the unwary. Thus the Jews, who from the beginning enjoyed the favor of God, repeatedly turned to the law of the kingdom of the Gentiles. When they were in the desert, after receiving manna, they kept recalling onions!

We would be censured along with those who dwelled in the desert and who desired the disgusting food of vice and filthiness after having eaten the heavenly manna, and we would seem to complain like them: It was well with us in Egypt, when we sat over pots of flesh and ate onions and garlic and cucumbers and melons. Although this manner of speaking first referred to that people, nonetheless we see it now daily fulfilled in our life and profession. For everyone who has first renounced this world and then returns to his former pursuits and his erstwhile desires proclaims that in deed and in intention he is the same as they were, and he says, It was well with me in Egypt.