When we reach the Mosaic period we find that though clouds and darkness are round the throne of the Eternal, the light that streams from it into the minds of men reveals, just more clearly, the same one living and true God. According to the Book of Origins, a period of four hundred and eighty years separated the patriarchal from the Mosaic age, and during that period the Hebrew tribes had first been sheltered, and then for long enslaved, by the most civilised of all peoples in the ancient world. Astonished by the grandeur of Egypt, they at last succumbed to its religion; and while oppression in the pent-up Egyptian cities deteriorated fearfully their physical condition, slavery and idolatry wrought with terrible effect upon their character. They came out of Egypt a cowardly horde, leprous in body, childish and brutish in their disposition. Their children however entered Palestine, more than a generation after, a powerful and consolidated and victorious force, whose fear was upon all the surrounding tribes; and their annals ascribe all this to revival and reformation due to Divine revelation and training under the plastic genius of one of Egypt’s wisest men, and one of the greatest prophets of the human race. The oldest Hebrew historian states that Moses wrote two tables of the Covenant, and one entire, though small, Book of Laws besides; and though it were proved to universal satisfaction that he never wrote anything else than the Ten Words, and the preface[107]: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one,” it will be admitted that no one in all the old world has ever contributed more than he did to man’s stock of the highest of all knowledge. The truth communicated by the patriarchs in the word Creator was of supreme moment and promise for the human race, for by it man was saved from the sin and folly of confounding the Deity with His works. The idea of a Creator occurs indeed in the Vedas,[108] but not as an idea that ever got hold of the popular mind, or ever ripened into the conception of Creator which we have in the Bible. The Brahman expounders of Vedic thought made deity the sum of all that is, a being that is ever becoming, a universe that is never completed. The Hebrew, on the contrary, conceived of the universe as God’s work—not God. It was but a part of His ways, and as nothing before Him. In the Indian creed emanation continues indefinitely, and their sacred books record a never-ending genesis. In the Hebrew Bible two pages suffice to relate the genesis of the world and man. Between the deities of the Vedas and the Jehovah of Moses there is no natural progression, and we never in any series, however prolonged, can reach from the one to the other. The Indian deities are simply one with Nature, and like its forces they are multitudinous, capricious, evanescent; but the Deity of Moses is One, Supreme, Invisible, not to be likened to anything we can see or hear—eternal as One who alone is, and causes to be: “I Am that I Am!”