At a certain point of time, when forgetfulness of the divine unity was becoming general, God chose one man out of whom to form a nation, whose function should be the preservation of a belief in this unity. Abraham, the friend of God and the forefather of Christ, was called out of his own country that he might preserve the religion of Noah, and that "in him all the kindreds of the earth might be blessed" (Gen. xii. 3). In the second generation his family was carried down into Egypt, and became, in the security of that kingdom, a people, but it likewise fell into bondage. From this it was redeemed in a series of wonderful events under the guidance of Moses, was led by him into the desert, and there formed into a nation by the discipline of a religious, which was also a civil code. In the law given on Mount Sinai we see once more the constitution of the society established in Noah. The whole moral order of the world contained in the ten commandments is made to rest upon the sovereignty of God: "I am the Lord; thou shalt have no strange gods." From this precept, which fills the first table, proceed the precepts which, in the second, maintain the order of society: "Honour thy father and thy mother; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal," and the rest. Such, says Bossuet, is the general order of all legislation. The ten words of God form the core of a complete religious and civil code, in which the two Powers exist in an ideal no less than a practical union. The individual and the national worship is the same, and the society springs out of it, the root being, "I am the Lord;" but the persuasiveness of redemption is added to the power of creation: "I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." Abraham, the father of the people, had exercised the patriarchal priesthood and the patriarchal sacrifice in his family; but just as God had not chosen Abraham because he was the first-born, so Moses, taking the patriarchal priesthood, with a special sanction, set it not in the first-born of the tribes, but in another tribe, and in a family of this tribe. He took, further, the rite of sacrifice, which had existed from the beginning, only developing its meaning in a series of ordinances, which, as St. Paul tells us, all pointed to Christ: "Almost all things according to the law are cleansed with blood, and without shedding of blood is no remission" (Heb. ix. 22). But while there is here a complete union in faith, in practice, and in worship, for every true Israelite and for the whole people, while there is one source of authority to the three, the bearers of the dignities which represent this triple life of man are separated. Moses instituted, in the person of Aaron, a high priesthood which from that time stands through the whole history of his people at the head of their worship, superior in all that concerns it to the civil authority, which is bound