other places in the Delta, as well as in Upper Egypt, and even in Nubia, were his work. What he had done in this way was so far in advance of all that had ever been done before, that it must have been the talk of all that part of the world. Of all these great names and great events, no mention whatever is made in the Hebrew Scriptures, although, during the sojourn, Egypt was actually the scene of the sacred history. The omission is very similar to that which is the subject of this chapter, and almost as difficult to explain. If, then, we were confined to the Jewish accounts, it would be impossible for us to assign to the date of the Exodus its place in the history of Egypt. There is, however, one name occurring incidentally in the account of the oppression, which, in conjunction with monumental evidence, enables us to fix precisely this indispensable date—so precisely as that we are sure that it took place in the reign of Menephthah, or Menophres, the son of the great Rameses, and the grandson of Sethos. I shall reserve the demonstration of this till I have occasion to mention the Canal of Rameses. I said that the date of the Exodus has an important bearing on the inquiry of why the doctrine of a future life was excluded from the Mosaic Dispensation: it has this importance, because it enables us to know what had been going on in that part of the world for some time immediately preceding the promulgation of that Dispensation. Knowing the date, we know that reciprocal barbarities, such as this age can fortunately form but a feeble conception of, had for centuries been the order of the day between the Egyptians and the Semites. At last the Egyptians had got completely the upper hand, and had driven out the main body of the Semites from their country, had devastated in a most sweeping, and ruthless manner neighbouring countries, and most frequently and most completely those parts of Syria which soon afterwards fell into the hands of the Israelites. If we can form but a feeble conception of the barbarities of those times, we can perhaps form only a still less adequate conception of that which prompted them—the gluttonous hatred that animated these two races towards each other. No amount of blood, no form of cruelty on any scale, could satiate it. There is nothing in the practices, the history, the religion, of the modern world which enables us to understand their feelings. We see much evidence of them on the Egyptian monuments, and some indications of them in the Hebrew Scriptures; and these, of course, must be translated, not in accordance with our ideas, but with the ideas of those times. Every shepherd was an abomination to the Egyptians. The Hebrews took the opposite view, and regarded the first tiller of the ground as the first murderer. The Hebrews might not eat with the Egyptians, for that was an abomination to them. It is the date, which enables us, in some measure, to understand the feelings that underlie these statements.