I will now give an instance that will include both. In those early times men had not been trained, as we have been, by ages of culture, to think abstractedly. They could only think, if we may so express it, concretely. It was necessary that a palpable image of what was meant should be before their minds. This was what made idolatry so attractive to the people Moses led up out of Egypt. It was so to all the young world, and is so still to all who are in the infancy of thought. And it was so in a pre-eminent degree with those Moses had to deal with, for they had been mentally degraded below even the level of the times, by the hard slavery in which they had been kept for some generations. Even among our own labouring class this inability to think abstractedly is very conspicuous. Their want of intellectual training, their ignorance, their life of toil, their poverty of language, particularly of abstract and general forms of expression, are the cause of it. They can never tell you what they themselves said, or what anybody else said, except in a dramatic form. With them it is always ‘I said,’ and ‘he said;’ in each case the very words being given. They cannot indicate the purport of what was said by the general, or abstract, form of expression that a man consented, or hesitated, or refused compliance, or remonstrated, &c. General forms of thought and expression are beyond them. Nor will they, for they cannot, tell you simply that a thing was done: instead of this they must tell you every step of the process. That which is very remarkable, in this nineteenth century, in one class, amongst ourselves, was a law, a necessity, of thought among those with whom Moses had to deal.