Fifteen hundred years had passed since the night when the Hebrew bondman had fled out of Egypt, or, as the Egyptian annals described the event, had, at the command of the gods of Egypt, been ignominiously cast out of the land. They had ordered his expulsion, so ran the record, because he was the incurable victim, and the prolific source, of a foul leprosy. This was the evil disease of Egypt that bondman never forgot. Those fifteen hundred years, from the days of the making of the brick for which no straw had been given, and from the building of Pithom and Ramses, had been very chequered years. In that time the fugitive people had had to pass through many a fiery furnace of affliction. Their old task-masters had again, as others, too, had done, set their heel upon them. During that long lapse of time what a stumbling-block to the Hebrew mind must have been the good things of Egypt: its wealth, its splendour, its power, its wisdom; even its abundance of corn and its fine linen: all that this world could give given to the worshippers of cats and crocodiles. Egypt must have occupied in the Hebrew mind much the same place that is held in the minds of many of ourselves by the existence of evil. It was a great fact, and a great mystery. Something which could neither be denied, nor explained, which it is unpleasant to be reminded of, and which had better be kept altogether out of the thoughts of the simple. The Hebrew “was grieved at seeing the Egyptian in such prosperity. He was in no peril of death. He was strong and lusty. He came not into misfortune, neither was he plagued like other men. This was why he was so holden with pride, and overwhelmed with cruelty. His eyes swelled with fatness, and he did even as he lusted. He spake wicked blasphemy against the Most High. He stretched forth his mouth unto the heavens, and his tongue went through the world. The people fell before him, and he sucked out from them no small advantage.” Such was the aspect in which the prosperity of Egypt presented itself to the mind of the Hebrew. “He sought to understand it, but it was too hard for him.” How grand, then, how noble, and for us how absolutely beyond all price, is the reiterated assertion of the Hebrew prophets, even in the worst and darkest times of this long and trying period, of the ultimate triumph of right; of a new heavens and a new earth, that is, of a time when mundane societies would be animated by diviner principles; and, pre-eminently, by those of universal inclusion and concord.