The day of trial had been long in coming, but it had come at last; and what we have been recalling to the reader’s mind was what the wisdom of Egypt had to confront now. It was the apotheosis of the ideas men could now attach to the words, Truth, Freedom, Justice, Goodness, Knowledge, Humanity. These were of God, and made man one with God. The time, then, had come for the Hebrew bondman to be revenged: for the Hebrew invasion of Egypt. We may contrast it with the old Egyptian invasions of Syria, and with the Hyksos invasion of Egypt. It was of a kind of which the organized wisdom of Egypt could have formed no anticipation; and against which the temples and the priesthood of Egypt were as powerless as heaps of stones, and dead men. It was an invasion of ideas which could now be understood, and of sentiments which could now be felt; and which were better than any the priests, and priest-kings of old Egypt had in their day felt or understood; and the feeling and the understanding of which would utterly abolish the system they had maintained. These ideas and sentiments had been proclaimed in the cities and villages of Judea and Galilee as the new commandment, as the fulfilment of all religion. The whole Roman world was ripening for their reception. They were carried down into Egypt in the thoughts and hearts of those who had received them. They spread from mind to mind, and from heart to heart. The fugitive bondman, the cast-out leper had returned; but he had now come to bestow a glorious liberty, to communicate the contagion of regenerating ideas and sentiments, and of a larger and better humanity. The Hyksos had again come down into the old Nile land; but this time they came not to oppress, not to exact tribute, but to break bonds, and to enrich, and to place men on a higher level than they had occupied before. This was an invasion to which Egypt, in all its thousands of years of national life, had never yet been exposed. Invasions of this kind can be very rare in the history of nations, and in the history of the human race; but if, when they do come, minds are prepared for them, they are irresistible. And so it was now with old Egypt. The old order of things passed away, and the new order of things came in its place. The priesthood, with all their lore, their science, their wisdom, their legitimacy of at least four thousand years, their impregnable temple-fortresses, their territorial supremacy, the awful authority with which a religion so old, that the memory of the world ran not to the contrary, invested them, passed away like a morning mist. The whole system fell, as the spreading symmetrical pine-tree falls, never to burst forth again into new life—the overthrow having killed the root, as well as all that had grown from the root. Even the very Houses of the Gods which, as the thought of the days of Rameses had phrased it, had been built for myriads of years, passed away with it, excepting the few which have been preserved to tell the