As the glow died down, however, a very rudimentary sort of civilisation the wilderness must have presented to these builders of the temples and the treasure cities by the Nile, and to the vigorous, resourceful Hebrew women. As day after day, and year after year, the cloud moved onward, darkening the road which it directed, as they gathered the manna and longed for the fleshpots, it could have been only the few and finer spirits among those listless groups who were able to discern that a civilisation based upon the Decalogue, shorn though it was of all present pleasantness and ease, had a promise about it that was lacking to a culture, ‘learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’ It was life reduced to its elements; Sinai and Pisgah stood so far apart, and such long level stretches of dull sand lay between the heights. One imagines the women, skilled like their men-folk in all manner of cunning workmanship, eagerly, generously ransacking their stores of purple and fine linen to decorate the Tabernacle, and spinning and embroidering with a desperately delighted sense of recovered refinements, which, as much perhaps as their fervour of religious enthusiasm, led them to bring their gifts till restrained ‘from bringing.’ The trust was accepted though in the wilderness, but grudgingly, with many a faint-hearted protest, and to some minds, in some moods, slavery must have seemed less insistent in its demands than trusteeship. The conquest of Canaan was the next experience, and as sinfulness and idolatry were relentlessly washed away in rivers of blood, one doubts if the impressionable descendants of Jacob, to whom it was given to overcome, might not perchance have preferred to endure. But such choice was not given to them; the trust had to be realised before it could be transmitted, and its value tested by its cost. With Palestine at last in possession of the chosen people, this civilisation of which they were the guardians by slow degrees became manifest. Samuel lived it, and David sang it, and Isaiah preached it, and the nation clung to it, individual men and women, stumbling and failing often, but dying each, when need came, a hundred deaths in its defence; perhaps finding it on occasion less difficult to die for an idea than to live up to it.