It was the most brilliant of all his efforts. He took as his text the
words, “All Scripture is given by inspiration and is profitable,” and he
had no difficulty in showing how vast was the profit to be derived from
a consideration of every portion of the sacred volume, it appeared to
him, than the account given of the early history of the Hebrew race.
That account appealed as an object lesson to all nations on the face of
the earth. It allowed every people to see the course which the children
of Israel had pursued at various periods of their existence and to
profit by such observation. The Hebrews were a terrible example to all
the world. If they were slaves when in the land of Egypt, that was their
own fault. Milton had magnificently expressed the origin of slavery:
“He that hath light within his own clear breast May walk i’ the noontide
and enjoy bright day, But he that hides dark deeds and foul thoughts.
. . . Himself is his own dungeon.”
The bondage of Egypt was, he believed, self-imposed. There is no account
available, he said, of the enslavement of the Children of Israel by the
Egyptians, but a careful consideration of the history of various peoples
shows beyond the possibility of a mistake being made, that only those
become enslaved who are best fitted for enslavement. A king arose that
knew not Joseph--a king who could not believe that at any time there was
belonging to that race of strangers a man of supreme intelligence.
The Israelites bowed their heads to the yoke of the superior race, the
Egyptians, and took their rightful place as slaves. After many days a
man of extraordinary intelligence appeared in the person of Moses. A
patriot of patriots, he gave the race their God--they seemed to have
lived in a perfectly Godless condition in Egypt; and their theology had
to be constructed for them by their leader, as well as their laws: the
laws for the desert wanderers, and a decalogue for all humanity. He was
equal to any emergency, and he had no scruples. He almost succeeded in
making a great nation out of a horde of superstitious robbers. Had he
succeeded the record would have thrown civilization back a thousand
years. Happy it was for the world that the triumph of crime was brief.
The cement of bloodshed that kept the kingdom of Israel together for a
time soon dissolved. Captivity followed captivity. For a thousand years
no improvement whatever took place in the condition of the people--they
had no arts; they lived in mud huts at a period when architecture
reached a higher level than it had ever attained to previously. When
the patriot prophets arose, endeavoring to reform them with words of
fire--the sacred fire of truth--they killed them. One chance remained
to them. They were offered a religion that would have purified them, in
place of the superstition that had demoralized them, and they cried
with one voice, as everyone who had known their history and their social
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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