son of Nazareth, was the Lord God who brought their forefathers up out of the land of Egypt, on the night of the first Passover. So they, to show how reverent and orthodox they were, and how they honoured the name of God, took up stones to stone Him—as many a man, who fancies himself orthodox and reverent, would now, if he dared, stone the preachers who declare that the Lord Jesus Christ is not changed since then; that He is as able and as willing as ever to deliver the poor from those who grind them down, and that He will deliver them, whenever they cry to Him, with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm, and that Easter-day is as much a sign of that to us as the Passover was for the Jews of old. But, my friends, if Christ the Lord showed His love and power in behalf of poor oppressed wretches on that first Passover, surely He showed it a thousand times more on that first Easter-day. His great love helped the Jews out of slavery; and that same great love of His at this Easter-tide, moved Him to die and rise again for the sins of the whole world. In that first Passover He delivered only one people. On the first Easter He delivered all mankind. The Jews were under cruel tyrants in the land of Egypt. So were all mankind over the world, when Jesus came. The Jews in Egypt were slaves to worse things than the whip of their task-masters; they had slaves’ hearts, as well as slaves’ bodies. They were kept down not only by the Egyptians, but by their own ignorance, and idolatry, and selfish division, and foul sins. They were spiritually dead—without a noble, pure, manful feeling left in them. Their history makes no secret of that. The Bible seems to take every care to let us see into what a miserable and brutal state they had fallen. Christ sent Moses to raise them out of that death; to take them through the Red Sea, as a sign that all that was washed away, to be forgiven of God and forgotten by them, and that from the moment they landed, a free people, on the farther shore, they were to consider all their old life past and a new one begun. So they were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea, as St. Paul says. And now all was to be new. They had been fancying that they belonged to the Egyptians. Now they had found out, and had it proved to them by signs and wonders which they could not mistake, that they belonged to the Lord. They had been brutal sinners. The Lord began to teach them that they were to rise above their own appetites and passions. They had been worshipping only what they could see and handle. The Lord began to teach them to worship Him—a person whom they could not see, though He was always near them, and watching over them. They had been living without independence, fellow-feeling, the sense of duty, or love of order. The Lord began to teach them to care for each other, to help each other, to know that they had a duty to perform towards each other, for which they were accountable to Him.