C. Staniland Wake, an English writer, in his great work on the _Evolution of Morality_, vol. ii., page 59, thus expresses his views: “Judging from this fact, many persons imagine—or at least, from the superstitious reverence that they have for the Decalogue, appear to do so—that until the time of the Hebrew lawgiver the most ordinary rules of morality were unknown. The mere fact of Egypt being the starting-point of the Exodus ought to be sufficient to disabuse the mind of this idea, without reference to the contents of the code itself. But the moral laws given in the Decalogue are of so primitive a character that it is absurd to suppose, except on the assumption that the Hebrews were at that period in a condition of pure savagery, that God would personally appear to give his immediate sanction to them. The commands, Honor thy father and thy mother, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor, Thou shalt not covet, were simply _reiterations_ of laws to which the Hebrews had been subject during their whole sojourn in Egypt, and which must, in fact, have been familiar to them before their ancestors left their traditional Chaldean home.” Then we must bear in mind that Moses himself was an Egyptian by birth, and that he was brought up at the court of Pharaoh until he was forty years of age, and in Acts 7: 22 we are told that “Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and in deeds.”