It is possible that even the merciful mitigations of the last plague were used by infatuated hearts to justify their wilfulness: the most valuable crops of all had escaped; so that these judgments, however dire, were not quite beyond endurance. Just such a course of reasoning deludes all who forget that the goodness of God leadeth to repentance. Besides the reasons already given for lengthening out the train of judgments, it is added that Israel should teach the story to posterity, and both fathers and children should “know that I am Jehovah.” Accordingly it became a favourite title—“The Lord which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” Even the apostates under Sinai would not reject so illustrious a memory: their feast was nominally to Jehovah; and their idol was an image of “the gods which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (xxxii. 4, 5). Has _our_ land no deliverances for which to be thankful? Instead of boastful self-assertion, should we not say, “We have heard with our ears, O God, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that Thou didst in their days and in the old time before them?” Have we forgotten that national mercies call aloud for national thanksgiving? And in the family, and in the secret life of each, are there no rescues, no emancipations, no enemies overcome by a hand not our own, which call for reverent acknowledgment? “These things were our examples, and are written for our admonition.” The reproof now spoken to Pharaoh is sterner than any previous one. There is no reasoning in it. The demand is peremptory: “How long wilt thou refuse to humble thyself?” With it is a sharp and short command: “Let My people go, that they may serve Me.” And with this is a detailed and tremendous threat. It is strange, in the face of the knowledge accumulated since the objection called for it, to remember that once this narrative was challenged, because locusts, it was said, are unknown in Egypt. They are mentioned in the inscriptions. Great misery was caused by them in 1463, and just three hundred years later Niebuhr was himself at Cairo during a plague of them. Equally arbitrary is the objection that Joel predicted locusts “such as there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after them, even to the years of many generations” (ii. 2), whereas we read of these that “before them there were no such locusts as they, neither after them shall be such” (x. 14). The objection is whimsical in its absurdity, when we remember that Joel spoke distinctly of Zion and the holy mountain (ii. 1), and Exodus of “the borders of Egypt” (x. 14). But it is true that locusts are comparatively rare in Egypt; so that while the meaning of the threat would be appreciated, familiarity would not have steeled them against it. The ravages of the locust are terrible indeed, and coming just in time to ruin the crops which had escaped the hail, would complete the misery of the land.