This is the spiritual state of the Indian Pariah, who has his idols, but no idea of an Almighty Godhead, and who deems his dead deities inferior in dignity to a live Brahman. What more indicative of their mental subjection to the superstitions of Egypt than their imaging the One Supreme by a calf or young bull, the emblem of Priapus all over the ancient world? They were equally inferior in physical force. Manetho numbers them at 80,000--a prodigious rate of increase, considering their circumstances and social state, for the descendants from seventy persons in the short space of 430 years. The compilers of the Book of Numbers[213] give 603,550 fighting men from twenty years old and upwards; this, with women and children, would amount to nearly three millions of human beings--an extravagant estimate. From this state of degradation the thousands of Israel must be raised--must return to the condition of their ancestors the bold free chiefs of the Bedawin. They must therefore depart from Egypt, and must prepare themselves, morally as well as physically by the discipline of the vast and terrible wilderness, to enter as conquerors the holy Promised Land. Many must perish under the hardships, privations, and fatigues of desert-travelling. According to Ibn Khaldun, the Hebrews, debased by slavery, were unable to oppose the Philistines or Arabs of Canaan until the old generation had died off and a new one had grown up in the hardy life of the wilderness. The great Lawgiver, a man of angry temper, as are all who accomplish wonderful actions, and master of the learning of Egypt, displayed in effecting the deliverance of his compatriots a work of itself wonderful, a strength of will, a power of contrivance, a might of words and deeds, which, seen by after-ages through the dim atmosphere of tradition and the mists of national vanity, has caused him to stand forth in the eyes of later ages a giant amongst his kind. He has been made the subject of fable, physically as well as spiritually. Josephus speaks of his divine form and vast stature. To the present day the Arabs of Sinai show traces of gigantic feet and indentations made by a rod which must have been taller than a mast. The monuments of Egypt, so full of minute information, allude neither to Moses nor to the Exodus. The migration of a few brickmaking slaves was, amongst a people surrounded by nomadic tribes, an event too common, too unconsequential, to claim a line of hieroglyph. But the people of old, in this point reversing our modern style of national genealogy, ever strove to dignify and to adorn their birth; and the Hebrews, who claimed the most ancient as well as the noblest of pedigrees, could not tell the tale of their origin as a nation without elevating its simple estate by a hundred fables, and embellishing it with signs and marvels and wonders tending to the honour of the Chosen People and of their great leader.