In one main point the Lawgiver miscalculated his powers. He had proposed making of his Hebrew followers a race of pure Theists, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, reverencing nothing but the One Supreme, worshipping him without medium or mediator, and therefore independent of temples and sacerdotal castes and the long list of ceremonies and sacred paraphernalia by which hierarchies strengthen and perpetuate their sway. But the Hebrew mind was thoroughly unfitted to receive pure truth. Amid the awful preternatural scenes which, according to their own accounts, heralded the proclamation of the God of Israel, with battle and destruction, miraculous plagues and fire and openings of the earth ever ready to punish those who denied their Deity or disobeyed his servants, this wonderful people were in a perpetual state of useless gainsaying and impotent revolt. Deeply imbued with the tenacious superstitions of the Nile, the stiff-necked race had become irritable rather than strong under the painful training of the desert, they longed and begged for a return to slavery, and none had eyes to look steadfastly upon the unveiled light of Revelation emanating from their leader and lawgiver. Finding, after his return from temporary seclusion and retirement,[214] his chosen people worshipping a molten calf, the god Apis, and _playing_--in other words, a scene of Egyptian debauchery--Moses broke in wrath the first Tables of the Law (Exod. xxxii. 19). These consisted simply of the Ten Commandments, a forbiddal to make gods of gold and silver, easy directions for building an earthen altar of sacrifice, and a brief civil and criminal code embodied in three chapters. After another term of forty days and nights spent in solitude amongst the awful and impressive scenes which had witnessed his meditations when feeding Jethro’s flocks, and now saw the disappointment of his early aspirations, Moses returned with a code (Exod. xxxiv.) better fitted to the sickly and diseased condition of the Hebrew soul. Of this the proportion of the ritual to the moral precepts is as ten to two. It is a priestly system, a faith of feasts and sacrifices, of holy days and ceremonies purposely assimilated to those idolatries of Egypt with which the minds of the people were familiar but secured to the worship of Jehovah their God. The Lawgiver no longer disdained to borrow from symbolical religion, especially in the ceremonial worship, which at first he appears to have avoided. The ark and the tabernacle were old types amongst the Egyptians, memorials of their Northern migration. The Urim and Thummim (Ra and Thenei) were the Sun and personified Justice--Light and Truth. The Elohim were Kneph and Pthah, the presiding spirit and the creative intellect of the Supreme. The Spirit of God that moved upon the face of the waters is again the Deity Kneph. The silence with which Jehovah was to be adored appears to be an idea borrowed from Amun Ra, the Unutterable Word, similar to the Hindu