This does not mean that they were at all less miraculous than any other supposable inflictions would have been; but only that they had more or less special fitness to the ends God had in view and were made to touch the sensibilities of Egypt and her king in tender points. Thus, the Nile was Egypt’s pride and glory, indeed her very life, and not improbably (as some maintain) was worshiped by the Egyptians as one of their gods. How terrible then to wake in the morning to find it one vast sea of blood!――to have only blood for themselves and their cattle to drink; blood every-where for the eye to rest upon in place of the glory of the Nile! How terribly suggestive of their national sin――of the male infants of the Hebrews murdered there, and of the resources of Israel’s God to punish the guilty! So we must suppose that frogs were often inconveniently plenty in Egyptian waters. This visitation of such masses of them brought an evil by no means foreign to their experience. The miracle lay in their numbers and was none the less a miracle because there had been frogs there before. It must have been excessively annoying and humiliating,――if the frog as a near neighbor is as unamiable in that country as in this. Essentially the same must be said of the lice [gnats]; of the flies; and of boils. All these were forms of evil not unknown in Egyptian life; but yet in the present case were truly miraculous and fearfully afflictive. Their cattle were so useful and so highly esteemed that some of them were made objects of idolatrous worship. The golden calf of Hebrew history was an Egyptian idea. There was special pertinence therefore in this fearful slaughter among Egypt’s gods! The hail, with most terrific lightning, was by far the more appalling because rain rarely falls there; hail and lightning yet more rarely. In the natural course of events, locusts are among the fearful visitations of Oriental countries――not unknown in Egypt. In this case the fearfulness of the plague lay in their numbers, and the miracle was none the less because they had had some experience before of this form of desolation. * * * * * 3. _The case of the magicians._