The plague of darkness is next in order. Again Pharaoh sets himself to negotiate as to the terms. He will consent that not only the men may go, but their wives and their little ones; _but their flocks must be left behind_. He must have some hostages――something left in his hands that will bring his bondmen back. Moses says _No!_ we need our flocks for sacrifice; not a hoof is to be left behind! Pharaoh is more mad than ever: he not only drives Moses out from his presence, but adds――“Take heed to thyself; see my face no more; for in the day thou seest my face thou shalt die.” In this case it is said――“The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart”; but these terrible uprisings and outbursts of madness well up from the depths of a depraved sinner’s soul. No supernatural miracle of divine hardening is at all needful to create them. Pharaoh is too proud a king to bear such confrontings of his will. Shall he yield to such a man as Moses, or even to the God of Moses? Not he. It stirs up all the elements of his pride and madness to have his propositions of compromise so peremptorily rejected. It is this in special that works in this present case to the hardening of his heart. There remains but one more plague――that awful night on Egypt when the wailing cry rang out over all the land, “for there was not a house where there was not one dead”! and that the _first-born_! Under this, Pharaoh for the time really broke down; he called for Moses and Aaron by night and said――“Go ye and all your people, and take your flocks and herds as ye have said and be gone, and bless me also.” This conceded everything, closing off with begging their blessing upon his consciously guilty soul! The Egyptians too were all astir; they were urgent upon the people to send them out of the land in haste; for they said――“We be all dead men.” And the people of Israel do really go.――――But strange as it may seem, when “it was told the king of Egypt that the people had really gone, then the heart of Pharaoh and of his servants was turned against the people and they said――Why have we done this that we have let Israel go from serving us”?――――Forthwith armed chariots are made ready and are off in hot pursuit;――till they find themselves battling the mighty waves of the Red Sea, quailing before the awful eye and under the uplifted arm of the Almighty!――――This last instance of hardening the heart seems most like pure and simple infatuation. No doubt Pharaoh and his servants had a fresh sense of what they had lost in letting go such a host of hard working bondmen. No doubt they also felt the mortification of having been worsted in the long-fought struggle over this national question of letting the people go; but after all they had seen and felt of God’s power to curse and to plague and to crush them, nothing but the most senseless infatuation can rationally account for this last desperate dash upon Israel with the armed force of the nation. Yet no one will say that