was of the one living, independent, uncreated god--_Nuk pu Nuk_, "I am that I am." A hereditary priesthood, animal sacrifices, circumcision, and abstinence from swine's flesh, were likewise Egyptian institutions. So was the seventh-day rest. These and minor practices were continued among the Israelites, and the Egyptian _Nuk pa Nuk_ became the Jewish Jehovah; but the symbolical idolatrous worship, likening the Creator to the creature, and the belief in the immortality of the soul, were rejected by Moses. They have no place in his system. The former he denounced, the latter he ignored. His conception of the unity and omnipotence of God was intense, and he indelibly stamped this belief on the mind of his nation, shunning the example of the priests of Egypt, who encouraged the people in idolatrous polytheistic rites, while the purer faith remained concealed among themselves. Contrary to the practice of all priestcraft, ancient and modern, he did not keep his followers in ignorance, that he himself might, by a superior understanding, retain an exalted position in their sight, but he sought to bring them up to the level of his own knowledge and belief. How far many of the Egyptian practices retained by the Israelites, and some of the more unworthy conceptions of the deity--such, for instance, as the ever-living omnipotent God _working_ six days in creating the world, and _resting_ the seventh; or his ordering the enemies of Israel to be massacred, man, woman, and child; or his exacting animal sacrifices, as if he, the source of life, could be appeased by the destruction of the very life he had brought into being--were forced by the nation upon Moses, rather than by Moses upon the nation, cannot now be ascertained. Jer. vii. 22, 23, seem to indicate that the animal sacrifices, at least, were not of Mosaic origin. But his stern prohibition of idolatry, and his ignoring a future life, constituted the principal differences between the Mosaic and the Egyptian systems. They were, indeed, radical differences. Had not Moses seen in Egypt how the pretended immortality of the soul, and the several connected doctrines and practices, in the hands of a polished priesthood, had been used so as to keep that very soul in this world in a state of vague fear and abject superstition: how the terrors or expectation of the life to come had led to misery and misdirection of the life on earth: how the dead had been cared for to the neglect of the living? And was there any good ground for this expectation of a future life? On the contrary, was not man, in his view, doomed to return to the dust whence he came? Was not the pretence of the soul being immortal an assumption of an attribute of the eternal Jehovah? And so he taught "that the Lord he is God, in heaven above, and in the earth beneath; there is none else. Thou shalt therefore keep his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that it