for he still believes are referable to some law; they are not mere accidents or irregularities.

The business of the magician or enchanter was to deal with portents of this kind. He was to produce them if they were wanted for the service of himself or of his masters. If they came without his summons, he was to explain their origin, and to suggest any measures that were desirable in consequence of them. His power had two supports. First, the certainty in men's minds that all phænomena must have some cause, with the witness of the conscience that the cause had something to do with them. Secondly, the uncertainty whether the cause might not be a malevolent being, whether his indignation might not proceed from some delight in injuring them, from a mere capricious pleasure in exercising power, from some honour or service refused to himself for which he required compensation or propitiation. The office of the soothsayer could not have been so honoured as it was, if there had not been an inward testimony in the heart to the worth and reality of the function which he assumed. It could not have become the false thing that it became, if there had not been an ignorance of a moral standard by which his explanations could be tested.

Now consider what was the foundation of the message which Moses brought to the king of Egypt. He said, 'The I AM,' the perfectly true Being, had sent him. He said this Being cared for a set of slaves upon whom Pharaoh and the Egyptians were trampling. He said that the Lord

God commanded Pharaoh to let this people go. First of all he gave signs and tokens such as the magicians were wont to give of their skill and potency, claiming the power of producing these signs, not for himself, but for the invisible Being who commanded Pharaoh to do what was right. Then all the powers of nature to which the Egyptians did homage, to which the magicians taught them to do homage, began to be ministers of destruction to them. One terrible visitation followed another. 'All these,' said Moses, 'have a moral end, all come from a righteous Ruler. These powers of nature are His. They have broken loose upon you, not in wild disobedience, but as the regular orderly ministers of His purposes. They come from no capricious decree. They obey a law. God's order has been violated by you; He is asserting it. Man, His chief and highest creature, has been put down. He is determined to raise him up, and to shew that these natural agents are his servants, not his masters. Again, a man has forgot that he only reigns because he is made in the image of God. Pharaoh has presumed to reign for himself, to set himself up as an independent self-willed ruler. These natural agents, these plagues of fire and darkness, are sent to mock his supremacy, to make him feel his weakness, to shew him that he can only be a master when he confesses himself to be a subject.'

I cannot conceive any sublimer witness than this for an order of the universe, and for that order which had been from the beginning, which

was proclaimed on the Creation-day, when God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness;' which was proclaimed in the Flood, in the Call of Abraham, in the lessons which the Hebrew prisoner gave to the king. Throughout it is a moral order, a human order; not interfering with the order of nature vindicating it, interpreting it, but still rising above it. The order of the family we found was more precious and sacred than the order of seed-time and harvest; yet God by bringing out the one into clearness, brought out also the other. Now we are to learn that the political order, the relation of kings to subjects, of the highest to the meanest, is more sacred than the laws of light and darkness, than those which regulate the flight of insects or the inundation of rivers. Yet in recognising the one, we learn to recognise the other. In feeling that there is a connexion and correspondency between them, and that Right and Justice which lie at the foundation of man's being do at last determine the movements of all involuntary creatures, we come to feel that they are the legitimate subjects of human investigation, and that it is for the glory of God that we should understand them.

The simplest and most patient study of that portion of the Book of Exodus, which refers to these Egyptian plagues, will, I think lead us most to this conclusion, that Moses is in these acts of his life, as in all others, the witness for a divine eternal law, and the witness against every kind of kingcraft or priest-craft which breaks this law, or

substitutes any devices of man's power or wit in place of it, or represents it as tolerating the oppression of any one of the creatures who are the subjects of it. How a man can be an assertor of such a law if he does not begin with the confession and assertion of an absolute Lawgiver, of One who commands right because He is right in Himself, in His own inward essence, I cannot understand. Moses protested against the deceits and impostures of the magicians, precisely because he protested for the living and eternal Lord. If he did not go in to Pharaoh with the real faith that he came from Him, he had no faith to withstand them. He might disbelieve them, contradict them, ridicule them; but he could not strike at the root of their falsehood, for he could not sever the truth which was latent in their falsehood from it. He could not justify the knowledge that there was in them by a higher knowledge. He could not expose the immorality of the ends to which they turned their power over nature by shewing that such a power had a moral end. You think you escape from miracles by getting rid of this story of Moses. No; you make everything miraculous; you leave the world at the mercy of fortune-tellers and soothsayers; you teach men to look upon everything which they see as a portent, and to trust to the most dishonest expounder of it.

For there will be, there must be, a mixture of some observations that have been the result of experience, of some traditional or distorted science, of some anticipations of truths which may hereafter

be brought to light, in every scheme of jugglery, whensoever or by whomsoever produced. No man, thanks be to the God of Truth, can invent or concoct a pure, naked, absolute lie. We all know this now. Everybody repeats it. But then we repeat it lazily, indifferently, with a shameful tolerance for lies, and a shameful indifference whether the truth is ever severed from them. And so it will be and must be more and more, till we lose all capacity of discerning what is genuine from what is counterfeit, if we do not believe that the genuine proceeds from an actual God, and the counterfeit from an actual Devil, if we do not believe that God wills us to know the truth, and that the Devil is seeking to make us dwell in a lie, till we become naturalised to it, and unable to breathe in any other atmosphere. I hold it then to be a special token of honesty and veracity, that Moses records the success of the magicians in several of their experiments. We might fairly have discredited the story as partial and unlikely if there had been no such admission. Certainly it would have been no guide to us in walking amidst the impostures of later times, in confronting them, and not being entangled in them, if we had been told that all which the deceivers attempted came to nought. We do not find it so. Even the most flagrant chicanery is not always disappointed; and in nine cases out of ten, fact and fraud are curiously dovetailed into each other. If you will not do homage to the one, you will not detect the other.

But supposing the contrast between Moses and the magicians did set forth the opposition between