narrative; they could not be passed over by any reader of it; a deep moral surely lay in them. Yet one who was occupied chiefly with them would be likely to contract a vehement and ferocious habit of feeling; along with some hatred of oppression there would be in his mind a peculiar hatred for Egyptians; he would contemplate the Lord of all exclusively, or mainly, as an Avenger.

The other Israelite might consider that the service was instituted to remind his countrymen of their own exemption; to tell them that the destroying angel passed by the houses upon which he saw the mark of blood; to awaken their wonder that the Red Sea should have been made the instrument of their protection instead of their overthrow. In such feelings you will be disposed to recognise a more genial temper, one sensitive to present mercies; willing to forget, in gratitude for them, any darker events that were associated with them. But you may reasonably suspect that a leaven a very large leaven-of self-congratulation and self-exaltation will have defiled this keeper of the feast. He will have been apt to look upon Israelites as possessing in themselves, for their own sake, some claim to the divine kindness and favour which other nations had not. practical experience and a recollection of the Scripture history prevented him from seeing in the people at large any distinguishing merits, he may have discovered them in certain individuals for whose interest the Lord was so solicitous that He tolerated the rest, or permitted the faults of

If

the one as a foil to the excellencies of the other. Gradually he must have become by this process of meditation more exclusive than even the man who started from a consideration of the divine venIt will have been more necessary for geance. him to dwell upon the curse of the surrounding people and of his own, that he might understand the blessing and security of those who had a right to feed upon the paschal Lamb. And he will have lost the sense which the other had of the divine Justice, of God as a punisher of wrong-doing. The vision of a capricious being favouring one race or portion of a race, will have been all that he could take in; such a being will have become his God.

But is it not possible to conceive a third Israelite coming to Jerusalem from some distant heathen land, with a fervent desire to participate in the great national solemnity and thanksgiving, yet possessed by a spirit unlike either of these? In the country where he was sojourning he will have heard continually of great avenging deities ruling the powers of nature, inflicting plagues and torments on men, to be conciliated and propitiated by hecatombs of oxen, or by the more precious sacrifice of children. He will have felt that those who confessed these deities had hold of a truth; that to deprive them of it would have been to make them think that wrong was safe and would go unpunished. But he will have felt also how continually wrong was safe and did go unpunished through this very belief, through the confusion of

the people as to the nature of the evils which provoked the divine displeasure; through the tendency of the priests to represent the chief of these evils as offences against themselves, as omissions of some services which they had prescribed, and through their willingness to overlook or forgive positive injuries to individuals and to society if such services were performed. He will have seen how really the people hated the gods whom they worshipped in this character, how much it was the whole aim and scope of their religion to provide escapes from them, yet how much their own minds were fashioned by their belief, how every day the lust of vengeance became their absorbing passion, how the relaxation of that vengeance must be purchased of them just as the relaxation of the divine vengeance was purchased by base hypocritical submission, by flattery, by presents.

Such a Jew will, moreover, have been familiar with the notion of divinities who patronized particular soils and races, who for the sake of these favourites would manifest themselves in the hour of battle, would put on human shapes, would suspend the laws of nature, who could be invoked as helpers and protectors in every emergency. He will have seen that this faith proved itself to have a foundation by the strength which it imparted to those who possessed it, by the courage with which they could struggle to the death for their hearths and homes, by the confidence with which they could go forth into other regions to spread the name of their tribe and of the God who watched

over it. But he will have seen that the belief in a divine protector was gradually absorbed into a belief of the excellence and glory of the particular people whom he protected, into a feeling that they were a law to themselves and might hold down all other people by their might; he will have seen that when they reached this period of declension they will have begun to lose their national unity and strength; that visible men will have seized the power which they had ascribed to gods; that those who had exulted in their intellectual superiority, or in their reverence for an unseen law, will have become slaves of brutal instincts, or a mortal tyrant.

A man who had contemplated the heathen divinities under both these aspects, or rather who, without any effort of contemplation, had been forced by all the ceremonial of heathen worship and the speech and practices of the people around him, to feel that these were the habitual prevailing impressions respecting them, will have turned to the records of his own country's history with a strange wonder. He will have perceived in them that which corresponded to the forms of belief with which he had become familiar. He would remember how each of those forms had at different times held possession of his own mind; he may have been conscious of a half-righteous, half-restless struggle with both; he may for a time have fancied that Judaism was but a peculiar type of national or tribe-religion. But he will have been struck with this amazing difference, that writers

of the Jewish books, when they speak of God as a judge and an avenger, seem for that very reason to fly To Him, that the one desire and object of their life is not to be delivered from Him, but to know Him better. He will have perceived that under the pressure of calamity, under the consciousness of moral evil, they betook themselves directly to Him, asking no counsel of any one how they might avoid the punishment of their sin, but asking Him to rid them of the sin itself. He will have perceived that whenever the Lord is spoken of as caring for the Israelite, it is because He is said to be a God who cares for the oppressed and the feeble. He could not but see that the crimes and wrong-doings of Israelites were punished as severely as those of other people; nay, that the history was one continual record of these punishments. Thus the idea of a God

of order and right will have risen up before him as a refuge from the divisions and contradictions of the world. To have such a God for their God he will have regarded as the great glory of the chosen people. He will have come then to the Passover, not first or chiefly to celebrate the destruction of Egyptians or the deliverance of Israelites, but first and chiefly to praise God the perfectly righteous Being, to acknowledge Him to be the Lord. And this will have been no cold, distant work, undertaken without reference to his own personal feelings and hopes. To find a solid rock beneath his feet instead of shifting sand, a just God and a Saviour, instead of chance, or fate, or