events had demonstrated to be neither impossible nor unlikely, the Hebrews, uniting with their enemies, might soon annihilate their independence and subvert their civil institutions, the Egyptians, with a barbarous policy, determined, by imposing upon them the burdens of a grinding and intolerable slavery, to prevent the further increase of their numbers, and to reduce them to a condition at once miserable and impotent. The religion of the Israelites, so directly opposed to the degrading idolatry and monstrous superstitions of the Egyptians, their industrious attention to their flocks and herds, which constituted their wealth, and which had no doubt increased in a corresponding ratio with the numbers of the people, and that union among themselves, which would necessarily arise from the nature of their institutions and the fact of their common relationship, would all combine to exasperate the hatred and the fears of their enemies, and consequently to aggravate the virulence of their persecution.

What became the condition of the Israelites in Egypt?

The Hebrews were reduced to a state of slavery the most frightful described in the annals of the world. Men, who united the double offices of taskmasters and tax-gatherers, were placed over them to harass them by ruinous extortion, and to weary them with oppressive labour. Pithom and Raamses, treasure cities, they were compelled to erect for the use of Pharaoh. They were employed," says the Jewish historian, “in draining rivers and directing their courses into new channels; walling towns; throwing up embankments to repel inundations, and forming dykes; nay even in erecting fantastic and useless pyramids, forcing them to acquire the knowledge of various painful and pernicious occupations, and condemning them to a life of continual labour." Another ancient author also states, that they were compelled to wear a distinctive dress, no doubt as a badge of degradation and infamy. But the malignity of men could not frustrate the purposes of God. "The more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew, so that the Egyptians were grieved because of the children of Israel." They redoubled their barbarous impositions upon their victims; they made them perform every menial aud mi

serable service which was appropriated to the lowest and most despised cast of the population, “so that their lives were made bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service wherein they made them serve, was with rigour."

How the Egyptian despot could make this tyrannical exertion of his power consistent with his views of justice, it is unnecessary to inquire. At the same time it is not to be forgotten, that during the seven years' famine, the Egyptians were reduced into a state of complete vassalage to their monarch; and a fifth part of the produce of the whole country was paid into the hands of his officers. (Gen. xlvii. 13, &c.) And it is not improbable, that Pharaoh imagined that he had a feasible right to the servitude of the Israelites, because they had been originally supported and preserved, in the time of famine, by the liberality of his predecessor. That the Israelites were considered as slaves, properly so called, is very evident from the language of Moses. (Deut. v. 21.—xv. 15.)

Mention a barbarous enactment of the king of Egypt against the Israelites.

When all the barbarities of the Egyptians were found to be insufficient to accomplish the nefarious purpose of their government, Pharaoh sent for two Hebrew midwives, no doubt as representatives or principals of the rest, and commanded them, when they attended upon the Hebrew women, to murder all the male children as soon as they were born. But these females recognized a higher duty than obedience to the mandate of an earthly despot; they served the King of Kings, and they could not obey those bloody decrees, which would have prevented the fulfilment of the divine promises, and effected the ultimate extirpation of their race. When Pharaoh found how they recoiled from the execution of his sanguinary command, when he perceived that still the people "multiplied and waxed very mighty," he ordered that every male child which was born should be cast into the river Nile ; and it appears, that if the parents, terrified by his threatenings, did not become the executioners of their own children, his subjects were intitled to tear the

devoted infants from the bosom of maternal affection, and to hurl them into a watery grave.

Describe the parentage and preservation of Moses. Amidst these horrors of cruelty and slaughter, the great deliverer and legislator of the persecuted Israelites was born. The celebrated Moses was

A. C. 1571. the son of Amram, the grandson of Levi, by Jochebed of the same family. The loveliness of the child so endeared it to the affections of its parents, that for three months they successfully concealed its existence. But the vigilance of the myrmidons of Pharaoh soon proved that it was impossible to avoid detection, and the helpless infant, in an ark of bulrushes covered with pitch, was committed to the waters of the Nile. Amram had already two children prior to the birth of Moses, Miriam a daughter, and Aaron a son. Miriam, yet a child, was appointed by her anxious parents to watch the fate of her infant brother on the stream. Wonderful was the providence of God. The daughter of the king with her attending ladies were passing by; their curiosity was excited by perceiving a remarkable object among the flags which grew on the banks of the river; the little ark was brought before the princess; the beauty of the child, its helplessness, its danger, and its tears, excited an affectionate interest in its favour; and although it was instantly known to be a Hebrew child, the pride of her rank, and the prejudices of her country, did not prevent the daughter of the despot from taking it to her bosom. Miriam beheld the scene; she approached; she offered to bring a nurse to take care of the child; her proposition was accepted; and the mother of Moses, under an assumed character, embraced the son of her love, and no doubt directed the first efforts of his faculties to the knowledge and the service of the living God.

What account is given by Josephus of the early life of Moses?

The account which Josephus gives of the early life of Moses is interesting, and also probably founded in fact. He states that his childish amusements were calculated to give instruction, that his actions were accompanied with singular grace, and that at three

years of age, the beauty of his person excited universal admiration. Thermutis, for so Josephus calls the daughter of Pharaoh, introduced him to the king as her adopted child, and as worthy to succeed him upon the throne. The king received him with kindness, and to please him, took the crown from his head and placed it upon that of the child; but Moses threw it upon the ground, and trampled upon it. This ominous circumstance so alarmed the royal attendants, that one of the scribes declared it to be necessary that the boy should instantly be destroyed; but the king derided their apprehensions, and permitted the princess to give to Moses a liberal education. A war broke out between the Egyptians and the Ethiopians; the Egyptians were defeated, and the Ethiopians subdued the whole country as far as Memphis. The priests and oracles recommended that Moses should be placed at the head of the Egyptian army. The country through which he had to march was infested, and almost rendered impassable by a prodigious mul titude of venemous reptiles and serpents; but Moses destroyed them by letting loose upon them numbers of the bird called Ibis, which is their mortal enemy; he then defeated the Ethopians and formed the siege of their metropolis. Tharbis, the daughter of the Ethiopian monarch, saw him from the walls, and immediately her affections were gained by his gallant bearing and manly beauty; her hand was tendered to him with the offer of peace; Moses accepted the overture; the war was concluded, and he returned in triumph to the capital of Egypt. But the Egyptians became jealous of his greatness, and he was compelled to flee into the desert to save his life.

Proceed with the history of Moses and give an aceount of the cause of his retirement from Egypt.

Whether this, and other traditional accounts of Moses be fabulous or true, it is certain that he became "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and was mighty in words and deeds" that he had the opportunity of rising to the highest elevation of opulence and honour under the auspices of Pharaoh-and that he was prepared by his acquisitions in the sciences of the times, as well by his personal and mental endow

ments, for the momentous offices he was to sustain, as the deliverer, the director, and the legislator of the Jews. But not all the kindness of his royal protectors and patrons, not all his proficiency in Egyptian learning, not all the splendid prospects which expanded before him, not all the pageantry of idolatry with which he was surrounded, could either seduce him from his fidelity to the God of his fathers, or render him insensible to the wrongs of his enslaved and suffering brethren. Beholding on one occasion an Egyptian, probably one of the official agents of Pharaoh's oppression, treating one of the wretched Hebrew bondsmen with the grossest indignity and brutality, his anger became incontroulable; he killed the Egyptian on the spot, and buried his carcass in the sand. But the Hebrew whose injuries he had avenged, betrayed the secret; and when Moses shortly afterwards was endeavouring to reconcile two of his countrymen, who were quarrelling, one of them resented his friendly interposition with the taunt, "Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? intendest thou to kill me as thou killedst the Egyptian?" Moses thus discovered that he had been betrayed; and knowing that he had perpetrated a deed which the EgypA. C. 1531. tians regarded as an unpardonable and enormous crime, and that the powerful protection which had hitherto been extended over him could not save him from the universal indignation which would infallibly be excited, he fled from Egypt and sought a refuge in the land of Midian. Thus he appeared to be totally excluded from the scene of action; and if he had already cherished any hopes of effecting the emancipation of his brethren, they seemed to be blasted for ever. Upon his arrival in Midian, his bravery introduced him to the notice of Raguel, the priest or prince of the country; and he married Zipporah one of the daughters of that personage, whose affections no doubt had been gained by the magnanimity, gallantry, and spirit of his conduct. Here, during the long period of forty years, he forgot the pageantry of a court in the occupation of a shepherd; in his moments of solitude, and under the immediate influence of the Holy Spirit, he probably composed that sublime, affecting, and instructive part of the