Egyptian bondage, and, after forty years of wandering desert life,
settled themselves permanently on the hills and in the valleys of
Palestine. The voice of the ruling race, indistinctly conveyed to us
from that distant antiquity, maintains that the fugitive slaves were
an abject and contemptible herd; but the leader of the exodus informs
us that, though cruelly trodden down by a haughty despot, they were of
noble parentage, the heirs of high hopes and promises. Their migration
is certainly the most remarkable national movement in the world's
history--remarkable, not merely in its events and immediate
circumstances, but in its remote political, literary, and moral
results. The rulers of Egypt, polished, enlightened, and practical
men, were yet the devotees of a complicated system of hero and animal
worship, like that from which Abraham dissented, and derived in great
part from the "animism" which caused some of the oldest nations of the
world to associate a spiritual indwelling with the natural objects
surrounding them; or, if they had ceased to believe in this, they had
sunk into a materialistic devotion to the good things of the present
world, combined with a superstitious belief in the efficacy of
priestly absolution.

The slaves, leaving all this behind them, rose in their religious
opinions to the pure and spiritual monotheism of the great father of
their race; and their leader presented to them a law unequalled up to
our time in its union of justice, patriotism, and benevolence, and
established among them, for the first time in the world's history, a
free constitutional republic. Nor is this all; unexampled though such
results are elsewhere in the case of serfs suddenly emancipated. The
Hebrew lawgiver has interwoven his institutions in a great historical
composition, including the grand and simple cosmogony of the
patriarchs, a detailed account of the affiliation and ethnological
relations of the races of men, and a narrative of the fortunes of his
own people; intimating not only that they were a favored and chosen
race, but that of them was to arise a great Deliverer, who would bless
all nations with pardon and with peace,[7] and would solve once for
all those great problems of the relations of man to God and the unseen
world, which in the time of Moses as in our own were the most
momentous of all, and gave to questions of origins all their practical
value.

The lawgiver passed to his rest. His laws and litera