inue to respect or pity them as before. We do not deny that men who
professed religion have perpetrated nameless cruelties, nor that
unbelievers have been humane, sometimes with a pathetic energy, a
tenacious grasp on the virtue still possible to those who have no Heaven
to serve. But it is plain that the average man will despise his brother,
and his brother's rights, just in proportion as the Divine sanctions of
those rights fade away, and nothing remains to be respected but the
culture, power and affluence which the victim lacks. "I know not
Israel's God" is a sure prelude to the refusal to let Israel go, and
even to the cruelty which beats the slave who fails to render impossible
obedience.

"They be idle, therefore they cry, saying, Let us go and sacrifice to
our God." And still there are men who hold the same opinion, that time
spent in devotion is wasted, as regards the duties of real life. In
truth, religion means freshness, elasticity and hope: a man will be not
slothful in business, but fervent in spirit, if he serves the Lord. But
perhaps immortal hope, and the knowledge that there is One Who shall
break all prison bars and let the oppressed go free, are not the best
narcotics to drug down the soul of a man into the monotonous tameness of
a slave.

In the tenth verse we read that the Egyptian taskmasters and the
officers combined to urge the people to their aggravated labours. And by
the fourteenth verse we find that the latter officials were Hebrew
officers whom Pharaoh's taskmasters had set over them.

So that we have here one of the surest and worst effects of
slavery--namely, the demoralisation of the oppressed, the readiness of
average men, who can obtain for themselves a little relief, to do so at
their brethren's cost. These officials were scribes, "writers": their
business was to register the amount of labour due, and actually
rendered. These were doubtless the more comfortable class, of whom we
read afterwards that they possessed property, for their cattle escaped
the murrain and their trees the hail. And they had the means of
acquiring quite sufficient skill to justify whatever is recorded of the
works done in the construction of the tabernacle. The time is long past
when scepticism found support for its incredulity in these details.

One advantage of the last sharp agony of persecution was that it finally
detached this official class from the Egyptian interest, and welded
Israel into a homogeneo