at grows dark at noon,
and at last over the secret springs of human life itself.

No pantheistic creed (and the Egyptian religion struck its roots deep
into pantheistic speculation) could thus completely exalt God above
nature, as a superior and controlling Power, not one with the mighty
wheels of the universe, of which the height is terrible, but, as Ezekiel
saw Him, enthroned above them in the likeness of fire, and yet in the
likeness of humanity.

No idolatrous creed, however powerful be its conception of one god of
the hills and another of the valleys, could thus represent a single
deity as wielding all the arrows of adverse fortune, able to assail us
from earth and sky and water, formidable alike in the least things and
in the greatest. And presently the demonstration is completed, when at
His bidding the tempest heaps up the sea, and at His frown the waters
return to their strength again.

And no philosophic theory condescends to bring the Ideal, the Absolute,
and the Unconditioned, into such close and intimate connection with the
frog-spawn of the ditch and the blain upon the tortured skin.

We may, with ample warrant from Scripture, make the controversial
application still more simple and direct, and think of the plagues as
wreaking vengeance, for the worship they had usurped and the cruelties
they had sanctioned, upon all the gods of Egypt, which are conceived of
for the moment as realities, and as humbled, if not in fact, yet in the
sympathies of priest and worshipper (xii. 12).

Then we shall see the domain of each impostor invaded, and every vaunted
power to inflict evil or to remove it triumphantly wielded by Him Who
proves His equal mastery over all, and thus we shall find here the
justification of that still bolder personification which says, "Worship
Him, all ye gods" (Psalm xcvii. 7).

The Nile had a sacred name, and was adored as "Hapee, or Hapee Mu, the
Abyss, or the Abyss of Waters, or the Hidden," and the king was
frequently portrayed standing between two images of this god, his throne
wreathed with water-lilies. The second plague struck at the goddess
HEKT, whose head was that of a frog. The uncleanness of the third plague
deranged the whole system of Egyptian worship, with its punctilious and
elaborate purifications. In every one there is either a presiding
divinity attacked, or a blow dealt upon the priesthood or the sacrifice,
or a sphere invaded which some deity should have protected, unt