wonted powers,
superseding utterly its familiar forces. They were to think of Him as
the Author of all; and of the common troubles of mortality as being
indeed the effects of sin, yet ever controlled and governed by Him, let
loose at His will, and capable of mounting to unimagined heights if His
restraints be removed from them. By the east wind He brought the
locusts, and removed them by the south-west wind. By a storm He divided
the sea. The common things of life are in His hands, often for
tremendous results. And this is one of the chief lessons of the
narrative for us. Let the mind range over the list of the nine which
stop short of absolute destruction, and reflect upon the vital
importance of immunities for which we are scarcely grateful.

The purity of water is now felt to be among the foremost necessities of
life. It is one which asks nothing from us except to refrain from
polluting what comes from heaven so limpid. And yet we are half
satisfied to go on habitually inflicting on ourselves a plague more foul
and noxious than any occasional turning of our rivers into blood. The
two plagues which dealt with minute forms of life may well remind us of
the vast part which we are now aware that the smallest organisms play in
the economy of life, as the agents of the Creator. Who gives thanks
aright for the cheap blessing of the unstained light of heaven?

But we are insensible to the every-day teaching of this narrative: we
turn our rivers into fluid poison; we spread all around us deleterious
influences, which breed by minute forms of parasitical life the germs of
cruel disease; we load the atmosphere with fumes which slay our cattle
with periodical distempers, and are deadlier to vegetation than the
hail-storm or the locust; we charge it with carbon so dense that
multitudes have forgotten that the sky is blue, and on our Metropolis
comes down at frequent intervals the darkness of the ninth plague, and
all the time we fail to see that God, Who enacts and enforces every law
of nature, does really plague us whenever these outraged laws avenge
themselves. The miraculous use of nature in special emergencies is such
as to show the Hand which regularly wields its powers.

At the same time there is no more excuse for the rationalism which would
reduce the calamities of Egypt to a coincidence, than for explaining
away the manna which fed a nation during its wanderings by the drug
which is gathered, in scanty morsels, upon th