them than ever were entrusted to a class,--not for this
our heroes bled on the field and on the scaffold. Tyrants rarely deny to
rich men leave to be self-indulgent. And self-indulgence rarely nerves
men to heroic effort. It is for the freedom of the soul that men dare
all things. And liberty is doomed wherever men forget that the true
freeman is the servant of Jehovah. On these terms the first demand for a
national emancipation was enforced.

And next, Pharaoh is warned that God, who at first threatened to destroy
his firstborn, but had hitherto come short of such a deadly stroke, had
not, as he might flatter himself, exhausted His power to avenge. Pharaoh
should yet experience "_all_ My plagues." And there is a dreadful
significance in the phrase which threatens to put these plagues, with
regard to others "upon thy servants and upon thy people," but with
regard to Pharaoh himself "upon thine heart."

There it was that the true scourge smote. Thence came ruin and defeat.
His infatuation was more dreadful than hail in the cloud and locusts on
the blast, than the darkness at noon and the midnight wail of a
bereaved nation. For his infatuation involved all these.

The next assertion is not what the Authorised Version made it, and what
never was fulfilled. It is not, "Now I will stretch out My hand to smite
thee and thy people with pestilence, and thou shalt be cut off from the
earth." It says, "Now I had done this, as far as any restraint for thy
sake is concerned, but in very deed for this cause have I made thee to
stand" (unsmitten), "for to show thee My power, and that My name may be
declared throughout all the earth" (vers. 15, 16). The course actually
taken was more for the glory of God, and a better warning to others,
than a sudden stroke, however crushing.

And so we find, many years after all this generation has passed away,
that a strangely distorted version of these events is current among the
Philistines in Palestine. In the days of Eli, when the ark was brought
into the camp, they said, "Woe unto us! who shall deliver us out of the
hand of these mighty gods? These are the gods that smote the Egyptians
with all manner of plagues in the wilderness" (1 Sam. iv. 8). And this,
along with the impression which Rahab declared that the Exodus and what
followed it had made, may help us to understand what a mighty influence
upon the wars of Palestine the scourging of Egypt had, how terror fell
upon all the inhabitant