darkness, as darkness itself;
A land of the shadow of death without any order,
And where the light is as darkness" (x. 21, 22).

With us, a mortal sentence is given in a black cap; in the East, far
more expressively, the head of the culprit was covered, and the darkness
which thus came upon him expressed his doom. Thus "they covered Haman's
face" (Esther vii. 8). Thus to destroy "the face of the covering that is
cast over all peoples and the veil that is spread over all nations," is
the same thing as to "swallow up death," being the visible destruction
of the embodied death-sentence (Isa. xxv. 7, 8). And now this veil was
spread over all the radiant land of Egypt. Chill, and hungry, and afraid
to move, the worst horror of all that prolonged midnight was the mental
agony of dire anticipation.

In other respects there had been far worse calamities, but through its
effect upon the imagination this dreadful plague was a fit prelude to
the tenth, which it hinted and premonished.

In the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom there is a remarkable study of this
plague, regarded as retribution in kind. It avenges the oppression of
Israel. "For when unrighteous men thought to oppress the holy nation,
they being shut up in their houses, the prisoners of darkness, and
fettered with the bonds of a long night, lay exiled from the eternal
Providence" (xvii. 2). It expresses in the physical realm their
spiritual misery: "For while they supposed to lie hid in their secret
sins, they were scattered under a thick veil of forgetfulness" (ver. 3).
It retorted on them the illusions of their sorcerers: "as for the
illusions of art magick, they were put down.... For they, that promised
to drive away terrors and troubles from a sick soul, were sick
themselves of fear, worthy to be laughed at" (vers. 7, 8). In another
place the Egyptians are declared to be worse than the men of Sodom,
because they brought into bondage friends and not strangers, and
grievously afflicted those whom they had received with feasting;
"therefore even with blindness were these stricken, as those were at the
doors of the righteous man." (xix. 14-17). And we may well believe that
the long night was haunted with special terrors, if we add this wise
explanation: "For wickedness, condemned by her own witness, is very
timorous, and being pressed by conscience, always forecasteth grievous
things. For"--and this is a sentence of transcendent merit--"fear is
nothing else than a