whether upon door or altar; the eating of the feast standing, with staff
in hand and girded loins; the application only to one day of the precept
to eat no leavened bread, and the sharing in the feast by all, without
regard to ceremonial defilement,--all these are cardinal differences
between the first passover and later ones. Can we be blind to their
significance? Even a drastic revision of the story, such as some have
fancied, would certainly have expunged every divergence upon points so
capital as these. Nor could any evidence of the antiquity of the
institution be clearer than its existence in a form, the details of
which have had to be so boldly modified under the pressure of the
exigencies of the later time.

Taking, then, the narrative as it stands, we place ourselves by an
effort of the historical imagination among those to whom Moses gave his
instructions, and ask what emotions are excited as we listen.

Certainly no light and joyous feeling that we are going to celebrate a
feast, and share our good things with our deity. Nay, but an alarmed
surprise. Hitherto, among the admonitory and preliminary plagues of
Egypt, Israel had enjoyed a painless and unbought exemption. The murrain
had not slain their cattle, nor the locusts devoured their land, nor the
darkness obscured their dwellings. Such admonitions they needed not. But
now the judgment itself is impending, and they learn that they, like
the Egyptians whom they have begun to despise, are in danger from the
destroying angel. The first paschal feast was eaten by no man with a
light heart. Each listened for the rustling of awful wings, and grew
cold, as under the eyes of the death which was, even then, scrutinising
his lintels and his doorposts.

And this would set him thinking that even a gracious God, Who had "come
down" to save him from his tyrants, discerned in him grave reasons for
displeasure, since his acceptance, while others died, was not of course.
His own conscience would then quickly tell him what some at least of
those reasons were.

But he would also learn that the exemption which he did not possess by
right (although a son of Abraham) he might obtain through grace. The
goodness of God did not pronounce him safe, but it pointed out to him a
way of salvation. He would scarcely observe, so entirely was it a matter
of course, that this way must be of God's appointment and not of his own
invention--that if he devised much more costly, elaborate a