one, and there
was little rest for "those who feared the Lord among the servants of
Pharaoh." These, knowing where the danger lay, would watch their
firstborn well, and when the ashy change came suddenly upon a blooming
face, and they raised the wild cry of Eastern bereavement, then others
awoke to the same misery. From remote villages and lonely hamlets the
clamour of great populations was echoed back; and when, under midnight
skies in which the strong wind of the morrow was already moaning, the
awestruck people rushed into their temples, there the corpses of their
animal deities glared at them with glassy eyes.

Thus the cup which they had made their slaves to drink was put in larger
measure to their own lips at last, and not infants only were snatched
away, but sons around whom years of tenderness had woven stronger ties;
and the loss of their bondsmen, from which they feared so much national
weakness, had to be endured along with a far deadlier drain of their own
life-blood. The universal wail was bitter, and hopeless, and full of
terror even more than woe; for they said, "We be all dead men." Without
the consolation of ministering by sick beds, or the romance and gallant
excitement of war, "there was not a house where there was not one dead,"
and this is said to give sharpness to the statement that there was a
great cry in Egypt.

Then came such a moment as the Hebrew temperament keenly enjoyed, when
"the sons of them that oppressed them came bending unto them, and all
they that despised them bowed themselves down at the soles of their
feet." Pharaoh sent at midnight to surrender everything that could
possibly be demanded, and in his abject fear added, "and bless me
also"; and the Egyptians were urgent on them to begone, and when they
demanded the portable wealth of the land,--a poor ransom from a
vanquished enemy, and a still poorer payment for generations of forced
labour,--"the Lord gave them favour" (is there not a saturnine irony in
the phrase?) "in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have
what they asked. And they spoiled the Egyptians."

By this analogy St. Augustine defended the use of heathen learning in
defence of Christian truth. Clogged by superstitions, he said, it
contained also liberal instruction, and truths even concerning
God--"gold and silver which they did not themselves create, but dug out
of the mines of God's providence, and misapplied. These we should
reclaim, and apply to C