ad mingled with the God-given insight of
Joseph, when he made his benefactor the owner of all the soil, the
Egyptian people were fully avenged upon him now. For this arrangement
laid his pastoral race helpless at their oppressor's feet. Forced
labour quickly degenerates into slavery, and men who find the story of
their misery hard to credit should consider the state of France before
the Revolution, and of the Russian serfs before their emancipation.
Their wretchedness was probably as bitter as that of the Hebrews at any
period but the last climax of their oppression. And they owed it to the
same cause--the absolute ownership of the land by others, too remote
from them to be sympathetic, to take due account of their feelings, to
remember that they were their fellow-men. This was enough to slay
compassion, even without the aggravation of dealing with an alien and
suspected race.

Now, it is instructive to observe these reappearances of wholesale
crime. They warn us that the utmost achievements of human wickedness are
human still; not wild and grotesque importations by a fiend, originated
in the abyss, foreign to the world we live in. Satan finds the material
for his master-strokes in the estrangement of class from class, in the
drying up of the fountains of reciprocal human feeling, in the failure
of real, fresh, natural affection in our bosom for those who differ
widely from us in rank or circumstances. All cruelties are possible when
a man does not seem to us really a man, nor his woes really woeful. For
when the man has sunk into an animal it is only a step to his
vivisection.

Nor does anything tend to deepen such perilous estrangement, more than
the very education, culture and refinement, in which men seek a
substitute for religion and the sense of brotherhood in Christ. It is
quite conceivable that the tyrant who drowned the Hebrew infants was an
affectionate father, and pitied his nobles when their children died. But
his sympathies could not reach beyond the barriers of a caste. Do _our_
sympathies really overleap such barriers? Would God that even His Church
believed aright in the reality of a human nature like our own, soiled,
sorrowful, shamed, despairing, drugged into that apathetical
insensibility which lies even below despair, yet aching still, in ten
thousand bosoms, in every great city of Christendom, every day and every
night! Would to God that she understood what Jesus meant, when He called
one lost cre