ature by the tender name which she had not yet forfeited,
saying, "Woman, where are thine accusers?" and when He asked Simon, who
scorned such another, "Seest thou this woman!" Would God that when she
prays for the Holy Spirit of Jesus she would really seek a mind like
His, not only in piety and prayerfulness, but also in tender and
heartfelt brotherhood with all, even the vilest of the weary and
heavy-laden!

Many great works of ancient architecture, the pyramids among the rest,
were due to the desire of crushing, by abject toil, the spirit of a
subject people. We cannot ascribe to Hebrew labour any of the more
splendid piles of Egyptian masonry, but the store cities or arsenals
which they built can be identified. They are composed of such crude
brick as the narrative describes; and the absence of straw in the later
portion of them can still be verified. Rameses was evidently named after
their oppressor, and this strengthens the conviction that we are reading
of events in the nineteenth dynasty, when the shepherd kings had
recently been driven out, leaving the eastern frontier so weak as to
demand additional fortresses, and so far depopulated as to give colour
to the exaggerated assertion of Pharaoh, "the people are more and
mightier than we." It is by such exaggerations and alarms that all the
worst crimes of statesmen have been justified to consenting peoples. And
we, when we carry what seems to us a rightful object, by inflaming the
prejudice and misleading the judgment of other men, are moving on the
same treacherous and slippery inclines. Probably no evil is committed
without some amount of justification, which the passions exaggerate,
while they ignore the prohibitions of the law.

How came it to pass that the fierce Hebrew blood, which was yet to boil
in the veins of the Maccabees, and to give battle, not unworthily, to
the Roman conquerors of the world, failed to resent the cruelties of
Pharaoh?

Partly, of course, because the Jewish people was only now becoming aware
of its national existence; but also because it had forsaken God. Its
religion, if not supplanted, was at least adulterated by the influence
of the mystic pantheism and the stately ritual which surrounded them.

Joshua bade his victorious followers to "put away the gods whom your
fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve ye the Lord"
(Josh. xxiv. 14). And in Ezekiel the Lord Himself complains, "They
rebelled against Me and would n