ious
code, and whence they prosecuted their conquests in various directions
for fifty years, until their invasion of Palestine. This is the sum of
what, with various modifications, Rationalist writers and preachers
present us, as the genuine historic basis of the Mosaic narrative.

It really does seem to have been very fortunate for the Israelites that
so many misfortunes should happen to fall upon their oppressors, all in
one season, and just at the time that men of such cleverness as Moses
and Aaron were among them; and that the Egyptians should luckily have
imbibed the superstition, that all nature was under the direction of a
Supreme Moral Governor, who was able and willing to wield all the
elements for the punishment of oppressors.

It was also very lucky for these poor, overworked, and oppressed
slaves--the class which in all other ages and countries suffers most
from hard times--that they should have escaped unhurt by these
calamities; for if they had suffered by them as well as the Egyptians,
they could not have persuaded them that God favored Israel.

Here one can not but wonder that these learned Egyptians, whose colleges
of priests were planted on the banks of the Nile, and who had made the
climate, soil, and productions of their native land their constant
study, should have been so ignorant of these natural causes of the
plagues--so easily discovered nowadays by anybody who makes a summer
trip to Egypt--as to be terrified into emancipating their slaves by a
stormy season. Just imagine to yourself a couple of abolitionist
lecturers proceeding to Lexington and commanding the slaveholders of
Kentucky to liberate their slaves immediately, on pain of the Ohio being
muddy during high water, and the swamps of the river-bottom being full
of frogs and musquitoes! But this interpretation does not reach the
climax of absurdity till our Rationalist Punch, by way of signalizing
his deliverance from Egyptian bondage, makes Pharaoh and his army forget
that the tide ebbs and flows in the Red Sea, raises the tide over a
shoal faster than cavalry could gallop from it, gathers an annual crop
of twenty millions of bushels of manna from the thorn-bushes of Sinai,
and feeds three millions of men, women, and children for forty years
upon purgative medicine!!!

"We must then give up the problem as insoluble; for if reason be
insufficient to give authority to the Bible, and criticism fails to
discover its truth, how are we to kn