y,
"Oh, Moses requires no defense at this late day!" But Moses, like all
great men, has suffered at the hands of his friends. To this man has
been attributed powers which no human being ever possessed.

Moses lived thirty-three hundred years ago. In one sense thirty-three
centuries is a very long time. All is comparative--children regard a man
of fifty as "awful old." I have seen several persons who have lived a
hundred years, and they didn't consider a century long, "and thirty-five
isn't anything," said one of them to me.

Geologically, thirty-three centuries is only an hour ago. It does not
nearly take us back to the time when men of the Stone Age hunted the
hairy mammoth in what is now Nebraska, nor does thirty-three centuries
give us any glimpse of the time when tropical animals, plants and
probably men lived and flourished at the North Pole.

Egyptian civilization, at the time of Moses, was more than three
thousand years old. Egypt was then in the first stage of senility,
entering upon her decline, for her best people had settled in the
cities, and this completes the cycle and spells deterioration. She had
passed through the savage, barbaric, nomadic and agricultural stages and
was living on her unearned increment, a part of which was Israelitish
labor. Moses looked at the Pyramids, which were built more than a
thousand years before his birth, and asked in wonder about who built
them, very much as we do today. He listened for the Sphinx to answer,
but she was silent, then as now. The date of the exodus has been fixed
as having probably occurred during the reign of the Great Pharaoh,
Mineptah, or the nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty. The date is, say, fourteen
hundred years before Christ. An inscription has recently been found
which seems to show that Joseph settled in Egypt during the reign of
Mineptah, but the best scholars now have gone back to the conclusions I
have stated.

At the time of the Pharaohs, Egypt was the highest civilized country on
earth. It had a vast system of canals, an organized army, a goodly
degree of art, and there were engineers and builders of much ability.
Philosophy, poetry and ethics were recognized, prized and discussed.

The storage of grain by the government to bank against famine had been
practised for several hundred years. There were also treasure-cities
built to guard against fire, thieves or destruction by the elements. It
will thus be seen that foresight, thrift, caution, wisd