VI

1 AND MOSES SAID UNTO THE PEOPLE, 'FEAR YE NOT, STAND STILL AND SEE THE SALVATION OF THE LORD.' EXODUS xiv. 13.

THERE are many allusions both in the Old and New Testament to the deliverance of the Israelites out of Egypt. It was the beginning of Jewish history in which God was first revealed to them. The nation in after ages delighted to think of the sea opening a way to their fathers and returning to overwhelm the Egyptian host. The passover preserved among them the tradition of that night in which they were suddenly waked up and sent forth from the land. They pictured to themselves the waters standing as a wall upon the right hand and upon the left, while the pillar of light was turned towards them and the cloud rested on their opponents. In the ironical language of the Psalmist, 'What ailed thee, thou sea, that thou fleddest, and thou, Jordan, that thou wast driven back?' By faith, as the author of the Hebrews says, they passed through the Red Sea, as on dry land, which the

1 Preached at Balliol, November 10, 1878.

Egyptians essaying to do perished. Like some wild animal they had escaped into the desert out of the toils of the hunter; they were now beyond his reach and could no more be detained by him. In the exultation of freedom there bursts from them that remarkable hymn, of which the burden is, 'I will sing unto the Lord, for He hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea.' The blow was struck at the oppressor not by their own arm but by the power of God. And with the deliverance from the house of bondage was inseparably connected in the mind of the Israelite another event in which the majesty of Jehovah was also revealed to him:—the giving of the Law! With liberty came order, with the existence of the Israelites as a nation was first proclaimed to them their rule of life, or Ten Commandments. And these Ten Commandments were transformed into a higher law, which ever and anon passed before the eyes of psalmists and prophets, the law of God written not on tables of stone, but on the heart of man. These were the

two leading ideas or types of Jewish history : the coming up out of Egypt, and the revelation of the law on Mount Sinai. They were to the Israelite what the heroic struggle of Marathon and Salamis, what the laws of their ancient lawgivers were to the Greek. The memories of them appeared to the prophet in the past or in the future

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to be always in process of being forgotten and being recovered. The God whom the people of Israel worshipped was the God who brought them out of a strange land and who gave them the law. When they forsook it, He forsook them; when they forgot the traditions of their race, the national glory departed from them. And still they were confident that when they returned to Him He would receive them like a father pitying his childrenso near is the relation of God to them as a nation that through them we seem to learn more than the world knew before of His relation to the individual soul.

The narratives in which the early history of the Israelites is recorded, like all other early histories, are partly of a poetical character. The poetry in them is a kind of prophecy, that is to say, it is not merely the work of the imagination but is inspired by a moral purpose. They were not written down or put into form for many hundred years after the times which they are supposed to describe. Yet they are not wholly unhistorical: of a connexion between Judea and Egypt many traces are found in the Egyptian monuments, as well as in the sacred books of the Israelites. It would be childish to maintain that great events like those recorded in the books of Moses did not take place, because they were attended by signs and wonders in an age when all great events were believed to be more

or less miraculous. The narrative from which the text is taken has been explained by saying that Moses, well acquainted with the tides of the Red Sea, took advantage of the ebb and passed over his army, while the incautious Egyptians attempting to follow were surprised by the flood and perished.' These words are taken from a well-known history of the Jews, written by a great and good man not now living, the late Dean Milman, and they breathe the spirit of the older school of German rationalists who were also good men and lovers of truth in their day. But I need hardly stop to point out the errors and inconsistencies which are involved in such a method of reducing Scripture to the laws of probability. For such criticism has had its day, and like many other labours of scholars under the sun, has passed away before a truer conception of early history. As little should this narrative be compared with the legends of Greek and Roman. States respecting their own origin. Neither is it like that famous Greek history, which was composed in order that from what had been men might learn what would be in the order of human things.' The Israelite wrote or prophesied that he might tell of God in history, of His more immediate presence among His people Israel, of His wider dominion among the nations of the earth. Such writings, whether they take the form of prophecy or of history, are really prophetical. They have an ex

traordinary moral interest and importance, and they will probably continue to supply the forms under which we conceive of some of the great truths of human life, as long as the world lasts. But we must not claim for them a degree of historical certainty which we neither find nor expect to find in other ancient histories—we cannot exempt them from the principles of criticism which we apply to similar writings: the attempt to do so would destroy not only their authority, but their meaning.

The spiritual house in which we live is not so constructed that if a single brick be taken out, the whole edifice falls to the ground. Rather by removing some of the false foundations the true ones are made to appear. The tree is not alive except it grow, and all growth implies some degree of change in which the old is entwined with the new or is transformed into the new. Such a process is not pernicious or dangerous, but healthy and natural; the real danger arises from the forcible suppression of it. We may say if we like, that religion and science move upon two different planes, and are like parallel lines which never touch; but the truth is that they are touching everywhere and at all times, in our minds and bodies, in education, in social and political life, in the history of the world; and therefore, if the speculative reconciliation of science and religion seem at the present moment to be distant and improbable, we should struggle