THE SOUL'S EXODUS

AND

PILGRIMAGE.

Sermon i.

The Land of Egypt: the House of Bondage.

Exodus xx. 2.

EGYPT stands foremost among the countries of the elder pagan world. Egypt is, in truth, the mother of paganism, the fruitful parent of idolatries, the nurse of pagan civilization, of pagan literature, politics, and art; and therefore the fitting representative in the language of Scripture of that "world" out of which, in all ages, God calls His sons.

Let us first study the physical aspects of the country. The plains of the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Hoang-ho, bear indisputable marks of having been the earliest settled homes of the human race. In these vast valleys, under the fos

tering warmth of an almost tropical sun, agriculture was at once simple and productive; bodies of men could be nourished readily, and societyusing the word in a popular sense, the aggregation of masses of men around common centresbecame easily possible. The soil of these alluvial plains is of the richest, and is cheaply renewed by inundation. Egypt has never been manured for four thousand years, and is as fruitful now as in the days of Sesostris. The means of communication, moreover, are in such countries easy and rapid; and the apparatus of a complicated social system can be set up with less toil and cost than in those varied and temperate regions which are fitted to develop the higher faculties of man, and to be the home of civilization at a more advanced era of its history. The early settlers in the valleys of Mesopotamia and Egypt attained very rapidly to an advanced stage of social and political development. While the Hebrew patriarchs were still feeding their flocks on the wolds of Canaan, and struggling with the inhabitants for no greater matter than a well, Egypt had a settled and complicated polity, castes of labourers, soldiers, and priests, a hierarchy, a court of great ceremonial pomp, and commercial relations with the most distant nations of the world.

At an equally early period Mesopotamia became

the seat of a powerful and splendid monarchy, whose earliest records are being disinterred from the sand-hills which, like the monasteries of the middle ages, guard treasures of which they little know the worth. These records show the exceeding rapidity of the growth of civilization under the propitious circumstances at which we have glanced. If, as has been suggested, the name Peleg, Gen. x. 25 (division), marks the period of the canalization of Mesopotamia, it shows what rapid progress had been made in that region in the time of the great-grandson of Shem.*

But such civilization is not fruitful in true progress. Though rich, it is stagnant, like the climate and the land. In such wealthy regions, where nature is so lavish and her smile is to be had for asking, man misses the stimulus to action, and that play of his nobler qualities and passions which the more thrifty temperament of nature in a colder climate and more broken country secures. If you want to see man in his individual manhood, full-grown, free, noble, and productive of his highest works, you must seek the colder and more varied European Continent. If you want to see men living in herds, springing up and perishing like the crops of summer fruits, preserving unchanged characteristics of form, feature, and

Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society. 1856.

habit, without progress, without regress, through thousands of years, you must go to the basins of the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Nile. The fellah of Egypt lives still, uncomplaining and hopeless, the life of his oppressed forefathers in the days of the Pharaohs, while the whole Western world has been in rapid progress, and has left all ancient landmarks, even the loftiest, hull-down in her wake.

Of the four regions which dispute the palm of antiquity and contend for the name of Mother of Civilization, Egypt stands first in interest and importance, as the wisest, the most developed, and, above all, the most influential on the civilization of Europe and the fortunes of mankind. From Egypt were carried the seeds which, received into the generous soil of the Greek nature, bore as their fruit the completest form of pagan society; and in Egypt was nursed and educated that intellect, which, receiving a diviner wisdom from on high, gave birth to the social and national institutions which have unfolded out of their bosom the Christian Church. Thus the two great streams of human progress had their startingpoint from Egypt; which became, though for different reasons, the classic ground of the pagan and Christian worlds.

Egypt is, in point of physical features, the

strangest country upon earth. It consists simply of a long narrow valley, with the Delta formed by the deposits of its river where it issues into the sea, of the length of about five hundred miles, and an average breadth of not more than seven. The cultivable land, from Syene to the commencement of the Delta, is simply a narrow slip of fertile soil, hemmed in by a belt of stony or sandy plain, reaching to the foot of the mountain chains which enclose it, and sometimes press closely on the river on either hand. The productive area, from Syene to the sea, may be estimated liberally at seven thousand square miles. In the time of the Pharaohs, it is said to have contained 7,000,000 of inhabitants; but the statement is a vague one, and, there is reason to think, somewhat exaggerated. Sir Gardner Wilkinson estimates the present population at 1,500,000. It is a country in which rain seldom falls, but the dews are copious. The land, as every child knows, is irrigated by the periodical overflowing of the river; which begins to rise at the time of the summer solstice, overflows the belt of cultivable land on its borders, and during its hundred days' dominion amply enriches the soil. The height of a fair average inundation is about forty feet at the Cataracts, thirty-six feet at Thebes, twenty-five feet at Cairo, and four feet