The Chosen People | Page 6

were consecrated, and when they died were rolled up
in fine linen and spices, just as the Egyptians embalmed their own
dead.
Mummies, as we call these embalmed Egyptian corpses, are often
found now, laid up in beautiful tombs, cut out in the rock, and painted
in colours still fresh with picture writing, called hieroglyphics, telling
in tokens all the history of the person whose body they contained. The
kings built tombs for themselves, like mountains, square at the bottom,
but each course of stones built within the last till they taper to a point at
the top. These are called pyramids, and have within them very small
narrow passages, leading to a small chamber, just large enough to hold
a king's coffin.
They had enormous idols hewn out of stone. The head of one, which
you may see in the British Museum, is far taller than the tallest man,

and yet the face is really handsome, and there are multitudes more, both
of them and of their temples, still remaining on the banks of the Nile.
The children of Israel, being chiefly shepherds, kept apart from the
Egyptians at first; but as time went on they learnt some of their habits,
and many of them had begun to worship their idols and forget the truth,
when their time of affliction came. The King of Egypt, becoming afraid
of having so numerous and rich a people settled in his dominions, tried
to keep them down by hard bondage and heavy labour. He made them
toil at his great buildings, and oppressed them in every possible manner;
and when he found that they still throve and increased, he made the
cruel decree, that every son who was born to them should be cast into
the river.
But man can do nothing against the will of God, and this murderous
ordinance proved the very means of causing one of these persecuted
Hebrew infants to be brought up in the palace of Pharaoh, and
instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, the only people who at
that time had any human learning. Even in his early life, Moses seems
to have been aware that he was to be sent to put an end to the bondage
of his people, for, choosing rather to suffer with them than to live in
prosperity with their oppressors, he went out among them and tried to
defend them, and to set them at peace with one another; but the time
was not yet come, and they thrust him from them, so that he was forced
to fly for shelter to the desert, among the Midianite descendants of
Abraham. After he had spent forty years there as a shepherd, God
appeared to him, and then first revealed Himself as JEHOVAH, the
Name proclaiming His eternal self-existence, I AM THAT I AM, a
Name so holy, that the translators of our Bible have abstained from
repeating it where it occurs, but have put the Name, the LORD, in
capital letters in its stead. Moses was then sent to Egypt to lead out the
Israelites on their way back to the land so long promised to their
fore-fathers; and when Pharaoh obstinately refused to let them go, the
dreadful plagues and wonders that were sent on the country were such
as to show that their gods were no gods; since their river, the glory of
their land, became a loathsome stream of blood, creeping things came
and went at the bidding of the Lord, and their adored cattle perished
before their eyes. At last, on the night of the Passover, in each of the

houses unmarked by the blood of the Lamb, there was a great cry over
the death of the first-born son; and where the sign of faith was seen,
there was a mysterious obedient festival held by families prepared for a
strange new journey. Then the hard heart yielded to terror, and Israel
went oat of Egypt as a nation. They had come in in 1707 as seventy
men, they went out in 1491 as six hundred thousand, and their enemies,
following after them, sank like lead in the mighty waters of that arm of
the Red Sea, which had divided to let the chosen pass through.

LESSON IV.
THE WILDERNESS.
"Where Is He that brought them up out of the sea with the shepherd of
His flock? Where is He that put His Holy Spirit within him?"--Isaiah,
lxiii. 11.
When Moses had led the 600,000 men, with their wives, children, and
cattle, beyond the reach of the Egyptians, they were in a small
peninsula, between the arms of the Red Sea, with the wild desolate
peaks of Mount Horeb towering in the midst, and all around grim stony
crags, with hardly a spring of water; and