available, he said, of the enslavement of the Children of Israel by the
Egyptians, but a careful consideration of the history of various peoples
shows beyond the possibility of a mistake being made, that only those
become enslaved who are best fitted for enslavement. A king arose that
knew not Joseph--a king who could not believe that at any time there was
belonging to that race of strangers a man of supreme intelligence.
The Israelites bowed their heads to the yoke of the superior race, the
Egyptians, and took their rightful place as slaves. After many days a
man of extraordinary intelligence appeared in the person of Moses. A
patriot of patriots, he gave the race their God--they seemed to have
lived in a perfectly Godless condition in Egypt; and their theology had
to be constructed for them by their leader, as well as their laws: the
laws for the desert wanderers, and a decalogue for all humanity. He was
equal to any emergency, and he had no scruples. He almost succeeded in
making a great nation out of a horde of superstitious robbers. Had he
succeeded the record would have thrown civilization back a thousand
years. Happy it was for the world that the triumph of crime was brief.
The cement of bloodshed that kept the kingdom of Israel together for a
time soon dissolved. Captivity followed captivity. For a thousand years
no improvement whatever took place in the condition of the people--they
had no arts; they lived in mud huts at a period when architecture
reached a higher level than it had ever attained to previously. When
the patriot prophets arose, endeavoring to reform them with words of
fire--the sacred fire of truth--they killed them. One chance remained
to them. They were offered a religion that would have purified them, in
place of the superstition that had demoralized them, and they cried
with one voice, as everyone who had known their history and their social
characteristics knew they would cry, "Not this Man, but Barabbas." That
was from the earliest period in the history of the race the watchword of
the Hebrews. Not the man, but the robber. All that is good and noble and