as far advanced as that of the Egyptians in the nineteenth
century B.C. in this last particular! What incalculable benefit
to mankind would flow from strict observance of the commandment,
"Thou shalt not multiply words in speaking!" Nothing is more
remarkable than the stress which the old Egyptians, here and
elsewhere, lay upon this and other kinds of truthfulness, as
compared with the absence of any such requirement in the
Israelitic Decalogue, in which only a specific kind of
untruthfulnes is forbidden.

If, as the story runs, Moses was adopted by a princess of the
royal house, and was instructed in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians, it is surely incredible that he should not have been
familiar from his youth up, with the high moral code implied in
the "Book of Redemption." It is surely impossible that he should
have been less familiar with the complete legal system, and with
the method of administration of justice, which, even in his
time, had enabled the Egyptian people to hold together, as a
complex social organisation, for a period far longer than the
duration of old Roman society, from the building of the city to
the death of the last Caesar. Nor need we look to Moses alone
for the influence of Egypt upon Israel. It is true that the
Hebrew nomads who came into contact with the Egyptians of
Osertasen, or of Ramses, stood in much the same relation to
them, in point of culture, as a Germanic tribe did to the Romans
of Tiberius, or of Marcus Antoninus; or as Captain Cook's Omai
did to the English of George the Third. But, at the same time,
any difficulty of communication which might have arisen out of
this circumstance was removed by the long pre-existing
intercourse of other Semites, of every grade of civilisation,