less than six weeks afterwards, have done the exact thing they
were thus awfully forbidden to do. Nor is the credibility of the
story increased by the statement that Aaron, the brother of
Moses, the witness and fellow-worker of the miracles before
Pharaoh, was their leader and the artificer of the idol.
And yet, at the same time, Aaron was apparently so ignorant of
wrongdoing that he made proclamation, "Tomorrow shall be a feast
to Jahveh," and the people proceeded to offer their burnt-
offerings and peace-offerings, as if everything in their
proceedings must be satisfactory to the Deity with whom they had
just made a solemn covenant to abolish image-worship. It seems
to me that, on a survey of all the facts of the case, only a
very cautious and hypothetical judgment is justifiable. It may
be that Moses profited by the opportunities afforded him of
access to what was best in Egyptian society to become
acquainted, not only with its advanced ethical and legal code,
but with the more or less pantheistic unification of the Divine
to which the speculations of the Egyptian thinkers, like those
of all polytheistic philosophers, from Polynesia to Greece,
tend; if indeed the theology of the period of the nineteenth
dynasty was not, as some Egyptologists think, a modification of
an earlier, more distinctly monotheistic doctrine of a long
antecedent age. It took only half a dozen centuries for the
theology of Paul to become the theology of Gregory the Great;
and it is possible that twenty centuries lay between the
theology of the first worshippers in the sanctuary of the Sphinx
and that of the priests of Ramses Maimun.

It may be that the ten commandments and the Book of the Covenant
are based upon faithful traditions of the efforts of a great