advantage have given place to another form: "For the Lord God did
not cause it to rain." The phenomenon referred to appears to have
been local and temporary. Had the pluperfect been omitted in one
case and supplied in the other two sources of apparent difficulty
would have been removed.

It is very clear, then, that there could be no approach to
scientific accuracy in a narrative written in such a language as
this. Such accuracy is, in fact, attainable only in proportion, as
science has moulded language for its own purposes. But language is
at all times an index of the general mental condition of the
people who use it, and so the knowledge and the ideas of the men
of these primitive times must have been extremely limited in all
those directions with which we have to do. Accordingly, we find no
trace of any doubt whether the information with reference to
external objects which was received through the senses was in all
cases to be depended on. There can be little doubt that to those
early observers the sky was a solid vault, on the face of which
the sun, moon, and planets moved in their appointed courses; the
stars were points of light, golden studs in the azure canopy; the
sun and moon were just as large as they appeared to be, and the
earth was a solid immovable plane of comparatively small extent.
At the time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a
people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the
mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to
belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the
terrible country through which the souls of the departed made
their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations
Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made
no attempt to extend the limits of their empire in this direction,