his countrymen of the fact, and also of the absolute necessity of
obedience to the moral law which he should declare, since without absolute
obedience, they would certainly merit, and probably suffer, such a fate as
befell the inhabitants of Sodom, under the very eyes of Abraham, and in
spite of his prayers for mercy.

There was one other apprehension which may have troubled, and probably did
trouble, Moses. The god of the primitive man, and certainly of the
Bedouin, is usually a local deity whose power and whose activity is
limited to some particular region, as, for instance, a mountain or a
plain. Thus the god of Abraham might have inhabited and absolutely ruled
the plain of Mamre and been impotent elsewhere. But this, had Moses for a
moment harbored such a notion, would have been dispelled when he thought
of Joseph. Joseph, when his brethren threw him into the pit, must have
been under the guardianship of the god of his fathers, and when he was
drawn out, and sold in the ordinary course of the slave-trade, he was
bought by Potiphar, the captain of the guard. "And the Lord was with
Joseph and he was a prosperous man." Thenceforward, Joseph had a wonderful
career. He received in a dream a revelation of what the weather was to be
for seven years to come. And by this dream he was able to formulate a
policy for establishing public graineries like those which were maintained
in Babylon, and by means of these graineries, ably administered, the crown
was enabled to acquire the estates of the great feudatories, and thus the
whole social system of Egypt was changed. And Joseph, from being a poor
waif, cast away by his brethren in the wilderness, became the foremost man
in Egypt and the means of settling his compatriots in the province of
Gotham, where they still lived when Moses fled from Egypt. Such facts had
made a profound impression upon the mind of Moses, who very reasonably
looked upon Joseph as one of the most wonderful men who had ever lived,
and one who could not have succeeded as he succeeded, without the divine