was willing to let them take
their wives and their little ones, but not their flocks and herds, and
because they would not leave them behind, Pharaoh drove Moses and Aaron
from him in anger, saying:

"See my face no more."

But the Lord proposed to break the hard heart of Pharaoh. He told
Moses to see that every Israelite should take a lamb from the flock and
keep it four days. Then, at evening, he was to kill it, and dip a
branch of hyssop in its blood, and strike it against the sides of his
door, also over it, leaving three marks of blood there. Then he was to
close his door and no one was to go out of it until morning.

They were to roast the lamb and eat of it, and be ready for the journey
they were to make, and it should be to them forever the feast called
the Passover. They were to eat it with unleavened bread, and the feast
should be kept forever from the first to the seventh day of the month,
a holy feast to the Lord.

And this is why it was called the feast of the Passover. At midnight,
after the lamb was killed in each house of the Israelites, and the
doors were shut, the Lord passed through the land, and wherever he saw
the blood on the side posts and the top of the door, he passed over
that house, and it was safe, but in every Egyptian house the first born
died, from the child of Pharaoh who sat on the throne, to the child of
the captive in the cell, and all the first born of cattle.

The next morning a great cry went up from the land of Egypt, for there
was not a house where there was not one dead.

Then Pharaoh was quite ready to let the Israelites go.

"Take all you have and be gone," he said.

They were all ready, and rose up very gladly to join the great
procession, led by Moses and Aaron, that gathered in Goshen, and
started on its long journey toward the east.

They had heard of the land of their fathers, and now they were going
home to be slaves no more. They were a family of seventy souls when
they came into Egypt, four hundred and thirty years before, and now
they went out a great nation, as the Lord had promised when he blessed
their fathers.

The feast of the Passover has been the chief one held by the
Israelites, from the time of their coming out of Egypt until now, and
since Jesus held the Passover feast with his disciples on the night
that he went forth to death, it has become to all Christians the
Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

CHAPTER XII.

FOLLOWING THE CLOUD.