wilderness and
hold a feast in obedience to the command of God. But Pharaoh said, who is
the Lord that I should obey his voice. I know not the Lord--_your God_. The
result was, the anger of the king and the increased burdens of the
Israelites, which tended to make them indifferent to the voice of Moses,
from the excess of their anguish.

(M92) Then followed the ten plagues which afflicted the Egyptians, and the
obstinacy of the monarch, resolved to suffer any evil rather than permit
the Israelites to go free. But the last plague was greater than the king
could bear--the destruction of all the first-born in his land--and he
hastily summoned Moses and Aaron in the night, under the impulse of a
mighty fear, and bade them to depart with all their hosts and all their
possessions. The Egyptians seconded the command, anxious to be relieved
from further evils, and the Israelites, after spoiling the Egyptians,
departed in the night--"a night to be much observed" for all generations,
marching by the line of the ancient canal from Rameses, not far from
Heliopolis, toward the southern frontier of Palestine. But Moses,
instructed not to conduct his people at once to a conflict with the
warlike inhabitants of Canaan, for which they were unprepared, having just
issued from slavery, brought them round by a sudden turn to the south and
east, upon an arm or gulf of the Red Sea. To the eyes of the Egyptians,
who repented that they had suffered them to depart, and who now pursued
them with a great army, they were caught in a trap. Their miraculous
deliverance, one of the great events of their history, and the ruin of the
Egyptian hosts, and their three months' march and countermarch in the
wilderness need not be enlarged upon.

(M93) The exodus took place 430 years from the call of Abraham, after a
sojourn in Egypt of 215 years, the greater part of which had been passed
in abject slavery and misery. There were 600,000 men, besides women and
children and strangers.

(M94) It was during their various wanderings in the wilderness of
Sinai--forty years of discipline--that Moses gave to the Hebrews the rules
they were to observe during all their generations, until a new
dispensation should come. These form that great system of original
jurisprudence that has entered, more or less, into the codes of all
nations, and by which the genius of the lawgiver is especially manifested;
although it is not to be forgotten he framed his laws by divine di