osea understood him?

Did this warrior, who served under Pharaoh's banner, realize how entirely
the Lord God Himself had ruled the souls of his people at their
departure.

Had the life among the Egyptians so estranged him from his people and his
God, rendered him so degenerate, that he would bid defiance to the wishes
and commands of his own father?

Was the man on whom the Hebrews' highest hopes were fixed a renegade,
forever lost to his people?

He received no verbal answer to these mute questions, but when Hosea
grasped his callous right hand in both his own and pressed it as he would
have clasped a friend's, when he bade him farewell with tearful eyes,
murmuring: "You shall hear from me!" he felt that he knew enough and,
overwhelmed with passionate delight, he pressed kiss after kiss upon the
warrior's arms and clothing.

CHAPTER VII.

Hosea returned to the camp with drooping head. The conflict in his soul
was at an end. He now knew what duty required. He must obey his father's
summons.

And the God of his race!

The old man's tale had given new life to the memories of his childhood,
and he now knew that He was not the same God as the Seth of the Asiatics
in Lower Egypt, nor the "One" and the "Sum of All" of the adepts.

The prayers he had uttered ere he fell asleep, the history of the
creation of the world, which he could never hear sufficiently often,
because it showed so clearly the gradual development of everything on
earth and in heaven until man came to possess and enjoy all, the story of
Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob, Esau, and his own ancestor, Joseph--how
gladly he had listened to these tales as they fell from the lips of the
gentle woman who had given him life, and from those of his nurse, and his
grandfather Elishama. Yet he imagined that they had faded from his memory
long ago.

But in old Eliab's hovel he could have repeated the stories word for
word, and he now knew that there was indeed one invisible, omnipotent
God, who had preferred his race above all others, and had promised to
make them a mighty people.

The truths concealed by the Egyptians under the greatest mystery were the
common property of his race. Every beggar, every slave might raise his
hands in supplication to the one invisible God who had revealed Himself
unto Abraham.

Shrewd Egyptians, who had divined His existence and shrouded His image
with monstrous shapes, born of their own thoughts and imaginations, had
draw