of them.

CHAPTER III.

_THE BURNING BUSH._

ii. 23-iii.

"In process of time the king of Egypt died," probably the great Raamses,
no other of whose dynasty had a reign which extended over the indicated
period of time. If so, he had while living every reason to expect an
immortal fame, as the greatest among Egyptian kings, a hero, a conqueror
on three continents, a builder of magnificent works. But he has only won
an immortal notoriety. "Every stone in his buildings was cemented in
human blood." The cause he persecuted has made deathless the banished
refugee, and has gibbeted the great monarch as a tyrant, whose
misplanned severities wrought the ruin of his successor and his army.
Such are the reversals of popular judgment: and such the vanity of fame.
For all the contemporary fame was his.

"The children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they
cried." Another monarch had come at last, a change after sixty-seven
years, and yet no change for them! It filled up the measure of their
patience, and also of the iniquity of Egypt. We are not told that their
cry was addressed to the Lord; what we read is that it reached Him, Who
still overhears and pities many a sob, many a lament, which ought to
have been addressed to Him, and is not. Indeed, if His compassion were
not to reach men until they had remembered and prayed to Him, who among
us would ever have learned to pray to Him at all? Moreover He remembered
His covenant with their forefathers, for the fulfilment of which the
time had now arrived. "And God saw the children of Israel, and God took
knowledge of them."

These were not the cries of religious individuals, but of oppressed
masses. It is therefore a solemn question to ask How many such appeals
ascend from Christian England? Behold, the hire of labourers ... held
back by fraud crieth out. The half-paid slaves of our haste to be rich,
and the victims of our drinking institutions, and of hideous vices which
entangle and destroy the innocent and unconscious, what cries to heaven
are theirs! As surely as those which St. James records, these have
entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. Of these sufferers every
one is His own by purchase, most of them by a covenant and sacrament
more solemn than bound Him to His ancient Israel. Surely He hears their
groaning. And all whose hearts are touched with compassion, yet who
hesitate whether to bestir themselves or to remain inert while evil is
mast