it by submission. But before the plague of frogs he was
distinctly commanded, "Let My people go." It is an advancing lesson. He
has felt the power of Jehovah: now he is to connect, even more closely,
his suffering with his disobedience; and when this is accomplished, the
third plague will break upon him unannounced--a loud challenge to his
conscience to become itself his judge.

The plague of frogs was far greater than our experience helps us to
imagine. At least two cases are on record of a people being driven to
abandon their settlements because they had become intolerable; "as even
the vessels were full of them, the water infested and the food
uneatable, as they could scarcely set their feet on the ground without
treading on heaps of them, and as they were vexed by the smell of the
great multitude that died, they fled from that region."

The Egyptian species known to science as the Rana Mosaica, and still
called by the uncommon epithet here employed, is peculiarly repulsive,
and peculiarly noisy too. The superstition which adored a frog as the
"Queen of the two Worlds," and placed it upon the sacred lotus-leaf,
would make it impossible for an Egyptian to adopt even such forlorn
measures of self-defence as might suggest themselves. It was an unclean
pest against which he was entirely helpless, and it extended the power
of his enemy from the river to the land. The range of the grievance is
dwelt upon in the warning: "they shall come up and enter into thine
house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed ... and into thine
ovens, and into thy kneading-troughs" (viii. 3). The most sequestered
and the dryest spots alike would swarm with them, thrust forward into
the most unsuitable places by the multitude behind.

Thus Pharaoh himself had to share, far more than in the first plague,
the misery of his humblest subjects; and, although again his magicians
imitated Aaron upon some small prepared plot, and amid circumstances
which made it easier to exhibit frogs than to exclude them, yet there
was no comfort in such puerile emulation, and they offered no hope of
relieving him. From the gods that were only vanities, he turned to
Jehovah, and abased himself to ask the intercession of Moses: "Intreat
Jehovah that He take away the frogs from me and from my people; and I
will let the people go."

The assurance would have been a hopeful one, if only the sense of
inconvenience were the same as the sense of sin. But when we wonde