and that he COULD have
his way.

Intensely painful and disgusting these plagues must have been to the
Egyptians, for this reason, that they were the most cleanly of all
people. They had a dislike of dirt, which had become quite a
superstition to them. Their priests (magicians as the Bible calls
them) never wore any garments but linen, for fear of their
harbouring vermin of any kind. And this extreme cleanliness of
theirs the next plague struck at; they were covered with boils and
diseases of skin, and the magicians could not stand before Pharaoh
by reason of the boils. They became unclean and unfit for their
office; they could perform no religious ceremonies, and had to flee
away in disgrace.

After plagues of thunder, hail, and rain, which seldom or never
happen in that rainless land of Egypt; after a plague of locusts,
which are very rare there, and have to come many hundred miles if
they come at all; of darkness, seemingly impossible in a land where
the sun always shines: then came the last and most terrible plague
of all. After solemn warnings of what was coming, the angel of the
Lord passed through the land of Egypt, and smote all the first-born
in Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh upon his throne to the
first-born of the captive in the dungeon; and there arose a great
cry in Egypt, for there was not a house in which there was not one
dead. A terrible and heart-rending calamity in any case, enough to
break the heart of all Egypt; and it did break the heart of Egypt,
and the proud heart of Pharaoh himself, and they let the people go.

But this was a RELIGIOUS affliction too. Most of these first-born
children--probably all the first-born of the priests and nobles, and
of Pharaoh himself--were consecrated to some god. They bore the
name of the god to whom they belonged; that god was to prosper and
protect them, and behold, he could not. The Lord Jehovah, the God
of the Hebrews, was stronger than all the gods of Egypt; none of
them could deliver their servants out of his hand. He was the only
Lord of life and death; he had given them life, and he could take it
away, in spite of all and every one of the gods of the Egyptians.

So the Lord God showed himself to be the Master and Lord of all
things. The Lord of the sacred river Nile; the Lord of the meanest
vermin which crept on the earth; the Lord of the weather--able to
bring thunder and hail into a land where thunder and hail was never
seen befor