carving the ten commandments on tablets of stone also
shows his skill with mallet and chisel, a talent he had acquired in
Egypt, where Rameses the Second had thousands of men engaged in
sculpture and in making inscriptions in stone.

Several chapters in Exodus might have been penned by Albrecht Durer or
William Morris. The commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any
graven image," was unmistakably made merely to correct a local evil: the
tendency to worship the image instead of the thing it symbolized. People
who do not contribute to the creation of an object fall easy victims to
this error. With all the stern good sense that Moses revealed, it is
but fair to assume that he did not mean the command to be perpetual. It
was only through so much moving about that the Jews seemed to lose their
art spirit.

And certainly the flame of art in the Jewish heart has never died out,
even though at times it has smoldered, for wherever there has been peace
and security for the Jews, they have not been slow to evolve the talent
which creates. History teems with the names of Jews who, in music,
painting, poetry and sculpture, have devoted their days to beauty. And
the germ of genius is seen in many of the Jewish children who attend the
manual-training and art schools of America.

Art has its rise in the sense of sublimity. It seems at times to be a
fulfilment of the religious impulse. The religion which balks at work,
stopping at prayer and contemplation, is a form of arrested development.

The number of people in the exodus was probably two or three thousand.
Renan says that one century only elapsed between the advent of Joseph
into Egypt and the revolt. Very certain it was not a great number that
went forth into the desert. A half-million women could not have borrowed
jewelry of their neighbors--the secret could not have been kept. And in
the negotiations between Moses and the King, it will be remembered that
Moses asked only for the privilege of going three days' journey into the
wilderness to make sacrifices. It was a kind of picnic or religious
campmeeting. A vast multitude could not have taken part in any such
exercise. We also hear of their singing their gratitude on account of
reaching Elim, where there were "twelve springs and seventy palm-trees."
Had there been several million people, as we have been told, the
insignificant shade of seventy trees would have meant nothing to them.

The distance from Goshen in Egypt