The Via Babuino opens upon the Piazza del Popolo, the finest and largest square in Rome.  In the centre is a magnificent Egyptian obelisk of red Syene granite, about eighty feet in height, carved with hieroglyphics, with four marble Egyptian lions at each corner of the platform upon which it stands, pouring from their mouths copious streams of water into large basins, with a refreshing sound.  Perhaps the eyes of Abraham rested upon this obelisk when he went down into Egypt, the first recorded traveller who visited the valley of the Nile; and the familiarity of the sight to the Israelites during their bondage in the neighbourhood may have suggested the wonderful vision of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night which regulated their wanderings in the wilderness.  God does not paint His revelations on the empty air, but weaves them into the web of history, or pours them into the mould of common earthly objects and ordinary human experiences.  Many of the rites and institutions of the Mosaic economy were borrowed from those of the Egyptian priesthood; the tabernacle and its furniture were composed of the gold and jewels of which the Israelites had spoiled the Egyptians; and its form, a tent moved from place to place, accommodated itself to the wandering camp-life of the Israelites.  It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suppose that He who appeared to Moses at Horeb, not in some unknown supernatural blaze of glory altogether detached from earth, but in the common fire of a shepherd in the common dry vegetation of the desert, and who made use of the common shepherd’s rod which Moses carried in his hand to perform the wonderful miracles before Pharaoh, would also make use of the obelisk of Heliopolis, one of the most familiar objects which met their eye during their captivity, as the pattern of the Shechinah cloud which guided His people in their journey to the land of Canaan.  The symbol of the sun that shone upon their weary toil as slaves in the clay-pits beside the Nile, now protected and illumined them in their march as freemen through the desert.  What they had probably joined their oppressors in worshipping as an idol, they now beheld with awe and reverence as the token of the overshadowing and overshining presence of the living and true God.  That flame-shaped obelisk was the link between Egypt and the Holy Land.  The divine effigy of it in the sky of the desert—­like the manna as the link between the corn of Egypt and the corn of Canaan—­marked the transition from the false to the true, from the old world of dark pagan thought, to the new world of religious light.  I need not say with what profound interest such a thought invested the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo.  I was never weary of looking up at its fair proportions, and trying to decipher its strange hieroglyphics—­figures of birds and beasts in intaglio, cut clear and deep into the hard granite, and all as bright in colour and carving as though it had been only yesterday cut