It was the most brilliant of all his efforts.  He took as his text the words, “All Scripture is given by inspiration and is profitable,” and he had no difficulty in showing how vast was the profit to be derived from a consideration of every portion of the sacred volume, it appeared to him, than the account given of the early history of the Hebrew race.  That account appealed as an object lesson to all nations on the face of the earth.  It allowed every people to see the course which the children of Israel had pursued at various periods of their existence and to profit by such observation.  The Hebrews were a terrible example to all the world.  If they were slaves when in the land of Egypt, that was their own fault.  Milton had magnificently expressed the origin of slavery: 

“He that hath light within his own clear breast May walk i’ the noontide and enjoy bright day, But he that hides dark deeds and foul thoughts. . . .  Himself is his own dungeon.”

The bondage of Egypt was, he believed, self-imposed.  There is no account available, he said, of the enslavement of the Children of Israel by the Egyptians, but a careful consideration of the history of various peoples shows beyond the possibility of a mistake being made, that only those become enslaved who are best fitted for enslavement.  A king arose that knew not Joseph—­a king who could not believe that at any time there was belonging to that race of strangers a man of supreme intelligence.  The Israelites bowed their heads to the yoke of the superior race, the Egyptians, and took their rightful place as slaves.  After many days a man of extraordinary intelligence appeared in the person of Moses.  A patriot of patriots, he gave the race their God—­they seemed to have lived in a perfectly Godless condition in Egypt; and their theology had to be constructed for them by their leader, as well as their laws:  the laws for the desert wanderers, and a decalogue for all humanity.  He was equal to any emergency, and he had no scruples.  He almost succeeded in making a great nation out of a horde of superstitious robbers.  Had he succeeded the record would have thrown civilization back a thousand years.  Happy it was for the world that the triumph of crime was brief.  The cement of bloodshed that kept the kingdom of Israel together for a time soon dissolved.  Captivity followed captivity.  For a thousand years no improvement whatever took place in the condition of the people—­they had no arts; they lived in mud huts at a period when architecture reached a higher level than it had ever attained to previously.  When the patriot prophets arose, endeavoring to reform them with words of fire—­the sacred fire of truth—­they killed them.  One chance remained to them.  They were offered a religion that would have purified them, in place of the superstition that had demoralized them, and they cried with one voice, as everyone who had known their history and their social characteristics knew