At the time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits.  It was the terrible country through which the souls of the departed made their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote:  “The Nations Around,” pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made no attempt to extend the limits of their empire in this direction, while the monarchs of the Mesopotamian region seem to have been equally unambitious of conquest beyond the mountain ranges which bounded the valley of the Tigris on the east.  Mesopotamia, then, on the east, Egypt on the west, Armenia and Asia Minor on the north, and Arabia on the south, seem, in the view of the contemporaries of Moses, to have been the utmost regions of the world.  Ignorant as they were of any countries beyond these, they were, of course, equally ignorant of the numberless varieties of plants and animals that were to be found in them, and with which we are familiar.  Mining was not unknown, but the mines were few and superficial; they could not reveal much of the structure of the earth, and what little they did reveal passed unnoticed.  Nothing was known of the successive beds of rock which form the crust of the earth, of the fossils with which they abound, or of the gradual changes to Which they are still subject.  If any one had told the men of that generation that the solid earth on which they stood, or the everlasting hills which surrounded them, were undergoing slow but steady modifications, he would have been looked upon as a madman.

A revelation, then, addressed to men whose language, whose intellectual powers, and whose stock of ideas were thus limited, must of itself also necessarily have been both limited and destitute of precision.  It could only deal with things with which they had some acquaintance, or of which they could form some idea, while, from the character of the language, and the extreme brevity of the record, the treatment of even these few subjects must have been of a vague and indefinite character.  Traces of a deeper knowledge there might be, but they would not lie upon the surface.  They must be carefully sought for, and then they would be discernible only by those who were in possession of the key which would unlock their hidden secrets.

Such are the limitations under which the revelation was necessarily given.  We have now to consider our own especial difficulties, the obstacles which stand in our way when we would discover for ourselves all the information which the record is capable of conveying.  For if this record be, as we believe, the work of the Great Architect of the Universe, then it is probable that its every detail is significant; that wherever it was possible words were chosen which, when scrutinized, would convey much more information than appeared on the surface.  The great problem for us to solve is, What are the difficulties which stand in our way when we would seek this knowledge, and what are the means by which those difficulties may be surmounted, and the hidden treasure displayed?