Three thousand two hundred years ago, Egypt and the Egyptians were already old. At that date, remote as it is, their most glorious period was in the past. Their grandest temples and pyramids were built; their finest art had been produced; their widest extension of boundaries had been reached; their greatest characters had appeared and had done their work. In short, the creative, originating period of the national life was over. All that the Egyptians, in the way of ideas and the realization of ideas in the arts, were capable of adding to the world's stock of civilization, they had already completed. It is true that a long career was still before them; but their function in world-history was to be conservation. Their future work was to guard the intellectual treasures which they had amassed, and to give these out to the later world in such ways and at such times as would conduce to general progress. In sharp contrast to this ancient highly civilized people, whose creative energy was spent, stood the Semitic tribes that inhabited Goshen, the north-east section of Egypt. They were in the first flush of youth. To their physical vigor and moral energy the fears and wiles of the Egyptians strongly testify. The first fact, therefore, of which we need to take account, in explaining the antagonism between the Israelites and the Egyptians, is the incompatibility between an old, fully developed civilization, on the one hand, and on the other, a nascent, almost embryonic, one. A second fact, entering even more deeply into the explanation of this antagonism, is the radical difference between the religion of the two peoples. That of Egypt offers many difficult problems. Its beginnings we cannot trace. There is ground for the view that it was originally monotheistic. It is well established that this doctrine prevailed among the priests; but as the religion was interpreted to the people and understood by them, it had, long before the day of Moses, degenerated into a coarsely idolatrous polytheism. Its temples were grand; its ceremonials were impressive; it did not countenance the cruel and licentious rites practiced by the neighboring Asiatic peoples; it taught the immortality of the soul and a future of rewards and punishments. But because it did not teach a just idea of divine holiness, it could not awaken in its devotees a profound sense of sin; and consequently the morality which it developed was formal and external. Its symbolism, drawn in large part from the animal world, was strange, and in some respects revolting. This symbolism influenced greatly the prevalent forms of idolatry, and goes far towards explaining the grotesque features of Egyptian worship. All things considered, the religion was so directly the product of the Nile valley and of Egyptian character and experience, that it could not be intelligible or useful to other peoples. To the masses it was a relig-