were too much fascinated by this theory to heed his warning, and the "Exodus papyri" began to have more honor in certain quarters than the Bible account itself, when the craze was checked by the publication of a careful, scientific rendering of these documents by Mr. C. W. Goodwin.* This was translated into French almost immediately by M. Chabas, who added to it a brilliant preface, in which he declared that in the papyri could be found" no more Jannes' than Moses,' no more Jew' than 'people of Sem,' no more 'circumcision' than hyssop,' no more 'magician' than 'sleeping in the waters.' Ӡ

6

The only other memorable attempt to read the history of the Israelites from contemporaneous Egyptian records, which has been made since the above critical annihilation of the "Exodus papyri," occurred ten years later, when Dr. Franz Joseph Lauth discovered, in a papyrus of Leyden, the name Mesu, and for various reasons-such as that this Mesu was a scribe,' "author of writings," had studied at On, had travelled in Palestine, had made religious researches, was a leader of armies, possessed the Semitic title of "champion," and was called "Marina of the Aperiu" -he leaped to the conclusion that this hero was the Moses of the Hebrews. The argument was interesting but by no means conclusive, and found few adherents. Thus has ended in failure the effort to read the annals of the Hebrews from the Egyptian records.

II. There is no hope that any such history of Israel will ever be discovered in Egypt.

1. No such record can be expected from the Hebrew sepulchres, for, in the first place, very few of the Hebrews in Egypt could have afforded themselves this luxury; and, in the second place, the Hebrews were never given to cutting inscriptions upon their sepulchres, even in Palestine, no single instance of this occurring earlier than the Babylonian captivity; and finally, if Joseph or some other high official had built a tomb and covered it with an account of the Oppression or of the events preceding the Exodus, and even if the government had not interfered in the matter, such a tomb immediately after the Exodus would have been unquestionably occupied by some Egyptian dignitary, and the inscription would have been erased to give place to his own, as can be paralleled in many instances..

2. But it is no less unlikely that an account of the entrance, oppression, or exodus of Israel should be preserved in the native Egyptian papyri. Few Egyptians were interested in their arrival or concerned about their servitude, and as for the Exodus, the only possible place where this might be mentioned would be in some private diary or letter of that epoch; but unfortunately private note-books and letters are scarce. Neither the Ancients nor the Moderns have been accustomed to preserve these treasures in their coffins. People may prize a Greek classic, but seldom a private letter relating to the affairs of state sufficiently to have it buried with

"Hieratic Papyri," Cambridge Essays, 1858.
+ "Moses der Ebraer."

"Sur Les Papyrus Hieratiques." München, 1868.

them. The large majority of the papyri discovered have been books of magic and devotion. Some scientific and literary works have been found and many legal documents, but scarcely any private correspondence worth mentioning.

3. Some have seemed to think that something might be discovered in the temple deposits, but who can really believe that the Israelites were ever invited to take part in these dedications? Others have had hope in the native Egyptian tombs, but these are universally tombs of government officials and priests, and the inscribed texts consist of prayers, lists of sacrifices, family genealogies, a report of the offices held by the deceased and of the property left by him, accompanied in the Mosaic period almost invariably by a funeral eulogy of the deceased and also of the reigning king. That a surveillance was exercised even over private monuments cannot be doubted. In a private tomb recently examined by Mr. Griffith near Siut, the inscription, which had incidentally mentioned a civil war then in progress, was found to have been stopped abruptly and to have been partly erased.

4. It is an absurd imagination that any narrative of the events connected with the Exodus could ever be gathered from the national annals of Egypt. Even though these national records had been like ours and had been preserved intact, yet we could hardly have hoped to find an account of the plagues of Egypt. Greece alone of all ancient nations has recorded her defeats; but the Egyptians never wrote history nor even biography, properly so called. Their writings were not elaborate and systematic, but wholly eulogistic and intended for public inscription upon temple walls and royal tombs.

Even our art galleries and churches and cemeteries, if examined never so carefully, would hardly throw a brilliant light upon our defeats in the War of 1776; while it would be equally difficult for the most expert archæologist, even in our era, to discover the chief causes and results of that great Revolution, from various ancient copies of the Book of Common Prayer, the art galleries of Windsor, the monuments of Bunhill Cemetery, or even from the sepulchral tablets of Westminster Abbey. True, a little tablet might be found in the Abbey, sacred to the memory of "William Wragg, Esq., of South Carolina, who, when the American colonies revolted from Great Britain, inflexibly maintained his loyalty to the person and government of his sovereign ;" and another little monument erected in honor of Major André, "who fell a sacrifice to his zeal for his king and country,' and is represented in the sculpture as being shot; but in neither case is there a hint that the Revolutionary war was a success and that the "revolt" was not crushed at its birth.

It is noticeable in this connection that, in the National Art Gallery at Versailles, hundreds of battles are pictured, from that of Clovis, 496 a.d., down to the latest time-and every battle is a victory for the French! There is Napoleon entering Berlin in 1806, while the German women are

holding up hands of supplication to the conqueror; but one searches in vain for a picture of the German army marching through the Porte St. Martin in 1814, or the crowning of William I. in that very palace in 1871. Among the battles whose names are recorded in the magnificent tomb of Napoleon, no one can help remarking that there appears no Waterloo.

We conclude, therefore, that sovereigns, and their subjects high in office, are not accustomed to commemorate the deeds of their opponents by cherishing their portraits and memorial tablets in their palaces or tombs. No portrait of Washington is likely to be found in the ruins of the palace of George III.; no picture of Moses among the shattered memorials of Ramses or Menephtah.

III. That the Israelites should not be mentioned at all on the monuments or in the papyri would by no means indicate that they had never been in Egypt.

It is far more probable that an incidental reference to the Hebrews should be found than a detailed account of their sojourn and departure; yet even if not one such explicit reference could ever be proved, it ought not to be thought surprising. Only a few scraps of the writings of those times have been preserved, and those scraps are chiefly found in temples and cemeteries. The antiquary who, three thousand years from now, will search in the Louvre, the Nôtre Dame, and the Pantheon for news of the Franco-Prussian War, will probably declare that war to be a myth if the canon holds then as now that silence proves non-existence.

Arguments against the Bible narrative, drawn from the silence of the monuments, reminds one of the confidence with which Baron Cuvier, a little over half a century ago, declared, "This much is certain, that they [the Pyramids] did not exist at the time of the Jewish migration, for the Scriptures make no mention of them"!

If it is accounted a proof of the Pyramids' non-existence that the Bible does not mention them, what shall we say of the fact that the monuments themselves convey to us not one solitary whisper concerning the existence of the Labyrinth, which Herodotus thought more wonderful than the Great Pyramid?

The silence of the Scriptures proves no more than the silence of the

monuments.

One might argue quite as convincingly that sandals were never worn in the Old and Middle Empires, because even the Pharaohs, clear down to the New Empire, are represented with bare feet, were it not that in one single instance a man of the fifth dynasty is seen holding his sandals in his hand. So far as the pictures and statues are concerned, I know of no other evidence for more than two thousand years that sandals were worn by the ancient Egyptians.

Equally unaccountable is the fact that not a camel is seen represented upon the monuments down to the Roman epoch, and it is even doubtful whether it is mentioned in the hieroglyphic texts; yet the records of

Greece and Assyria, as well as Judea, prove that the Ship of the Desert was known and used in Egypt centuries before.*

Additional force is given to these suggestions when it is remembered that some blanks occur even in this fragmentary monumental testimony. There are entire dynasties which have wholly disappeared.

It unfortunately happens that several of these blanks occur at the very epochs in which the Bible student is most interested. Scarcely a trace remains of the Hyksos dynasties, during which, according to the best chronologists, Abraham and Joseph flourished.

Another blank occurs at the period immediately following the Exodus ; for the end of the nineteenth dynasty and the beginning of the twentieth are practically non-existent so far as memorials are concerned. If ever the Exodus would have been mentioned in the Egyptian records it would have been then; but of that era no record on any subject is obtainable. We only know that in the reign of Menephtah or his successor some terrible catastrophe happened, followed by anarchy, and then that Night settled upon Egypt.

If it is accounted surprising that the monuments do not mention the sojourn of Israel in Egypt, it is equally noteworthy that the Bible itself compresses the entire history into one verse (Ex. i. 7).

The silence of the monuments proves no more than the silence of the Scriptures.

SERMONIC SECTION.

“THE TILLAGE OF THE POOR." BY ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D. [BAPTIST], MANCHESTER, ENG. Much food is in the tillage of the poor.

Prov. xiii. 23.

PALESTINE was a land of small peasant proprietors, and the institution of the Jubilee was intended to prevent the acquisition of large estates by any Israelite. The consequence, as intended, was a level of modest prosperity. It was "the tillage of the poor," the careful, diligent husbandry of the man who had only a little patch of land to look after, that filled the storehouses of the Holy Land. Hence the proverb of our text arose. It preserves the picture of the economical conditions in which it originated, and it is capable of, and is intended to have, an application to all forms and fields of work. In all it is Soc. Bib. Arch., vols. XII, XIII.

The

true that the bulk of the harvested results are due, not to the large labors of the few, but to the minute, unnoticed toils of the many. Small service is true service, and the aggregate of such produces large crops. Spade husbandry gets most out of the ground. laborer's allotment of half an acre is generally more prolific than the average of the squire's estate. Much may be made of slender gifts, small resources, and limited opportunities if carefully cultivated, as they should be, and as their very slenderness should stimulate their being.

One of the psalms accuses "the children of Ephraim" because, “being armed and carrying bows, they turned back in the day of battle." That saying deduces obligation from equipment, and preaches a stringent code of duty to those who are in any direction largely gifted. Power to its last particle is