recognized leaders. This principle was well understood by Moses, and he acted upon it in all his dealings with the children of Israel. When he would play off a new game of deception upon the people he would operate to accomplish it through Aaron, or a selected few in whom the people confided. This was the course pursued by him when hard pushed by the people at Rephidim; there he selected a few of those same elders through whom before he had deceived and defrauded the people by enticing them to enlist under his banner. Here he selected the elders to bear testimony to the people concerning his declared performances in obtaining water for them to drink.

SEC. 8. Contemners of the people, those who withhold from the masses their legitimate rights, and deny to them the rightful exercise of their individual sovereignty, may object to the positions which I have taken, relative to Moses, and concerning the course pursued by him with the people; and they may justify Moses in everything that he did. They may allege, and persist in the allegation, that the children of Israel were incompetent to either entertain the question or to judge of the right and wrong of the scheme, or to adjudge of the expediency of the measures which he had to submit for their action. It is more than probable that this objection will be made, and persisted in, for this portion of the human family, enemies of their species, claim that the universal Father instituted among men, between himself and the people, a vicegerency; and, also, instituted an aristocracy, so called in popular language, to be an intermediate in authority between his viceroyal and the masses. It is on this principle, to a greater or less extent, that all existing religious institutions and civil governments are erected, and enforced upon the children of men. Though these governments and institutions be maintained through claimed divine authority they, one and all, are lies; for, all men, according to their capacity, are equal before the government of God, the universal Father.

SEC. 9. Moses claimed to have been specially appointed

by the universal Father his viceroy to the children of Jacob, and through them his law-giver to other nations of the earth; but, the object of his declared mission gave the lie to his claims; and his declarations were a slander upon the attributes of that God whose viceroy he claimed that he was. Right, and Justice, are essential, and the higher attributes of the universal Father. Moses' purposes were wicked, and when carried into execution, were violence and wrong; his ultimate design was to pillage and to murderto destroy and subjugate, nations of people whom he never saw, and who never had wronged him, nor his countrymen whom he led forth to despoil them. As remorseless, and as the lion leaps forth from the jungle upon and destroys his prey, and as ruthlessly as the wolf comes from the depths of the forest into the green pasture, and the sheepfold, Moses went out from Egypt at the head of the Israelites with predetermination to overrun and despoil the whole country between the river of Egypt and the Euphrates. Hence, when Moses appeared before the elders, to declare his mission unto them, his mouth was filled with lies, and it was through this aristocracy, the elders, that the people were made to drink those lies. Then, if the record speaks truly, here, at Rephidim, again he used the same elders to deceive the people, and through that deception to hold them in subjection to his arbitrary authority, as the vicegerent of God, and as one specially commissioned by his authority to rule, and to rule over them.

SEC. 10. Something further about that rock, and the water which it is said ran out of it. The Pentateuch, Moses' auto-biography, does not say that the water ran out of the rock at all. It only says that Moses' Lord told him, that if he would go and smite that rock, "there should come water out of it; and Moses did so in the sight of the elders of the elders of Israel." If Moses' Lord was a sham, as, most assuredly, he was, then the flowing out of the water was also a sham. But where the record is deficient in making the story good, the Commentators come to the rescue of the

heroes of this fabulous story. They say, that after Moses caned the rock, the waters did flow out of it. One of them, after arguing that water did gush forth from the rock, copiously, says:

"We have reason to conclude that this water followed them (the Israelites) as a river from place to place, for a long time; and some think that it continued afterwards to water those parts of the deserts."

Another orthodox, so called, commentator says of this fabulous narration :

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"The water ran like rivers to supply the want of the whole camp, unto which it flowed as far as Rephidim; so that they needed not to go to Horeb for it. This was a continued fountain of water which flowed out of the rock and made this part of Arabia habitable for future ages, which no man dwelt in before."

Such irrational inferences as these Commentators, eminent men, and men of letters, drew from this fabulous narration, and such conclusions as they arrived at, concerning the dealings of a just God with any portion of the children of men, are astounding to every rational mind; and such nonsensical trash as they have published, concerning this fable about Moses smiting a dry rock in Horeb, and rivers of water gushing forth and running miles away to the camp of the famishing Israelites, and then following them in the trail of their march across sandy deserts, around mountains, and through wildernesses, carries with itself to the minds of all who exercise on the subject their own God-powers, their reasoning faculties, the stamp of falsehood; therefore, there exists no necessity for my longer dwelling on this point.

CHAPTER XVIII.

MOSES THE ISRAELITES-THEIR TRAVELS FROM THE WILDERNESS OF SIN TO SINAI, CONCLUDED.

"And they took their journey out of the wilderness of Sin, and encamped in Dophkah. And they departed from Dophkah, and encamped in Alush. And they removed from Alush, and encamped at Rephidim, where was no water for the people to drink. And they departed from Rephidim, and pitched in the wilderness of Sinai." [Num. XXXIII: 12-15.

SECTION 1. According to Moses' record it was at, or near, Rephidim that the Israelites fought the Amalekites; this was their first battle with opposing tribes, or nations, after they left Egypt. From this record it appears that this battle with the Amalekites was fought after the difficulty had at that place, between Moses and the people, had been compromised, or in some way settled, and the people no longer "thirsted for water to drink." This fact is made apparent by Josephus. He says, that, in the disposition made of the military force of the Israelites, Moses "appointed a small party of armed men to be near the water, and take care of the children, and the women, and of the entire camp."

SEC. 2. I here would correct what appears to me to be a great error of the popular Commentators, and of the translators of Jewish manuscripts. It is asserted by them that the Israelites were wholly unarmed when they departed out of Egypt; and, that at this battle with the Amalekites the weapons of war which they possessed were such, and those only, which they gathered along the sea shore, after the overthrow of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. This, with them, is conjecture, only. The record, rationally, construed, tells the story different from the Commentator's version of it. In Ex. xIII: 18, it is said, "the children of

Israel went up harnessed out of the land of Egypt." In the margin of King James' bible, the commonly received English version of the Jewish scriptures, the word "harnessed,” in the foregoing quotation, is rendered, “five in rank." In the authorized version used by the Catholic Church, this text says that the Israelites came up out of Egypt "armed "—prepared for war. This latter interpretation of the original text is, by far, the most consistent as well as most probably the true one-unquestionably, this latter construction is the true interpretation of the text.

SEC. 3. It may be seen, at a glance, that the story, as it is told in King James' bible, is untrue, taking the record itself for authority in the premises. If the numbers of the children of Israel, which left Egypt with Moses, were as great as therein represented to have been, namely, "six hundred thousand" warriors, and the usual proportion of the classes accompanying them which were not warriors, say three millions, or more, in all, and the order of their march was as stated in the said margin, namely, "five in rank," the column of the men of war alone, would have extended from their place of rendezvous, near the Nile, to the Red Sea. Those of the men of war who departed first from Rameses, their place of rendezvous, would have reached the shore of the sea before the last of the army had left the camp-the front would have rested on the shore of the Red Sea and the rear in the valley of the Nile. This form of Moses' fighting force would have given Pharaoh a poor chance for making a quick and successful flank movement upon Moses' column. Then, again, to say nothing about space for their "flocks and herds, and even very much cattle," which they had along with them, the whole people of Israel, placed five in rank, would have formed a marching column of some four hundred miles in length, if the aforesaid estimated number be correct.

SEC. 4. The foregoing expose of the error alluded to above, is a fair statement of its true character, and when tried by its own standard, and reduced to a practicability,