of Joseph, when understood correctly, is a warning to all in official stations not to treat those in their power with insolence, and with unrighteous bonds; for they cannot tell in how short a period Time may reverse the current of events and they be made to feel the iron heel of despotic power trampling on the finer fibers of their own souls.

SEC. 11. The objection to my position, and to the reasons that I have given why it was that Joseph so earnestly enjoined it upon his countrymen to take with them his bones out of Egypt, is this: "It was his pious attachment to the land of his birth which prompted that expressed desire." To the objector's position I reply thus: The balance of testimony preponderates, greatly, against that position; and the following facts go far towards verifying this truth. Practically, Joseph knew very little of the country of his birth; his means of thus knowing it were very limited, he being only seventeen years old when he left it and was taken to Egypt. Of his mother, who was buried in Canaan, he knew, comparatively, nothing, he being only five years old when she died. By adding to these the local accident of his birth, in the main, these were the sum total of his attachments to the land of his nativity. But his associations in Egypt were infinitely more extensive, and his opportunities to create far higher associations, and more endearing ties, were almost unbounded.

SEC. 12. In Egypt, Joseph emerged from youth to manhood. In Egypt, he married, and there his children were born and raised. He spent all his active life in Egypt; and, eighty years of that time he was its Governor; so says the record. These opportunities should, and would, if they had been improved in serving God and humanity, have created associations and engendered ties that were ten thousand times stronger, more endearing, and more glorious, than the accident of birth and all its local surroundings. If Joseph had served the people justly, and as his official station afforded him the opportunity, his remains would

have been a sacred relic with the people of Egypt in all coming time; and, his attachment to the people of Egypt would have been infinitely stronger than possibly could have been the cords that tied him to the land of his birth, and stronger than those that bind the true mother to her first-born son.

CHAPTER X.

MOSES THE ISRAELITES-THEIR TRAVELS FROM SUCCOTH TO

ETHAM.

"And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give light: to go by night: He took not away the pillar of the cloud by day, nor the pillar of fire by night, from before the people."

[Ex. XIII: 20-22.

"And it came to pass, when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God led them not through the way of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt; but God led the people about through the way of the wilderness of the Red Sea: And the children of Israel went up harnessed out of the land of Egypt." [Ex. xIII: 17, 18.

"At the commandment of the Lord, they rested in their tents, and at the commandment of the Lord they journeyed: they kept the charge of the Lord by the hand of Moses." [Num. IX: 23.

SECTION 1. In order to prevent any misunderstanding on the part of the reader, by what follows, and to shorten all future debate on the subject, I will define further. My position is this: In that whole movement of the children of Israel in which the record represents that our heavenly Father was special Dictator, and Director, of the movements, Moses was the devising, determining, and directing Power and agency. And when Moses declared that God said thus, and thus, his declarations generally, were the result of his own cogitations; then, practically, he put himself "instead of God," before the people. Otherwise, the God to which Moses directed the people was a mongrel God, one which he constructed out of the forces of discordant matter in the world around him, and the erroneous conceptions of his own ideality.

SEC. 2. That he played the deceiver with the people from the first moment of appearing before them, after his

return from Midian, is certain, else the record belies him. He led, and governed, the people by the false representations which he made to them-through appeals to their credulity and their fears. To sum it all up, I repeat what, before in substance, I have said: In that whole movement, outside of Moses himself, there was no special God-power about it; the directions were all of Moses, and the sacred tomfooleries about the "Tabernacle," and the costly Tabernacle itself, the "Ark of the Covenant," the "Shekinah," the "Holy of Holies," the "Urim and the Thummim" (the conjurer's stone,) and all the gaudy trappings of his Priesthood, originated, or was matured, in Moses' own brain--there was nothing miraculous about the originating of his system, or about the directing agency of the march, nor was there, in fact, anything miraculous manifested before the people during those forty years that they were humbugged by Moses, and followed the lead of his "pillars." All that was done was performed in obedience to natural law; and, whatever was said to have been done that conflicted with natural law, was not done at all-that was a fraud palmed off upon the people, either by Moses, his tools that were his contemporaries, else by his partisan friends who have tinkered with his record, since his day.

SEC. 3. While perusing what follows, the reader will keep steadily in mind this fact, that Moses "was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," and that in his day the Egyptian Court was a leading power in the world of intellect; and that Moses had spent his whole life, eighty years, within less than one hundred miles of the Red Sea, forty years on the west side of it, and forty years east of it; and, that Moses twice, at least, had traveled over the way from Egypt to Mount Horeb; hence, he was well acquainted with the intervening roads and country, and with the coasts, the tides, the channel, or bed, of the sea, and with the winds that swept up and down that body of water, periodically. All this was known to Moses by survey, by actual observation, as well as by study, before

he started with the children of Israel on his filibustering expedition, over that route; hence, until he had passed beyond Horeb he needed no guides, either human or superhuman-up to this old stamping ground of his, he did not require the aid of Hobab's knowledge, nor the use of his eyes to direct the way, and tell them where to encamp; nor, did he need any pillar of cloud or pillar of fire, for the simple reason that he knew the way. Also, be it remembered, that all this time in which Moses was playing conjurer before Pharaoh, and drumming up volunteers, in Egypt, his wife and children, and her relatives, were residing in Midian-in the vicinity of Horeb.

SEC. 4. "And they took their journey from Succoth, and encamped in Etham, in the edge of the wilderness," so says the record. Thus far on the way, there is but little disagreement between different commentators as to the route traveled by the army of Moses. As to the particular locality, or town, called Etham, all is conjectural; it exists in print, but since the Israelites struck their tents, it has not existed elsewhere only in men's minds at least, no traveler has been able to give it a local habitation with any degree of certainty; but, while the Israelites were tented there the place was an habitation in fact as well as in name. But Etham was a wilderness, or desert, bordering on the northern extremity of the western arm of the Red Sea, and extending not only far away to the north, but both west and east, and also south, of its northern extremity. In the southwestern edge of this desert, north of west of the head of the Gulf, is the place, or rather, it is supposed to be the place, where the Israelites encamped in "Etham."

SEC. 5. At this encampment in Etham commences, more visibly, the pious conjectures of writers on sacred history,” and of biblical commentators; and, taking the record for authority, it was here that Moses began to exhibit, plainly, the fact that he knew that he was perpetrating a fraud upon the people of which they were not yet cognizant. Moses had induced the people to follow his lead by the promise