The bondage of Egypt was, he believed, self-imposed. There is no account available, he said, of the enslavement of the Children of Israel by the Egyptians, but a careful consideration of the history of various peoples shows beyond the possibility of a mistake being made, that only those become enslaved who are best fitted for enslavement. A king arose that knew not Joseph--a king who could not believe that at any time there was belonging to that race of strangers a man of supreme intelligence. The Israelites bowed their heads to the yoke of the superior race, the Egyptians, and took their rightful place as slaves. After many days a man of extraordinary intelligence appeared in the person of Moses. A patriot of patriots, he gave the race their God--they seemed to have lived in a perfectly Godless condition in Egypt; and their theology had to be constructed for them by their leader, as well as their laws: the laws for the desert wanderers, and a decalogue for all humanity. He was equal to any emergency, and he had no scruples. He almost succeeded in making a great nation out of a horde of superstitious robbers. Had he succeeded the record would have thrown civilization back a thousand years. Happy it was for the world that the triumph of crime was brief. The cement of bloodshed that kept the kingdom of Israel together for a time soon dissolved. Captivity followed captivity. For a thousand years no improvement whatever took place in the condition of the people--they had no arts; they lived in mud huts at a period when architecture reached a higher level than it had ever attained to previously. When the patriot prophets arose, endeavoring to reform them with words of fire--the sacred fire of truth--they killed them. One chance remained to them. They were offered a religion that would have purified them, in place of the superstition that had demoralized them, and they cried with one voice, as everyone who had known their history and their social characteristics knew they would cry, "Not this Man, but Barabbas."
That was from the earliest period in the history of the race the watchword of the Hebrews. Not the man, but the robber. All that is good and noble and true in manhood--the mercy, the compassion, the self-sacrifice that are comprised in true manhood--they cast beneath their feet, they spat upon, they crucified; but all of the Barabbas in man they embraced. Thus are they become a hissing in the earth, and properly so; for those who hiss at the spirit which has always animated Judaism show that they abhor a thing that is abhorrent. "All Scripture is profitable," continued the preacher, "and practically all that is referred to in the text is an indictment of Judaism. The more earnestly we hold to this truth the greater will be the profit accruing to us from a consideration of the Scripture. But what more terrible indictment of the Hebrew systems could we have than that which is afforded us in the record that the father of the race had twelve sons? He had. But where are ten of them now? Swept out of existence without leaving a single record of their destruction even to their two surviving brethren." He concluded his sermon by stating that he hoped it would be clearly understood that he recognized the fact that in England those members of the Hebrew community who had adopted the methods, the principles, the truths of Christianity even though they still maintained their ancient form of worship in their synagogues, were on a line with civilization. They searched their scriptures and these scriptures had been profitable to them, inasmuch as they had been taught by those scriptures how impossible it was for that form of superstition known as Judaism to be the guide for any people on the face of the earth.
