ing his kindred by an oath, that whensoever they should leave Egypt, they should carry his bones with them.

CHAP. XVII. The History of Job.

THUS ends the first great portion of the history of mankind and of the chosen people of God. The Bible, however, records the piety, trials, and rewards of another of the ancient patriarchs, who lived in the East about this period, or at a somewhat earlier date. In a part of Edom called Huz, resided a chief or prince named Job, whose piety was in striking contrast to the licentiousness and idolatry of the general inhabitants of the country. His riches were very great; he had a large family of sons and daughters; and in every respect was one of the most prosperous of men. At length Satan was permitted by God to tempt Job's patience to the uttermost, by heaping upon him every calamity, short of actual death, which his malice could devise. Yet Job was prepared for the snares that the enemy of his soul was devising for him; for it is said that he continually offered up sacrifices to God on behalf of his children, fearing that, in the excitement of their worldly prosperity and pleasure, they should be forgetting God, and drawing down His wrath upon them. And thus, when the hand of God was laid upon him, and Satan strove to bring him to blaspheme God in wrath because of his afflictions, Job's soul was already strengthened; his prayers returned into his own bosom; and God, who suffered Satan to tempt him, suffered him not to tempt him beyond his strength to bear.

First, all his property was destroyed; plunderers seized his oxen, camels, and asses, and slew his servants; and lightnings struck his sheep. Then his sons and daughters were killed by a tempest, which shattered the house where they were feasting, and crushed them all to death; and lastly, thinking that by this crowning misery he should bring Job to rebel against the goodness of God, Satan obtained leave to smite him with a loath

some disease, which covered him with ulcers from head to foot. Yet Job murmured not, though the wife of his bosom became his chief tormentor, and mocked at him for what she called his weak simplicity, and bade him curse God and die. Stripped of his wealth, and loathsome in his body through his sickness, he sat upon the ground, and was visited by three of his friends. Their comfort, however, was such as to add only to his misery; instead of binding up the wounds of the soul, which the hand of God had inflicted, they aggravated his sufferings by imputing them all to his great guilt; and argued with him, day after day, urging him to admit that it was as they said. But Job, though bitterly lamenting his miseries and the day when he was born, and confessing the greatness and holiness of God, and the sinfulness and nothingness of man, maintained his own integrity and uprightness of heart. This he did, not in pride, or denying that he was a sinner, but against the false accusations of utter ungodliness which his friends laid to his charge. Then a fourth friend came, and though angry with the three former accusers of Job, still he blamed Job, and condemned him for asserting his innocence.

At length God himself spoke, and, in a miraculous voice, condemned the accusers of His faithful servant; and while He declared His own almighty power and majesty, and the nothingness of man, He vindicated Job from the charges brought against him; and, in return for the steadfastness with which he had held fast to his duty in the midst of such bitter calamities, gave him large possessions, a numerous family, and a great reputation among his fellow-countrymen.

A large portion of the Book of Job is written in verse in the original Hebrew; and scarcely any part of the whole of Scripture contains more wonderful or instructive descriptions of the greatness and glory of God in His visible creation. It is to be remarked also, that on one of the occasions in which Job replies to his friends' harsh charges, he declares his belief, not only in a future state of happiness, but in the resurrection of the body

also; declaring that, through the power of a Redeemer, he should in his flesh see God. "I know that my Redeemer liveth," he said; "and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God: whom I myself shall see; and my eyes shall behold, and not another."

BOOK II.

THE DEPARTURE FROM EGYPT.

CHAP. I. The Birth of Moses, and his Mission to the Israelites.

MANY years after Joseph's death, the affairs of his kindred underwent a total change. The king who now sat on the throne of Egypt, and who, like the other Egyptian monarchs, was called Pharao, abhorred the Israelites as much as the Pharao who had been Joseph's friend had respected them. The natural dislike of the Egyptian people to a shepherd race broke forth as violently as ever, and nothing could exceed the misery to which the children of Israel were reduced. And the more they increased in numbers, the more jealous of their prosperity and strength were Pharao and his subjects, dreading lest they should take part with any foreign people who might invade Egypt. Yet they would not consent to their leaving Egypt in peace, but preferred retaining them as slaves; and they sought to reduce their numbers to a less formidable amount by all kinds of cruelty. Pharao set them to build various immense public works and new cities; tormenting them still more by forcing them to toil beyond their strength in brickmaking and other laborious tasks. Still all was vain. The more the Israelites were persecuted, the more quickly they multiplied, till at last Pharao resolved to have every newborn male child thrown into the river Nile.

At this time a child was born to a woman of the tribe, or descendants, of Levi, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, who contrived to hide her infant from his murderers for three months. At length, when she could conceal him no longer, she made a little basket of bulrushes, and put the babe in it, and laid him gently

down among the water-plants that grew by the river's bank. His sister also, who was several years older, was stationed hard by, to watch and see what would become of the child. By and by the king's daughter and her maidens came down to bathe, and found the child lying in the basket. Her heart was touched with pity, for she guessed that the babe must belong to one of the Hebrew women; and while she was looking at it, the child's sister, who had seen all that had passed, came up and begged to be allowed to call a Hebrew woman to be the child's nurse. To this Pharao's daughter consented, and the girl ran and called her own mother. When the mother was come, the king's daughter, not knowing that the child's mother was before her, gave him to her to nurse, and adopted him as her own child, calling him by the name of Moses, which signifies one who is taken out of the water. When Moses was grown up, his mother returned him to the king's daughter; and he lived under her protection, favoured and prosperous, while all his fellow-countrymen were persecuted and in misery.

An occasion soon offered on which he shewed that his heart was with his suffering kindred, notwithstanding all the luxuries he enjoyed in Pharao's house. He one day saw an Egyptian striking a Hebrew; and in his indignation at the tyranny, for the Hebrew dared not resist, he struck the Egyptian and slew him, thinking no one was near. The next day he saw two of his own fellow-countrymen quarrelling, and tried to reconcile them; when the man who was in the wrong said, "Wilt thou kill me, as thou didst the Egyptian yesterday?" Hearing this, Moses was filled with fear, finding that what he had done had got abroad. Pharao also heard the story, and would have killed Moses in return, had he not fled instantly from the palace and taken refuge in a distant country, the land of Madian, where he married the daughter of Jethro, the priest of the country, and undertook the duties of a shepherd to his father-in-law.

At length the time came when it was the will of