But still the awful signs proceeded, and in the fifth, the plague of murrain, Apis the bull-god suffered, with all his bovine tribe,—that Apis, the first of animal deities, one of the incarnations of Osiris the god of agriculture, and the most popular deity throughout the land of Egypt,—that Apis which was stalled in a golden manger, and fed to the sound of music, with perfumed oats, and straw from golden plates,—that bovine deity, who bleated oracles, and whose very excrements were holy-who was supposed to be born of a virgin cow. by the direct influence of the rays of the moon, and upon whose life depended the welfare of Lower Egypt, that same Apis then became hopelessly smitten with the same murrain whereby the less sacred domestic cattle of Egypt were destroyed. So important was the birth of the Apis, that his discovery was a triumphant festival,-his death, a national mourning. Civil and domestic occurrences were dated by the years of its life; and stored away in the vast subterranean catacombs of the Serapeum, near Memphis, in lofty granite sarcophagi, lay all the sacrasanct mummies of the Apis gods of Egypt. These sarcophagi have in the last few years rendered a most important service to Biblical chronology, for M. Marriette Bey in his excavations for the Pasha of Egypt discovered the entrance to the catacombs, and was the first European who for many centuries had read the hieroglyphical epitaphs upon those tombs. which had been closed since the rise of Christianity.

The sarcophagi, sixty-four in number, when discovered, were all dated; and further, had around them. no less than six hundred funeral tablets in honour of the priests of the different Apii, dating from the eighteenth dynasty, 200 B.C., to the very rise of the Christian era. These were not only consecutive, but contained many historical facts, and by the aid of these tablets, or stéle, much of the later chronology of the Bible has been synchronized. But time presses.

The sixth plague converted the ashes of blessing into the instruments of curse. The clergy, by supernatural power the prescriptive doctors of the people, fled from the infliction, and were powerless to cure or to avert it, and hence they and their gods were shown to be inutile. Of the extent of their real knowledge of medical science, students are now themselves enabled to judge more correctly than any former commentators, for three treatises on medicine written in ancient hieroglyphics exist; of one, an account has lately been published by the learned Dr. Birch, who has shown that it contains prescriptions ascribed to king Cheops, the founder of the first pyramid, 4000 B.C. A second, published by M. Brugsch, and ascribed to the time of Rameses I., treats of the cure of diseases by the use of amulets, incantations, and sympathetic remedies,-analogous to those used in England two hundred years ago, when a man who was knocked down by a club, or stabbed by a knife, simply bathed the part afflicted and put himself to bed, and sent

for the doctor to anoint the stick or knife with which the injury was inflicted with Fryer's Balsam, tallow from the altar candles, and extracts inspissated from plants gathered when the planets were in trine, or the sun in Jupiter. Of a like class were all the Egyptian remedies-superstitious, empirical, and absurd to an extreme degree; when therefore, in the sixth judgment, both physician and patient were attacked by the plague of boils, neither charm nor prayer availed them, no rank excepted, or amulet protected, all suffered alike.

The seventh act of the drama of the Dies Iræ commenced with a fearful storm. Rain, though not unknown in Egypt, was the particular attribute of the feminine deities of Isis, queen of heaven, of Satē, goddess of the material sky, and of Neith, the spiritual heaven, and goddess of wisdom. The souls of the dead, which were supposed to ascend to the heavens, were by Isis and Neith especially protected, and from them all blessings descended. But in this plague, regardless of, and restraintless by, feminine deities, the hail and lightning descended, and, terrified by the awful judgment, the king, disowning his own divinity, declared that he was wicked, a concession of a nature which only those who well understand the Egyptian theology can duly appreciate.

As the seventh with storm, so the eighth with locusts, devastated the land, and the trees, which themselves were sacred, the vegetable gods, despised

by Juvenal and ridiculed by Pliny,-the pine, the tree of life; the tamarisk, that of knowledge; the lotus, sacred to the dead, the papyrus to the gods, and many lesser vegetables to lesser deities, all were smitten then, and finally the locust, rarely seen, and scarcely, from its rarity, even dreaded in Egypt, devoured all that the hail had left.

As the curtain closed upon the awful tragedy, the stage of the theatre became darkened, for when the hands of the prophet were extended towards heaven, a darkness that might be felt covered the land. This, as it was the last directly theological, so it was also, in one sense, the most conclusive; for after all, at the root of all the Egyptian theogony lay the divine truth that there was one unbegotten God, sole, existent, and eternal. "The creator of all existences and the unbegotten." He, the great deity, or Amun Ra, was believed to inhabit the heaven of heavens itself-to produce all the other gods by direct emanation; as most of the deities were originated from him, so most of their names were compounded with his, and hè the invisible and beneficent God was symbolized by eternal light-the sun was his representative, and all living things were but his manifestations. In the conception of his power and dignity. the extremes of materialism and pantheism united. But then at the word of the servant of a greater god, a dark veil passed between him and his creatures. A three-days' curse, because of his three attributes, as Amun Ra, father of divine life, Kheper Ra, the

father of animal, and Kneph Ra, of human, then he, the god of the heavens and of the Egyptians, was by

the God of the Israelites blotted out.

Last of all, descended the horrors of the tenth plague. The Egyptians having felt, and the Israelites having witnessed, the powerlessness of the gods they had been accustomed to venerate, the long-delayed retribution fell upon the Pharaoh and his servants; and those who had made the Israelites childless, were by an invisible and irresistible executioner rendered childless themselves. Fancy cannot imagine, artist cannot paint, nor poet describe, the scene which produced the cry which rang throughout all the land of Egypt, when under the very shadow of the gods whom he worshipped, with their amulets upon his heart, and their adorations inscribed in the bracelets upon his hands, the first-born of every Egyptian lay agonized, paralyzed, dead! To say more, belongs to the province of the theologian, and perhaps I have already said too much; but as this is one of the subjects which has received most light from the researches of Biblical archæology, I have ventured, despite its necessary length of detail, to bring it before your notice.

Nor are the corroborations of Old Testament History to be taken from Egypt alone, for, as might be expected from the monuments of Assyria, fresh confirmations avail us there, and that mighty empire has witnessed for the truth of the Bible in an unexpected manner, and with no uncertain voice. From the ruins