Egypt.”[1] “Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”[2] And in a still more solemn passage: “For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”[3] “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger, as for one of your own country: for I am the Lord your God.”[4] But nevertheless the Hebrew did not understand, nor, without a miracle which would have made the shadow go down two thousand years on the sundial of history, could he have understood the brotherhood of man; much less that higher brotherhood by which all men are united in Christ.
When the scene of history opens, the nations are simply competitors for existence, bound together by no laws or sympathies, but preying on each other like the wild beasts of the forest, and having each its own national God, who is an enemy to the Gods of the other nations. Devotion to his nation was the most comprehensive, and therefore the highest, bond of affection which man then knew; and his moral eye could see nothing but patriotic virtue in the deeds of Scævola and Ehud, or in the triumphal song of Deborah over the fall (it mattered not by what means) of the grand
