And now remember the scene at the threshing floor of Atad (Gen. 50th, 10 and 11).
“A grievous mourning.” They embalmed Jacob. They put him in a coffin. They dutifully bore him home, for his son’s sake. Whatsoever may well be done of earthly deed, they do by him and his race. And the end of it all, for them, is a grievous mourning.
Then, for corollary, remember,—all fear of death, and embalming of death, and contemplating of death, and mourning for death, is the pure bondage of Egypt.
And whatsoever is formal, literal, miserable, material, in the deeds of human life, is the preparatory bondage of Egypt; of which, nevertheless, some formalism, some [[112]]literalism, some misery, and some flesh-pot comfort, will always be needful for the education of such beasts as we are. So that, though, when Israel was a child, God loved him, and called his son out of Egypt, He preparatorily sent him into Egypt. And the first deliverer of Israel had to know the wisdom of Egypt before the wisdom of Arabia; and for the last deliverer of Israel, the dawn of infant thought, and the first vision of the earth He came to save, was under the palms of Nile.
Now, therefore, also for all of us, Christians in our nascent state of muddy childhood, when Professor Huxley is asking ironically, ‘Has a frog a soul?’ and scientifically directing young ladies to cut out frogs’ stomachs to see if they can find it,—whatsoever, I say, in our necessary education among that scientific slime of Nile, is formal, literal, miserable, and material, is necessarily Egyptian.
As, for instance, brickmaking, scripture, flogging, and cooking,—upon which four heads of necessary art I take leave to descant a little.
And first of brickmaking. Every following day the beautiful arrangements of modern political economists, obeying the law of covetousness instead of the law of God, send me more letters from gentlemen and ladies asking me ‘how they are to live’?
Well, my refined friends, you will find it needful to live, if it be with success, according to God’s Law; and to love that law, and make it your meditation all [[113]]the day. And the first uttered article in it is, “In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.”
“But you don’t really expect us to work with our hands, and make ourselves hot?”
Why, who, in the name of Him who made you, are you then, that you shouldn’t? Have you got past the flaming sword, back into Eden; and is your celestial opinion there that we miserable Egyptians are to work outside, here, for your dinners, and hand them through the wall to you at a tourniquet? or, as being yet true servants of the devil, while you are blessed, dish it up to you, spiritually hot, through a trap-door?