Those who do their life-work in foreign lands, far from home, should not forget that Jesus also was driven into exile as a boy, and died without a roof over His head. There were multitudes of Jews in Egypt, but not one of them recognized Him as Messiah. There were shepherds, but they did not sing His praise, and wise men, but they brought no gifts. Yet in Egypt they had the Old Testament, with its prophecies, translated into the Greek vernacular--an open Bible--and they had the heathen at their very doors. Here surely was the ideal headquarters for a worldwide mission! But nothing, not one word, of the same is recorded. Our Lord went to Egypt and returned thence without arousing one flicker of interest, apparently, in any human heart. Nor at any subsequent time did He visit this unresponsive region. And when the Apostle Paul mapped out his missionary tours, as a strategist maps out the advance of his army, the territory which he set forth to win was not Egypt, but Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome herself.
The name "Egypt," like the country, means Mud. In Egypt man has been all that he can be as a creature of the dust, living at ease in his long valley, with the rich river at his feet, flowing he knows not whence, and bringing to him as a matter of course the red and fruitful soil of distant mountains, which he has no need to climb or to pierce with his pickaxe. There were treasures in Egypt. There was science. There were glitter and pomp. There were chariots and horses in which men trusted. But the leeks, the garlics, the cucumbers, the melons, and the onions, on which men fed themselves, grew upon the ground, and could only be gathered by stooping. The temples of Egypt were doubtless massive and abiding; but, unlike the Temple of Jerusalem, and all, even the rudest, Christian churches, they had no pinnacle, pointing to God, being finished skywards with a heavy, level line, as if worship itself must creep along the ground like the sacred and cruel crocodile. The plagues of Egypt were, as a rule, the plagues of plenty--hideous diseases on man and beast, loathsome vermin in the very sanctity of home, corrupted water, devastation by locusts, the darkness of superstition, the death even of the firstborn. In Egypt, one discovers precisely what our Lord meant when He spoke of the deceitfulness of riches choking the Word. He learnt that lesson while He was learning to walk.
The Doom of Egypt
When Abraham left Chaldea, the great question that he had to decide was whether he would settle in Palestine, with its constant dread of drought, its crags and caves, its whirlwinds, earthquakes, and convulsions; or in Egypt, with its comfort and ease. Abraham, fleeing from famine, tasted the Egyptian pleasures, and only escaped therefrom just in time to avoid irreparable disgrace. The first Joseph went to Egypt under compulsion, and showed us that a man so compelled may preserve his soul amid an evil environment. But when he had overcome the trials of prison on the one hand and of the palace on the other, even he directed that at least his bones should escape, and lie in the land of liberty, from which his spirit had never been separated. And when his brethren declined to follow that cortege, as they might have done--when they failed to return to the land of reverence and justice--they were enslaved. Moses was bred a prince of Egypt, o but preferring the rigor of law to the luxury of a court, he also fled to the solitude of Sinai. And Jeremiah, knowing that no good could come of it, only emigrated to Egypt under protest.
The tyranny of the Nile was one with the tyranny of the Euphrates, from which Abraham fled; and " the Land of Promise," struggling for existence between the sand of the sea and the sand of the desert, was the one shred of God's earth where a man could call his soul his own, and so render up that soul to God who gave it. You find it all set out in that long 78th Psalm. You find it again in Psalm 105. The drama is the very burden of Stephen's address. It was what Paul preached at Antioch. It is prominent in the great pćan of faith which was written "to the Hebrews." And Hosea--the earliest of Minor Prophets, whose very name means "Salvation"--struck the dominant note of Jewish history when he said: " Out of Egypt have I called my son "--called him, because I loved him. Commerce, comfort, riches, courts--all these things are secondary to the supreme claim of the soul. Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon, had shown the utmost that a good man may do to reclaim a country without changing the people's hearts. If Jesus did not revive their efforts, it was because His aims were more thorough. He knew that the best of rulers is powerless when the populace is depraved. Nations are governed neither better nor worse than they deserve.
The Return to Nazareth
Although Joseph, the husband of Mary, was reminded by his very name of these great traditions of his race, he was apparently settling down in Egypt as a Jew of the Dispersion, when a dream aroused him. Then, like Abraham and Moses, he also returned again to the Promised Land, taking with him the Child and His mother. But he heard that Archehus reigned in Jerusalem, and he had to turn aside from Judea, so that Jesus became once more an exile, this time in His own native land. In Bethlehem He could trace an ancestry. In Jerusalem He could claim a crown. But in Nazareth He was stripped of all His privileges. He began life simply as a village boy, The only etiquette that He learned was respect for others. His only statecraft was service. His only decoration was character. His only armory was Scripture. Nothing, not even goodness, was made easier for Him than it is for us; and we who chafe at our days of routine will find that routine was also His appointed lot. He understands its every detail. He was in all points tempted or tested like as we are, yet without sin; and He is thus able to put us at our ease with our best selves--the best that is in us--so helpful is His friendship, so sympathetic. It was well for us that He was not brought up artificially, as a Prince or a Lama, but with the home for His school, with a mother for His guide, and with the countryside for His outlook.
Jesus did not revisit Egypt, nor did He once mention this place of His babyhood. But on His inner consciousness the thought and life of Egypt left a color that never faded. When one looks at the colossal effigies of the Pharaohs, one cannot but think of our Lord's question--how, by taking thought, a man can add one cubit to his stature. In that single sentence He summed up the megalomania of a thousand despots, and reduced us all to our true limits. If His Bible was the Alexandrian Septuagint, translated by seventy scholars, so was His Gospel to be preached by seventy evangelists, who could translate the Word of God into terms, not of language, but of life and faith and happiness.
And, further, He first dealt with the one eternal fact which even Egypt cannot avoid--the fact of death. The Land of Promise was a place of home, where men could dwell, each under his own vine and fig-tree, with those fruits that one must gather, not by stooping, but by reaching forth the hand and looking upward. The House of Bondage was a place where men lived among the tombs. By the desperate device of embalming the body, they hoped to win the splendors of immortality, and they succeeded. You may still see the face of Rameses II in the museum of Cairo. Jesus taught us that, whatever happens to the body, in Him our souls are safe; and, by removing from us His own most blessed and wounded body, bearing it with Him to the throne of God, He destroyed for ever the efficacy of relic-worship, which fades into a memory, having accomplished in Egypt all the human consolation of which it was capable. Prolonged and determined as has been the attempt of the Catholic Church, in this respect, to undo His liberating work, that attempt has failed.
Books of Life and Death
Where our Bible is a Book of Life, the Bible of ancient Egypt was a Book of the Dead. In the British Museum you may see it unfolded, with all its cold and pitiless portrayal of the Last Judgment. Egyptians knew that the time would come when souls would be weighed in the balance, and they recognized that, under this test, character alone would count. Like Paul, when he wrote to the Romans, they held that man's life in this world, left to itself, tended steadily to reduce him to the level of an animal, and their conception of a future state was that our souls would return, not to God, but to brute beasts and creeping creatures. They constantly separated the righteous from the unrighteous--the sheep from the goats--and by what test? Knowing our Lord's parable, one is startled to find, in the Egyptian ritual of the Last Judgment, the soul crying out:
"I have won for myself God by my love; I have given bread to the hungry--water to the thirsty---clothes to the naked; I have made a refuge for the forsaken."
Even the terrible declaration of Jesus--that of every idle word a man shall speak he must give an account, when all is known--has its parallel in the Book of the Dead, where punishment is set out as essentially a disclosure of truth, in which our conversations are evidence.
This was the fear of death under which, in the words of Zecharias, afterwards developed by the Apostle Paul, men were all their lifetime subject to bondage. What it means to the world and to each of us can best be illustrated--though it is only illustration--by comparing the scales of right and wrong, as painted by the artists of Egypt, with those same scales as sculptured by the masons of the Middle Ages above the doors of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris. To heal the sick, to feed the hungry, to support the widowed mother, to hallow the marriage-feast, and to cheer the poor--all this would have left the salvation of man still imperfect, if the last and final terror of retribution remained as a shadow over the imagination and the conscience. Across the heartless logic of the Egyptian Bible--the blind tragedy of cause and effect--the Redeemer shed His life-blood; and while the Judge assumes the black cap, His ministers, in every land and every age, offer mercy to the repentant soul. With Jesus it was not, as in Egypt, that we win for ourselves God by our love. It was God who, by His love, won for Himself us men.