cruelty. As Isaiah had predicted, they were given over "into the hand of a cruel lord, and a fierce king ruled over them." The Persians oppressed them so severely that they were driven again and again to revolt, but each time they were subdued with fresh cruelties. When the Persian empire fell, Alexander the Great-a Grecian, and therefore another Aryan or Japhetic conqueror-became their master, and left the city of Alexandria as a memento of his dominion in the land. After his death Egypt fell to the share of his general, Ptolemy, whose successors governed it for many generations, the first few fairly well; but, as Strabo asserts, "all after the third very ill, being corrupted by luxury." This dynasty, after reigning 294 years, ended in the suicide of the infamous Cleopatra. Octavius Cæsar then reduced Egypt to a Roman province (30 B.C.), and for 670 years it was governed by prefects sent from Rome, or-after the division of the empire -from Constantinople. Then succeeded the Saracen dominion, when Omar conquered Egypt, and burned the invaluable Alexandrian library of 400,000 volumes, sinking the already base kingdom lower than ever before, by leaving it a prey to ignorance and superstition. For six centuries this Saracenic rule lasted; and then a dynasty of actual slaves ruled Egypt for 267 years.1 THE MAMELUKS were Circassian or Turkish slaves bought young and trained to military service by the Sultans of Egypt, who grew insolent at last, slew their sovereign, and usurped the government of the country. Here then were the once proud Egyptians become servants of servants indeed! The rule of the Mameluks was a succession of "wars, battles, injuries, and rapines." Twenty-four Turkish and twenty-three Circassian sultans succeeded each other, the last being hanged before one of the gates of Cairo by Selim, the Turkish emperor, who put an end to the Mameluk government, and annexed Egypt to the Ottoman empire, to which nominally it still belongs.

1 Until A.D. 1517.

Thus, for twenty-five long centuries, the Egyptian descendants of Ham have been in subjection to successive forms of Semitic and Aryan rule; never once independent, never ruled even by a native viceroy, never able to throw off the yoke, much less to impose their authority on others, they have continued a kingdom, but have been, and are, "the basest of the kingdoms." "A servant of servants will he be unto his brethren," said Noah; and such is Egypt to this day. Look where we will the world over, nowhere can we see Hamitic races in a position of supremacy.

But it was not always thus. The earliest empires of antiquity were Hamitic. Nimrod conquered Semitic peoples; Egypt held Israel in bondage. In chronological order, supremacy in the earth fell first to the Hamites, then to the Shemites or Semitic nations, and lastly, up to the present time, to the descendants of Japhet.

Now, here a remarkable and most interesting fact claims our attention, and is in itself a strong argument for the inspiration of this Noahic prophecy. So far from there being any sign of its fulfilment in the days of Moses, or even at the latest date to which sceptical criticism assigns the authorship of the Pentateuch, appearances were all entirely the other way. No human foresight would have anticipated degradation and servile subjection for the Hamitic races in those early ages. Things looked as if nothing could have well been more mistaken than the prediction. All the greatest empires of the earliest antiquity were Hamitic: the mighty and long-continued kingdom of Egypt; the great empire of Nimrod, of whose gigantic and magnificent cities and temples we have ocular evidence in our own day; all the seven nations of Canaan; and above all, this mighty, warlike, extensive, and long-lasting empire of the Hittitesall were Hamitic. Wherever the eye turned, the posterity of the youngest son of Noah would in those early ages have been observed to be in the ascendant. While Abraham

was still nothing but a sheik of a pastoral tribe wandering over the quiet uplands of Palestine, the Hamitic Pharaoh surrounded by his princes was already reigning in state in Egypt; and centuries later, when Abraham's posterity were groaning under cruel bondage in the land of Ham, its proud monarch refused to liberate his oppressed captives. Even when a first instalment of fulfilment occurred in the conquest of the Canaanites by the Israelites under Joshua, the mighty empire of the Hittites remained, and continued to hold by far the larger part of the territory promised to the seed of Abraham. Just as Cain, who was cursed from the earth which had opened her mouth to receive his brother's blood from his hand, went out from the presence of the Lord, and with his descendants built cities, invented arts, cultivated music, grew rich and great and wicked, so with the descendants of Noah's youngest son. Their doom of

God's great

The nations

degradation did not overtake them all at once. judgments linger; they are slow, but sure. of Canaan were not expelled until their iniquity was full; the Hamites generally did not sink into servile subjection to their brethren until they had proved their utter unfitness to be the leading races of the world. A thousand years is with the Lord only as one day. The Lord was not slack concerning His promise of supremacy to Shem and Japhet, but He was in no haste to vindicate His own truth and faithfulness. The two great branches of the Hamitic family -the African and the Asiatic-were both permitted to rise into eminence in the earliest ages of history: "For the last three thousand years the world has been mainly indebted for its advancement to the Semitic and Indo-European races, but it was otherwise in the first ages. Egypt and Babylon, Mizraim and Nimrod-both descendants of Ham-led the way and acted as the pioneers of mankind in the various untrodden fields of art, literature, and science. Alphabetic writing, astronomy, history, chronology, architecture, plastic

art, sculpture, navigation, agriculture, textile industry, seem all of them to have had their origin in one or other of these two countries." 1

Is this strange? No, but it is in harmony with the course of Divine providence revealed to us throughout Scripture: "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterward that which is spiritual." "Many that are first shall be last, and the last shall be first." These sons of Ham had ample time and a wide sphere allowed them in which to show forth what was in them, in which to display the character that was subsequently to bring down upon them the degradation predicted. God never inflicts undeserved judgments; He waits until men fill up the measure of their iniquity. Had servitude overtaken the Hamites from the first, it might have seemed an arbitrary and unjust infliction —a thing of which the providential government of God affords no instance. He renders to every man according to his works. What a man sows, that he also reaps; and what is true of individuals, is true also of nations and of races. Egypt and Babylon, the Canaanites and the Hittites, one and all fell into the lowest depths of idolatry, and into the vilest forms of sensualism, cruelty, and sin; they perished in their own corruption, and were the victims of their own iniquities. They deserved the degradation that in after ages overtook them, and sank not into servitude ere they had proved themselves unworthy of supremacy. The Hamitic races have left us-what? The inheritance of great and influential religions, like the Semites? Descendants who form the leading nations of the earth to-day, like the Japhetites ? A rich and precious literature moulding still the minds of men? No; none of these. They have left us-the pyramids of Egypt, the monstrous carvings of Memphis and Thebes, the masses of masonry buried in the mounds of Nimrud; boastful, vainglorious inscriptions by the hundred,

1 Rawlinson's "Ancient Monarchies," vol. i. p. 60.

with bas-relief presentations, all too vivid, of their horrible cruelties, their devastating wars, and their degrading superstitions. We know what their religion and their morals must have been from these, as well as from the assertions of history. Nineveh, Babylon, and Egypt were, besides all of them, enemies and oppressors of Israel. Ezekiel's description of

the idolatry, the pride, and the wickedness of Egypt present an awfully dark picture of the nation.

They are described by contemporary historians as a luxurious, unwarlike, vicious, and faithless people. "Such men are evidently born not to command, but to obey; they are altogether unworthy of liberty, and slavery is the fittest for them, as they are fittest for slavery." For "righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach to any people." Where now are the Hamite races ? What thrones do they occupy? what sceptres do they wield? what influence do they exert in the earth? They have disappeared from the stage of history as rulers, leaders, actors, almost as completely as if they had never been. They continue to exist, but as degraded and enslaved peoples; living witnesses of the truth of God, almost as great a miracle as the Jews themselves.

And next we inquire, What about the religious supremacy of Shem? Has God in any peculiar sense been the God of His descendants, and have they held Hamitic races in subjection ?

The answer to this question is the simple but all-comprehensive statement that Shem was the father of Abraham. As we shall see more fully in a later section, all the true religion in the world comes to it through Abraham, and thus through Shem. The only three religions on earth which have any knowledge at all of the one living and true God are Semitic. Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism (which, defective and even blasphemous as it is, is yet infinitely nearer the truth than any form of idol-worship or "fetish")—all three flow from Abraham, the Hebrew, as their human fountain