Idolatry therefore in this country was in no advanced state in Joseph's time, and the settlement of the patriarchs there, and the rank and authority that Joseph held, must have checked its growth for some considerable period.

At the time when the Israelites went out of Egypt, that country and the land of Canaan were sunk in the grossest idolatry. The name of Jehovah was forgotten, and in the public religion no traces were remaining of his worship. And yet the examples upon record of particular persons who amid the general apostasy retained some attachment to the service of the true God, afford I think an argument, that in either country this extreme degeneracy was at that time of no very ancient date.

The two Egyptian women to whom Pharaoh committed the iniquitous business of stifling the male children of the Hebrews

in the birth "feared God," i. e. they feared the true God; for the superstitious fear of idols is never in the Scripture language called the fear of God. They feared God in that degree that they would not execute the king's command; and that the true fear of God was the motive from which they acted appears from the recompense they received: "Because the midwives "feared God, God dealt well with them and “made their families great and prosperous." The mixed multitude which went with Moses out of Egypt, though not genuine Israelites, were surely in some degree worshippers of the God of Israel; for idolaters, in the proper sense of the word, would hardly have been permitted to follow the armies of the Lord. And after forty years, when the Israelites arrived at the land of Canaan, Joshua's spies found in the town of Jericho a woman who confessed that

"Jehovah the God of Israel, he is God "in heaven above and in the earth be"neath." And from this persuasion and in confident expectation of the execution of his vengeance on her guilty country, she entertained the Israelitish spies and managed their escape, for which she is commemorated by St Paul in his epistle to the Hebrews among the eminent examples of faith.

These remains of true religion which were found in Egypt and Canaan so late as the days of Moses and Joshua are I think a proof, that a total apostasy from the invisible Creator to the worship of fictitious deities as the sole managers and masters of this lower world, general as it was now become, had not however long prevailed in the countries where the corruptions of idolatry were of the longest

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standing, and may be supposed to have made the greatest advances.

And as for the idolatry of the older and the milder sort, which retaining the worship of the true God and acknowledging his providence, added a superstitious adoration of certain inferior spirits, who were supposed to have a delegated command under the controul of the Supreme over different parts of nature, from this even the chosen family itself was not always

pure.

When the patriarch was to take up his abode at Bethel, the place where God appeared to him when he fled from Esau, which he considered as sanctified by God's immediate presence, we find him ordering his household to put away their strange gods; of which they had no small variety as appears by the sacred historian's expression, that in compliance with this injunc

tion they gave unto Jacob all their strange gods. These were probably the idols which Rachel brought with her from Mesopotamia, with others introduced by Judah's marriage with the daughter of a Canaanite.

Upon occasion of this removal to Bethel the patriarch reformed the worship of his family and his dependants, and took measures to prevent an immediate revival of the corruption. He put the objects of superstitious adoration out of sight, burying the idols under an oak near Shechem. But none that is conversant with the sacred history of the Israelites can doubt, that after Jacob's death his descendants contracted a new stain, and in the later years of their sojournment in Goshen were deeply infected with the idolatry which then prevailed in Egypt, to which in the desert they discovered an attachment.