His great
love helped the Jews out of slavery; and that same great love of His
at this Easter-tide, moved Him to die and rise again for the sins of
the whole world. In that first Passover He delivered only one
people. On the first Easter He delivered all mankind. The Jews were
under cruel tyrants in the land of Egypt. So were all mankind over
the world, when Jesus came. The Jews in Egypt were slaves to worse
things than the whip of their task-masters; they had slaves' hearts,
as well as slaves' bodies. They were kept down not only by the
Egyptians, but by their own ignorance, and idolatry, and selfish
division, and foul sins. They were spiritually dead--without a
noble, pure, manful feeling left in them. Their history makes no
secret of that. The Bible seems to take every care to let us see
into what a miserable and brutal state they had fallen. Christ sent
Moses to raise them out of that death; to take them through the Red
Sea, as a sign that all that was washed away, to be forgiven of God
and forgotten by them, and that from the moment they landed, a free
people, on the farther shore, they were to consider all their old
life past and a new one begun. So they were baptized unto Moses in
the cloud and in the sea, as St.
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