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 sation with the Israelites, and previous to their reception of him as a messenger from God, the true state of the Jewish people, by many significant acts. Among those acts, was the leprosy of his own hand. They might not, and probably did not, view it as representative of their own condition. They beheld it as a miracle, and to their external and sensuous perception, miracles alone were convincing, and these only for the time they lasted. But to those who are accustomed to reflect on every thing they behold, and who believe in the spiritual sense of the Word, the leprous hand of Moses was a true figure of the condition of the children of Israel then, and of the condition it would ultimately shadow forth as the representation of a church. The leper was at once separated from all the comforts and endearments of social enjoyment. Possessed of no power, treated as something most loathsome, not suffered to mingle with, or even to come near others, he might, in the expressive words of the book of the Apocalypse, uttered on another occasion, be said to be dead while he lived. And such were the Israelites to the Egyptians: they were, in every sense of the word, an abomination to them. The Egyptians profited by their labour, but the hand was considered too polluted for association. That same leprous hand, too, represented exactly their own state as a church. Their religion was external; all their ceremonies were destitute of spirituality; they were fair and beautiful without, but within stained by every evil. Thus they, in many instances, perverted truth, and in some instances profaned it by their traditions; and the leprous hand, white as snow, was a true figure of their condition,