Steps in sin.
Bad men, when their designs are frustrated, and things fall out otherwise than as they wish, are far from suspecting that it is God who opposes them and brings their counsels to nought. They find fault with themselves or their advisers, and suppose that, if their end is not to be compassed in one way, it may he obtained in another. Like Balak (Numbers 22:23.), they would outwit God; or rather, not realising his existence, they would force fortune by a combination of inventiveness, perseverance, and audacity. When one means fails, they do not lay aside their design, but seek another means. And their second plan is almost always more wicked than their first. Pharaoh follows up the cruel thought of grinding oppression by the still more cruel resolve to effect his purpose through murder. And not liking to incur the odium of open murder, he devises a secret system, a crypteia, which shall rid him of a certain number of his enemies, and yet keep him clear, even of suspicion. The midwives, had they come into his plan, would of course have said that the children they murdered were stillborn, or died from natural causes. But this crafty scheme likewise fails; and then what follows? His subtle brain invents a third plan, and it is the cruelest and wickedest of all. Grown shameless, he openly avows himself a murderer, takes his whole people into his confidence, compels them, so far as he can, to be a nation of murderers, and extends his homicidal project to all the males. "Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river." The Nile, according to his own religion, was a god, and no Egyptian corpse ever defiled it; but everything must give way that the king may work his wicked will, and the restraints of the national creed are as little regarded as those of natural morality. Facilis descensus Averni; the steps by which men go down the road to hell are easy; each is in advance of the other, a little further on in guilt; there is no startling transition; and so, by little and little, advance is made, and the neophyte becomes a graduate in the school of crime.