The laws of Moses still influence the world, but not even the orthodox
Jews follow them literally. We bring our reason to bear upon the
precepts of Moses, and those which are not for us we gently pass over.
In fact, the civil laws of most countries prohibit many of the things
which Moses commanded. For instance, the eighteenth verse of the
twenty-second chapter of Exodus says, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to
live." Certainly no Jewish lawyer nor Rabbi, in any part of the world,
advocates the killing of persons supposed to be witches. We explain that
in this instance the inspired writer lapsed and merely mirrored the
ignorance of his time. Or else we fall back upon the undoubted fact that
various writers and translators have tampered with the original
text--this must be so, since the book written by Moses makes record of
his death.
But when we find passages in Moses requiring us to benefit our enemies,
we say with truth that this was the first literature to express for us
the brotherhood of man.
"Thou shalt take no gift: for the gift blindeth the wise and perverteth
the words of the righteous." Here we get Twentieth-Century Wisdom. And
very many passages as fine and true can be found, which prove for us
beyond cavil that Moses was right a part of the time, and to say this
of any man, living or dead, is a very great compliment.
In times of doubt the Jewish people turn to the Torah, or Book of the
Law. This book has been interpreted by the Rabbis, or the learned men,
and to meet the exigencies of living under many conditions, it has been
changed, enlarged and augmented. In these changes the people were not
consulted. Very naturally it was done secretly, for inspired men must be
well dead before the many accept their edict. To be alive is always more
or less of an offense, especially if you be a person and not a
personage.
The murmurings against Moses during his lifetime often broke into a
rumble and a roar. The mob accused him of taking them out into the
wilderness to perish. To get away from the constant bickering and
criticisms of the little minds, Moses used to go up into the mountains
alone to find rest, and there he communicated with his god. It was
surely a great step in advance when all the Elohims were combined into
one Supreme Elohim that was everywhere present and ruled the world.
Instead of dozens of little gods, jealous, jangling, fearful, fretful,
fussy, boastful, changing walking-sticks to serpents, or doing other
things quite as useless, it was a great advance to have one Supreme
Being, dispassionate, a God of Love and Justice, "with whom can be no
variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning." This gradual
ennobling of the conception of Divinity reveals the extent to which man
is ennobling his own nature.
Up to within a very few years God had a rival in the Devil, but now the
Devil lives only as a pleasantry. Until the time of Moses, the God of
Sinai was only the God of the Hebrew people, and this accounts for His
violence, wrath, jealousy, and all of those qualities which went to make
up a barbaric chief, including the tendency of His sons and servants to
make love to the daughters of earth.
It is probable that the idea of God--in opposition to a god, one of many
gods--was a thought that grew up very gradually in the mind of Moses.
The ideal grew, and Moses grew with the ideal.
Then from God being a Spirit, to being Spirit, is a natural, easy and
beautiful evolution.
The thought of angels, devils, heavenly messengers, like Gabriel and the
Holy Ghost, constantly surrounding the Throne, is a suggestion that
comes from the court of the absolute monarch. The Trinity is the
oligarchy refined, and the one son who gives himself as a sacrifice for
all the people who have offended the monarch is the retreating vision of
that night of ignorance when all nations sought to appease the wrath of
their god by the death of human beings.
God to us is Spirit, realized everywhere in unfolding Nature. We are a
part of Nature--we, too, are Spirit. When Moses commands his people that
they must return the stray animal of their enemy to its rightful owner,
we behold a great man struggling to benefit humanity by making them
recognize the laws of Spirit. We are all one family--we can not afford
to wrong or harm even an enemy.
Instead of thousands of warring, jarring families or tribes, we have now
a few strong federations of States, or countries, which, if they would
make war on one another, would today quickly face a larger foe. Already
the idea of one government for all the world is taking form--there must
be one Supreme Arbiter, and all this monstrous expense of money and
flesh and blood and throbbing hearts for purposes of war, must go, just
as we have sent to limbo the jangling, jarring, jealous gods. Also, the
better sentiment of the world will send the czars, emperors, kings,
grand dukes, and the greedy grafters of so-called democracy, into the
dust-heap of oblivion, with all the priestly phantoms that have obscured
the sun and blackened the sky. The gods have gone, but MAN IS HERE.
* * * * *
The plagues that befell the Egyptians were the natural ones to which
Egypt was liable: drought, flood, flies, lice, frogs, disease. The
Israelites very naturally declared that these things were sent as a
punishment by the Israelitish god. I remember a farmer, in my childhood
days, who was accounted by his neighbors as an infidel. He was struck by
lightning and instantly killed, while standing in his doorway. The
Sunday before, this man had worked in the fields, and just before he was
killed he had said, "dammit," or something quite as bad. Our preacher
explained at length that this man's death was a "judgment." Afterward,
when our church was struck by lightning, it was regarded as an accident.
Ignorant and superstitious people always attribute special things to
special causes. When the grasshoppers overran Kansas in Eighteen Hundred
Eighty-five, I heard a good man from the South say it was a punishment
on the Kansans for encouraging Old John Brown. The next year the
boll-weevil ruined the cotton crop, and certain preachers in the North,
who thought they knew, declared it was the lingering wrath of God on
account of slavery.
Three nations unite to form our present civilization. These are the
Greek, the Roman and the Judaic. The lives of Perseus, Romulus and Moses
all teem with the miraculous, but if we accept the supernatural in one
we must in all. Which of these three great nations has contributed most
to our well-being is a question largely decided by temperament; but
just now the star of Greece seems to be in the ascendant. We look to art
for solace. Greece stands for art; Rome for conquest; Judea for
religion.
And yet Moses was a lover of beauty, and the hold he had upon his people
was quite as much through training them to work as through his moral
teaching. Indeed, his morality was expediency--which is reason enough
according to modern science. When he wants them to work, he says, "Thus
saith the Lord," just the same as when he wishes to impress upon them a
thought.
No one can read the twenty-sixth, twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth
chapters of Exodus without being impressed with the fact that the man
who wrote them had in him the spirit of the Master Workman--a King's
Craftsman. His carving the ten commandments on tablets of stone also
shows his skill with mallet and chisel, a talent he had acquired in
Egypt, where Rameses the Second had thousands of men engaged in
sculpture and in making inscriptions in stone.
Several chapters in Exodus might have been penned by Albrecht Durer or
William Morris. The commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thyself any
graven image," was unmistakably made merely to correct a local evil: the
tendency to worship the image instead of the thing it symbolized. People
who do not contribute to the creation of an object fall easy victims to
this error. With all the stern good sense that Moses revealed, it is
but fair to assume that he did not mean the command to be perpetual. It
was only through so much moving about that the Jews seemed to lose their
art spirit.
And certainly the flame of art in the Jewish heart has never died out,
even though at times it has smoldered, for wherever there has been peace
and security for the Jews, they have not been slow to evolve the talent
which creates. History teems with the names of Jews who, in music,
painting, poetry and sculpture, have devoted their days to beauty. And
the germ of genius is seen in many of the Jewish children who attend the
manual-training and art schools of America.
Art has its rise in the sense of sublimity. It seems at times to be a
fulfilment of the religious impulse. The religion which balks at work,
stopping at prayer and contemplation, is a form of arrested development.
The number of people in the exodus was probably two or three thousand.
Renan says that one century only elapsed between the advent of Joseph
into Egypt and the revolt. Very certain it was not a great number that
went forth into the desert. A half-million women could not have borrowed
jewelry of their neighbors--the secret could not have been kept. And in
the negotiations between Moses and the King, it will be remembered that
Moses asked only for the privilege of going three days' journey into the
wilderness to make sacrifices. It was a kind of picnic or religious
campmeeting. A vast multitude could not have taken part in any such
exercise. We also hear of their singing their gratitude on account of
reaching Elim, where there were "twelve springs and seventy palm-trees."
Had there been several million people, as we have been told, the
insignificant shade of seventy trees would have meant nothing to them.
The distance from Goshen in Egypt to Canaan in Palestine was about one
hundred seventy-five miles. But by the circuitous route they traveled it
was nearly a thousand miles. It took forty years to make the passage,
for the way had to be fought through the country of foes who very
naturally sought to block the way. Quick transportation was out of the
question. The rate of speed was about twenty-five miles a year.
Here was a people without homes, or fixed habitation, beset on every
side with the natural dangers of the desert, and compelled to face the
fury of the inhabitants whose lands they overran, fearful,
superstitious, haunted by hunger, danger and doubt. By night a man sent
ahead with a lantern on a pole led the way; by day a cavalcade that
raised a cloud of dust. One was later sung by the poets as a pillar of
fire, and the other a cloud. Chance flocks of quail blown by a storm
into their midst were regarded as a miracle; the white exuding wax of
the manna-plant was told of as "bread"--or more literally food.
Those who had taken part in the original exodus were nearly all
dead--their children and grandchildren survived, desert born and savage
bred. Canaan was not the land flowing with milk and honey that had been
described. Milk and honey are the results of labor applied to land.
Moses knew this and tried to teach this great truth. He was true to his
divine trust. Through doubt, hardship, poverty, misunderstanding, he
held high the ideal--they were going to a better place.
At last, worn by his constant struggle, aged one hundred twenty, "his
eye not dim nor his natural force abated"--for only those live long who
live well--Moses went up into the mountain to find solace in solitude as
was his custom. His people waited for him in vain--he did not return.
Alone there with his God he slept and forgot to awaken. His pilgrimage
was done. "And no man knoweth his grave even unto this day."
History is very seldom recorded on the spot--certainly it was not then.
Centuries followed before fact, tradition, song, legend and folklore
were fused into the form we call Scripture. But out of the fog and mist
of that far-off past there looms in heroic outline the form and features
of a man--a man of will, untiring activity, great hope, deep love, a
faith which at times faltered, but which never died. Moses was the first
man in history who fought for human rights and sought to make men free,
even from their own limitations. "And there arose not a prophet since
Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face."
[Illustration: CONFUCIUS]