Moses loses nothing by diffuseness. Even in days that were made long
by intolerable monotony--in which men lived centuries because of
weariness--Moses did not shrink from a condensation unparalleled in human
literature.
Considered as embracing the history of one month only, the third Book
of Moses may claim to be the most remarkable book in the Old Testament.
Containing twenty-seven chapters, ranging its contents under sixteen
different categories, and requiring to be actively represented within the
space of twenty-eight days--it may, in its own degree, claim an energy
not inferior to the Book of Genesis.
The same fearlessness of treatment is distinctive of both books.
The reverent audacity which represented creation as the work of six
days--whatever the measure of a day may be--did not shrink from
focalizing into one month the whole discipline of life.
Moses’ words could hardly have been fewer if he had lived in our time of
feverish haste and tumult. To put up the Heavens and the Earth in one
chapter was a miracle in authorship. Yet, well pondered, it was the only
thing to be done. Any poet could have built them in endless stanzas, and
any philosopher could have begun the infinite story in a book too large
for the world to hold.
Moses chose the more excellent way, creating creation with a swiftness
that has dazed a literal criticism ever since--literal criticism that
has but one season in its dreary year, a year that knows nothing of
snow-blossom or wedded light and song. But this very haste was part of
the man.
The Moses of Poetry required fifty-one days for the revolution of his
“Iliad”; the Moses of Revelation only took a week for the settlement of
the Heavens and the Earth, and in that week he found one whole day of
rest for the Creator.
This action was entirely characteristic of Moses, for he was the most
wrathful man as well as the meekest--killing, smiting, destroying and
burning with anger, as well as praying like the father-priest of his
people.
In a sense obvious enough he was the protoplastic Christ--for was not
he who described himself as “meek and lowly in heart” the scourger of
trespassers, and did he not burn the religious actors of his day?
Moses and Christ both did things with most startling rapidity. In their
very soul they were akin. They were “straitened” until their work was
“accomplished.” The Pentateuch and the Gospels have action enough in them
to fill innumerable volumes, yet there is an infinite calm in both--the
haste being in the temporary framework, the calm being in the eternal
purpose.
Think of these twenty-seven chapters constituting the discipline of one
month! The reflections started by this circumstance culminate in a sense
of pain, for who can bear this grievous toil or endure this sting of
accusation? There is no respite.
Egyptian burdens were for the body, but these wilderness exactions
tormented the soul, and by so doing made Egyptian memories bright. The
trial of muscle is nothing to the trial of patience. Men may sleep
after labor, but an unquiet conscience keeps the eyes wide open. This
discipline afflicted both the body and the soul, and thus drained the
entire strength of the people.
This conscious toil must have been accompanied by unconscious
inspiration--a reciprocal action impossible in theory but well understood
in spiritual experience.
We resume our burdens in the very act of dreading them. We pray the next
prayer in the very process of waiting for answers to a thousand prayers
to which God has paid no known heed. Yesterday’s sacrifice has nothing to
do with this day’s sin, except to remind us that today must provide its
own sacrifice.
This was so with the Jews; this is precisely so with ourselves. Yet we
boast our liberty, and suppose that in leaping one inch from the Earth we
have broken the tether of gravitation.
As put before us in this manual called Leviticus, the discipline of the
month seems to be more than we could endure; and this we say in ignorance
of the fact that our own manual imposes a more severe discipline. Our
pity for the Jews arises out of the apparently ineradicable sophism that
spiritual service is easier than bodily exercise. A most deadly sophism
is this, and prevalent yet, notwithstanding the rebuke and condemnation
of universal history.
In no spiritual sense is Leviticus an obsolete book. Moses is not dead.
The inventors of the alphabet have some rights even in “Paradise Lost,”
and quite a large property in “Euclid.” It is not grateful on our part to
forget the primers through which we passed to the encyclopedias, though
their authors were but our intellectual nurses. In no mere dream was
Moses present when Christ communed with Him concerning the Exodus that
was to be accomplished at Jerusalem, and in no dramatic sense did Elijah
watch the consummation of prophecy.
The wonder is that Christians should be so willing to regard the
Pentateuch as obsolete. This is practically a foregone conclusion--to
such an extent, certainly, that the Pentateuch is tolerated rather than
studied for edification by the rank and file of Christians.
Without the Pentateuch, Christ as revealed in the Gospels would have been
impossible; and without Christ the Pentateuch would have been impossible.
I venture upon this proposition because I find no great-event in the
Pentateuch that is not for some purpose of argument or illustration used
by Christ or by His disciples and apostles in the interests of what is
known as evangelical truth.
It lies within easy proof that Christ is the text of the Old Testament
and that the Old Testament is the text of Christ. What use is made in
the New Testament of the creation of the universe, the faith of Abraham,
the rain of manna, the lifting up of the serpent and the tabernacle of
witness! The sublime apology of Stephen epitomizes the Old Testament, and
the Epistle to the Hebrews could not have been written but for the ritual
of Exodus and Leviticus. In its purely moral tone the Old Testament is of
kindred quality with the New.
Take an instance from Leviticus. Three forms of evil are recognized in
one of its most ardent chapters--namely, Violence, Deceit and Perjury.
This is a succession amounting to a development, and, unwittingly it
may or may not be, confirming that law of evolution which is as happily
illustrated in morals as in physics.
Men begin with acts of violence, then go on to silent deceit and
calculation, and close with a profanation of the holiest terms. The early
sinners robbed gardens and killed brothers; the later sinners “agreed
together” to “lie unto God.” It is something, therefore, to find in so
ancient a book as Leviticus recognition of an order which is true to
philosophy and to history.
But the proof that Moses and Christ are identical in moral tone is to
be found in the process which offenders were commanded to adopt. By
no sacerdotal jugglery was the foul blot to be removed; by no sigh of
selfishness could the inward corruption be permitted to evaporate; by no
investment of cheap tears could thieves compound for felony.
First, there must be restoration; second, there must be an addition of
a fifth part of the whole; third, the priest must be faced as the very
representative of God and a trespass offering be laid on the altar. After
atonement forgiveness would come--a white angel from Heaven--and dwell
in the reclaimed and sanctified heart. All the past would be driven
away as a black cloud and all the present filled with a light above the
brightness of the Sun.
What is this but an outline or forecast of what Christ said when He
drove the hostile and vindictive man from the altar, bidding him first
be reconciled with his brother and at peace with society? Christianity
is not a substitute for morality; it is morality inspired, glorified
and crowned. Say that the ritual was sanitary rather than doctrinal or
theological. What then? All divine things are first sanitary, but not
necessarily bounded by that term.
It will be found that the practice of genuine cleanness, chemical as well
as mechanical, will be followed by a philosophy, and that the morality of
cleanness will be followed by a theology.
Accustom a man to look out for bullocks and rams and lambs “without
blemish,” and he will find that he can not stop at that point. He has
begun an education which can only culminate in the prayer: “Create in me
a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Yet no word of
that holy thought was named in the original instructions.
Leviticus is the gospel of the Pentateuch--glistening with purity,
turning law into music and spreading a banquet in the wilderness. But its
ritual is dead. This is hard to believe--hard because religious vanity is
fond of ritualism, which makes no demand on the conscience. Yet ritualism
had a divinely appointed function in the education of the awakening mind,
and was the only influence which could hold the attention of a people to
whom freedom was a new experience.
Spectacular religion is alphabetic religion; therefore, to revert to it
is to ignore every characteristic and impulse of manhood and progress.
But they who say so be prepared to complete the philosophy which that
contention initiates.
It is not enough to dismiss ritualism on the ground that it has been
displaced by spiritual worship. Admit that such is the case, and other
and broader admissions are involved in the plea, and can only be shirked
at the expense of consistency.
It is generally admitted, for example, that the Old Testament law has
been displaced by a New Testament principle. So Ritualism and Law, in
their ancient forms, have passed away. But let us be careful. When we say
Ritualism and Law, we mean in reality the letter, and it is evident that
if any one letter can be displaced every other letter may be outlived and
completed. And what is “the letter” but a symbol of flesh--visibleness,
objectivity, historic fact and bulk?
Apostle Paul went so far as to say that even Christ was no longer known
“after the flesh”--yea, though He had been known after the flesh, that
kind of knowledge was for ever done away, and another knowledge had
permanently taken its place.
The Church has never adopted the whole meaning of that teaching. Willing
enough to consign Leviticus to the shades, the Church still clings to
some sort of bodily Christ--the figure of a man--a bulk to be at least
imaginatively touched. This is easily accounted for without suggesting
superstition, and yet it might be done away with without imperiling
faith. We are held in bondage by a mistaken conception of personality.
When we think of that term we think of ourselves.
But even admitting the necessity of this, we may by a correct definition
of personality acquire a higher conception of our own being. Instead of
saying personality is this or that, after the manner of a geometrical
figure, binding it to four points and otherwise limiting it, say that
personality is the unit of being, and instantly every conception is
enlarged and illuminated--the meaning being that personality is the
starting point of conscious existence; not the fullness, but the outline;
not the maximum, but the minimum; the very smallest conception which the
mind can lay hold of--the Euclidic point, to be carried on into ratios
and dimensions which originate a new vocabulary.
We do not, then, define “God” when we describe Him as a “Person,” but
we merely begin to define Him; in other words, we say that God can not
be less than a Person. What more He is, we must gradually and adoringly
discover.
So far as Christ is concerned, there is one enlargement of His
personality which no school of thinkers will dispute. This is
rhetorically expressed by M. Renan, when he says of Jesus:
“A thousand times more living, a thousand times more loved, since Thy
death than during the days of Thy pilgrimage here below, Thou wilt become
to such a degree the Corner-Stone of humanity that to tear Thy name from
this world would be to shake it to its foundations.”
If ritualism has been displaced by spirituality, and if law has been
suspended by a principle--in other words, if the local has made way for
the universal--why shrink from the admission that limited Personality has
been exchanged for unlimited Influence?
How would Moses regard nineteenth century worship--say, of a Low Church
and Evangelical type, as the true evolution of Leviticus? Where is the
resemblance? The eye that can see the similitude is surely looking
through an adapted medium. Yet the mystery would be dissolved if the Book
of Leviticus were not open to reference.
The man is the completion of the child, but the child is no longer in
existence.
The fruit is the fulfillment of the blossom, but the blossom is no longer
available for comparison and for contrast.
Christianity is the consummation of Leviticus, but Leviticus
remains--unlike the child and the blossom--and offers a series of
dissonances or dissimilarities of the most positive quality.
Yet if Moses were living now he would be unchurched if he refused to
identify the meaning of Leviticus in the service of the Christian
sanctuary--the Papist nearest in gorgeousness, the Protestant claiming to
be nearest in doctrine.
The Nonconformist Moses, in the absence of inspiration, would in this
matter be the arch-heretic of the century.