It was a commonwealth based upon the individual – a commonwealth whose
ideal it was that every man should sit under his own vine and fig tree, with
none to vex him or make him afraid. It was a commonwealth: in which none should
be condemned to ceaseless toil; in which, for even the bond slave, there should
be hope; and in which, for even the beast of burden, there should be rest.
A commonwealth in which, in the absence of deep poverty, the many virtues that
spring from personal independence should harden into a national character – a
commonwealth in which the family affections might knit their tendrils around
each member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into
the living whole.
It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity, that
is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to securing
the strong in heaping up wealth as much as to preventing the weak from being
crowded
to the wall. At every point it interposes its barriers to the selfish greed
that, if left unchecked, will surely differentiate men into landlord and
serf, capitalist and working person, millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled.
Its
Sabbath day and Sabbath year secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure.
With the blast of the Jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that
cannot be paid is cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again
to the poorest
their fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must leave
something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he treadeth
out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is that of our
homely
phrase: "Live and let live!"
And the religion with which this civil policy is so closely intertwined
exhibits kindred features – from the idea of the "brotherhood of man" springs
the idea of the fatherhood of God. Though the forms may resemble those of Egypt,
the spirit is that which Egypt had lost. Though a hereditary priesthood is
retained, the law in its fullness is announced to all the people. Though the
Egyptian rite of circumcision is preserved, and Egyptian symbols reappear in
all the externals of worship, the tendency to take the type for the reality
is sternly repressed. It is only when we think of the bulls and the hawks,
of the deified cats, and sacred ichneumons of Egypt, that we realise the full
meaning of the command: "Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven
image!"
And if we seek beneath form and symbol and command, the thought of which
they are but the expression, we find that the great distinctive feature of
the Hebrew
religion, that which separates it by such a wide gulf from the religions
amid which it grew up, is its utilitarianism, its recognition of divine law
in human
life. It asserts, not a God whose domain is confined to the far
off beginning or the vague future, who is over and above and beyond humanity,
but a God
who in His inexorable laws is here and now; a God of the living as well as
of the
dead; a God of the market place as well as of the temple; a God whose judgments
wait not another world for execution, but whose immutable decrees will,
in this life, give happiness to the people that heed them and bring misery
upon
the people that forget them. Amid the forms of splendid degradation in
which a once noble religion had in Egypt sunk to petrification, amid a social
order
in which the divine justice seemed to sleep – I AM was the truth that
dawned upon Moses. And in his desert contemplation of nature’s flux and
reflux, the death that bounds her life, the life she brings from death, always
consuming yet never consumed – I AM was the message that fell upon
his inner ear.
The absence in the Mosaic books of any reference to a future life
is only intelligible by the prominence into which this truth is brought. Nothing could
have been more familiar to the Hebrews of the Exodus than the doctrine of immortality.
The continued existence of the soul, the judgment after death, the rewards
and punishments of the future state, were the constant subjects of Egyptian
thought and art. But a truth may be hidden or thrown into the background by
the intensity with which another truth is grasped.
And the doctrine of immortality, springing as it does from the very depths
of human nature, ministering to aspirations which become stronger and stronger
as intellectual life rises to higher planes and the life of the affections
becomes more intense, may yet become so incrusted with degrading superstitions,
may be turned by craft and selfishness into such a potent instrument for enslavement,
and so used to justify crimes at which every natural instinct revolts, that
to the earnest spirit of the social reformer it may seem like an agency of
oppression to enchain the intellect and prevent true progress; a lying device
with which the cunning fetter the credulous.
The belief in the immortality of the soul must have existed in strong
forms among the masses of the Hebrew people. But the truth that Moses brought
so prominently forward, the truth his gaze was concentrated upon, is a truth
that
has often been thrust aside by the doctrine of immortality, and that may
perhaps, at times, react on it in the same way. This is the truth that the
actions of
men and women bear fruit in this world, that though on the petty scale
of individual life wickedness may seem to go unpunished and wrong to be rewarded,
there is
yet a nemesis that with tireless feet and pitiless arm follows every national
crime and smites the children for the father’s transgression; the
truth that each individual must act upon and be acted upon by the society
of which
he or she is a part, that all must in some degree suffer for the sin of
each, and the life of each be dominated by the conditions imposed by all.
It is the intense appreciation of this truth that gives the Mosaic institutions
so practical and utilitarian a character. Their genius, if I may so speak,
leaves the abstract speculations, where thought so easily loses and wastes
itself, or finds expression only in symbols that become finally but the basis
of superstition, in order that it may concentrate attention upon the laws which
determine the happiness or misery of humanity upon this earth.
Its lessons have never tended to the essential selfishness of asceticism,
which is so prominent a feature in Brahmanism and Buddhism, and from which
Christianity and Islamism have not been exempt. Its injunction
has never been "Leave
the world to itself that you may save your own soul" but rather: "Do
your duty in the world that you may be happier and the world be better." It
has disdained no sanitary regulation that might secure the health of the
body. Its promise has been of peace and plenty and length of days, of stalwart
sons
and comely daughters.
It maybe that the feeling of Moses in regard to a future life was that expressed
in the language of the Stoic: "It is the business of Jupiter, not mine;" or
it may be that it partook of the same revulsion that shows itself in modern
times, when a spirit essentially religious has been turned against the forms
and expressions of religion, because these forms and expressions have been
made the props and bulwarks of tyranny, and even the name and teachings of
the carpenter’s son perverted into supports of social injustice – used
to guard the pomp of Caesar and justify the greed of Dives.
Yet, however such feelings influenced Moses, I cannot think that such a
soul as his, living such a life as his – feeling the exaltation of great thoughts,
feeling the burden of great cares, feeling the bitterness of great disappointments – did
not stretch forward to the hope beyond; did not rest and strengthen and
ground itself in the confident belief that the death of the body is but
the emancipation
of the mind; did not feel the assurance that there is a power in the universe
upon which it might confidently rely through wreck of matter and crash
of worlds!
Yet the great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before
him; the effort to lay the foundations of a social state in which deep
poverty and
degrading want should be unknown – where people released from
the meaner struggles that waste human energy should have opportunity
for intellectual
and moral development. ... Read the
whole speech