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
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