It is not remarkable, therefore, that the ancient Hebrew institutions show
in so many points the influence of Egyptian ideas and customs. What is remarkable
is the dissimilarity. To the unreflecting nothing may seem more natural than
that a people, in turning their backs upon a land where they had been long
oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions. But the student of history,
the observer of politics, knows that nothing is more unnatural. Habits of thought
are even more tyrannous than habits of the body. They make for the masses of
people a mental atmosphere out of which they can no more rise than out of the
physical atmosphere. A people long used to despotism may rebel against a tyrant;
they may break his statutes and repeal his laws, cover with odium that which
he loved, and honour that which he hated; but they will hasten to set up another
tyrant in his place. A people used to superstition may embrace a purer faith,
but it will be only to degrade it to their old ideas. A people used to persecution
may flee from it, but only to persecute in their turn when they get power.
For "institutions make men." And when amid a people used to institutions
of one kind, we see suddenly arise institutions of an opposite kind, we know
that behind them must be that active, that initiative force – the "men
who in the beginnings make institutions."
This is what occurs in the Exodus. The striking differences between Egyptian
and Hebrew polity are not of form, but of essence. The tendency of the one
is to subordination and oppression; of the other to individual freedom. Strangest
of recorded births! From out of the strongest and most splendid despotism of
antiquity comes the freest republic. From between the paws of the rock-hewn
Sphinx rises the genius of human liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb
with the defiant proclamation of the rights of humanity.
Consider what Egypt was. See the grandeur of her monuments; those very monuments – that
after the lapse, not of centuries but of millenniums, seem to say to us, as
the Egyptian priests said to the boastful Greeks: "Ye are children!" – testify
to the enslavement of the people, and are the enduring witnesses of a social
organisation that rested on the masses an immovable weight. That narrow
Nile valley, the cradle of the arts and sciences, the scene, perhaps, of
the greatest
triumphs of the human mind, is also the scene of its most abject enslavement.
In the long centuries of its splendour, its lord, secure in the possession
of irresistible temporal power, and securer still in the awful sanctions
of a mystical religion, was as a god on earth, to cover whose poor carcass
with
a tomb befitting his state hundreds of thousands toiled away their lives.
For the classes who came next to him were those who enjoyed all the sensuous
delights of a most luxurious civilisation, and high intellectual pleasures
which the mysteries of the temple hid from vulgar profanation. But for the
millions who constituted the base of the social pyramid there was but the lash
to stimulate their toil, and the worship of beasts to satisfy the yearnings
of the soul. From time immemorial to the present day the lot of the Egyptian
peasants has been to work and to starve so that those above them might live
daintily. They have never rebelled. That spirit was long ago crushed out of
them by institutions which make them what they are. They know but to suffer
and to die. Imagine what opportune circumstances we may, yet, to organise and
carry on a movement resulting in the release of a great people from such a
soul-subduing tyranny, backed by an army of half a million highly trained soldiers,
required a leadership of most commanding and consummate genius, But this task,
surprising great though it be, is not the measure of the greatness of the leader
of the Exodus.
It is not in the deliverance from Egypt, it is in the constructive statesmanship
that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the superlative
grandeur of the leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine the Exodus without
the great
leader, neither can we account for the Hebrew polity without the great
statesman. Not merely intellectually great, but morally great – a statesman
aglow with the unselfish patriotism that refuses to grasp a sceptre or found
a dynasty.
The lessons of modern history, the manifestations of human nature that we
behold around us, would teach us to see in the essential divergence of the
Hebrew polity from that of Egypt the impress of a master mind, even if Hebrew
tradition had not testified both to the influence of such a mind, and to the
constant disposition of accustomed ideas to reassert themselves in the minds
of the people.
...
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.
Here stands out the greatness of the man. What was the wisdom and stretch
of the forethought that in the desert sought to guard in advance against the
dangers of a settled state, let the present speak!
In the full blaze of the nineteenth century, when every child in our schools
may know as common truths things of which the Egyptian sages never dreamed;
when the earth has been mapped and the stars have been weighed; when steam
and electricity have been pressed into our service, and science is wresting
from nature secret after secret – it is but natural to look back
upon the wisdom of three thousand years ago as an adult looks back upon
the learning
of a child.
And yet, for all this wonderful increase of knowledge, for all this enormous
gain of productive power, where is the country in the civilised world in
which today there is not want and suffering – where the masses are not condemned
to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not pursued by a greed of
gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get and to keep? Three thousands
years of advances, and still the moan goes up: "They have made our lives
bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick, and in all manner of service!" Three
thousand years of advances! and the piteous voices of little children are
in the moan.
Standing as I stand, where modern ideas have had fullest, freest development;
in the newest great city of the newest great nation; by the side of that ultimate
sea, where ends the westward march of the race that has circled the globe,
and farthest west meets east, the cool shades and sweet waters whose promise
has so long lured us on seem dissolving into mocking mirage.
Over ocean wastes far wider than the Syrian desert we have sought our promised
land – no narrow strip between the mountains and the sea, but a wide
and virgin continent. Here, in greater freedom, with vaster knowledge and fuller
experience, we are building up a nation that leads the van of modern progress.
And yet while we prate of the rights of humanity there are already many among
us thousands who find it difficult to assert the first of natural rights – the
right to earn an honest living; thousands who from time to time must accept
of degrading charity or starve.
We boast of equality before the law; yet notoriously justice is deaf to the
call of those who have no gold and blind to the sin of those who have.
We pride ourselves upon our common schools; yet after our boys and girls
are educated we vainly ask: "What shall we do with them?" And about
our colleges children are growing up in vice and crime, because from their
homes
poverty has driven all refining influences. We pin our faith to universal
suffrage; yet with all power in the hands of the people, the control of public
affairs
is passing into the hands of a class of professional politicians, and our
governments are, in many cases, becoming but a means for robbery of the people.
We have prohibited hereditary distinctions, we have forbidden titles of nobility;
yet there is growing up an aristocracy of wealth as powerful and merciless
as any that ever held sway.
We progress and we progress; we girdle continents with iron roads and knit
cities together with the mesh of telegraph wires; each day brings some
new invention, each year marks a fresh advance – the power of production
increased, and the avenues of exchange cleared and broadened. Yet the complaint
of "hard times" is louder and louder; everywhere are people harassed
by care, and haunted by the fear of want. With swift, steady strides and
prodigious leaps, the power of human hands to satisfy human wants advances
and advances,
is multiplied and multiplied. Yet the struggle for mere existence is more
and more intense, and human labour is becoming the cheapest of commodities.
Beside
glutted warehouses human beings grow faint with hunger and shiver with
cold; under the shadow of churches festers the vice that is born of want.
Trace to its roots the cause that is producing want in the midst of plenty,
ignorance in the midst of intelligence, aristocracy in democracy, weakness
in strength – that is giving to our civilisation a one-sided and unstable
development – and you will find it something which this Hebrew statesman
three thousand years ago perceived and guarded against.
Moses saw that the real cause of the enslavement of the masses of
Egypt was – what
has everywhere produced enslavement – the possession by a class of land
upon which and from which the whole people must live. He saw that to permit
in land the same unqualified private ownership that by natural right attaches
to the things produced by labour, would be inevitably to separate the people
into the very rich and the very poor, inevitably to enslave labour – to
make the few the masters of the many, no matter what the political forms, to
bring vice and degradation no matter what the religion.
And with the foresight of the philosophic statesman who legislates not for
the need of a day, but for all the future, he sought, in ways suited to his
times and conditions, to guard against this error.
Everywhere in the Mosaic institutions is the land treated as the gift
of the Creator to His common creatures, which no one has the right to monopolise.
Everywhere it is, not your estate, or your property, not the land which you
bought, or the land which you conquered, but "the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee" – "the land which the Lord lendeth thee".
And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the highest sanctions,
he tried to guard against the wrong that converted ancient civilisations into
despotisms – the wrong that in after centuries ate out the heart of Rome,
that produced the imbruting serfdom of Poland and the gaunt misery of Ireland,
the wrong that is today filling American cities with idle men, and our virgin
states with tramps.
He not only provided for a redistribution of the land among the people,
and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the institution
of the Jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land every fifty years,
and made monopoly impossible.
...
Let the mistakes of those who think that "man was made for the Sabbath," rather
than "the Sabbath was made for man," be what they may; that there
is one day in the week that the working people may call their own, one day
in the week on which hammer is silent and loom stands idle, is due, through
Christianity, to Judaism – to the code promulgated in the Sinaitic
wilderness.
It is in these characteristics of the Mosaic institutions that, as in the
fragments of a Colossus, we may read the greatness of the mind whose impress
they bear – of a mind in advance of its surroundings, in advance
of its age; of one of those star souls that dwindle not with distance,
but, glowing
with the radiance of essential truth, hold their light while institutions
and languages and creeds change and pass.
That the thought was greater than the permanent expression it found, who can
doubt?
Yet from that day to this that expression has been in the world a living power.
From the free spirit of the Mosaic law sprang that intensity of family life
that amid all dispersions and persecutions has preserved the individuality
of the Hebrew race; that love of independence that under the most adverse circumstances
has characterised the Jew; the burning patriotism that flamed in the Maccabees
and bared the breasts of Jewish peasants to the serried steel of Grecian phalanx
and the resistless onset of Roman legion; that stubborn courage that in exile
and in torture held the Jew to his faith. It kindled that fire that has made
the strains of Hebrew seers and poets phrase for us the highest exaltations
of thought; that intellectual vigour that has over and over again made the
dry staff bud and blossom. And passing onward from one narrow race it has exerted
its power wherever the influence of the Hebrew scriptures has been felt, It
has toppled thrones and cast dawn hierarchies. It strengthened the Scottish
covenanter in the hour of trial, and the Puritan amid the snows of a strange
land. It charged with the Ironsides at Naseby; it stood behind the low redoubt
on Bunker Hill.
But it is in example as in deed that such lives are helpful. It is thus
that they dignify human nature and glorify human effort, and, to those who
struggle,
bring hope and trust. The life of Moses, like the institutions of Moses,
is a protest against that blasphemous doctrine current now as it was three
thousand
years ago, preached oft times even from Christian pulpits – that the
want and suffering of the masses of humankind flow from a mysterious dispensation
of providence, which we may lament, but can neither quarrel with nor alter.
Let those who hug that doctrine themselves, those to whom it seems that the
squalor and brutishness with which the very centres of our civilisation abound
are not their affair, turn to the example of that life. For to them who will
look, yet burns the bush; and to them who will hear, again comes the voice: "The
people suffer: who will lead them forth?"
Adopted into the immediate family of the supreme monarch and earthly
god; standing almost at the apex of the social pyramid which
had for its base those toiling millions; priest and prince in a land
where prince
and priest might
revel in all delights – everything that life could offer to gratify
the senses or engage the intellect was open to him. ... Read the whole speech