Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/25

MOSES 5 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 injts fulness is announced to all the people. Though the Egyptian rite of circumcision is preserved, and the Egyptian symbols reappear in all the exter- nals 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 realize 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 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 begin- ning or the vague future, who is over and above and beyond men, 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. The absence in the Mosaic books of any reference to a future life is only in- telligible 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 back- ground by the intensity with which another truth is grasped. And 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 bear fruit in this world, that though on the petty scale of individual life wickedness may seem to go unpunished and wrong to be re- warded, 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 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