Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/26

6 STATESMEN AND SAGES expression only in symbols that become finally but the basis of superstition, in order that it may concentrate attention upon laws that determine the happi- ness or misery of men 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 may be that the feeling of Moses in regard to a future life was that ex- pressed 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 faeen made the props and bulwarks of tyranny, and even the name and teachings of the Carpen- ter'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 soul ; 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. But the great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before him ; the effort to lay foundations of a social state in which deep poverty and degrading want should be unknown where men, 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 dan- gers 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 the man looks back upon the learning of the child. And yet, for all this wonderful increase of knowledge, for all this enormous gain of productive power, where is the country in the civilized world' in which to- day 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 thousand years of ad-