Moses was the world's first great teacher. He is still one of the world's great teachers. Seven million people yet look to his laws for special daily guidance, and more than two hundred millions read his books and regard them as Holy Writ. And these people as a class are of the best and most enlightened who live now or who have ever lived.
Moses did not teach of a life after this--he gives no hint of immortality--all of his rewards and punishments refer to the present. If there is a heaven for the good and a hell for the bad, he did not know of them.
The laws of Moses were designed for the Now and the Here. Many of them ring true and correct even today, after all this interval of more than three thousand years. Moses had a good knowledge of physiology, hygiene, sanitation. He knew the advantages of cleanliness, order, harmony, industry and good habits. He also knew psychology, or the science of the mind: he knew the things that influence humanity, the limits of the average intellect, the plans and methods of government that will work and those which will not.
He was practical. He did what was expedient. He considered the material with which he had to deal, and he did what he could and taught that which his people would and could believe. The Book of Genesis was plainly written for the child-mind.
The problem that confronted Moses was one of practical politics, not a question of philosophy or of absolute or final truth. The laws he put forth were for the guidance of the people to whom he gave them, and his precepts were such as they could assimilate.
It were easy to take the writings of Moses as they have come down to us, translated, re-translated, colored and tinted with the innocence, ignorance and superstition of the nations who have kept them alive for thirty-three centuries, and then compile a list of the mistakes of the original writer. The writer of these records of dreams and hopes and guesses, all cemented with stern commonsense, has our profound reverence and regard. The "mistakes" lie in the minds of the people who, in the face of the accumulated knowledge of the centuries, have persisted that things once written were eternally sufficient.
In point of time there is no teacher within many hundred years following him who can be compared with him in originality and insight.
Moses lived fourteen hundred years before Christ.
The next man after him to devise a complete code of conduct was Solon, who lived seven hundred years after. A little later came Zoroaster, then Confucius, Buddha, Lao-tsze, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle--contemporaries, or closely following each other, their philosophy woven and interwoven by all and each and each by all.
Moses, however, stands out alone. That he did not know natural history as did Aristotle, who lived a thousand years later, is not to his discredit, and to emphasize the fact were irrelevant.
Back of it all lies the undisputed fact that Moses led a barbaric people out of captivity and so impressed his ideals and personality upon them that they endure as a distinct and peculiar people, even unto this day. He founded a nation. And chronologically he is the civilized world's first author.
Moses was a soldier, a diplomat, an executive, a writer, a teacher, a leader, a prophet, a stonecutter. Beside all these he was a farmer--a workingman, one who when forty years of age tended flocks and herds for a livelihood. Every phase of the outdoor life of the range was familiar to him. And the greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that his plans and aspirations were so far beyond his achievements that at last he thought he had failed. Exultant success seems to go with that which is cheap and transient. All great teachers have, in their own minds, been failures--they saw so much further than they were able to travel.
All ancient chronology falls easily into three general divisions: the fabulous, the legendary, and the probable or natural.
In the understanding of history, psychology is quite as necessary as philology.
To reject anything that has a flaw in it is quite as bad as to have that excess of credulity which swallows everything presented.
It is not necessary to throw away the fabulous nor deny the legendary. But it is certainly not wise to construe the fabulous as the actual and maintain the legendary as literally true. Things may be true allegorically and false literally, and to be able to distinguish the one from the other, and prize each in its proper place, is the mark of wisdom.
If, however, we were asked to describe the man Moses to a jury of sane, sensible, intelligent and unprejudiced men and women, and show why he is worthy of the remembrance of mankind, we would have to eliminate the fabulous, carefully weigh the traditional, and rest our argument upon records that are fair, sensible and reasonably free from dispute.
The conclusions of professional retainers, committed before they begin their so-called investigations to a literal belief in the fabulous, should be accepted with great caution. For them to come to conclusions outside of that which they have been taught, is not only to forfeit their social position, but to lose their actual means of livelihood. Perhaps the truth in the final summing up can best be gotten from those who have made no vows that they will not change their opinions, and have nothing to lose if they fail occasionally to gibe with the popular.
On a certain occasion after Colonel Ingersoll had delivered his famous lecture entitled, "Some Mistakes of Moses," he was entertained by a local club. At the meeting, which was of the usual informal kind known as "A Dutch Feed," a young lawyer made bold to address the great orator thus: "Colonel Ingersoll, you are a lover of freedom--with you the word liberty looms large. All great men love liberty, and no man lives in history, respected and revered, save as he has sought to make men free. Moses was a lover of liberty. Now, wouldn't it be gracious and generous in you to give Moses, who in some ways was in the same business as yourself, due credit as a liberator and law-giver and not emphasize his mistakes to the total exclusion of his virtues?"
Colonel Ingersoll listened--he was impressed by the fairness of the question. He listened, paused and replied: "Young man, you have asked a reasonable question, and all you suggest about the greatness of Moses, in spite of his mistakes, is well taken. The trouble in your logic lies in the fact that you do not understand my status in this case. You seem to forget that I am not the attorney for Moses. He has more than two million men looking after his interests. I am retained on the other side!"
Like unto Colonel Ingersoll, I am not an attorney for Moses. I desire, however, to give a fair, clear and judicial account of the man. I will attempt to present a brief for the people, and neither prosecute nor defend. I will simply try to picture the man as he once existed, nothing extenuating, nor setting down aught in malice. As the original office of the State's Attorney was rather to protect the person at the bar than to indict him, so will I try to bring out the best in Moses, rather than hold up his mistakes and raise a laugh by revealing his ignorance. Modesty, which is often egotism turned wrong side out, might here say, "Oh, Moses requires no defense at this late day!" But Moses, like all great men, has suffered at the hands of his friends. To this man has been attributed powers which no human being ever possessed.
Moses lived thirty-three hundred years ago. In one sense thirty-three centuries is a very long time. All is comparative--children regard a man of fifty as "awful old." I have seen several persons who have lived a hundred years, and they didn't consider a century long, "and thirty-five isn't anything," said one of them to me.
Geologically, thirty-three centuries is only an hour ago. It does not nearly take us back to the time when men of the Stone Age hunted the hairy mammoth in what is now Nebraska, nor does thirty-three centuries give us any glimpse of the time when tropical animals, plants and probably men lived and flourished at the North Pole.
Egyptian civilization, at the time of Moses, was more than three thousand years old. Egypt was then in the first stage of senility, entering upon her decline, for her best people had settled in the cities, and this completes the cycle and spells deterioration. She had passed through the savage, barbaric, nomadic and agricultural stages and was living on her unearned increment, a part of which was Israelitish labor. Moses looked at the Pyramids, which were built more than a thousand years before his birth, and asked in wonder about who built them, very much as we do today. He listened for the Sphinx to answer, but she was silent, then as now. The date of the exodus has been fixed as having probably occurred during the reign of the Great Pharaoh, Mineptah, or the nineteenth Egyptian Dynasty. The date is, say, fourteen hundred years before Christ. An inscription has recently been found which seems to show that Joseph settled in Egypt during the reign of Mineptah, but the best scholars now have gone back to the conclusions I have stated.
At the time of the Pharaohs, Egypt was the highest civilized country on earth. It had a vast system of canals, an organized army, a goodly degree of art, and there were engineers and builders of much ability. Philosophy, poetry and ethics were recognized, prized and discussed.
The storage of grain by the government to bank against famine had been practised for several hundred years. There were also treasure-cities built to guard against fire, thieves or destruction by the elements. It will thus be seen that foresight, thrift, caution, wisdom, played their parts. The Egyptians were not savages.
About five hundred years before the birth of Moses there lived in Arabia a powerful Sheik or Chief, known as Abraham. This man had a familiar spirit, or guide, or guardian-angel known as Yaveh or Jehovah. All of the desert tribes had such tutelary gods; and all of these gods were once men of power who lived on earth. The belief in special gods has often been held by very great men: Socrates looked to his "demon" for guidance; Themistocles consulted his oracle; a President of the United States visited a clairvoyant, who consented to act as a medium and interpret the supernatural. This idea, which is a variant of ancestor worship, still survives, and very many good people do not take journeys or make investments until they believe they are being dictated to by Shakespeare, Emerson, Beecher or Phillips Brooks. These people also believe that there are bad spirits to which we must not harken.
Abraham was led by Jehovah; what Jehovah told him to do he did; when Jehovah told him to desist or change his plans, he obeyed. Jehovah promised him many things, and some of these promises were fulfilled.
Whether these tutelary gods or controlling spirits had any actual existence outside of the imagination of the people who believed in them--whether they were merely pictures thrown upon the screen by a subconscious spiritual stereopticon--is not the question now under discussion. Something must be left for a later time: the fact remains that special providences are yet relied upon by sincere and intelligent people.
