THE LIFE AND CHARACTER OF MOSES  

By J. T. Christian

Part II

 

MOSES THE PHILOSOPHER

            In that period that may be called the childhood of the world, Moses knew more of philosophy than has been discovered with all of the advancement and learning of the nineteenth century. I call Moses a great thinker. This means something if we take it in the higher sense of Carlyle: “Not one in a thousand has the smallest time for thinking; only for passive dreaming, and hear-saying, and active babbling by note. “Of the eyes men glare withal, so few can see.” Or as Samuel Taylor Coleridge very pertinently asks, “If you are not a thinking man, to what purpose are you a man at all?” Moses thought deep and dived for wisdom’s pearl far beneath the current of life.

            He is thoroughly posted on all scientific subjects. M. Henri, a candid and erudite French writer, says: “The cosmogony of Moses, simple, clear, and natural is evidently the result of learned research. The author of this system, respecting the origin of the earth and the heavens, must necessarily have devoted himself to profound meditations on the history of the globe; and it is certain, that geology must, in his day, have reached an extraordinary point of perfection, for the historian to follow, as Moses has done, step by step, all the mysteries of that creation.” M. Saintis remarks in his history of Rationalism in Germany, “So many things would prove Moses to be a wise geologist of our own age, if he did not learn the facts which he related, from some other source than the study of the formation of the globe, that it is only a mind in which great frivolity of character is joined to deplorable ignorance, that can perceive any flagrant contradiction between Holy Scripture and the profane sciences.” And in another passage referring to Genesis, he remarks,  “The sciences, in our days, display in their teachings, notwithstanding the assertions to the contrary, more and more harmony with biblical facts.”

            Moses places the creation of man last in the order of Genesis, and this is wonderfully corroborated by Geology. In the beautiful words of Mr. Richardson we will say, “The whole vast series of aqueous deposits, are crowded with organic remains, with fragments of the weeds, plants, corals, shells, crustaceae, fish, reptiles, birds and mammalian, relics of the vegetable and animal existence of the ancient earth; but no fossil remains of the human form have yet discovered in the solid rocks themselves, or in any, since the accumulations of silt or mud, which date from the most modern era, the yesterday, as it were, in the infinite history of the past. It is only in these accumulations of the historic period that we discover the remains of even the most ancient families of mankind; that in the British Isles, we meet with the implements or utensils of the ancient Britons, or the coins and weapons of their Roman invaders; that in Italy we find the Cyclopean structures and works of the Etruscans, a nation who appeared to have preceded the Romans in occupation of Italy, and to have excelled them in civilization and the arts of life; while vestiges of the Pelasgi are alike discovered in similar deposits of Greece; and in the New World, traces exist of the Talteques, a people who seem to have been the predecessors of the Mexicans, and their superiors in knowledge and improvement. In the solid repeat, no traces of man are discernible.”

            Look at the clear views Moses had of God, of the brotherhood of man, and the unity of the human race. On these subjects scientists are still lingering in the border land, but Moses had gone up and possessed the country.

THE LAWGIVER

            The Bible has ruled the world; all the beneficent laws which have governed the nations have directly or indirectly been derived from the Bible. Blackstone, that eminent writer on common law, has fully admitted this. “As God,” says he, “when he created matter and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the direction of that motion, so, when he created man, and endued him with free will, to conduct himself in all part of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of good and evil, to which God himself always conforms, and which, as applicable to man, reason can discover; and which are so admirably ordered of God, as always to promote the substantial and permanent happiness of men; such, e. q., as that we should live honorably, hurt nobody, and render to every one his due. Indeed, to these three precepts Justinian has reduced the whole doctrine of law. This is the law of nature. But further, in comparison to the frailty, the imperfection, and the blindness of human reason, God hath been pleased, at sundry times and in divers manners, to discover and enforce his laws by an immediate and direct revelation. The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures. These precepts, when revealed, are found, upon comparison, to be really a part of the original law of nature, as they tend, in all their consequences, to man’s felicity; but, though agreeable to right reason, reason, unaided and alone, could not make them known. Upon these two foundations, the law of nature, and the law of revelation, depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should contradict them.”

            Jurisprudence is indebted to no portion of the Word of God more than to the books of Moses. It is not to the stern laws of Solon, or the wisdom of Confucius that the world has turned, but to Moses. Not the Forum, not the Areopagus, but the lone granite mountain of Sinai has become the judicial centre of the world. I here use the words of Chief Justice Hornblower of New Jersey : “When these giants of human intellect can tell me whence Moses derived his science in legislation, without admitting the supernatural and divine authority of the Ten Commandments, I shall begin to listen with more reverence to the teachers of human perfectibility. In that short and comprehensive code, we find given to us a perfect rule of action, covering the whole ground of man’s existence; a rule, not only prescribing our duty to God and man, in our external behavior, but reaching to the secret thoughts and feelings of our hearts in every possible condition of life, and in all our relations to our maker and to our fellow beings. The wisdom of ages, the learning and philosophy of the schools, have never discovered a single defect in that code. Not a virtue which is not there inculcated. Not a vice, in its most doubtful and shadowy form, which is not there prohibited. Whence, then, I ask, did the great Jewish lawgiver derive his spirit of legislation? If that code was written by the finger of the Almighty, let us bow in it with holy reverence, and seek no better rule of life, nor any wiser principles of action. But if it emanated only from the capacious mind, and was the capacious mind, and was dictated by the wisdom of Moses---then Moses was a wiser, a more learned man, than any of our new teachers; and I had rather be under his jurisdiction and keep his commandments, than learn new rules of civil polity and social intercourse from the most learned and wise of the present day.”

            We boast of our liberty and free institutions, but all of these were learned from Moses. His system of society was for the people and not to elevate the few in rank or power; it was one of equality, not the circumstances, but the civil institutions were contrived with that end in view.

THE GENERAL

            Josephus tells us that Moses at the head of the Egyptian army gained great victories over the Aethiopians and captured Saba . However this may be we know he was a warrior of great powers. Pharaoh had a well organized army and successful generals;  the Israelites had no arms, no provisions, for years they had been in slavery, and yet he successfully led them out of Egypt . In the wilderness there were many enemies who would have been only too glad to overcome them. By his skillful generalship he defeated Sihon and Og; and by not following his advice the battle of Hormah was lost. It is true that he did not sweep over the entire East as a mighty tornado, as did Alexander; he did not fight the bloody Marengo, or Austeritz, as did Napoleon, but he conquered under more adverse circumstances than any general who ever lived.

THE PREACHER AND THE MAN OF GOD

            His doctrine distilled as the dew, and his speech dropped like the rain. It was with Moses as Coleridge said in his tribute to his friend Thomas Poole. The mere abstract argument was almost lost sight of “in the life, freshness, and practical value of his remarks and notices; truths, plucked as they are growing, and delivered to you with the dew on them; the faith earnings of a deserving eye, armed and kept on the watch by thought and meditation.” In all of his manifold duties he forgot not the coming Christ. He esteemed “the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt .” It was his pleasure to know that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; then shall come a star out of Jacob; and a scepter shall come out of Israel; and he was wont to admonish his brethren that, “A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren like unto me; him shall you hear.” He had sincere love to his God, and “respect unto the recompense of the reward.” This is the loveliest part of his character. A mind of the greatest stature without love “is like the huge pyramid of Egypt ---chill and cheerless in all its dark halls and passages. A mind with love is as a king’s palace lighted for a royal festival.”

            He was slow of speech; but it was always noted that he meant something. “A man rather taciturn in speech; silent when there was nothing to be said; but pertinent, wise, sincere, when he did speak; always throwing light on the matter. This is the only sort of speech worth speaking.”

            He was a man of prayer and loyally submissive to his God; only small, mean souls are otherwise. He was ever ready to put his shoes from off his feet when he was on holy ground and he has left one of the most beautiful prayers on record. To him prayer was the shining of heaven’s own splendor in the waste howling wilderness, the pillar of fire by night, that was to guide him on his desolate, perilous way.

            He was a man of meekness and humility; perhaps this is the test of a true great man. But I very readily agree with John Ruskin in his Modern Painters when he says, “I do not mean by humility doubt of his own power, or hesitation of speaking his opinion; but a right understanding of the relation between what he can do and say, and the rest of the world’s doings and sayings. All great men not only know their business, but usually know that they know it; and are not only right in their main opinions, but they usually know that they are right in them; only they do not think much of themselves on that account.”

            He did what God commanded in the face of every danger. He could stand before the angry Pharoah, or his own treacherous people. He would drop his actions as an ostrich does its young and hasten on without caring where they fell. He dared to

“Do all that may become a man,

Who dares do more is none.”

            Thus we have seen Moses as the poet, historian, philosopher, warrior, and preacher. In either of these capacities he would have left a name that eternity will not forget; but consider all of these combined in one man and you have a faint conception of the comprehensive mind of Moses. He was

“The noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of time.”

            He was no less honored in death than in life. Enoch was translated that he should not see death; Elijah was carried away in his chariot of fire; but God Himself, with the angels for pall bearers, performed the sepulchral rites for this man.

“By Nebo’s lonely mountain,

By cool Beth-Peor’s wave,

In the beautiful land of Moab ,

There lies a lonely grave,

And no man knoweth his sepulcher,

And no man saw it o’er,

For the land of God upturned the sod,

and laid the dead man there.”

            God sent forth His angels to guard that tomb; and when long afterwards Satan wished his body, it was defended by no less a person than the archangel Michael. Here we leave the sleeping dust of Moses but his memory lives on.

“He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.”