MOSES.
Moses loses nothing by diffuseness. Even in days that were made long by intolerable monotony—in which men lived centuries because of weariness—Moses did not shrink from a condensation unparalleled in human literature.
Considered as embracing the history of one month only, the third Book of Moses may claim to be the most remarkable book in the Old Testament. Containing twenty-seven chapters, ranging its contents under sixteen different categories, and requiring to be actively represented within the space of twenty-eight days—it may, in its own degree, claim an energy not inferior to the Book of Genesis.
The same fearlessness of treatment is distinctive of both books. The reverent audacity which represented creation as the work of six days—whatever the measure of a day may be—did not shrink from focalizing into one month the whole discipline of life.
Moses’ words could hardly have been fewer if he had lived in our time of feverish haste and tumult. To put up the Heavens and the Earth in one chapter was a miracle in authorship. Yet, well pondered, it was the only thing to be done. Any poet could have built them in endless stanzas, and any philosopher could have begun the infinite story in a book too large for the world to hold.
Moses chose the more excellent way, creating creation with a swiftness that has dazed a literal criticism ever since—literal criticism that has but one season in its dreary year, a year that knows nothing of snow-blossom or wedded light and song. But this very haste was part of the man.
The Moses of Poetry required fifty-one days for the revolution of his “Iliad”; the Moses of Revelation only took a week for the settlement of the Heavens and the Earth, and in that week he found one whole day of rest for the Creator.
This action was entirely characteristic of Moses, for he was the most wrathful man as well as the meekest—killing, smiting, destroying and burning with anger, as well as praying like the father-priest of his people.
In a sense obvious enough he was the protoplastic Christ—for was not he who described himself as “meek and lowly in heart” the scourger of trespassers, and did he not burn the religious actors of his day?
Moses and Christ both did things with most startling rapidity. In their very soul they were akin. They were “straitened” until their work was “accomplished.” The Pentateuch and the Gospels have action enough in them to fill innumerable volumes, yet there is an infinite calm in both—the haste being in the temporary framework, the calm being in the eternal purpose.
Think of these twenty-seven chapters constituting the discipline of one month! The reflections started by this circumstance culminate in a sense of pain, for who can bear this grievous toil or endure this sting of accusation? There is no respite.
Egyptian burdens were for the body, but these wilderness exactions tormented the soul, and by so doing made Egyptian memories bright. The trial of muscle is nothing to the trial of patience. Men may sleep after labor, but an unquiet conscience keeps the eyes wide open. This discipline afflicted both the body and the soul, and thus drained the entire strength of the people.
This conscious toil must have been accompanied by unconscious inspiration—a reciprocal action impossible in theory but well understood in spiritual experience.
We resume our burdens in the very act of dreading them. We pray the next prayer in the very process of waiting for answers to a thousand prayers to which God has paid no known heed. Yesterday’s sacrifice has nothing to do with this day’s sin, except to remind us that today must provide its own sacrifice.
This was so with the Jews; this is precisely so with ourselves. Yet we boast our liberty, and suppose that in leaping one inch from the Earth we have broken the tether of gravitation.
As put before us in this manual called Leviticus, the discipline of the month seems to be more than we could endure; and this we say in ignorance of the fact that our own manual imposes a more severe discipline. Our pity for the Jews arises out of the apparently ineradicable sophism that spiritual service is easier than bodily exercise. A most deadly sophism is this, and prevalent yet, notwithstanding the rebuke and condemnation of universal history.
In no spiritual sense is Leviticus an obsolete book. Moses is not dead. The inventors of the alphabet have some rights even in “Paradise Lost,” and quite a large property in “Euclid.” It is not grateful on our part to forget the primers through which we passed to the encyclopedias, though their authors were but our intellectual nurses. In no mere dream was Moses present when Christ communed with Him concerning the Exodus that was to be accomplished at Jerusalem, and in no dramatic sense did Elijah watch the consummation of prophecy.
The wonder is that Christians should be so willing to regard the Pentateuch as obsolete. This is practically a foregone conclusion—to such an extent, certainly, that the Pentateuch is tolerated rather than studied for edification by the rank and file of Christians.
Without the Pentateuch, Christ as revealed in the Gospels would have been impossible; and without Christ the Pentateuch would have been impossible.
I venture upon this proposition because I find no great-event in the Pentateuch that is not for some purpose of argument or illustration used by Christ or by His disciples and apostles in the interests of what is known as evangelical truth.
It lies within easy proof that Christ is the text of the Old Testament and that the Old Testament is the text of Christ. What use is made in the New Testament of the creation of the universe, the faith of Abraham, the rain of manna, the lifting up of the serpent and the tabernacle of witness! The sublime apology of Stephen epitomizes the Old Testament, and the Epistle to the Hebrews could not have been written but for the ritual of Exodus and Leviticus. In its purely moral tone the Old Testament is of kindred quality with the New.
Take an instance from Leviticus. Three forms of evil are recognized in one of its most ardent chapters—namely, Violence, Deceit and Perjury. This is a succession amounting to a development, and, unwittingly it may or may not be, confirming that law of evolution which is as happily illustrated in morals as in physics.
Men begin with acts of violence, then go on to silent deceit and calculation, and close with a profanation of the holiest terms. The early sinners robbed gardens and killed brothers; the later sinners “agreed together” to “lie unto God.” It is something, therefore, to find in so ancient a book as Leviticus recognition of an order which is true to philosophy and to history.
But the proof that Moses and Christ are identical in moral tone is to be found in the process which offenders were commanded to adopt. By no sacerdotal jugglery was the foul blot to be removed; by no sigh of selfishness could the inward corruption be permitted to evaporate; by no investment of cheap tears could thieves compound for felony.
First, there must be restoration; second, there must be an addition of a fifth part of the whole; third, the priest must be faced as the very representative of God and a trespass offering be laid on the altar. After atonement forgiveness would come—a white angel from Heaven—and dwell in the reclaimed and sanctified heart. All the past would be driven away as a black cloud and all the present filled with a light above the brightness of the Sun.
What is this but an outline or forecast of what Christ said when He drove the hostile and vindictive man from the altar, bidding him first be reconciled with his brother and at peace with society? Christianity is not a substitute for morality; it is morality inspired, glorified and crowned. Say that the ritual was sanitary rather than doctrinal or theological. What then? All divine things are first sanitary, but not necessarily bounded by that term.
It will be found that the practice of genuine cleanness, chemical as well as mechanical, will be followed by a philosophy, and that the morality of cleanness will be followed by a theology.
Accustom a man to look out for bullocks and rams and lambs “without blemish,” and he will find that he can not stop at that point. He has begun an education which can only culminate in the prayer: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.” Yet no word of that holy thought was named in the original instructions.
Leviticus is the gospel of the Pentateuch—glistening with purity, turning law into music and spreading a banquet in the wilderness. But its ritual is dead. This is hard to believe—hard because religious vanity is fond of ritualism, which makes no demand on the conscience. Yet ritualism had a divinely appointed function in the education of the awakening mind, and was the only influence which could hold the attention of a people to whom freedom was a new experience.
Spectacular religion is alphabetic religion; therefore, to revert to it is to ignore every characteristic and impulse of manhood and progress. But they who say so be prepared to complete the philosophy which that contention initiates.
It is not enough to dismiss ritualism on the ground that it has been displaced by spiritual worship. Admit that such is the case, and other and broader admissions are involved in the plea, and can only be shirked at the expense of consistency.
It is generally admitted, for example, that the Old Testament law has been displaced by a New Testament principle. So Ritualism and Law, in their ancient forms, have passed away. But let us be careful. When we say Ritualism and Law, we mean in reality the letter, and it is evident that if any one letter can be displaced every other letter may be outlived and completed. And what is “the letter” but a symbol of flesh—visibleness, objectivity, historic fact and bulk?
Apostle Paul went so far as to say that even Christ was no longer known “after the flesh”—yea, though He had been known after the flesh, that kind of knowledge was for ever done away, and another knowledge had permanently taken its place.
The Church has never adopted the whole meaning of that teaching. Willing enough to consign Leviticus to the shades, the Church still clings to some sort of bodily Christ—the figure of a man—a bulk to be at least imaginatively touched. This is easily accounted for without suggesting superstition, and yet it might be done away with without imperiling faith. We are held in bondage by a mistaken conception of personality. When we think of that term we think of ourselves.
But even admitting the necessity of this, we may by a correct definition of personality acquire a higher conception of our own being. Instead of saying personality is this or that, after the manner of a geometrical figure, binding it to four points and otherwise limiting it, say that personality is the unit of being, and instantly every conception is enlarged and illuminated—the meaning being that personality is the starting point of conscious existence; not the fullness, but the outline; not the maximum, but the minimum; the very smallest conception which the mind can lay hold of—the Euclidic point, to be carried on into ratios and dimensions which originate a new vocabulary.
We do not, then, define “God” when we describe Him as a “Person,” but we merely begin to define Him; in other words, we say that God can not be less than a Person. What more He is, we must gradually and adoringly discover.
So far as Christ is concerned, there is one enlargement of His personality which no school of thinkers will dispute. This is rhetorically expressed by M. Renan, when he says of Jesus:
“A thousand times more living, a thousand times more loved, since Thy death than during the days of Thy pilgrimage here below, Thou wilt become to such a degree the Corner-Stone of humanity that to tear Thy name from this world would be to shake it to its foundations.”
If ritualism has been displaced by spirituality, and if law has been suspended by a principle—in other words, if the local has made way for the universal—why shrink from the admission that limited Personality has been exchanged for unlimited Influence?
How would Moses regard nineteenth century worship—say, of a Low Church and Evangelical type, as the true evolution of Leviticus? Where is the resemblance? The eye that can see the similitude is surely looking through an adapted medium. Yet the mystery would be dissolved if the Book of Leviticus were not open to reference.
The man is the completion of the child, but the child is no longer in existence.
The fruit is the fulfillment of the blossom, but the blossom is no longer available for comparison and for contrast.
Christianity is the consummation of Leviticus, but Leviticus remains—unlike the child and the blossom—and offers a series of dissonances or dissimilarities of the most positive quality.
Yet if Moses were living now he would be unchurched if he refused to identify the meaning of Leviticus in the service of the Christian sanctuary—the Papist nearest in gorgeousness, the Protestant claiming to be nearest in doctrine.
The Nonconformist Moses, in the absence of inspiration, would in this matter be the arch-heretic of the century.