This saved explanation; and I spent several days (during his prolonged absence) in studying my new volumes. They led me into a maze—or rather, maze after maze—of bewildering novelties. Sosia had told me that my first volume, containing five books, was called by the Jews “the Law.” But it included pedigrees, poems, prophecies, histories of nations, and stories of private persons. The legal portion of it was largely devoted to details about feasts and purificatory sacrifices—the very things that David appeared to call needless. However, when I came to look into the Law more closely, I found that its fundamental enactments were humane and gentle—so much so as to give me the impression of being unpractical. It enjoined on the Jews kindness to strangers as well as to citizens. While retaining capital punishment, it prohibited torture. At least I took that to be a fair inference from the fact that it even forbade the infliction of more than forty blows with the scourge, on the ground that a “brother”—that was the word—must not be so far degraded as to become “vile” in the eyes of his fellow-citizens. It also placed some limitations on the right of masters to punish slaves, even when the latter were foreigners.
Having been accustomed to regard the Jews as unique for their moroseness and unneighbourliness I was all the more astonished at these things. It occurred to me then, as it does sometimes now, that the Law was almost too humane to have been ever fully obeyed by the greater part of the people. For example, even the slaves, even the beasts of burden, were to have one day in seven as a holiday, on which all labour was forbidden. Periodic remission of debts was enacted by law! This surprised me most of all. To think that the revolutionary measure—so our Roman historians called it—for which our tribunes of the people had contended in vain under the Republic, should here be found legalised by the Law of Moses—and this, too, not as an exceptional and isolated condonation, but as a regular remission after a fixed number of years!
“How,” I asked, “could the Lawgiver expect people to lend money to borrowers if the creditor knew that in the course of a few months the obligation to pay the debt would cease?” Was he blind to the most manifest tendencies of human nature? No, I found he was not blind to them. He simply said that they must be resisted: “Beware,” said he, “that there be not a base thought in thine heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand.”
This notion of forbidding an action, or abstinence from action, in a code of laws as being “base”—not as being “subject to a penalty of such a kind,” or “a fine of so much,” was quite new to me. I had given some time to the study of Roman law, and had always assumed that when the law says “Do this,” it adds a punishment in some form or other, “Do this, or you shall suffer this or that.” But here, embedded in the Law of Moses, was a law, or rather a recommendation, without penalty. And presently I found that the last of their Ten Greater Laws—if I may so call them—was of the same kind. It could not possibly be enforced—for it forbade “coveting”! Only a few days ago, before I had bought these books from Sosia, I had read in Paul’s epistle to the Romans “I should not have known covetousness if the law had not said, Thou shalt not covet”; and these words had puzzled me a good deal. I had thought that they must refer to some “law” of a spiritual kind, such as we might call “the law of the conscience” or “the law of our higher nature,” or the like. Yet I felt that this interpretation did not quite agree with the context. Now I found, to my utter astonishment, that this was the very letter of the first clause of the tenth of the Greater Laws, “Thou shalt not covet.”
To crown all, I found that elsewhere the whole of the code was based by the Lawgiver on two fundamental precepts. The first was, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” and this love was to call forth all the powers of mind and soul and body. The second was, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” How was either of these to be enforced? “Love,” say all the poets, “is free.” The Law neither prescribed nor suggested any means of enforcing these two Great Commandments of “loving.” And how could “love” be at once “free,” as poetry protests, and yet a part of the Law, as Moses testified? There seemed no answer to this question, unless some God could make us willing and eager to enforce the two commandments on ourselves, constraining us (so to speak) by love to love both Him and one another. “Truly,” said I, “this Law of Moses is very ambitious.” It seemed to aim at more than Law could accomplish. It reminded me of a sentence I had found in one of my new volumes, entitled “Proverbs,” “The light of the Lord is as the breath of men; He searcheth the storehouses of the soul.”
Somewhat similar was a saying imputed to Epictetus—which I had not heard from Arrian but from a fellow-student—reproving one of his disciples in these words, “Man, where are you putting it? See whether the basin is dirty!” The disciple, though an industrious scholar, was of impure life; and Epictetus meant that, if the vessel of his soul was foul, all the knowledge put into that vessel would also become foul. The moral was, “First cleanse the vessel!” So the Jewish Proverb seemed to say, “The light of the Lord must first search the storehouse of the soul: then the food taken out from the storehouse will be pure and wholesome.” This brought me back to the words of David, who seemed to think that the searching and cleansing must come from God and not from man alone, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me!”
Comparing these two fundamental or Greatest Laws of Moses with the fundamental law of Epictetus, “Keep the things that are thine own,” I thought at first that the Jew and the Greek were entirely opposed. On second thoughts, however, I perceived that in “the things that are thine own” Epictetus would include justice and kindness, and all social so-called virtues so far as they did not interfere with one’s own peace of mind—for he would perhaps exclude pity, and certainly sympathy in the full sense of the term. But Epictetus thought that people could be sufficiently kind and just and virtuous without other aid than that of the “logos” within them. David did not, in his own case, unless that which was within him had been cleansed or renewed by a Power regarded as outside him, to whom he prayed as God. There seemed to me, in this difference of “within” and “outside,” more than a mere difference of metaphor. But I had no time to think over the matter. For, just as I was regretting that Arrian was not with me to talk over some of these subjects, Glaucus, coming in to borrow a book, informed me that he had met my friend late in the previous night coming from the quay. I had intended to stay at home that morning. But now, finding that Glaucus was on his way to the lecture, I resolved to accompany him, expecting to meet Arrian there.