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.
ll 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.