Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

But I have not yet exhausted all the light that can be brought to bear on this difficulty. I can see a fourth solution. It occurred to me at Jerusalem. I there said to myself, ‘Let us endeavour to look at it in the form in which it appears to have presented itself to the Divine Master. He “brought life and immortality to light” to His countrymen, and, in the highest sense, to us. He must, while engaged in this work, have seen clearly the very difficulty that is now before us. It was, in fact, the difficulty that directly, or in its logical consequences, stood up before Him on all occasions of His teaching. How, then, did He meet it? How did He deal with it?’ I will now proceed to propound the answer, that this way of contemplating the difficulty evolved in my mind.

I assumed that the first step towards finding the way to the true answer to our question was to ascertain what was precisely the work Moses had been called to do, and what were the conditions under which he had to do it. In order to reach a right understanding of these matters, it was necessary to know the date at which his work was done. Without that we should have been quite unable to reconstruct in our minds the conditions under which he had done his work; the very chief of which were the nature and composition of the human materials, out of which he had to form a people, which was his great task. A similar process must here be repeated with respect to the work of Christ: we must now make out distinctly what it was that He had to accomplish, and what were the obstacles in the way of His accomplishing it.

Hitherto we have been endeavouring to make out what had to be done at the first establishment of, and throughout, the old Dispensation; and we have summoned before us, successively, three reasons, which might be imagined, and alleged, for the omission in that Dispensation of one particular doctrine we might have expected to find in it. This we did with a constant reference to the times, circumstances, and conditions of the work. We saw, however, that not one of those reasons is sufficient and admissible. Not one explains all the phenomena. What, therefore, we are endeavouring to get sight of is still in obscurity. The answer sought has not yet been found. What we now propose to do, still for the purpose of obtaining this answer, is to recall what He taught, and what arguments He used, Who ‘brought life and immortality to light;’ and how in doing this He dealt with what Moses had taught, and with what he had not taught; and how He dealt with the thoughts that were in the minds of the people He was addressing. If this inquiry shall enable us to see that it was, precisely, the doctrine of the future life (what Moses had abstained from teaching) which overturned the old Dispensation (what he had taught); and at the same time to see how, and why, it had this effect, then we shall know why Moses, and the Prophets, had not taught it.

Fifteen hundred years had elapsed since Moses’s day. What we have to set before our minds, now, is the conditions under which the new work had to be done. It was new, because it cancelled, or supplemented, what was old. It did both. How did it do it? What were the difficulties it had to contend with? What were the obstacles that stood in its path, and had to be surmounted? Of course, they must have been the creation of the foregoing state of things. Let us, then, be sure that we understand the antecedent times and events.

The object of Moses had been to form a people, in the ordinary sense of these words; a people, that is to say, who would be well-ordered at home, and able to hold their own among their neighbours. For this purpose a code was the first necessity, and, indeed, it might effect all that was required. But even a somewhat superficial acquaintance with the history of those fifteen centuries shows us that this code must come from God. That was a necessity. A law from man would, at that time, have been useless, and even inconceivable. There was, however, no difficulty about a law from God. In the spontaneous apprehensions of the people, at that time, God was the source of all law, directly and immediately, as distinctly as He is to our apprehensions the source of all law, mediately and ultimately. We must make out the effect of this difference. Theirs was the case in which the intervention of God is not confined to principles, it being left to human legislators to apply those principles; but it was the case in which He gives, necessarily, the letter of the statute. Of this it is the natural, and logical, sequence, that He should be the administrator and executor of His own law, even of what we call civil and criminal law. Human agency, when employed, was employed only mechanically, in the same way as a famine, or pestilence. There was nothing in the mind of the people that could dispose them to reject this conclusion, for they had already accepted the premises. They saw God standing behind the law—which is regulative of society; and dictating its letter; and, because they saw this, they could not, also, but see Him standing behind the course of events, and bringing about the rewards and punishments the law required.

But, furthermore, it is evident that law, civil and criminal, must be executed here in this life. This is a concern of existing human societies that must be attended to. The more instantaneously punishment overtakes the offender the better. The more completely, then, will the very object of the law be carried out, that which is the whole of its raison d’être. It always has been so all over the world. To be effective, to answer its purpose, to do what it aims at doing, its action must be certain, speedy, visible. Punishment has two political objects, to rid society of those who are disturbing it, and to strike terror into, and so deter, those who might be disposed to disturb it. The object of law, therefore, can not be attained without present, immediate punishment. The more immediate the better. It has been so everywhere, and always. Moses’s law, therefore, required the sanction of direct, immediate, mundane rewards and punishments, just like any other code.

We see, then, at once, that there was no absolute need for future rewards and punishments. We can even already imagine that they would have had a weakening and disturbing effect upon the system: at all events, we shall eventually find that they were, precisely, as a matter of fact and history, the very solvent that was used, designedly, for the very purpose of disintegrating and destroying it. As it was a system of statute law, what was needed was that the offender should be punished here at once. Moses had no concern with the world to come, or with the unseen world at all, excepting so far as it could further his great object. No code of civil and criminal law, that ever was heard of, could be maintained, if it relegated the punishment of the offender to a future life. And, furthermore, as God was the primary giver of the law, and the actual source of it, so must He be the actual executor of it: it was His own law. This was intelligible, and logical. And furthermore, it was in perfect harmony both with the physics and the metaphysics of those ages, among the learned and the unlearned alike. To their apprehension everything good in nature, in society, and the mind of man, came direct from God. God’s arm, therefore, was ever bared, and visible. Every offence had its penalty, whether the offence of an individual, or of the nation; and that penalty was visibly exacted at the time, that is to say, in this life. The idea of future rewards and punishments would have been antagonistic to this. It would have been an element of confusion and weakness. There was no place for it. It was practically and logically and philosophically excluded. The one thing that was paramount, and indispensable, was thoroughly attended to. What would have acted injuriously on that imperious necessity was set aside.

All this is clear abstractedly. And in the concrete history it comes out with perfect distinctness. During the fifteen hundred years the law is in force, we have not one syllable about a doctrine of a future life. It was so, because it was absolutely logical, and quite natural, that it should be so. Nothing else could account for the fact. It was just what ought to have been the case. It was excluded not so much designedly as spontaneously. There was no more place for it in the teaching of the Prophets than there had been, originally, in the code itself, because it would have been destructive of the system they were expounding and enforcing. It could not, therefore, have occurred to them to teach it.

But at last, for certain reasons, the time has come for teaching it. What now, therefore, we have to do is to mark the way in which the law was dealt with in order that it might be taught. The object of the Light of the World was not, as that of the code of Moses had been, to form a people, in the ordinary sense of those words, that is, to make and maintain in the world that political organism we call a nation, but to form a peculiar people, that would belong to all nations. His kingdom was not to be as the separate kingdoms of the world, but an universal kingdom, constructed out of all the kingdoms of the world. It would differ from the ordinary kingdoms of the world in the source, in the purview, and in the object of its law. It would reject everything, however necessary for national purposes, which conflicted with the idea of the universal brotherhood of mankind, the only conceivable principle for an universal voluntary society; and its law, for obvious reasons, would not be a written law. It would not require that its members should pay taxes, though it would require that they should tax themselves to satisfy the claims of fraternity. Nor would it require that they should fight. God would not be to them the Lord of hosts, but the universal Father. The working of the community would give no occasion for the use of arms. It would be composed of Jews, Greeks, and Scythians; of bond and free; of all peoples, kindreds, and languages. Nothing could bind together this unlocalized society but their morality. And the only sanction, looking at mankind generally, for the morality of an unlocalized society, would be the rewards and punishments of a future life. The principles, therefore, of an universally applicable system of morality, binding together a people taken out of all nations, must be made the law of this peculiar people, this unworldly, universally-diffused community; and they must believe in the rewards and punishments of a future life. Their law must find both its source, and its sanction, in themselves, that is to say, in what they felt, and believed: whereas both the source and the sanction of the old law had been ab extra.