Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

The above statements contain, I submit, the fundamental governing ideas of Christ’s teaching, as it is set before us in the Gospels. No surprise need be felt at finding that these ideas are not presented in the sacred documents categorically. The reasons for their not having been so propounded were quite insurmountable. It is enough that they are the substance of them. That we should clearly apprehend that it is so, is necessary to a right understanding of the documents, of the religion they offer to the world, and of the history of the religion. They will, also, often show, by an easy and sure test, what doctrines of particular Churches are excrescences on the religion of Christ, and what are contradictions to it.

So also was it with the teaching of St. Paul. He made the enlightened moral consciousness of man the source of the law of religion, as distinguished from municipal law; and he taught that the sanction for this heart-inscribed law exists in the rewards and punishments of a future life. For this reason the resurrection was his cardinal doctrine; for, if there be no resurrection, he had but little, in what would be the sentiments and opinions of the mass of mankind on these subjects, to support and enforce his teaching. It is evident that he could not have maintained either of these two points, if he had maintained that the old Dispensation was of perpetual obligation. With respect to it, all he could maintain was, that, morally and practically, it had its legitimate issue in what he was teaching. Logically and implicitly, its requirements had necessitated its contradicting both his two above-mentioned great points. At all events, with respect to both, it had taught something very different from what he was teaching. To the conjoint consideration of what it had formerly taught, and what he had to teach now, he addressed himself; and we find that all that he said upon these subjects was in perfect accord with what had been said, and implied, by his Divine Master.

II. And, now that we have collected our facts, let us proceed to combine them into a regular and synoptical argument. If, in my endeavour to establish them, I may have been too concise, I beg the reader to call to mind the title of this work. These are matters which, here, I can neither pass over altogether, nor yet treat as fully as I might think desirable.

For the purpose, then, of his great work—that of forming a people, the municipal law (this we must endeavour to separate in thought from the religion) had occupied in the mind of Moses the first place. The subordination of the religion to the law is evident, because the object and use of the religion were to sanction and enforce the law. Law is nothing, unless there be force to maintain it. In ordinary cases, the requisite force is found in the majority, or in the strongest class, or in an individual stronger than the community. In this case it was sought ab extra: the religion was to supply it. In the dispensation that was to be the place, and the use, of the religion. It had no ulterior, nor collateral, objects; because it did not include in its purview the future life. These ideas belong to an early stage of knowledge, and of thought, in which municipal law and religion are inextricably entangled. We, at this time, are able to disentangle them; and, while keeping them in thought distinct from each other, to make out, in any case that may be before us, in what relation they are standing towards each other.

But municipal codes have always required, and must, from their very nature and purpose require, immediate rewards and punishments. This is common to them all. Moses, as a legislator, had little, or no, concern with anything else. His code, however, required them in a somewhat greater degree than others, because it was to be applied to a singularly rude and intractable people; and where the code is in advance of the general manners and sentiments of a people, as was his, speediness and severity of punishment are needed especially. So would it have been with his code had it been merely as others are. On that supposition he would probably, just as other legislators have done, and for the same reasons, have abstained from putting forward the sanction of future rewards and punishments. As far as his business and object were concerned, they would have introduced considerations which, while they were irrelevant, would also have been confusing; and must have weakened the appropriate sanction of his law, which was so essentially his main reliance, that he could not afford to risk its being at all weakened. Indeed, we see that it was a great object in the code to intensify the sense of the severity, and of the speediness of its punishments.

So it would have been, if the code he delivered had been as other codes. On that supposition, he would, probably, have confined himself to the rewards and punishments of this world. There was, however, one supreme peculiarity which distinguished his from all the municipal codes of civil and criminal law people in this part of the world have ever had to do with; that was that it came direct from God. And it came in such a manner and sense, that it required that God should see, more or less immediately, to its execution. It was His law in such a sense that He must be its executor. This meant that God did actually superintend the distribution of the rewards and punishments it required.

This was a structural necessity. At all events it was recognized as such, and was logically carried out in the system.

It will enable us to see this more clearly, if we consider in what way, and on what footing, could have been introduced the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, had they been superadded to these immediate ones, the distribution of which was superintended by God, and which Moses was compelled to insist on. It could, as far as we can imagine, have been done only in one or other of the two following ways. Either he, and the Prophets after him, must have said, and this was what they did say: ‘This is God’s law; and God rewards and punishes all violations of it here in this world; so that you get, here and now, the rewards and punishments He Himself assigns to your actions, and which He Himself actually apportions. But,’ they must then have gone on to add, ‘you will have the same process repeated in a future world.’ Had this been announced, it would have been equivalent to saying, that the Omniscient and Omnipotent Judge having, according to His own law, unerringly tried, and adequately compensated, every act, would repeat the process a second time. That is to say, that every case, having been already adjudicated upon, without any possibility of error, or of insufficiency of award, or of miscarriage of any kind, would be adjudicated upon again by the same Judge, who had in the first instance known every particular, and had, in accordance with His own law, thoroughly dealt with it. No man in his right mind could have propounded such a system: and in these matters Orientals, down to the very bottom of society, are far more logical than ourselves. Jesus precisely, because He taught that the transgressor is not tried by God in this world, could teach that he would be tried by God in the world to come. But this was just what Moses, and the prophets, could not say, because their system rested on the opposite assumption.

Or, and this is the only alternative, they must have said, ‘This is God’s law; and He executes it here. But though it is God’s business, and in God’s hands, still, notwithstanding, it is executed in a very incomplete and insufficient way. Many escape punishment; and many do not get rewarded at all. And those who are rewarded and punished here, are rewarded and punished in very inadequate measures. In every instance there may be, indeed there is, more or less of a miscarriage of justice. But there will be future rewards and punishments, which with set all this right.’ Suppose this had been what had been said; and then see what would have been the consequences. It would have suggested to every man the thought, even the hope, that he might escape in part, perhaps altogether, in this life, the punishment of any crime he was contemplating. But what was most vitally needed was, that is should be seen, and felt, by the people, that punishment would be quite unerring, and as severe as unerring. This way of introducing the doctrine would have been thoroughly illogical; and not more illogical than, morally and politically, bad in its effects. It would have been illogical, because it would have been in direct contradiction to the idea, that it was God who was seeing to the execution of His own law: a point that was as clear to the people as that intelligence governs the universe is to us; and which was the very thought that gave authority and force to the law. And it would have been morally, and politically, bad in its effects, because the vicious, and the ill-disposed, and the would-be criminals of all kinds, are not withheld from doing evil so much by the fear of punishment in the world to come as by fear of punishment here in this world. Nothing encourages them so much in their evil courses as the expectation of present impunity. And this was peculiarly applicable to the people for whom Moses legislated. They were, throughout the whole of the earlier part of their history, ever ready to forget and abandon God; and their temper required, in the highest degree, immediate punishments. Neither, therefore, could the doctrine have been introduced by Moses in this fashion.

Looking, then, at the circumstances, I cannot imagine how the two systems, of present and of future rewards and punishments, could have been taught together under the old heaven-given, heaven-administered, heaven-executed law. A choice had to be made between teaching, on the one hand, what was logical and in conformity with the instinctive beliefs of the people, and might prove to be politically sufficient; and, on the other hand, what, equally in whatever way it might have been put, would have been glaringly illogical and full of contradiction, and could only have caused confusion of ideas, and enfeeblement of the system. This brings me to the conclusion that it was the doctrine that God was seeing to the execution of His own law, in this world and in this life; this law being also, at the same time, a code of municipal law; which in the main decided Moses in making his choice, that is, in leading him to restrict the sanction of his law to what was mundane and immediate.