These books are not such as any person would forge to gain popularity, or to make money by. There is nothing in them to bribe the good opinion of influential people, or catch the favor of the multitude. On the contrary, their stern severity, and unsparing denunciation of popular vice and profitable sin must have secured their rejection by the Jewish people, had they not been constrained by undeniable evidence to acknowledge their divine authority. They set out with the assertion of the divine authority of the law of Moses, and everywhere sharply reprove princes, priests, and people for breaking it. The prophets, so far from seeking popularity, are foolhardy enough to denounce the bonnets, hoops, and flounces of the ladies, and to cry, Woe! against the regular business of the most respectable note-shavers,[142] to croak against the march of intellect, and shake public confidence in the prosperity of their great country,[143] to ally themselves with fanatic abolitionists, and introduce agitating political questions into the pulpit; crying, Woe to him that useth his neighbor's service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.[144] To crown all, they organized abolition clubs to procure immediate emancipation, and published incendiary proclamations in the cities of the slaveholders,[145] and, strange to say, they were allowed to escape with their lives; and their writings were held sacred by the children of those very men and women they so unsparingly denounced; a conclusive proof that the calamities they predicted had compelled them to acknowledge these prophets as the heralds of God. The proof must have been conclusive, indeed, which compelled the Jews to acknowledge the writings of the prophets as sacred.

Another very striking feature of these writings is, their mutual connection with each other. They were written at various intervals, during a period of a thousand years' duration, by shepherds and kings, by prophets and priests, by governors of States and gatherers of sycamore fruit; in deserts and in palaces, in camps and in cities, in Egypt and Syria, in Arabia and Babylon; under the iron heel of despotic oppression, and amid the liberty of the most democratic republic the world ever saw; yet, circumstances, and lapse of time, they ever hold to one great theme, always assert the same great principles, and perpetually claim connection with the writers who have preceded them. There is nothing like this in the histories of other nations. Two centuries will work such changes of opinion, that you can not find nowadays any historian who approves the sentiments of Pepys or Clarendon, whatever use he may make of their facts. But the historians of the Bible not only refer to their predecessors' writings, but refer to them as of acknowledged divine authority. Thus the very latest of these books gives the weight of its testimony to the first—"And they set the priests in their divisions, and the Levites in their courses for the service of God, which is at Jerusalem, as it is written in the book of Moses."[146] And Daniel spake of the books of Moses as well known when he says, "Therefore the curse is poured upon us, and the oath that is written in the law of Moses the servant of God."[147] The shortest book in the Old Testament—the prophecy of Obadiah, consisting only of twenty sentences—contains twenty-five allusions to the preceding histories and laws. The last of the prophets shuts up the volume with a command to "Remember the law of Moses." In fact, just as the epistles prove the existence and acknowledged authority of the gospels; so do the prophets prove the existence and acknowledged authority of the law of Moses. They were acknowledged not merely by one generation of the Jewish people, but by the nation during the whole period of its national existence; and they are of such a character, that they must then, and now, be taken as one whole—all accepted, or all rejected together.

The reader of the Old Testament will speedily find that these writings are not merely a connected history of the nation, of great general interest, like Bancroft's or Macaulay's, but of no such special interest to any individual as to force him, by a sense of self-interest, or the danger of loss of liberty or property, to correct their errors. On the contrary, every farmer in Palestine was deeply concerned in the truth and accuracy of the Bible; for it contained not only the general boundaries of the country, and of the particular tribes, like the survey of the Maine boundary, or of Mason and Dixon's line, but it delineated particular estates, also, and was, in fact, the report of the Surveyor-General, deposited in the county court for reference, in case of any litigation about sale or inheritance of property.[148] The genealogies of the tribes and families were also preserved in these writings; and on the authenticity and correctness of these records, the inheritance of every farm in the land depended; for as no lease ran more than fifty years, every farm returned to the heirs of the original settler at the year of jubilee.[149] Thus every Jewish farmer had a direct interest in these sacred records; and it would be just as hard to forge records for the county courts of Ohio, and pass them off upon the citizens as genuine, and plead them in the courts as valid, as to impose at first, or falsify afterward, the records of the commonwealth of Israel.

This will appear more clearly when we consider that they contained also the laws of the land—the Constitution of the United States of Israel, with the statutes at large—according to which every house, and farm, and garden in the whole country was possessed, every court of justice was guided,[150] every election was held, from the election of a petty constable, to that of Governor of the State,[151] and the militia enrolled, mustered, officered, and called out to the field of battle.[152] These laws prescribed the way in which every house must be built, regulated the weaver in weaving his cloth, and the tailor in making it, and the cooking of every breakfast, dinner and supper eaten by an Israelite over the world, from that day to this.[153] Now, let any one who thinks it would be an easy matter to forge such a series of documents, and get people to receive and obey them, try his hand in making a volume of Acts of Assembly, and passing it off upon the people of Ohio for genuine. Let him bring an action into one of the courts, and persuade the judges to give a decision in his favor, upon the strength of his forged or falsified statutes, and then he may hope to convince us that the laws of Moses are simply a collection of religious tracts, which came to be held sacred through lapse of time, nobody knows how or why.

Nor were these laws, and the usages thus established, common, and such as the people would be ready easily to adopt. On the contrary, Moses repeatedly asserts, and all ancient history shows, that they were quite peculiar to the Hebrew people then; and they are to this day confined to the republics which, like our own, have drawn their ideas from the Bible. It is enough to name the common law and trial by jury; the armed nation; the right of free public assembly, free speech, free passport, and free trade; the election of civil, judicial, and military officers by universal suffrage; the division of the land in fee-simple among the whole people; the rights of women to hold real estate in their own right, to speak in public assemblies, and to prophetic functions; and the support of religion by the voluntary offerings of the people.

Our own republic resembles Israel as a daughter her mother. The land of liberty was the Bible country. The first republic which the world ever saw was designed by Almighty God, and revealed to the world in the Bible, and by the example of the United States of Israel. From that pattern our forefathers copied all the grand features of our glorious republic—the equitable distribution of the land, in fee-simple, among the people; securing them, by the jubilee, against the introduction of feudal tenure, and landlordism; the abolition of a standing army, and the defense of the country by the militia; the election of all officers, civil and military, from the town constable, and the justice of the peace, up to the president of the republic, the Lord Jehovah himself, by universal suffrage—and the Federal Union of the twelve tribes into one nation, with township, county, and state governments, with a common law, common schools, and the equality of all citizens before the law; the right of naturalization; sanitary and social institutions, such as modern philanthropists are only beginning to dream of, for the elevation of the people; and all this avowedly held in trust for all mankind, as a fountain of blessings for all the families of the earth. No such ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity, ever existed among the wisest heathen nations—the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, or Romans. On the face of the whole earth there never was, and there is not to-day, a free republic outside of the light and liberty of the Bible. The so-called republics of Athens and Rome were hideous aristocracies, and tyrannies. From the Bible the men of the Continental Congress learned the grand truth, which they emblazoned on the forefront of their immortal Declaration of Independence, "That all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" thus planting the rights of man upon the only immovable basis—the throne of the eternal God.

But there were other features of the Mosaic legislation so far in advance of the ideas of our modern Materialism as not to have been even yet suggested in our social congresses, nor even dreamt of by our most advanced Christian philanthropists, in their endeavors after the elevation of the masses. Moses' idea was the prevention of pauperism, and of the conflict between labor and capital, and of the gambling speculating fever, and the formation of an independent, intelligent, joyous, religious, healthy, and thrifty people, well-bred, well-fed, well-lodged, able to fight their foes on the battle-field, to reap their ridge on the harvest-field, to enjoy the blessings of healthy families, and to rejoice before the Lord. A volume would be needed to develop the social bearings of the laws of the Hebrews. We can only suggest for consideration the laws regarding inalienability of the homestead, and the bankrupt law; the laws of marriage and inheritance; the laws of servitude and wages; the sanitary laws regarding building, clothing, bathing, eating, and contagion; the protection of the rights of animals; the dispersion of the educated class; and the three great national festivals, during which the whole people were released from the labors of the field, and of the kitchen, and enjoyed during the eight summer days of each picnic such an excitement of social enjoyment, religious fervor, and political patriotism, as modern Christendom anticipates in the millennium, but which neither Church nor State has, as yet, systematically attempted to nurture.

That the Hebrews did not obey the law, and so did not enjoy the happiness obedience would have secured, is only what God foresaw, and foretold repeatedly, with solemn warning of the disastrous degradation to which disobedience to God's laws must ever reduce man. Nevertheless, even their very imperfect conformity to these institutions gave them such superiority of blood and breeding to their ungodly neighbors, that they have survived the most powerful nations, and, in spite of dispersion, exile, disfranchisement, and persecution, they exist as a distinct people, superior intellectually, commercially, and morally to all the heathen nations at this day. How much higher had been their position had they fully obeyed the law.

Our argument is, that this law of liberty, equality, fraternity, and religion, was worthy of our Father in heaven, and a seed of blessing to all the families of the earth.

To a Jew living before the coming of Christ, the unanimous testimony of his nation, confirmed by all the commemorative observances of the sacrifices, the passover, the Sabbath, and the jubilee, by the reading of the law and the prophets, and the singing of the historical psalms in the temple and the synagogues, by the execution of the laws of Moses in the courts, and by the very existence of his nation as a distinct people, separate from all the other nations—could leave no doubt that laws so peculiar and beneficent must have been enacted by a wisdom superior to that of man, and their observance imposed by divine authority; nor that the miracles by which these laws were authenticated, and the national existence of the people of Israel was secured, were genuine, and divine. The chain of historical and internal evidence is too strong to be broken, while the Jewish nation exists.