hat
expressed in the language of the Stoic, "It is the business of Jupiter,
not mine;" or it may be that it partook of the same revulsion that shows
itself in modern times, when a spirit essentially religious has been
turned against the forms and expressions of religion, because these
forms and expressions have been made the props and bulwarks of tyranny,
and even the name and teachings of the Carpenter's Son perverted into
supports of social injustice--used to guard the pomp of Caesar and
justify the greed of Dives.

Yet, however such feelings influenced Moses, I cannot think that such a
soul as his, living such a life as his--feeling the exaltation of great
thoughts, feeling the burden of great cares, feeling the bitterness of
great disappointments--did not stretch forward to the hope beyond; did
not rest and strengthen and ground itself in the confident belief that
the death of the body is but the emancipation of the soul; did not feel
the assurance that there is a power in the universe upon which it might
confidently rely, through wreck of matter and crash of worlds. But the
great concern of Moses was with the duty that lay plainly before him:
the effort to lay foundations of a social state in which deep poverty
and degrading want should be unknown--where men, released from the
meaner struggles that waste human energy, should have opportunity for
intellectual and moral development.

Here stands out the greatness of the man. What was the wisdom and
stretch of the forethought that in the desert sought to guard in advance
against the dangers of a settled state, let the present speak.

In the full blaze of the nineteenth century, when every child in our
schools may know as common truths things of which the Egyptian sages
never dreamed; when the earth has been mapped, and the stars have been
weighed; when steam and electricity have been pressed into our service,
and science is wresting from nature secret after secret--it is but
natural to look back upon the wisdom of three thousand years ago as the
man looks back upon the learning of the child.

And yet, for all this wonderful increase of knowledge, for all this
enormous gain of productive power, where is the country in the civilized
world in which to-day there is not want and suffering--where the masses
are not condemned to toil that gives no leisure, and all classes are not
pursued by a greed of gain that makes life an ignoble struggle to get
and to keep? Three tho