th thee"--"the land which the Lord lendeth
thee." And by practical legislation, by regulations to which he gave the
highest sanctions, he tried to guard against the wrong that converted
ancient civilizations into despotisms--the wrong that in after centuries
ate out the heart of Rome, and produced the imbruting serfdom of Poland
and the gaunt misery of Ireland, the wrong that is to-day crowding
families into single rooms and filling our new States with tramps. He
not only provided for the fair division of the land among the people,
and for making it fallow and common every seventh year, but by the
institution of the jubilee he provided for a redistribution of the land
every fifty years and made monopoly impossible.

I do not say that these institutions were, for their ultimate purpose,
the best that might even then have been devised, for Moses had to work,
as all great constructive statesmen have to work, with the tools that
came to his hand, and upon materials as he found them. Still less do I
mean to say that forms suitable for that time and people are suitable
for every time and people. I ask, not veneration of the form, but
recognition of the spirit.

Yet how common it is to venerate the form and to deny the spirit! There
are many who believe that the Mosaic institutions were literally
dictated by the Almighty, yet who would denounce as irreligious and
"communistic" any application of their spirit to the present day. And
yet to-day how much we owe to these institutions! This very day, the
only thing that stands between our working classes and ceaseless toil is
one of these Mosaic institutions. Let the mistakes of those who think
that man was made for the Sabbath, rather than the Sabbath for man, be
what they may; that there is one day in the week on which hammer is
silent and loom stands idle, is due, through Christianity, to
Judaism--to the code promulgated in the Sinaitic wilderness.

It is in these characteristics of the Mosaic institutions that, as in
the fragments of a Colossus, we may read the greatness of the mind whose
impress they bear--of a mind in advance of its surroundings, in advance
of its age; of one of those star souls that dwindle not with distance,
but, glowing with the radiance of essential truth, hold their light
while institutions and languages and creeds change and pass.

That the thought was greater than the permanent expression it found, who
can doubt? Yet from that day to this that expre