EN AND SAGES

Lives of great men all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.

--LONGFELLOW

MOSES[1]

By HENRY GEORGE

(1571-1451 B.C.)

[Footnote 1: Copyright. 1894. by Selmar Hess.]

[Illustration: Moses. [TN]]

Three great religions place the leader of the Exodus upon the highest
plane they allot to man. To Christendom and to Islam, as well as to
Judaism, Moses is the mouthpiece of the Most High; the medium, clothed
with supernatural powers, through which the Divine Will has spoken. Yet
this very exaltation, by raising him above comparison, may prevent the
real grandeur of the man from being seen. It is amid his brethren that
Saul stands taller and fairer.

On the other hand, the latest school of Biblical criticism asserts that
the books and legislation attributed to Moses are really the product of
an age subsequent to that of the prophets. Yet to this Moses, looming
vague and dim, of whom they can tell us almost nothing, they, too,
attribute the beginning of that growth which flowered centuries after in
the humanities of Jewish law, and again, higher still and fairer,
gleamed forth in that star of spiritual light which rested over the
stable of Bethlehem, in Judea.

But whether wont to look on Moses in this way or in that, it may be
sometimes worth our while to take the point of view in which all shades
of belief may find common ground, and accepting the main features of
Hebrew record,[2] consider them in the light of history, and of human
nature as it shows itself to-day. Here is a case in which sacred history
may be treated as we would treat profane history without any shock to
religious feeling. The keenest criticism cannot resolve Moses into a
myth. The fact of the Exodus presupposes such a leader.

[Footnote 2: Moses, the lawgiver of the Hebrew people, was,
according to the Biblical account, an Israelite of the tribe of
Levi, and the son of Amram and Jochebed. He was born in Egypt,
in the year 1571 B.C., according to the common chronology. To
evade the edict of Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, that all the
male children of the Hebrews should be killed, he was hid by
his mother three months, and then exposed in an ark of rushes
on the banks of the Nile. Here the child was found by Pharaoh's
daughter, who adopted him for her so