land. His want of
friends and ignorance of their social order would place him at a
disadvantage, of which they are forbidden to avail themselves, either by
legal process (for the first passage is connected with jurisprudence),
or in the affairs of common life. But the spirit of the commandment
could not fail to influence their treatment of all foreigners; and
simple and commonplace though it appear to us, it would have startled
many of the wisest and greatest peoples of antiquity, and would have
fallen as strangely upon the ears of the Greeks of Pericles, as of the
modern Bedouin, with whom Israel had kinship. A foreigner, as such, was
a foe: to wrong him was a paradox, because he had no rights: kinship, or
else alliance or treaty was required to entitle the weaker to any better
treatment than it suited the stronger to allow.

Yet we find a precept reiterated in this Jewish code which involves, in
its inevitable though slow development, the abolition of negro slavery,
the respect by powerful and civilised nations of the rights of
indigenous tribes, the most boundless advance of philanthropy, through
the most generous recognition of the fraternity of man.

However sternly the sword of Joshua might fall, it struck not at the
foreigner, as such, but at those tribes, guilty and therefore accursed
of God, the cup of whose iniquity was full. And yet there was enough of
carnage to prove that so gracious a commandment as this could not have
risen spontaneously in the heart of early Judaism. Does it seem to be
made more natural, by any proposed shifting of the date?

The reason of the precept is beautifully human. It rests upon no
abstract basis of common rights, nor prudential consideration of mutual
advantage.

In our time it is sometimes proposed to build all morality upon such
foundations; and strange consequences have already been deduced in cases
where the proposed sanction has not seemed to apply. But, in fact, no
advance in virtue has ever been traced to self-interest, although,
after the advance took place, self-interest has always found its account
in it. A progressive community is made of good men, and the motive to
which Moses appeals is compassion fed by memory: "For ye were strangers
in the land of Egypt" (xxii. 21); "For ye know the heart of a stranger,
seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (xxiii. 9).

The point is not that they may again be carried into captivity: it is
that they have felt its bitt