Egyptian worship. It would have been
difficult for Moses to have recognized the future state, in the
degrading ignorance and sensualism of the Jews, without associating with
it the tutelary deities of the Egyptians and all the absurdities
connected with the doctrine of metempsychosis, which consigned the
victims of future punishment to enter the forms of disgusting and
hideous animals, thereby blending with the sublime doctrine of a future
state the most degrading superstitions. Bishop Warburton seizes on the
silence of Moses respecting a future state to prove, by a learned yet
sophistical argument, his divine legation, _because_ he ignored what so
essentially entered into the religion of Egypt. But whether Moses
purposely ignored this great truth for fear it would be perverted, or
because it was a part of the Egyptian economy which he wished his people
to forget, still it is also possible that this doctrine of immortality
was so deeply engraved on the minds of the people that there was no need
to recognize it while giving a system of ritualistic observances. The
comparative silence of the Old Testament concerning immortality is one
of its most impressive mysteries. However dimly shadowed by Job and
David and Isaiah, it seems to have been brought to light only by the
gospel. There is more in the writings of Plato and Cicero about
immortality than in the whole of the Old Testament, And this fact is so
remarkable, that some trace to the sages of Greece and Egypt the
doctrine itself, as ordinarily understood; that is, a _necessary_
existence of the soul after death. And they fortify themselves with
those declarations of the apostles which represent a happy immortality
as the special gift of God,--not a necessary existence, but given only
to those who obey his laws. If immortality be not a gift, but a
necessary existence, as Socrates supposed, it seems strange that heathen
philosophers should have speculated more profoundly than the patriarchs
of the East on this mysterious subject. We cannot suppose that Plato was
more profoundly instructed on such a subject than Abraham and Moses. It
is to be noted, however, that God seems to have chosen different
races for various missions in the education of his children. As
Saint Paul puts it, "There are diversities of gifts, but the same
Spirit,... diversities of workings, but the same God who worketh in
all." The Hebrew genius was that of discerning and declaring moral and
spiritual t