the world's first great teacher. He is still one of the
world's great teachers. Seven million people yet look to his laws for
special daily guidance, and more than two hundred millions read his
books and regard them as Holy Writ. And these people as a class are of
the best and most enlightened who live now or who have ever lived.

Moses did not teach of a life after this--he gives no hint of
immortality--all of his rewards and punishments refer to the present. If
there is a heaven for the good and a hell for the bad, he did not know
of them.

The laws of Moses were designed for the Now and the Here. Many of them
ring true and correct even today, after all this interval of more than
three thousand years. Moses had a good knowledge of physiology, hygiene,
sanitation. He knew the advantages of cleanliness, order, harmony,
industry and good habits. He also knew psychology, or the science of the
mind: he knew the things that influence humanity, the limits of the
average intellect, the plans and methods of government that will work
and those which will not.

He was practical. He did what was expedient. He considered the material
with which he had to deal, and he did what he could and taught that
which his people would and could believe. The Book of Genesis was
plainly written for the child-mind.

The problem that confronted Moses was one of practical politics, not a
question of philosophy or of absolute or final truth. The laws he put
forth were for the guidance of the people to whom he gave them, and his
precepts were such as they could assimilate.

It were easy to take the writings of Moses as they have come down to us,
translated, re-translated, colored and tinted with the innocence,
ignorance and superstition of the nations who have kept them alive for
thirty-three centuries, and then compile a list of the mistakes of the
original writer. The writer of these records of dreams and hopes and
guesses, all cemented with stern commonsense, has our profound reverence
and regard. The "mistakes" lie in the minds of the people who, in the
face of the accumulated knowledge of the centuries, have persisted that
things once written were eternally sufficient.

In point of time there is no teacher within many hundred years following
him who can be compared with him in originality and insight.

Moses lived fourteen hundred years before Christ.

The next man after him to devise a complete code of conduct was Solon,
who lived se