Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/28

 8 STATESMEN AND SAGES structive 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 venera- tion 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 Al- mighty, yet who would denounce as irreligious and " communistic" any applica- tion 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 work- ing 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 expression has been in the world a living power. From the free spirit of the Mosaic law sprang that intensity of family life that amid all dispersions and persecutions has preserved the individuality of the He- brew race ; that love of independence that under the most adverse circumstances has characterized the Jew ; that burning patriotism that flamed up in the Macca- bees and bared the breasts of Jewish peasants to the serried steel of Grecian phalanx and the resistless onset of Roman legion ; that stubborn courage that in exile and in torture has held the Jew to his faith. It kindled that fire that has made the strains of Hebrew seers and poets phrase for us the highest exaltations of thought ; that intellectual vigor that has over and over again made the dry staff bud and blossom. And passing outward from one narrow race it has exerted its power wherever the influence of the Hebrew scriptures has been felt. It has top- pled thrones and cast down hierarchies. It strengthened the Scottish Covenanter in the hour of trial, and the Puritan amid the snows of a strange land. It charged with the Ironsides at Naseby; it stood behind the low redoubt on Bunker Hill. But it is in example as in deed that such lives are helpful. It is thus that they dignify human nature and glorify human effort, and bring to those who struggle hope and trust. The life of Moses, like the institutions of Moses, is a protest against that blasphemous doctrine, current now as it was three thousand years ago ; that blasphemous doctrine preached ofttimes even from Christian pulpits : that the want and suffering of the masses of mankind flow from a mys- terious dispensation of Providence, which we may lament, but can neither quar- rel with nor alter.