Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/164

 Such was the democracy of theocracy — a democracy not merely joined with theocracy in a forced and unnatural union — an alliance of two systems which were by nature hostile, and ready to fly apart; but a union in which one sprang out of the other. Men were equal because God was their Ruler — a Ruler so high that before Him there was neither great nor small, but all stood on the same level.

But the Hebrew Law did not stop with equality: it inculcated fraternity. A man was not only a man, he was a brother. That Law contains some of the most beautiful provisions ever recorded in any legislation, not only for the cold administration of justice, but for the exercise of humanity. The spirit of the Hebrew Law was broader than race, or country, or kindred. What liberality, for example, in its treatment of foreigners! In the Exodus of the Israelites; in their migration from the Delta to the Desert; in their long wanderings through the wilderness; and in their approaches to the Holy Land — they came in contact with other tribes and nations. With these they were often at war; but after the war there were great numbers of persons of foreign birth settled among them, and unless guarded by special enactments, they were liable to be objects of hatred and persecution. Among the ancients generally a foreigner had no rights in any country but his own. In some languages the very word "stranger" was synonymous with enemy. Against all these race hatreds Moses set up this command, "Thou shalt not oppress a stranger" — which he enforced upon the Israelites by the touching remembrance of their own bitter experience — "for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Perhaps indeed he thought of himself — how he had once fled to this land of Midian, and been a wanderer among these mountains; and remembering his own days of