Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/750

730 principles of self-culture and self-denial involve a noble and spiritual conception of life, and are capable of leading to the most admirable results. But, even with the obscurity that rests on the beginnings of Buddhism and the moral-religious development that preceded it, none of us will be inclined to deny that it is the outcome of the experience and thoughts of the time. Such, also, appears to be the case with the ethical codes of the Bible. The ordinary social duties which are enjoined in the Old Testament and New Testament, such as honesty, truthfulness, sobriety, kindness to the poor, are common to many times and peoples. All the moral requirements of the Decalogue are found among the Egyptians at a period earlier than that usually assigned to Moses, Even the nobler qualities of love to man, forgiveness of injuries, denial of self, are not without parallel in other communities. In some cases a process of natural development may be observed in the biblical ethics. The prophets enjoin on the Israelites justice and kindness to their own countrymen, but their view does not extend beyond their own land; one of the later law-books (Lev. xix, 18) contains the precept, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," but it defines neighbors as "the children of thy people"; the great Jewish lawyer Hillel, toward the end of the first century before the beginning of our era, announced as the central principle of conduct that a man should not do to others what he would not have them do to him; Jesus put this principle into positive shape (the same thing substantially existed among the Chinese and Greeks). The ethical treatise of the Egyptian Ptah-hotep, said by Maspero, Renouf, and other eminent scholars to be the oldest book in the world (its date is put before 2000 contains a moral code remarkable for loftiness and spirituality; it enjoins gentleness, forgetting wrong, contentment, kindness, avoidance of pride, of hardness of heart, and of bad temper. It would appear, from the codes of peoples for whom no divine revelation is claimed by us, that man by his unaided efforts has come to the knowledge of the best principles and practices of morality, has not only made admirable rules of conduct, but has perceived that the essence of goodness lies in the character of the soul. If this be so, it is unnecessary to suppose a supernatural divine revelation to account for the ethical phenomena of society. It might be said, indeed, that all this ethical development proceeds from a primitive divine revelation. But this statement rests on no historical proof, nor would it explain the fact that the ethical progress of a nation goes hand in hand with its growth in civilization. If the ancient Hebrews received their ethical code directly from God, whence comes it that manners were milder in Ezra's time than in the pre-exilian prophetic period, less mild in the days of David, and comparatively rude in the period of the Judges? It would be singular if the