Moses loses nothing by diffuseness. Even in days that were made long by intolerable monotony--in which men lived centuries because of weariness--Moses did not shrink from a condensation unparalleled in human literature.
Considered as embracing the history of one month only, the third Book of Moses may claim to be the most remarkable book in the Old Testament. Containing twenty-seven chapters, ranging its contents under sixteen different categories, and requiring to be actively represented within the space of twenty-eight days--it may, in its own degree, claim an energy not inferior to the Book of Genesis.
The same fearlessness of treatment is distinctive of both books. The reverent audacity which represented creation as the work of six days--whatever the measure of a day may be--did not shrink from focalizing into one month the whole discipline of life.
Moses’ words could hardly have been fewer if he had lived in our time of feverish haste and tumult. To put up the Heavens and the Earth in one chapter was a miracle in authorship. Yet, well pondered, it was the only thing to be done. Any poet could have built them in endless stanzas, and any philosopher could have begun the infinite story in a book too large for the world to hold.
Moses chose the more excellent way, creating creation with a swiftness that has dazed a literal criticism ever since--literal criticism that has but one season in its dreary year, a year that knows nothing of snow-blossom or wedded light and song. But this very haste was part of the man.
The Moses of Poetry required fifty-one days for the revolution of his “Iliad”; the Moses of Revelation only took a week for the settlement of the Heavens and the Earth, and in that week he found one whole day of rest for the Creator.
This action was entirely characteristic of Moses, for he was the most wrathful man as well as the meekest--killing, smiting, destroying and burning with anger, as well as praying like the father-priest of his people.
In a sense obvious enough he was the protoplastic Christ--for was not he who described himself as “meek and lowly in heart” the scourger of trespassers, and did he not burn the religious actors of his day?
Moses and Christ both did things with most startling rapidity. In their very soul they were akin. They were “straitened” until their work was “accomplished.” The Pentateuch and the Gospels have action enough in them to fill innumerable volumes, yet there is an infinite calm in both--the haste being in the temporary framework, the calm being in the eternal purpose.
Think of these twenty-seven chapters constituting the discipline of one month! The reflections started by this circumstance culminate in a sense of pain, for who can bear this grievous toil or endure this sting of accusation? There is no respite.
Egyptian burdens were for the body, but these wilderness exactions tormented the soul, and by so doing made Egyptian memories bright. The trial of muscle is nothing to the trial of patience. Men may sleep after labor, but an unquiet conscience keeps the eyes wide open. This discipline afflicted both the body and the soul, and thus drained the entire strength of the people.
This conscious toil must have been accompanied by unconscious inspiration--a reciprocal action impossible in theory but well understood in spiritual experience.
We resume our burdens in the very act of dreading them. We pray the next prayer in the very process of waiting for answers to a thousand prayers to which God has paid no known heed. Yesterday’s sacrifice has nothing to do with this day’s sin, except to remind us that today must provide its own sacrifice.
This was so with the Jews; this is precisely so with ourselves. Yet we boast our liberty, and suppose that in leaping one inch from the Earth we have broken the tether of gravitation.
As put before us in this manual called Leviticus, the discipline of the month seems to be more than we could endure; and this we say in ignorance of the fact that our own manual imposes a more severe discipline. Our pity for the Jews arises out of the apparently ineradicable sophism that spiritual service is easier than bodily exercise. A most deadly sophism is this, and prevalent yet, notwithstanding the rebuke and condemnation of universal history.
In no spiritual sense is Leviticus an obsolete book. Moses is not dead. The inventors of the alphabet have some rights even in “Paradise Lost,” and quite a large property in “Euclid.” It is not grateful on our part to forget the primers through which we passed to the encyclopedias, though their authors were but our intellectual nurses. In no mere dream was Moses present when Christ communed with Him concerning the Exodus that was to be accomplished at Jerusalem, and in no dramatic sense did Elijah watch the consummation of prophecy.