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Updated: June 16, 2025
All the genius and learning of the ancient world, all the penetration of the profoundest philosophers, have never been able to produce a book that was as widely read, as voluminously commented on, as dearly loved, as this book, neither have all the law-givers of all the lands, and of all ages, been able to produce a code of law and ethics that was universally and as implicitly followed as that of the law-giver, Moses.
There farther to the north was the rock whence Moses had struck the water; there higher up, and more to the south-east, was the hill, where the Lord had spoken to the law-giver face to face, and where he had seen the burning bush; there again was the spring where he had met the daughters of Jethro, Zippora and Ledja, so called in the legend.
And from the days of the Stoic down almost to our own, the will has been treated much as though it were an especial and distinct faculty of man, not uninfluenced by desire, but in no sense to be identified with it, above it, its law-giver, detached, independent, supreme.
Tumult and fracas disgrace bench, bar, legislature, and general society. The great wars of Senators Gwin and Broderick precede the separation of Northern and Southern Democrats. As the summer of 1856 draws on, corruption, violence, and sectional hatred bitterly divide all citizens. School and Church, journal and law-giver, work for the right. The strain on the community increases.
Some time in the ninth century Polydec'tes, one of the Spartan kings, died without children, and the reins of government fell into the hands of his brother Lycurgus, who became celebrated as the "Spartan law-giver." But Lycurgus soon resigned the crown to the posthumous son of Polydectes, and went into voluntary exile.
But in daily living how does a man know whether his predicament is the one the law-giver had in mind? He is told not to kill. But if his children are attacked, may he kill to stop a killing? The Ten Commandments are silent on the point. Therefore, around every code there is a cloud of interpreters who deduce more specific cases.
And finally, in breaking off and denying the dependence of man upon God, and leading to mechanical determinism, it destroys the deepest and most effective motive to moral action the tracing of the moral law to the authority of the divine Law-giver, and the consciousness of an individual moral responsibility.
And here really belongs the legislation ascribed to Moses and given in the Pentateuch; the law-giver having an original in some great, dim, historic figure, long treasured in the popular imagination, but rehabilitated by priestly art as the author of a great volume of minute legislation, to which dignity is lent by the legends of a personality sublime yet meek.
At other times he is dry and prosaic, indulging in wearisome iterations, and childish trivialities. Now he assumes the plain, clear voice of the law-giver, or raises his accents into the angry threatenings of the relentless and bloodthirsty fanatic.
Slavery puts the master in the place of God, and the master's law in the place of God's law! "The negro," says Thomas S. Clay, "is seldom taught to feel, that he is punished for breaking God's law! He only knows his master as law-giver and executioner, and the sole object held up to his view is to make him a more obedient and profitable slave.
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