val
frenzy was the burning to ashes of multitudes who made no
pretensions to traffic with the invisible world, who frequently held
fast their innocence while enduring the agonies of torture, who were
only aged and ugly and alone. Upon any theory, the prohibition of
sorcery by the Pentateuch was no more answerable for these
iniquities than its other prohibitions for the lynch law of the
backwoods.
On the other hand, there were real professors of the black art:
men did pretend to hold intercourse with spirits, and extorted great
sums from their dupes in return for bringing them also into
communion with superhuman beings. These it is reasonable to call
sorcerers, whether we accept their professions or not, just as we
speak of thought-readers and of mediums without being understood to
commit ourselves to the pretensions of either one or other. In point
of fact, the existence, in this nineteenth century after Christ, of
sorcerers calling themselves mediums, is much more surprising than
the existence of other sorcerers in the time of Moses or of Saul;
and it bears startling witness to the depth in human nature of that
craving for traffic with invisible powers which the law prohibited
so sternly, but the roots of which neither religion nor education
nor scepticism has been able wholly to pluck up.
Again, from the point of view which Moses occupied, it is plain
that such professors should be punished. They are virtually punished
still, whenever they obtain money under pretence of granting
interviews with the departed. If we now rely chiefly upon educated
public opinion to stamp out such impositions, that is because we
have decided that a struggle between truth and falsehood upon equal
terms will be advantageous to the former. It is a subdivision of the
debate between intolerance and free thought. Our theory works well,
but not universally well, even under modern conditions and in
Christian lands. And assuredly Moses could not proclaim freedom of
opinion, among uneducated slaves, amid the pressure of splendid and
of seductive idolatries, and before the Holy Ghost was given. To
complain of Moses for proscribing false religions would be to
denounce the use of glass for seedlings because the full-grown plant
flourishes in the open air.
Now, it would have been preposterous to proscribe false religions
and yet to tolerate the sorcerer and the sorceress. For these were
the active practitioners of another worship than that of God. They
might not profess idolatry; but they offered help and guidance from
sources which Jehovah frowned upon, rival sources of defence or
knowledge.
The holy people was meant to grow up under the most elevating of
all influences, reliance upon a protecting God, Who had bidden His
children to subdue the world as well as to replenish it, and of Whom
one of their own poets sang that He had put all things under the
feet of man. Their true heritage was not bounded by the strip of
land which Joshua and his followers slowly conquered; to them
belonged all the resources of nature which science, ever since, has
wrested from the Philistine hands of barbarism and ignorance. And
this nobler conquest depended upon the depth and sincerity of man's
feeling that the world is well-ordered and stable and the heritage
of man, not a chaos of various and capricious powers, where Pallas
inspires Diomed to hunt Venus bleeding off the field, or where the
incantations of Canidia may disturb the orderly movements of the
skies. Who could hope to discover by inductive science the secrets
of such a world as this?
The devices of magic cut the links between cause and effect,
between studious labour and the fruits which sorcery bade men to
steal rather than to cultivate. What gambling was to commerce, that
was witchcraft to philosophy, and the mischief no more depended on
the validity of its methods than upon the soundness of the last
device for breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.
If one could actually extort their secrets from the dead, or win
for luxury and sloth a longer life than is bestowed upon temperance
and labour, he would succeed in his revolt against the God of
nature. But the revolt was the endeavour; and the sorcerer, however
falsely, professed to have succeeded; and preached the same revolt
to others. In religion he was therefore an apostate, and in the
theocracy a traitor against the King, one whose life was forfeited
if it was prudent to exact the penalty.
And when we consider the fascination wielded by such pretensions,
even in ages when the stability of nature is an axiom, the dread
which false religions all around and their terrible rituals must
have inspired, the superstitious tendencies of the people and their
readiness to be misled, we shall see ample reasons for treading out
the first sparks of so dangerous a fire.
Beyond this it is vain to pretend that the law of Moses goes. It
was right in declaring the sorcerer and the sorceress to be real and
dangerous phenomena. It never declared their pretensions to be valid
though illegitimate. And in one noteworthy passage it proclaims that
a real sign or a wonder could only proceed from God, and when it
accompanied false teaching was still a sign, though an ominous one,
implying that the Lord would prove them (Deu 13:1-3). This does not
look very like an admission of the existence of rival powers,
inferior though they might be, who could interfere with the order of
His world.
Sorcery in all its forms will die when men realise indeed that
the world is His, that there is no short or crooked way to the
prizes which He offers to wisdom and to labour, that these rewards
are infinitely richer and more splendid than the wildest dreams of
magic, and that it is literally true that all power, in earth as
well as heaven, is committed into the Hands which were pierced for
us. In such a conception of the universe, incantations give place to
prayers, and prayer does not seek to disturb, but to carry forward
and to consummate, the orderly rule of Love.
The denunciation of witchcraft is quite naturally followed, as we
now perceive, by the reiteration of the command that no sacrifice
may be offered to any god except Jehovah (Exo 22:20). Strange and
hateful offerings were an integral part of witchcraft, long before
the hags of Macbeth brewed their charm, or the child in Horace
famished to yield a spell.
THE STRANGER.
Exo 22:21, Exo 23:9.
Immediately after this, a ray of sunlight falls upon the sombre
page.
We read an exhortation rather than a statute, which is repeated
almost literally in the next chapter, and in both is supported by a
beautiful and touching reason. "A stranger shalt thou not wrong,
neither shall ye oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of
Egypt." "A stranger shall ye not oppress, for ye know the heart of a
stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exo 22:21,
Exo 23:9).
The "stranger" of these verses is probably the settler among
them, as distinguished from the traveller passing through the land.
His want of friends and ignorance of their social order would place
him at a disadvantage, of which they are forbidden to avail
themselves, either by legal process (for the first passage is
connected with jurisprudence), or in the affairs of common life. But
the spirit of the commandment could not fail to influence their
treatment of all foreigners; and simple and commonplace though it
appear to us, it would have startled many of the wisest and greatest
peoples of antiquity, and would have fallen as strangely upon the
ears of the Greeks of Pericles, as of the modern Bedouin, with whom
Israel had kinship. A foreigner, as such, was a foe: to wrong him
was a paradox, because he had no rights: kinship, or else alliance
or treaty was required to entitle the weaker to any better treatment
than it suited the stronger to allow.
Yet we find a precept reiterated in this Jewish code which
involves, in its inevitable though slow development, the abolition
of negro slavery, the respect by powerful and civilised nations of
the rights of indigenous tribes, the most boundless advance of
philanthropy, through the most generous recognition of the
fraternity of man.
However sternly the sword of Joshua might fall, it struck not at
the foreigner, as such, but at those tribes, guilty and therefore
accursed of God, the cup of whose iniquity was full. And yet there
was enough of carnage to prove that so gracious a commandment as
this could not have risen spontaneously in the heart of early
Judaism. Does it seem to be made more natural, by any proposed
shifting of the date?
The reason of the precept is beautifully human. It rests upon no
abstract basis of common rights, nor prudential consideration of
mutual advantage.
In our time it is sometimes proposed to build all morality upon
such foundations; and strange consequences have already been deduced
in cases where the proposed sanction has not seemed to apply. But,
in fact, no advance in virtue has ever been traced to self-interest,
although, after the advance took place, self-interest has always
found its account in it. A progressive community is made of good
men, and the motive to which Moses appeals is compassion fed by
memory: "For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exo 22:21);
"For ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in
the land of Egypt" (Exo 23:9).
The point is not that they may again be carried into captivity:
it is that they have felt its bitterness, and ought to recoil from
inflicting what they writhed under.
Now, this appeal is a master-stroke of wisdom. Much cruelty, and
almost all the cruelty of the young, springs from ignorance, and
that slowness of the imagination which cannot realise that the pains
of others are like our own. Feeling them to be so, the charities of
the poor toward one another frequently rise almost to sublimity. And
thus, when suffering does not ulcerate the heart and make it savage,
it is the most softening of all influences. In one of the most
threadbare lines in the classics, the queen of Carthage boasts that
"I, not ignorant of woe, To pity the distressful know."
And the boldest assertion in Scripture of the natural development
of our Saviour's human powers, is that which declares that "In that
He Himself hath suffered, being tempted, He is able to succour them
that are tempted" (Heb 2:18).
To this principle, then, Moses appeals, and by the appeal he
educates the heart. He bids the people reflect on their own cruel
hardships, on the hateful character of their tyrants, on their own
greater hatefulness if they follow the vile example, after such
bitter experience of its character. He does not yet rise to the
grand level of the New Testament morality, Do all to thy neighbour
which it is not servile and dependent to will that he should do for
thee. But he attains to the level of that precept of Confucius and
Zoroaster which has been so unworthily compared with it: Do not unto
thy neighbour what thou wouldest not that he should do to thee--a
precept which mere indifference obeys. Nay, he excels it; for the
mental and spiritual attitude of one who respects his helpless
neighbour because he so much resembles himself, will surely not be
content without relieving the griefs that have so closely touched
him. Thus again the legislation of Moses looks beyond itself.
Now, if the Jew should be merciful because he had himself known
calamity, what implicit confidence may we repose upon the Man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief?
In the same spirit they are warned against afflicting the widow
or the orphan. And the threat which is added joins hand with the
exhortation which preceded. They should not oppress the stranger,
because they had been strangers and oppressed. Now the argument
advances. The same God Who then heard their cry will hear the cry of
the forlorn, and avenge them, according to the judicial fate which
He had just announced, in kind, by bringing their own wives to
widowhood and their children to orphanage (Exo 22:22-24).
To their brethren they should not lend money upon usury; but
loans are no more recommended than afterwards by Solomon: the words
are "if thou lend" (Exo 22:25). And if the raiment of the borrower
were taken for a pledge, it must be returned for him to use at
night, or else God will hear his cry, because, it is added very
significantly and briefly, "I am gracious" (Exo 22:27). It is the
most exalting of all motives: Be merciful, for I am merciful: ye
shall be the children of your Father.
Again is to be observed the influence reaching beyond the
prescription--the motive which cannot be felt without many other and
larger consequences than the restoration of pledges at sunset.
How comes this precept to be followed by the words, "Thou shalt
not curse God nor blaspheme a ruler" (Exo 22:28)? and is not this
again somewhat strangely followed by the order not to delay to offer
the firstfruits of the soil, to consecrate the firstborn son, and to
devote the firstborn of cattle at the same age when a son ought to
be circumcised? (Exo 22:29-30).
If any link can be discovered, it is in the sense of communion
with God, suggested by the recent appeal to His character as a
motive that should weigh with man. Therefore they must not blaspheme
Him, either directly or through His agents, nor tardily yield Him
what He claims. Therefore it is added, "Ye shall be holy men unto
Me," and from the sense of dignity which religion thus inspires, a
homely corollary is deduced--"Ye shall not eat any flesh that is
torn of beasts in the field" (Exo 22:31). The bondmen of Egypt must
learn a high-minded self-respect.