n army of half a million highly
trained soldiers, requires a leadership of most commanding and
consummate genius. But this task, surpassingly great though it is, is
not the measure of the greatness of the leader of the Exodus. It is not
in the deliverance from Egypt, it is in the constructive statesmanship
that laid the foundations of the Hebrew commonwealth that the
superlative grandeur of that leadership looms up. As we cannot imagine
the Exodus without the great leader, neither can we account for the
Hebrew polity without the great statesman. Not merely intellectually
great, but morally great--a statesman aglow with the unselfish
patriotism that refuses to grasp a sceptre or found a dynasty.

It matters not when or by whom were compiled the books popularly
attributed to Moses; it matters not how much of the code there given may
be the survivals of more ancient usage or the amplifications of a later
age; its great features bear the stamp of a mind far in advance of
people and time, of a mind that beneath effects sought for causes, of a
mind that drifted not with the tide of events, but aimed at a definite
purpose.

The outlines that the record gives us of the character of Moses--the
brief relations that wherever the Hebrew scriptures are read have hung
the chambers of the imagination with vivid pictures--are in every way
consistent with this idea. What we know of the life illustrates what we
know of the work. What we know of the work illumines the life.

It was not an empire such as had reached full development in Egypt or
existed in rudimentary patriarchal form in the tribes around, that Moses
aimed to found. Nor was it a republic where the freedom of the citizen
rested on the servitude of the helot, and the individual was sacrificed
to the state. It was a commonwealth based upon the individual; a
commonwealth whose ideal it was that every man should sit under his own
vine and fig-tree, with none to vex him or make him afraid; a
commonwealth in which none should be condemned to ceaseless toil; in
which, for even the bond slave, there should be hope; in which, for even
the beast of burden, there should be rest. A commonwealth in which, in
the absence of deep poverty, the manly virtues that spring from personal
independence should harden into a national character; a commonwealth in
which the family affections might knit their tendrils around each
member, binding with links stronger than steel the various parts into