the living whole.

It is not the protection of property, but the protection of humanity,
that is the aim of the Mosaic code. Its sanctions are not directed to
securing the strong in heaping up wealth, so much as to preventing the
weak from being crowded to the wall. At every point it interposes its
barriers to the selfish greed that, if left unchecked, will surely
differentiate men into landlord and serf, capitalist and workman,
millionaire and tramp, ruler and ruled. Its Sabbath day and Sabbath year
secure, even to the lowliest, rest and leisure. With the blast of the
Jubilee trumpets the slave goes free, the debt that cannot be paid is
cancelled, and a re-division of the land secures again to the poorest
his fair share in the bounty of the common Creator. The reaper must
leave something for the gleaner; even the ox cannot be muzzled as he
treadeth out the corn. Everywhere, in everything, the dominant idea is
that of our homely phrase--"Live and let live!"

And the religion with which this civil policy is so closely intertwined
exhibits kindred features--from the idea of the brotherhood of man
springs the idea of the fatherhood of God. Though the forms may resemble
those of Egypt, the spirit is that which Egypt had lost; though a
hereditary priesthood is retained, the law in its fulness is announced
to all the people. Though the Egyptian rite of circumcision is
preserved, and the Egyptian symbols reappear in all the externals of
worship, the tendency to take the type for the reality is sternly
repressed. It is only when we think of the bulls and the hawks, of the
deified cats and sacred ichneumons of Egypt, that we realize the full
meaning of the command--"Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven
image!"

And if we seek, beneath form and symbol and command, the thought of
which they are but the expression, we find that the distinctive feature
of the Hebrew religion, that which separates it by such a wide gulf from
the religions amid which it grew up, is its utilitarianism, its
recognition of divine law in human life. It asserts, not a God whose
domain is confined to the far-off beginning or the vague future, who is
over and above and beyond men, but a God who in His inexorable laws is
here and now; a God of the living as well as of the dead; a God of the
market-place as well as of the temple; a God whose judgments wait not
another world for execution, but whose immutable decrees will, in this
life, give happiness t