nd theological
beliefs--the vacillating attribution of sin and guilt partly
to moral weakness, partly to the interference of evil spirits,
and likewise of righteousness to moral worth, and again to the
help of good genii or angels; the immortality of the soul and
its final judgment--_all these things have met us in the
Egyptian ritual and moral treatises_. So, too, the purely
human side of morals, and the catalogue of virtues and vices,
are by natural consequences as like as are the theological
systems. _But I recoil from opening this great subject now; it
is enough to have lifted the veil and shown the scene of many
a future contest._"[414:1]

In regard to the _moral sentiments_ expressed in the books of the New
Testament, and believed by the majority of Christians to be peculiar to
Christianity, we shall touch them but lightly, as this has already been
done so frequently by many able scholars.

The moral doctrines that appear in the New Testament, even the sayings
of the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord's Prayer, are found with slight
variation, among the Rabbins, who have certainly borrowed nothing out of
the New Testament.

Christian teachers have delighted to exhibit the essential superiority
of Christianity to Judaism, have quoted with triumph the maxims that are
said to have fallen from the lips of Jesus, and which, they surmised,
could not be paralleled in the elder Scriptures, and have put the least
favorable construction on such passages in the ancient books as seemed
to contain the thoughts of evangelists and apostles. A more ingenious
study of the Hebrew law, according to the oldest traditions, as well as
its later interpretations by the prophets, reduces these differences
materially by bringing into relief sentiments and precepts whereof the
New Testament morality is but an echo.

There are passages in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, even tenderer in
their humanity than anything in the Gospels. The preacher from the
Mount, the prophet of the Beatitudes, does but repeat with persuasive
lips what the law-givers of his race proclaimed in mighty tones of
command. Such an acquaintance with the later literature of the Jews as
is really obtained now from popular sources, will convince the
ordinarily fair mind that the originality of the New Testament has been
greatly over-estimated.

"To feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the
n