the informing with its life the nascent worlds as in turn prepared, by the operation of physical law, for life-abodes. Conversely, the healthful action and happy development of all subordinate lives, is in steady progress toward this highest life,—toward oneness with it, through the countless steps of the upward-leading scale of being, — a ceaseless evolution, a constant aggrandizement, and an ultimate re-union.

CHAPTER VII.

THE THIRD GREAT SCHOOL AND TEACHER OF RELIGION CONTINUED. MOSHAI AND THE HEBREWS. — LEGENDS OF GENESIS, THEIR AUTHORSHIP AND CHARACTER.

IF, in investigating any and all human religions whatsoever, our veneration for man and for his mysterious. Originator should lead us to do so in a reverent spirit,to none is that spirit of reverence more due than to the religion of the Hebrews, from which that of the foremost nations of the world is lineally descended, and from which we ourselves have derived, by the development and slow refinement of thought during many centuries, our own present conceptions of God. Yet if we would know the truth to be extracted from the Hebrew theological fabric and doctrine, we must consider them in the light of fact and reason, and not in that of the fond and loving prejudice which has become almost inwrought into our very natures during many generations, in whose course our ancestors have considered Hebrew religion as something apart from all others, sacred, taboo, and not to be judged by the same canons as are applied to them.

No one doubts that the venerable religions of antiquity, -the results, in the first place, of rude speculation and almost instinctive conviction in the infantile minds of primitive men,—in the second, of the hard, earnest thinking of a limited number of intellects of the first order,and in the third, of the manifold imaginings and dreamy superstitions of successive generations, clustering about

these great primary thoughts, and worked up into fixed forms by interested priesthoods, no one doubts, I say, that these ancient religions exercised a powerful glamour over men's minds, were, each in turn, held by their devotees to be absolute and sacred truth, exempt from the ordinary laws of evidence and criticism. Yet but few of us can easily consent to admit that a religion on which our own has been founded, exercises a similar glamour upon our own minds; - or to allow that it, as well as Brahmanism or Booddhism, the Chaldæan, the Persian or the Egyptian cults, is fairly open to the test of candid historical inquiry. Still, these admissions are precisely those we must be ready to make, if we are to glean the kernel of absolute truth which Hebraism contains, from amidst the mass of its myths, its legends, and its enthusiastic and imaginative poetry.

The time has gone by, when the facts of geology, bearing upon the age of the earth, could be refuted (in his own opinion) by even the most devout of poets with a contemptuous appeal to "inspiration," and the query, (in substance,) "can He, who made it, and revealed its date. to Moses, be mistaken in its age?" The period, it is to be hoped, has forever passed away, when a powerful genius like Hugh Miller's could be driven to madness by the agony of the effort to reconcile scientific truth with the "inspired" and therefore "infallible" record of "Moses." If Moshai or "Moses" did not write the Pentateuch, (and we may take it as proven that he could not have written it,) the "inspiration" doctrine of course falls to the ground. Yet Moshai is a historical character of a very high grade, and in all probability the first character, really historic, in the Hebrew records, while the Pentateuch, after all deduction of myth and foreign matter, remains a historical document of inestimable value.

It may be proper, in this place, to say a few words in defence of my phonetic spelling of the name Moshai. There is no doubt that the usual phonetic Hebrew-English

spelling Mōsheh represents rightly the Hebrew sound to those who know how to pronounce this spelling. The sound represented by el is, however, foreign to the English tongue.

The Hebrew, (Mōsheh,) ends with a rough breathing difficult to be conveyed in English spelling, as the only English word in which e, h, are so combined, the interjection Eh! (borrowed from the French,) is pronounced. Hay or Hai! (Hey!)

Movos is the Greek spelling of the Hebdomekonta or Septuagint version, B.C. 301-277, showing a prolonged emphasis on the first syllable, and yet a long quantity in the second. The vowel sound in the second syllable, î, represented by my ai, should however be pronounced somewhat short for a diphthong, to give nearly the old Hebrew pronunciation. By cutting off the Greek terminals, and replacing middle Sigma by the original sh, Movos becomes Mōüshai, pronounced, nearly, Moöshai. This was the pronunciation of the celebrated "Seventy" or rather seventy-two Hebrew scholars, who, three centuries before Christ, edited the LXX. version.

In the Greek New Testament the name is Moons, convertible, by similar process, into Mōshai, the HebrewAramaic pronunciation in use at the period when the apostles lived and wrote.

I have therefore adopted Moshai, (to be accented on first syllable, and with a short utterance of the second,) as the form most likely to give ordinary English readers a correct idea of the original name.

Our chief knowledge of the life of Moshai is, of course, derived from the Pentateuch, though we have good sidelights upon it from Josephus, and from the Egyptian monuments. The Pentateuch accounts are given with a marvellous particularity and detail of circumstances, (such as private conversations with the Deity and other matters,) of which no one but Moshai himself could possibly know any thing, and which therefore led distant generations of

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Hebrews naturally to suppose that Moshai himself must have written them. Yet the accounts, attributed to Moshai, give with equal minuteness the private conversations of Yehovah with the Patriarchs, long before Moshai's period, and it was the uniform custom of ancient historians to put, without any hesitation, elaborate speeches into the mouths of their heroes, when there was no shadow of authentication for the language used, and, seemingly, without any expectation of being literally believed by their readers. The conversations of Moshai, therefore, as well as those of the Patriarchs, may very well have been put into his and their mouths by a subsequent writer, and they are no proof whatever, of Moshai himself being their recorder. Per contra, Moshai is always spoken of in the third person in the Pentateuch; no hint of his being the author is given in its pages, and not only is his own death narrated in it, but a multitude of events, names of persons and places, etc., long subsequent to his period, are referred to, as matters of notoriety.

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These facts alone would be sufficient, in the case of any book not of the exceptional and "taboo" or sacred character attributed to this work, to settle the point of its authorship being of a much later period than that of Moshai. But besides these obvious facts, a mass of evidence has been accumulated, by more than thirty laborious, erudite, and conscientious critics, of all the chief European nations, working with a single eye to the establishment of the truth in the question, which leaves no room for doubt, that no part of the Pentateuch is earlier than the reign of David, — that a very small part, and that, only of the "Elohistic" narrative in Genesis, can be as early even as David's reign, that a principal part of the

The Law is, however, ascribed to "the Prophets" as authors, in 2 Kings xvii. 13, and in Ezra ix. 11. The expressions, therefore, sometimes used in other OldTestament books, “the book of the Law of Moses," "the book of the Law of Jehovah by the hand of Moses," can only be meant to indicate "Moses "as the minister of the Law, not the author of the book or record. Yet such expressions might, and probably did, mislead the Hebrews into attributing the authorship to him.