No one who
attentively weighs the evidence can, I apprehend, escape the conviction
that Moses was at bottom an honest man who would have conformed to the
moral law he laid down in the name of the Lord had it been possible for
him to do so. Among these precepts none ranked higher than a regard for
truth and honesty. "Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie
one to another." [Footnote: Leviticus XIX, 11.] And this text is but one
example of a general drift of thought.
Whether these particular words of Leviticus, or any similar phrases, were
ever used by Moses is immaterial. No one can doubt that, in substance,
they contained the gist of his moral doctrine and that he enforced the
moral duty which they convey to the best of his power. And here the burden
lay, which crushed this man, from which he never thenceforward could, even
for an instant, free himself, and which Saint Paul avers to be the
heaviest burden man can bear. Moses, to fulfil what he conceived to be his
destiny and which at least certainly was his ambition, was condemned to
lead a life of deceit and to utter no word during his long subsequent
march which was not positively or inferentially a lie. And the bitterest
of his trials must have been the agony of anxiety in which he must have
lived lest some error in judgment on his part, some slackness in measuring
the exact credulity of his audience, should cause his exposure and lead to
his being cast out of the camp as an impostor and hunted to death as a
false prophet: a fate which more than once nearly overtook him.
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