CHAPTER IX.-PRIVATE LIFE AND PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS.

HE land-law of the Mosaic system was a perfect contrivance to keep all the land in the possession of all the people, as the true source of sustenance. At the same time, it was designed to prevent the growth of chronic poverty, and to secure the powerful development of family life by striking its roots into the soil by inalienable family inheritance. But it required something more than this to keep life in its true shape. Mere agriculture and family interest might have fostered health and domesticity at the expense of intelligence and high character. A land of peaceful homesteads and prosperous peasants, without appropriate stimulants thrown in, might have. become a land of stolid dullards, like many a country side at home and abroad.

This was prevented by other appointments of the law, which interwove the God of Israel with every phase of private life as well as public, and gave a quickening stimulus to all the higher faculties. There was, first of all, the care they were to observe as to what they ate, a regulation affecting every day of the year. They were not to eat everything. Some things were declared unclean, and forbidden to be touched, such as the flesh of the pig, the camel, the hare, &c., among beasts; the flesh of the eagle, the vulture, the raven, the owl, &c., among birds, and every kind of fish that was destitute of fins and scales. The law was peremptory: all these were to be held in abomination (Lev. xi. 4-8; 10-20). They were not only to be avoided at the meal table, but anyone touching the carcases of any of them was to be considered "unclean" and unfit for intercourse till next day (verses 8 and 27). Even any domestic utensil coming in contact with interdicted flesh was to be immersed in water and reckoned unclean till next day. And any earthen vessel so defiled was to be broken (verses 32, 33). Even an oven or pot range in a similar case was to be esteemed unfit for use and broken down. The law was so stringent that even water in which a defiled article was steeped for purification was to be considered as defiling everything it touched, with certain exceptions (verses 34, 38).

The reason given to them for these scrupulosities was this: "For I am the Lord your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy for I am holy. I am the Lord that bringeth

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you out of the land of Egypt to be your God. Ye shall, therefore, be holy, for I am holy" (44-45). It would not have been possible to devise an arrangement more calculated to keep Israel in the attitude of continual care and continual recognition of God. It had its spiritual meaning, but we are looking just now at the bearing of the law on the life of the nation.

Next, there was the observance of every seventh day as a sabbath of rest. This was not to be merely a day of inaction and lounge, as Sunday is in multitudes of British homes, but a day of mental exercise in things pertaining to God; a day on which they were to abstain from private occupations and pleasures, and devote themselves to the contemplation and honour of God. "Not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words " (Isa. lviii. 13). How wholesome and ennobling an institution this was, we in some degree experience in these chaotic times, when we merely suspend business and change the channel of our thoughts once in seven days in accommodation to a public custom of Mosaic origin. How good must it have been when the day of rest was blended with a true and intelligent direction of the mind towards the Highest and Holiest as revealed.

Then there was the rite of circumcision to be performed on every male child when it was eight days old. Here was a direct challenge of family attention to the divine relationship of the nation. There is no evidence that they understood, or were called upon to understand, the spiritual import of this ceremony, marking the appearance of every little brother in the family circle. This much they certainly knew, that it was "the token of the covenant betwixt God and Abraham " under which God had chosen them for His people, and assigned them the land in possession, and a thing to be observed by them in their generations (Gen. xvii. 9-11). Therefore, it was an obtrusion of God on their notice every time it occurred.

Then the mother on every such occasion, as well as on the birth of a daughter (with a variation in the latter case as to time), was to consider herself unclean for seven days, and be ineligible to touch any hallowed thing or come into the sanctuary for 33 days; at the end of which she was required to bring a lamb for a burnt-offering, and a young pigeon or turtle dove for a sin-offering, to the priest for offering to the Lord-the offering of which should be accepted as an atonement -after which she should be clean. Here was quite an elaborate ritual which laid hold of family life in every house at all seasons, and was calculated to keep God before the whole population, and themselves in continual memory of the holiness which He required at their hands.

So every first-born son was to be presented before the Lord and redeemed by sacrifice for the purpose of preserving a family memory of the nation's origin in God's interposition, as is evident from this addition to the redemption law: "And it shall be when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What is this? That thou shalt say unto him, By strength of hand the Lord brought us out from Egypt from the house of bondage. And it came to pass when Pharaoh would hardly let us go that the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both the first-born of man and the first-born of beast; therefore I sacrifice to the Lord all that openeth the matrix being males, but all the firstborn of my children I redeem " (Ex. xiii. 14-15). Indeed, the memorial aim of almost the whole Mosaic institution is well defined in the words of Psalm lxxviii. 5-7: "He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel which He commanded our fathers that they should make them known to their children, that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born-who should arise and declare them to their children, that they might set their hope in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments."

The law touched them at almost every point in their daily lifenot only at what we might call the epochal incidents already noticed, but in the hourly bearings of things. If a man touched a dead creature, —even though one that was clean and that might be eaten,—he was to be considered unclean for the whole day (Lev. xi. 39). If he had a swelling or breaking in any part of his body, he was to hurry off to the priest for consultation and treatment (xiii. 2). If he ate or slept in a house that was legally unclean, he had to wash his clothes (xiv. 47), so also, if he touched an unclean man or a bed on which the man had lain or clothes on which he had sat, or if the unclean man should spit on him, he was to be unclean for the day and wash his clothes (xv. 4-8). The same result followed from all natural defilements in man or woman (16-27).

The inevitable tendency of enactments affecting so many phases of common life was to bring God continually home to the consciences of faithful men. They were not allowed to forget Him for a single day. And what would be the effects of all these exercises but the one contemplated in the statement with which their enumeration concludes: "Thus shall ye separate the children of Israel from their uncleanness that they die not in their uncleanness when they defile my tabernacle that is among them" (Lev. xv. 31). And the fact declared by Moses: "Thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God: and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto Himself above all the nations that are upon the earth" (Deut. xiv. 2).

It is customary to think of these appointments as mere ceremonials that have no life in them; but it is evident that they were intended to have, and calculated to have, and did in fact in many cases have, a powerful spiritual effect on the mind. That they failed of this effect in the vast majority was due to the intractable nature of the people which Moses repeatedly bemoaned (Deut. ix. 6; xxix. 4; xxxi. 27). Why God chose a people so intractable we shall probably understand to a nicety if we are permitted to see the glorious climax of the plan. It has been said by some that if He had chosen the Greeks instead of the Hebrews, it would have been more of a success; but this is a shallow-minded criticism. Human nature everywhere is an evil thing, and we may be quite sure that the plan that God has chosen in choosing the seed of Abraham His friend is the very best adapted for the ultimate realisation of His glory upon earth.

The uncleanness involved in the various laws referred to in the foregoing was what is called "ceremonial"; that is, such as is not uncleanness itself, in the physical sense, but such as was merely constituted by the law of the case. Such an uncleanness has otherwise been expressed as fictitious uncleanness as distinguished from physical defilement. We can all understand the reality of a physical defilement requiring to be cleansed away, but this was a defilement recognised merely, that is, not subsisting physically in itself, e.g., where a man touched the dead body of a prohibited animal, there was nothing in this to physically defile the man; we have all touched dead hares and been none the worse. There has been some attempt to claim a scientific basis for the uncleannesses of the Mosaic law, that is, to connect them with some physical influence of an inherently defiling or corrupting character, such as polluted gas, or microbe-infected air, &c. But this is evidently a mistake. All the uncleannesses of the law were what might be called imputative or artificial.

But they were none the less powerful on this account as an actually felt or recognised uncleanness. We all know the power of a current recognition in any matter,—losing caste, for example, which is nothing more nor less than a prevalent view that one is not up to a certain standard of recognition. Or the law of taboo in savage races; a tabooed person is avoided and even detested by those around him, while the subject of that state is a misery in himself on account of the taboo. The experience is actual, though artificial in its source; so indeed we may say with all games. A person in a certain unfavourable state by the standard of some rule, feels himself in that state, and others recognise it; although it is all a matter of mere convention.

If this be so with human distinctions, we may easily understand how powerful the states constituted by the Mosaic law would come to be amongst those in Israel by whom the law was faithfully obeyed. The object in such artificial distinctions would be very pleasant to contemplate in the light of divine explanation. Some of them we can recognise; nothing could have more powerfully contributed to the conception of the idea of holiness than this constant scrupulosity as to contracting ceremonial defilement and nothing, as already observed, could have been more calculated to keep God continually before the minds of the people. There were also concealed significances unknown to them which have been hinted at in apostolic exposition, some of which may engage our attention afterwards.

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The laws referred to had all to do with the details of private life, but it was not enough that God should be privately regarded, or that the people should be exercised as individuals in matters of wisdom and holiness. Israel was intended as a holy nation. National life is a part of the true life of men. The insulated mummified life of individuals is one of the abortions of the present evil state. It was therefore needful that there should be institutions to give them a collective life of the right development. It was good that privately they should be prosperous and godly, but this did not complete the circle of what was needful for their well-being. There were therefore public institutions which supplied the means of developing the beautiful symmetry of human life that should exist in a perfect nation, a nation of divinely regulated life, private and public. These institutions come into view in the feasts of the law, one of the most picturesque and charming features of the national life as constituted by the law of Moses. Three times in the year every male had to appear at an appointed time, to keep a certain feast, according to the law (Lev. xxiii.).

There was first the feast of the Passover; second, the feast of weeks or first-fruits; and third, the feast of tabernacles, which divided off the year into convenient sections that redeemed it from monotony, besides rousing the nation periodically into purifying and noble and healthful activity (Deut. xvi. 16). These feasts were something of which the world has no experience in Gentile life, and of which it is very difficult for us to form an adequate idea. The mere fact of coming together at a common centre was a circumstance involving much that was good; it took the people away from their own houses and neighbourhoods for about a fortnight at least each time, and we all know the good effects of a holiday such as this would involve. Then the people of one neighbourhood would journey together, which would be a pleasant stimulus of the social element, and appears to be