Singular discoveries rewarded my industry. The ecclesiastical "Moses"
proved to be a mere traditional mask, behind which, no doubt, lay the
features of the historical Moses--just as many a mediaeval fresco has
been hidden by the whitewash of Georgian churchwardens. And as the
aesthetic rector too often scrapes away the defacement, only to find
blurred, parti-coloured patches, in which the original design is no
longer to be traced; so, when the successive layers of Jewish and
Christian traditional pigment, laid on, at intervals, for near three
thousand years, had been removed, by even the tenderest critical
operations, there was not much to be discerned of the leader of the
Exodus.
Only one point became perfectly clear to me, namely, that Moses is not
responsible for nine-tenths of the Pentateuch; certainly not for the
legends which had been made the bugbears of science. In fact, the
fence turned out to be a mere heap of dry sticks and brushwood, and
one might walk through it with impunity: the which I did. But I was
still young, when I thus ventured to assert my liberty; and young
people are apt to be filled with a kind of _saeva indignatio_, when
they discover the wide discrepancies between things as they seem and
things as they are. It hurts their vanity to feel that they have
prepared themselves for a mighty struggle to climb over, or break
their way through, a rampart, which turns out, on close approach, to
be a mere heap of ruins; venerable, indeed, and archaeologically
interesting, but of no other moment.
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