Certainly this is a mistake.  The easiest and most natural solution of wonderful results is the supposition of genius, inspiration, heroism, as their cause.  Great men explain history.  Napoleon explains the history of Europe during a quarter of a century.  Suppose a critic, a thousand years hence, should resolve Napoleon into half a dozen Napoleons; would they explain the history of Europe as well?  Given a man like Napoleon, and we can understand the French campaigns in Italy and Germany, the overthrow of Austria, the annihilation of Prussia, the splendid host of field-marshals, the Bonaparte circle of kings, the Codex, the Simplon Road, and the many changes of states and governments on the map of Europe.  One man of genius explains it all.  But take away the man of genius, and substitute a group of small men in his place, and the thing is much more obscure and unintelligible.  So, given Moses, the man of genius and inspiration, and we can understand the Exodus, understand the Jewish laws, understand the Pentateuch, and understand the strange phenomenon of Judaism.  But, instead of Moses, given a mosaic, however skilfully put together, and the thing is more difficult.  Therefore, Moses is to be preferred to the mosaic, as the more reasonable and probable of the two, just as Homer is preferable to the Homerids, and Shakespeare to the Shakespeare Club.[352]

We find in Moses the three elements of genius, inspiration, and knowledge.  Perhaps it is not difficult to distinguish them.  We see the natural genius and temperament of Moses breaking out again and again throughout his career, as the rocky strata underlying the soil crop out in the midst of gardens, orchards, and fields of corn.  The basis of his nature was the hardest kind of rock, with a surging subterranean fire of passion beneath it.  An awful soul, stem and terrible as Michael Angelo conceived him, the sublime genius carving the sublime lawgiver in congenial marble.  The statue is as stern as law itself.  It sits in one of the Roman churches, between two columns, the right hand grasping the tables of the law, the symbolic horns of power protruding from the brow, and the austere look of the judge bent upon those on the left hand.  A fiery nature, an iron will, a rooted sense of justice, were strangely overflowed and softened by a tenderness toward his race, which was not so much the feeling of a brother for brethren as of a parent for children.

Educated in the house of Pharaoh, and adopted by his daughter as her child, taken by the powerful and learned priesthood of Egypt into their ranks, and sharing for many years their honors and privileges, his heart yearned toward his brethren in the land of Goshen, and he went out to see them in their sufferings and slavery.  His impetuous nature broke out in sudden indignation at the sight of some act of cruelty, and he smote the overseer who was torturing the Jewish slave.  That act made him an exile, and sent him to live in Arabia Petrea, as a shepherd.  If he