human laws were always like a hedge round the divine law, to withdraw us from any approach to vice, to inure us to the good and to make us familiar with virtue.  That was the aim of Moses and of other good lawgivers, of the wise men who founded religious orders, and above all of Jesus Christ, divine founder of the purest and most enlightened religion.  It is just the same with the formularies of belief:  they would be valid provided there were nothing [50] in them inconsistent with truth unto salvation, even though the full truth concerned were not there.  But it happens only too often that religion is choked in ceremonial, and that the divine light is obscured by the opinions of men.

The pagans, who inhabited the earth before Christianity was founded, had only one kind of outward form:  they had ceremonies in their worship, but they had no articles of faith and had never dreamed of drawing up formularies for their dogmatic theology.  They knew not whether their gods were real persons or symbols of the forces of Nature, as the sun, the planets, the elements.  Their mysteries consisted not in difficult dogmas but in certain secret observances, whence the profane, namely those who were not initiated, were excluded.  These observances were very often ridiculous and absurd, and it was necessary to conceal them in order to guard them against contempt.  The pagans had their superstitions:  they boasted of miracles, everything with them was full of oracles, auguries, portents, divinations; the priests invented signs of the anger or of the goodness of the gods, whose interpreters they claimed to be.  This tended to sway minds through fear and hope concerning human events; but the great future of another life was scarce envisaged; one did not trouble to impart to men true notions of God and of the soul.

Of all ancient peoples, it appears that the Hebrews alone had public dogmas for their religion.  Abraham and Moses established the belief in one God, source of all good, author of all things.  The Hebrews speak of him in a manner worthy of the Supreme Substance; and one wonders at seeing the inhabitants of one small region of the earth more enlightened than the rest of the human race.  Peradventure the wise men of other nations have sometimes said the same, but they have not had the good fortune to find a sufficient following and to convert the dogma into law.  Nevertheless Moses had not inserted in his laws the doctrine of the immortality of souls:  it was consistent with his ideas, it was taught by oral tradition; but it was not proclaimed for popular acceptance until Jesus Christ lifted the veil, and, without having force in his hand, taught with all the force of a lawgiver that immortal souls pass into another life, wherein they shall receive the wages of their deeds.  Moses had already expressed the beautiful conceptions of the greatness and the goodness of God, whereto many civilized peoples to-day assent; but Jesus Christ demonstrated fully [51] the results of these ideas, proclaiming that divine goodness and justice are shown forth to perfection in God’s designs for the souls of men.