Massachusetts -- Church history; Massachusetts -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775; Puritans -- Massachusetts
In the case of Moses the contrast between precept and practice in the
race for wealth and fortune was not nearly so violent. Moses, it is
true, according to Leviticus, declared it to be the will of the
Lord that the Israelites should love their neighbors as themselves,
[Footnote: Lev. XIX, 18.] while on the other hand in Deuteronomy he
insisted that obedience was the chief end of life, and that if the
Israelites were to thoroughly obey the Lord’s behests, they were to
“consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine
eye shall have no pity upon them: neither” should thou serve their gods,
“for the Lord thy God is a jealous God.” [Footnote: Deut. VII, 16.] And
the penalty for slackness was “lest the anger of the Lord thy God be
kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth.”
[Footnote: Deut. VI, 15.] There is, nevertheless, this much to be
said in favor of the morality of Moses as contrasted with that of
thirteenth-century orthodox Christians like Arnold; Moses led a crusade
against a foreign and hostile people, while Arnold slaughtered the
Albigenses, who were his own flock, sheep to whom he was the shepherd,
communicants in his own church, and worshippers of the God whom he
served. What concerns us, however, is that the same stimulant animated
Moses and Arnold alike. The stimulant, pure and simple, of greed. On
these points Moses was as outspokenly, one may say as brutally, frank as
was Arnold. In the desert Moses commanded his followers to exterminate
the inhabitants of the kingdom of Bashan in order that they might
appropriate their possessions, which he enumerated, and Moses had no
other argument to urge but the profitableness of it by which to secure
obedience to his moral law.
Arnold stood on precisely the same platform. He did not accuse Count
Raymond of heresy or any other crime, nor did Pope Innocent III
consider Raymond as morally guilty of a criminal offence, or worthy of
punishment. Indeed, the pope would have protected the Count had it been
possible, and summoned him before the Fourth Lateran Council for that
purpose. But Arnold told his audience that were Raymond allowed to
escape there would be an end of the Catholic faith in France. Or, in
other words, monastic property would be secularized. Perhaps he was
right. At all events, this argument prevailed, and Raymond and his
family and people were sacrificed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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