sudden inspiration, was a stroke of genius in the way of quackery. He was,
indeed, in this way almost portentous. It had a great and terrifying
effect upon the people, who were completely subdued by it. Against
corporeal enemies they might hope to prevail, but they were helpless
against the plague. And they all cried out with one accord, "Behold we
die, we perish, we all perish. Whosoever cometh anything near unto the
tabernacle of the Lord shall die: shall we be consumed with dying?"

As I have already pointed out, Moses was a very great theurgist, as many
saints and prophets have been. When in the actual presence of others he
evidently had the power of creating a belief in himself which approached
the miraculous, so far as disease was concerned. And he presumed on this
power and took correspondingly great risks. The case of the brazen serpent
is an example. The story is--and there is no reason to doubt its
substantial truth--that the Hebrews were attacked by venomous serpents
probably in the neighborhood of Mount Hor, where Aaron died, and thereupon
Moses set up a large brazen serpent on a pole, and declared that whoever
would look upon the serpent should live. Also, apparently, it did produce
an effect upon those who believed: which, of course, is not an
unprecedented phenomenon among faith healers. But what is interesting in
this historical anecdote is not that Moses performed certain faith cures
by the suggestion of a serpent, but that the Israelites themselves, when
out of the presence of Moses, recognized that he had perpetrated on them a
vulgar fraud. For example, King Hezekiah destroyed this relic, which had
been preserved in the Temple, calling it "Nehushtan," "a brazen thing," as
an expression of his contempt. And what is more remarkable still is that
although Hezekiah reigned four or five centuries after the exodus, yet
science had made no such advance in the interval as to justify this
contempt. Hezekiah seems to have been every whit as credulous as were the
pilgrims who looked on the brazen serpent and were healed. Hezekiah "was