It is more surprising to find the return of the infant Jesus connected

with the words "When Israel was a child then I loved him, and I called

My son out of Egypt,"--for it is impossible to doubt that the prophet

was here speaking of the Exodus, and had in mind the phrase "Israel is

My son, My firstborn: let My son go, that he may serve Me" (Matt. i. 15;

Hos. xi. 1; Exod. iv. 22).

How are such passages to be explained? Surely not by finding a

superficial resemblance between two things, and thereupon transferring

to one of them whatever is true of the other. No thought can attain

accuracy except by taking care not to confuse in this way things which

superficially resemble each other.

But no thought can be fertilising and suggestive which neglects real and

deep resemblances, resemblances of principle as well as incident,

resemblances which are due to the mind of God or the character of man.

In the structure and furniture of the tabernacle, and the order of its

services, there are analogies deliberately planned, and such as every

one would expect, between religious truth shadowed forth in Judaism, and

the same truth spoken in these latter days unto us in the Son.

But in the emancipation, the progress, and alas! the sins and

chastisements of Israel, there are analogies of another kind, since here

it is history which resembles theology, and chiefly secular things which

are compared with spiritual. But the analogies are not capricious; they

are based upon the obvious fact that the same God Who pitied Israel in

bondage sees, with the same tender heart, a worse tyranny. For it is not

a figure of speech to say that sin is slavery. Sin does outrage the

will, and degrade and spoil the life. The sinner does obey a hard and

merciless master. If his true home is in the kingdom of God, he is,

like Israel, not only a slave but an exile. Is God the God of the Jew

only? for otherwise He must, being immutable, deal with us and our

tyrant as He dealt with Israel and Pharaoh. If He did not, by an

exertion of omnipotence, transplant them from Egypt to their inheritance

at one stroke, but required of them obedience, co-operation, patient

discipline, and a gradual advance, why should we expect the whole work

and process of grace to be summed up in the one experience which we call

conversion? Yet if He did, promptly and completely, break their chains

and consummate their emancipation, then the fact that grace is a

progressive and gradual experience does not forbid us to reckon

ourselves dead unto sin. If the region through which they were led,

during their time of discipline, was very unlike the land of milk and

honey which awaited the close of their pilgrimage, it is not unlikely

that the same God will educate his later Church by the same means,

leading us also by a way that we know not, to humble and prove us, that

He may do us good at the latter end.

And if He marks, by a solemn institution, the period when we enter into

covenant relations with Himself, and renounce the kingdom and tyranny of

His foe, is it marvellous that the apostle found an analogy for this in

the great event by which God punctuated the emancipation of Israel,

leading them out of Egypt through the sea depths and beneath the

protecting cloud?

If privilege, and adoption, and the Divine good-will, did not shelter

them from the consequences of ingratitude and rebellion, if He spared

not the natural branches, we should take heed lest He spare not us.

Such analogies are really arguments, as solid as those of Bishop

Butler.

But the same cannot be maintained so easily of some others. When that is

quoted of our Lord upon the cross which was written of the paschal lamb,

"a bone shall not be broken" (Exod. xii. 46, John xix. 36), we feel that

the citation needs to be justified upon different grounds. But such

grounds are available. He was the true Lamb of God. For His sake the

avenger passes over all His followers. His flesh is meat indeed. And

therefore, although no analogy can be absolutely perfect, and the type

has nothing to declare that His blood is drink indeed, yet there is an

admirable fitness, worthy of inspired record, in the consummating and

fulfilment in Him, and in Him alone of three sufferers, of the precept

"A bone of Him shall not be broken." It may not be an express prophecy

which is brought to pass, but it is a beautiful and appropriate

correspondence, wrought out by Providence, not available for the

coercion of sceptics, but good for the edifying of believers.

And so it is with the calling of the Son out of Egypt. Unquestionably

Hosea spoke of Israel. But unquestionably too the phrase "My Son, My

Firstborn" is a startling one. Here is already a suggestive difference

between the monotheism of the Old Testament and the austere jealous

logical orthodoxy of the Koran, which protests "It is not meet for God

to have any Son, God forbid" (Sura xix. 36). Jesus argued that such a

rigid and lifeless orthodoxy as that of later Judaism, ought to have

been scandalised, long before it came to consider His claims, by the

ancient and recognised inspiration which gave the name of gods to men

who sat in judgment as the representatives of Heaven. He claimed the

right to carry still further the same principle--namely, that deity is

not selfish and incommunicable, but practically gives itself away, in

transferring the exercise of its functions. From such condescension

everything may be expected, for God does not halt in the middle of a

path He has begun to tread.

But if this argument of Jesus were a valid one (and the more it is

examined the more profound it will be seen to be), how significant will

then appear the term "My Son," as applied to Israel!

In condescending so far, God almost pledged Himself to the Incarnation,

being no dealer in half measures, nor likely to assume rhetorically a

relation to mankind to which in fact He would not stoop.

Every Christian feels, moreover, that it is by virtue of the grand and

final condescension that all the preliminary steps are possible. Because

Abraham's seed was one, that is Christ, therefore ye (all) if ye are

Christ's, are Abraham's seed, heirs according to promise (Gal. iii. 16,

29).

But when this great harmony comes to be devoutly recognised, a hundred

minor and incidental points of contact are invested with a sacred

interest.

No doctrinal injury would have resulted, if the Child Jesus had never

left the Holy Land. No infidel could have served his cause by quoting

the words of Hosea. Nor can we now cite them against infidels as a

prophecy fulfilled. But when He does return from Egypt our devotions,

not our polemics, hail and rejoice in the coincidence. It reminds us,

although it does not demonstrate, that He who is thus called out of

Egypt is indeed the Son.

The sober historian cannot prove anything, logically and to

demonstration, by the reiterated interventions in history of atmospheric

phenomena. And yet no devout thinker can fail to recognise that God has

reserved the hail against the time of trouble and war.

In short, it is absurd and hopeless to bid us limit our contemplation,

in a divine narrative, to what can be demonstrated like the propositions

of Euclid. We laugh at the French for trying to make colonies and

constitutions according to abstract principles, and proposing, as they

once did, to reform Europe "after the Chinese manner." Well, religion

also is not a theory: it is the true history of the past of humanity,

and it is the formative principle in the history of the present and the

future.

And hence it follows that we may dwell with interest and edification

upon analogies, as every great thinker confesses the existence of

truths, "which never can be proved."

In the meantime it is easy to recognise the much simpler fact, that

these things happened unto them by way of example, and they were written

for our admonition.

FOOTNOTES:

[32] Take as an example the assertion of Bunyan that the sea in the

Revelation is a sea of glass, because the laver in the tabernacle was

made of the brazen looking-glasses of the women. (_Solomon's Temple_,

xxxvi. 1.)

CHAPTER XIX.

_AT SINAI._

xix. 1-25.

In the third month from the Exodus, and on the selfsame day (which

addition fixes the date precisely), the people reached the wilderness of

Sinai. This answers fairly to the date of Pentecost, which was

afterwards connected by tradition with the giving of the law. And

therefore Pentecost was the right time for the gift of the Holy Ghost,

bringing with Him the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, and

that freedom from servile Jewish obedience which is not attained by

violating law, but by being imbued in its spirit, by the love which is

the fulfilling of the law.

* * * * *

There is among the solemn solitudes of Sinai a wide amphitheatre,

reached by two converging valleys, and confronted by an enormous

perpendicular cliff, the Ras Sufsâfeh--a "natural altar," before which

the nation had room to congregate, awed by the stern magnificence of the

approach, and by the intense loneliness and desolation of the

surrounding scene, and thus prepared for the unparalleled revelation

which awaited them.

It is the manner of God to speak through nature and the senses to the

soul. We cannot imagine the youth of the Baptist spent in Nazareth, nor

of Jesus in the desert. Elijah, too, was led into the wilderness to

receive the vision of God, and the agony of Jesus was endured at night,

and secluded by the olives from the paschal moon. It is by another

application of the same principle that the settled Jewish worship was

bright with music and splendid with gold and purple; and the notion that

the sublime and beautiful in nature and art cannot awaken the feelings

to which religion appeals, is as shallow as the notion that when these

feelings are awakened all is won.

What happens next is a protest against this latter extreme. Awe is one

thing: the submission of the will is another. And therefore Moses was

stopped when about to ascend the mountain, there to keep the solemn

appointment that was made when God said, "This shall be the token unto

thee that I have sent thee: When thou hast brought forth the people out

of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain" (iii. 12). His own

sense of the greatness of the crisis perhaps needed to be deepened.

Certainly the nation had to be pledged, induced to make a deliberate

choice, now first, as often again, under Joshua and Samuel, and when

Elijah invoked Jehovah upon Carmel. (Josh. xxiv. 24; 1 Sam. xii. 14; 1

Kings xviii. 21, 39.)

It is easy to speak of pledges and formal declarations lightly, but they

have their warrant in many such Scriptural analogies, nor should we

easily find a church, careful to deal with souls, which has not employed

them in some form, whether after the Anglican and Lutheran fashion, by

confirmation, or in the less formal methods of other Protestant

communions, or even by delaying baptism itself until it becomes, for the

adult in Christian lands, what it is to the convert from false creeds.

Therefore the Lord called to Moses as he climbed the steep, and offered

through him a formal covenant to the people.

"Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob,[33] and tell the children of

Israel: Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you

on eagles' wings, and brought you unto Myself."

The appeal is to their personal experience and their gratitude: will

this be enough? will they accept His yoke, as every convert must, not

knowing what it may involve, not yet having His demands specified and

His commandments before their eyes, content to believe that whatever is

required of them will be good, because the requirement is from God? Thus

did Abraham, who went forth, not knowing whither, but knowing that he

was divinely guided. "Now, therefore, if ye will obey My voice indeed

and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me from

among all peoples; for all the earth is Mine, and ye shall be unto Me a

kingdom of priests and a holy nation."

Thus God conveys to them, more explicitly than hitherto, the fact that

He is the universal Lord, not ruling one land or nation only, nor, as

the Pentateuch is charged with teaching, their tutelary deity among many

others. Thus also the seeds are sown in them of a wholesome and rational

self-respect, such as the Psalmist felt, who asked "What is man, that

Thou art mindful of him?" yet realised that such mindfulness gave to

man a real dignity, made him but little lower than the angels, and

crowned him with glory and honour.

Abolish religion, and mankind will divide into two classes,--one in

which vanity, unchecked by any spiritual superior, will obey no

restraints of law, and another of which the conscious pettiness will

aspire to no dignity of holiness, and shrink from no dishonour of sin.

It is only the presence of a loving God which can unite in us the sense

of humility and greatness, as having nothing and yet possessing all

things, and valued by God as His "peculiar treasure."[34]

And with a reasonable self-respect should come a noble and yet sober

dignity--"Ye shall be a kingdom of priests," a dynasty (for such is the

meaning) of persons invested with royal and also with priestly rank.

This was spoken just before the law gave the priesthood into the hands

of one tribe; and thus we learn that Levi and Aaron were not to supplant

the nation, but to represent it.

Now, this double rank is the property of redeemed humanity: we are "a

kingdom and priests unto God." Yet the laity of the Corinthian Church

were rebuked for a self-asserting and mutinous enjoyment of their rank:

"Ye have reigned as kings without us"; and others there were in this

Christian dispensation who "perished in the gainsaying of Korah" (1 Cor.

iv. 8; Jude 11).

If the words "He hath made us a kingdom and priests" furnish any

argument against the existence of an ordained ministry now, then there

should have been no Jewish priesthood, for the same words are here. And

is it supposed that this assertion only began to be true when the

apostles died? Certainly there is a kind of self-assertion in the

ministry which they condemn. But if they are opposed to its existence,

alas for the Pastoral Epistles! It was because the function belonged to

all, that no man might arrogate it who was not commissioned to act on

behalf of all.

But while the individual may not assert himself to the unsettling of

church order, the privilege is still common property. All believers have

boldness to enter into the holiest place of all. All are called upon to

rule for God "over a few things," to establish a kingdom of God within,

and thus to receive a crown of life, and to sit with Jesus upon His

throne. The very honours by which Israel was drawn to God are offered to

us all, as it is written, "We are the circumcision," "We are Abraham's

seed and heirs according to the promise" (Phil. iii. 3; Gal. iii. 29).

To this appeal the nation responded gladly. They could feel that indeed

they had been sustained by God as the eagle bears her young--not

grasping them in her claws, like other birds, but as if enthroned

between her wings, and sheltered by her body, which interposed between

the young and any arrow of the hunter. Thus, say the Rabbinical

interpreters, did the pillar of cloud intervene between Israel and the

Egyptians. If the image were to be pressed so far, we could now find a

much closer analogy for the eagle "preferring itself to be pierced

rather than to witness the death of its young" (Kalisch). But far more

tender, and very touching in its domestic homeliness, is the metaphor

of Him Whose discourses teem with allusions to the Old Testament, yet

Who preferred to compare Himself to a hen gathering her chickens under

her wing.

With the adhesion of Israel to the covenant, Moses returned to God. And

the Lord said, "Lo, I come unto thee in a thick cloud, that the people

may hear when I speak with thee, and may also believe thee for ever."

The design was to deepen their reverence for the Lawgiver Whose law they

should now receive; to express by lessons, not more dreadful than the

plagues of Egypt, but more vivid and sublime, the tremendous grandeur of

Him Who was making a covenant with them, Who had borne them on His wings

and called them His firstborn Son, Whom therefore they might be tempted

to approach with undue familiarity, were it not for the mountain that

burned up to heaven, the voice of the trumpet waxing louder and louder,

and the Appearance so fearful that Moses said, "I exceedingly fear and

quake" (=to phantazomenon=--Heb. xii. 21).

When thus the Deity became terrible, the envoy would be honoured also.

But it is important to observe that these terrible manifestations were

to cease. Like the impressions produced by sickness, by sudden deaths,

by our own imminent danger, the emotion would subside, but the

conviction should remain: they should believe Moses for ever. Emotions

are like the swellings of the Nile: they subside again; but they ought

to leave a fertilising deposit behind.

That the impression might not be altogether passive, and therefore

ephemeral, the people were bidden to "sanctify themselves"; all that is

common and secular must be suspended for awhile; and it is worth notice

that, as when the family of Jacob put away their strange gods, so now

the Israelites must wash their clothes (cf. Gen. xxxv. 2). For one's

vestment is a kind of outer self, and has been with the man in the old

occupations from which he desires to purify himself. It was therefore

that when Jehu was made king, and when Jesus entered Jerusalem in

triumph, men put their garments under their chief to express their own

subjection (2 Kings ix. 13; Matt. xxi. 7). Much of the philosophy of

Carlyle is latent in these ancient laws and usages.

Moreover, the mountain was to be fenced from the risk of profanation by

any sudden impulsive movement of the crowd, and even a beast that

touched it should be slain by such weapons as men could hurl without

themselves pursuing it. Only when the trumpet blew a long summons might

the appointed ones come up to the mount (ver. 13).

On the third day, after a soul-searching interval, there were thunders

and lightnings, and a cloud, and the trumpet blast; and while all the

people trembled, Moses led them forth to meet with God. Again the

narrative reverts to the terrible phenomena--the fire like the smoke of

a furnace (called by an Egyptian name which only occurs in the

Pentateuch), and the whole mountain quaking. Then, since his commission

was now to be established, Moses spake, and the Lord answered him with a

voice. And when he again climbed the mountain, it became necessary to

send him back with yet another warning, whether his example was in

danger of emboldening others to exercise their newly given priesthood,

or the very excess of terror exercised its well-known fascinating power,

as men in a burning ship have been seen to leap into the flames.

And the priests also, who come near to God, should sanctify themselves.

It has been asked who these were, since the Levitical institutions were

still non-existent (ver. 22, cf. 24). But it is certain that the heads

of houses exercised priestly functions; and it is not impossible that

the elders of Israel who came to eat before God with Jethro (xviii. 12)

had begun to perform religious functions for the people. Is it supposed

that the nation had gone without religious services for three months?

It has been remarked by many that the law of Moses appealed for

acceptance to popular and even democratic sanctions. The covenant was

ratified by a plébiscite. The tremendous evidence was offered equally to

all. For, said St. Augustine, "as it was fit that the law which was

given, not to one man or a few enlightened people, but to the whole of a

populous nation, should be accompanied by awe-inspiring signs, great

marvels were wrought ... before the people" (_De Civ. Dei_, x. 13).

We have also to observe the contrast between the appearance of God on

Sinai and His manifestation in Jesus. And this also was strongly wrought

out by an ancient father, who represented the Virgin Mary, in the act of

giving Jesus into the hands of Simeon, as saying, "The blast of the

trumpet does not now terrify those who approach, nor a second time does

the mountain, all on fire, cause terror to those who come nigh, nor does

the law punish relentlessly those who would boldly touch. What is

present here speaks of love to man; what is apparent, of the Divine

compassion." (Methodius _De Sym. et Anna_, vii.)

But we must remember that the Epistle to the Hebrews regards the second

manifestation as the more solemn of the two, for this very reason: that

we have not come to a burning mountain, or to mortal penalties for

carnal irreverence, but to the spiritual mountain Zion, to countless

angels, to God the Judge, to the spirits of just men made perfect, and

to Jesus Christ. If they escaped not, when they refused Him Who warned

on earth, much more we, who turn away from Him Who warneth from heaven

(Heb. xii. 18-25).

There is a question, lying far behind all these, which demands

attention.

It is said that legends of wonderful appearances of the gods are common

to all religions; that there is no reason for giving credit to this one

and rejecting all the rest; and, more than this, that God absolutely

could not reveal Himself by sensuous appearances, being Himself a

Spirit. In what sense and to what extent God can be said to have really

revealed Himself, we shall examine hereafter. At present it is enough to

ask whether human love and hatred, joy and sorrow, homage and scorn can

manifest themselves by looks and tones, by the open palm and the

clenched fist, by laughter and tears, by a bent neck and by a curled

lip. For if what is most immaterial in our own soul can find sensuous

expression, it is somewhat bold to deny that a majesty and power beyond

anything human may at least be conceived as finding utterance, through a

mountain burning to the summit and reeling to the base, and the blast of

a trumpet which the people could not hear and live.

But when it is argued that wondrous theophanies are common to all

faiths, two replies present themselves. If all the races of mankind

agree in believing that there is a God, and that He manifests Himself

wonderfully, does that really prove that there is no God, or even that

He never manifested Himself wondrously? We should certainly be derided

if we insisted that such a universal belief proved the truth of the

story of Mount Sinai, and perhaps we should deserve our fate. But it is

more absurd by far to pretend that this instinct, this intuition, this

universal expectation that God would some day, somewhere, rend the veil

which hides Him, does actually refute the narrative.

We have also to ask for the production of those other narratives,

sublime in their conception and in the vast audience which they

challenged, sublimely pure alike from taint of idolatrous superstition

and of moral evil, profound and far-reaching in their practical effect

upon humanity, which deserve to be so closely associated with the giving

of the Mosaic law that in their collapse it also must be destroyed, as

the fall of one tree sometimes breaks the next. But this narrative

stands out so far in the open, and lifts its head so high, that no other

even touches a bough of it when overturned.

Is it seriously meant to compare the alleged disappearance of Romulus,

or the secret interviews of Numa with his Egeria, to a history like

this? Surely one similar story should be produced, before it is asserted

that such stories are everywhere.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] This phrase is not found elsewhere in the Pentateuch. Is it fancy

which detects in it a desire to remind them of their connection with the

least worthy rather than the noblest of the Patriarchs? One would not

expect, for instance, to read, Fear not, thou worm Abraham, or even

Israel; but the name of Jacob at once calls up humble associations.

[34] This word is the same which occurs in the verse so beautifully but

erroneously rendered "They shall be Mine, saith the Lord of hosts, in

the day when I make up My jewels" (Mal. iii. 17, A.V.). "They shall be

Mine ... in the day that I do make, even a peculiar treasure" (R.V.).

CHAPTER XX.

_THE LAW._

xx. 1-17.

We have now reached that great event, one of the most momentous in all

history, the giving of the Ten Commandments. And it is necessary to

consider what was the meaning of this event, what part were they

designed to play in the religious development of mankind.

1. St. Paul tells us plainly what they did _not_ effect. By the works of

the law could no flesh be justified: to the father of the Hebrew race

faith was reckoned instead of righteousness; the first of their royal

line coveted the blessedness not of the obedient but of the pardoned;

and Habakkuk declared that the just should live by his faith, while the

law is not of faith, and offers life only to the man that doeth these

things (Rom. iv. 3, 6; Gal. iii. 12). In the doctrinal scheme of St.

Paul there was no room for a compromise between salvation by faith and

reliance upon our own performance of any works, even those simple and

obvious duties which are of world-wide obligation.

2. But he never meant to teach that a Christian is free from the

obligation of the moral law. If it is not true that we can keep it and

so earn heaven, it is equally false that we may break it without penalty

or remorse. What he insisted upon was this: that obligation is one

thing, and energy is another; the law is good, but it has not the gift

of pardon or of inspiration; by itself it will only reveal the

feebleness of him who endeavours to perform it, only force into direst

contrast the spiritual beauty of the pure ideal and the wretchedness of

the sinner, carnal, sold under sin. In this respect, indeed, the law was

its own witness. For if, among all the millions of its children, one had

lived by obedience, how could he have shared in its elaborate

sacrificial apparatus, in the hallowing of the altar from pollution by

the national uncleanness, in the sprinkling of the blood of the offering

for sin? Take the case of the highest official. A sinless high priest

under the law would have been paralysed by his virtue, for his duty on

the greatest day of all the year was to make atonement first for his own

sins.

3. The law being an authorised statement of what innocence means, and

therefore of the only terms upon which a man might hope to live by

works, is an organic whole, and we either keep it as a whole or break

it. Such is the meaning of the words, he that offendeth in one point is

guilty of all; because He who gave the seventh commandment gave also the

sixth--so that if one commit no adultery, yet kill, he has become a

transgressor of the law in its integrity (James ii. 11). The challenge

of God to human self-righteousness is not one which can be half met. If

we have not thoroughly kept it, we have thoroughly failed.

4. But this failure of man does not involve any failure, in the law, to

accomplish its intended work. It is, as has been said, a challenge. The

sense of our inability to meet it is the best introduction to Him Who

came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance, and thus the

law became a tutor to bring men to Christ. It awoke the conscience,

brought home the sense of guilt, and entered, that sin might abound in

us, whose ignorance had not known sin without it. It was strictly that

which Moses most frequently calls it--the Testimony.

5. Finally, however, the teaching of Scripture is not that Christians

are condemned to live always in a condition of baffled striving,

hopeless longing, conscious transgression of a code which testifies

against them. The old and carnal nature gravitates downward, to

selfishness and sin, as surely as by a law of the physical universe. But

the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus emancipates us from that

law of sin and death--the higher nature doing, by the very quality of

its life, what the lower nature cannot be driven to do, by dread of hell

or by desire of heaven. The creature of earth becomes a creature of air,

and is at home in a new sphere, poised on its wings upon the breeze.

Love is the fulfilling of the law. And the Christian is free from its

dictation, as affectionate men are free from any control of the laws

which command the maintenance of wife and child, not because they may

defy the statutes, but because their volition and the statutes coincide.

Liberty is not lawlessness--it is the reciprocal harmony of law and the

will.

And thus the grand paradox of Luther is entirely true: "Unless faith be

without any, even the smallest works, it does not justify, nay, it is

not faith. And yet it is impossible for faith to be without

works--earnest, many and great." We are justified by faith without the

works of the law, and yet we do not make void the law by faith--nay, we

establish the law.

All this agrees exactly with the contrast, so often urged, between the

giving of the Law and the utterance of the Sermon on the Mount. The

former echoes across wild heights, and through savage ravines; the

latter is heard on the grassy slopes of the hillside which overlooks the

smiling Lake of Galilee. The one is spoken in thunder and graven upon

stone: the other comes from the lips, into which grace is poured, of Him

Who was fairer than the children of men. The former repeats again and

again the stern warning, "Thou shalt not!" The latter crowns a sevenfold

description of a blessedness, which is deeper than joy, though pensive

and even weeping, by adding to these abstract descriptions an eighth,

which applies them, and assumes them to be realised in His

hearers--"Blessed are _ye_." If so much as a beast touched the mountain

it should be stoned. But Simeon took the Divine Infant in his arms.

And this is not because God has become gentler, or man worthier: it is

because God the Lawgiver upon His throne has come down to be God the

Helper. But the beatitudes could never have been spoken, if the law had

not been imposed: the blessedness of a hunger and thirst for

righteousness was created by the majestic and spiritual beauty of the

unattained commandment.

Yes, it had a spiritual beauty. For, however formal, external, and even

shallow, the commandments may appear to flippant modern babblers, St.

Paul bewailed the contrast between the law, which was spiritual, and his

own carnal heart. And he, who had kept all the letter from his youth,

was only the more vexed and haunted by the fleeting consciousness of a

higher "good thing" unattained. Did not one table say "Thou shalt not

covet," and the other promise mercy to thousands of those that love?

This leads us to consider the structure and arrangement of the

Decalogue. Scripture itself tells us that there were "ten words" or

precepts, written upon both sides of two tables. But various answers

have been given at different times, to the question, How shall we divide

the ten?

The Jews of a later period made a first commandment of the words, "I am

the Lord thy God," which is not a commandment at all. And they restored

the proper number, thus exceeded, by uniting in one the prohibition of

other gods and of idolatry; although the worship of the golden calf,

almost immediately after the law was given, suffices to establish the

distinction. For then, as well as under Gideon, Micah and Jeroboam, the

sin of idolatry fell short of apostasy to a wholly different god (Judg.

viii. 23, 27, xvii. 3, 5; 1 Kings xii. 28). The worship of images

dishonours God, even if it be His semblance that they claim. In this

arrangement, the tables were allotted five commandments each.

Another curious arrangement was devised, apparently by St. Augustine;

and the weight of his authority imposed it upon Western Christianity

until the Reformation, and upon the Latin and Lutheran churches unto

this day. Like the former, it adds the second commandment to the first,

but it divides the tenth. And it gives to the first table three

commandments, "since the number of commandments which concern God seem

to hint at the Trinity to careful students," while the seven

commandments of the second table suggest the Sabbath. Such mystical

references are no longer weighty arguments. And the proposed division

of the tenth commandment seems quite precluded by the fact that in

Exodus we read, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house nor his

wife," while in Deuteronomy the order is reversed; so that its advocates

are divided among themselves as to whether the coveting of a house or a

wife is to attain the dignity of separate mention.

The ordinary English arrangement assigns to the tables four commandments

and six respectively. And the noble catechism of the Church of England

appears to sanction this arrangement by including among "my duties to my

neighbour" that of loving, honouring and succouring my father and

mother. There are several objections to this arrangement. It is

unsymmetrical. There seems to be something more sacred and divine about

my relationship with my father and mother than those which connect me

with my neighbour. The first table begins with the gravest offence, and

steadily declines to the lowest; sin against the unique personality of

God being followed by sin against His spirituality of nature, His name,

and His holy day. If now the sin against His earthly representative, the

very fountain and sanction of all law to childhood, be added to the

first table, the same order will pervade those of the second--namely,

sin against my neighbour's life, his family, his property, his

reputation, and lastly, his interest in my inner self, in the wishes

that are unspoken, the thoughts and feelings which

"I wad nae tell to nae man."

We thus obtain both the simplest division and the clearest arrangement.

In Romans xiii. 9 the fifth commandment is not enumerated when

rehearsing the actions which transgress the second table. In the Hebrew

text of Deuteronomy all the later commandments are joined with the sixth

by the copulative (represented along with the negative fairly enough in

our English by "Neither"), which seems to indicate that these five were

united together in the author's mind. But the fifth stands alone, like

all those of the first table. Now, it is clear that such an arrangement

gives great sanction and weight to the sacred institution of the family.

Finally, the comprehensiveness and spirituality of the law may be

observed in this; that the first table forbids sin against God in

thought, word and deed; and the second table forbids sin against man in

deed, word and thought.

_THE PROLOGUE._

xx. 2.

The Decalogue is introduced by the words "I am the Lord thy God, which

brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage."

Here, and in the previous chapter, is already a great advance upon the

time when it was said to them "The God of thy fathers, the God of

Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, hath appeared." Now they are expected

to remember what He has done for themselves. For, although religion must

begin with testimony, it ought always to grow up into an experience.

Thus it was that many of the Samaritans believed on Jesus because of the

word of the woman; but presently they said, "Now we believe, not because

of thy speaking, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know." And thus

the disciples who heard John the Baptist speak, and so followed Jesus,

having come and seen where He abode, could say, "We have found the

Messiah."

This prologue is vitally connected with both tables of the law. In

relation to the first, it recognises the instinct of worship in the

human heart. In vain shall we say Do not worship idols, until the true

object of adoration is supplied, for the heart must and will prostrate

itself at some shrine. A leader of modern science confesses "the

immovable basis of the religious sentiment in the nature of man," adding

that "to yield this sentiment reasonable satisfaction is the problem of

problems at the present hour."[35] It is indeed a problem for the

unbelief which, because it professes to be scientific, cannot shut its

eyes to the fact that men whose faith in Christ has suffered shipwreck

are everywhere seen to be clinging to strange planks--spiritualism,

esoteric Buddhism, and other superstitions,--which prove that man must

and will reverence something more than streams of tendencies, or

beneficial results to the greatest numbers. The Law of Moses abolishes

superstition by no mere negation, but by the proclamation of a true God.

Moreover, it declares that this God is knowable, which flatly

contradicts the brave assertion of modern agnostics that the notion of a

God is not even "thinkable." That assertion is a bald and barren

platitude in the only sense in which it is not contrary to the

experience of all mankind. As we cannot form a complete and perfect, nor

even an adequate notion of God, so no man ever yet conceived a complete

and adequate notion of his neighbour, nor indeed of himself. But as we

can form a notion of one another, dim and fragmentary indeed, yet more

or less accurate and fit to guide our actions, so has every nation and

every man formed some notion of deity. Nor could even the agnostic

declare that God is unthinkable, unless the word God, of which he makes

this assertion, conveyed to him _some_ idea, some thought, more or less

worthy of the thinking. The ancient Jew never dreamed that he could

search out the Almighty to perfection, yet God was known to him by His

actions (the only means by which we know our fellow-men); and the

combined terror and loving-kindness of these at once warned him against

revolt, and appealed to his loyalty for obedience.

In relation to the second table, the prologue was both an argument and

an appeal. Why should a man hope to prosper by estranging his best

Friend, his Emancipator and Guide? And even if disobedience could obtain

some paltry advantage, how base would he be who snatched at it, when

forbidden by the God Who broke his chains, and brought him out of the

house of bondage--a Benefactor not ungenial and remote, but One Who

enters into closest relations with him, calling Himself "Thy God"!

Now, a greater emancipation and a closer personal relationship belong to

the Church of Christ. When a Christian hears that God is unthinkable, he

ought to be able to answer, 'God is my God, and He has brought my soul

out of its house of bondage.'

Moreover, his emancipation by Christ from many sins and inner slaveries

ought to be a fact plain enough to constitute the sorest of problems to

the observing world.

It must be observed, besides, that the Law, which was the centre of

Judaism, does not appeal chiefly to the meaner side of human nature.

Hell is not yet known, for the depths of eternity could not be uncovered

before the clouds had rolled away from its heights of love and

condescension; or else the sanity and balance of human nature would have

been overthrown. But even temporal judgments are not set in the foremost

place. As St. Paul, who knew the terrors of the Lord, more commonly and

urgently besought men by the mercies of God, so were the ancient Jews,

under the burning mountain, reminded rather of what God had bestowed

upon them, than of what He might inflict if they provoked Him. And our

gratitude, like theirs, should be excited by His temporal as well as His

spiritual gifts to us.

_THE FIRST COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt have none other gods before Me."--xx. 3.

When these words fell upon the ears of Israel, they conveyed, as their

primary thought, a prohibition of the formal worship of rival deities,

Egyptian or Sidonian gods. Following immediately upon the proclamation

of Jehovah, their own God, they declared His intolerance of rivalry, and

enjoined a strict and jealous monotheism. For God was a reality. Races

who worshipped idealisations or personifications might easily make room

for other poetic embodiments of human thought and feeling; but Jehovah

would vindicate His rights. He had proved himself very real in Egypt.

Other gods would not displace Him: He would observe them: they would be

"before Me."[36] God does not quit the scene when man forgets Him.

Now, it is hard for us to realise the charm which the worship of false

gods possessed for ancient Israel. To comprehend it we must reflect upon

the universal ignorance which made every phenomenon of nature a

portentous manifestation of mysterious and varied power, which they

could by no means trace back to a common origin, while the crash and

discord of the results appeared to indicate opposing wills behind. We

must reflect how closely akin is awe to worship, and how blind and

unintelligent was the awe which storm and earthquake and pestilence then

excited. We must remember the pressure upon them of surrounding

superstitions armed with all the civilisation and art of their world.

Above all, we must consider that the gods which seduced them were not of

necessity supreme: homage to them was very fairly consistent with a

reservation of the highest place for another; so that false worship in

its early stages need not have been much more startling than belief in

witchcraft, or in the paltry and unimaginative "spirits" which, in our

own day, are reputed to play the banjo in a dark room, and to untie

knots in a cabinet. Is it for us to deride them?

To oppose all such tendencies, the Lord appealed not to philosophy and

sound reason. These are not the parents of monotheism: they are the

fruit of it. And so is our modern science. Its fundamental principle is

faith in the unity of nature, and in the extent to which the same laws

which govern our little world reach through the vast universe. And that

faith is directly traceable to the conviction that all the universe is

the work of the same Hand.

"One God, one law, one element;"--the preaching of the first was sure to

suggest the other two. Nor could any race which believed in a multitude

of gods labour earnestly to reduce various phenomena to one cause.

Monotheism is therefore the parent of correct thinking, and could not

draw its sanctions thence. No: the law appeals to the historical

experience of Israel; it is content to stand and fall by that; if they

acknowledged the claim of God upon their loyalty, all the rest followed.

Their own story made good this claim. And so does the whole story of the

Church, and the whole inner life of every man who knows anything of

himself, bear witness to the religion of Jesus.

Never let us weary of repeating that while we have ample controversial

resource, while no missile can pierce the chain-armour of the Christian

evidences, connected and interwoven into a great whole, and while the

infidelity which is called scientific is really infidel only so far as

it begs its case (which is an unscientific thing to do), nevertheless

the strength of our position is experimental. If the experience which

testifies to Jesus were historical alone, I might refuse to give it

credit: if it were only personal, I might ascribe it to enthusiasm. But

as long as a great cloud of living witnesses, and all the history of the

Church, declare the reality of His salvation, while I myself feel the

sufficiency of what He offers (or else the bitter need of it), so long

the question is not between conflicting theories, but between theories

and facts. To have another god is to place him beside One Whom we

already have, and Who has wrought for us the great emancipation. It is

not an error in theological science: it is ingratitude and treason.

But it very soon became evident that men could apostatise from God

otherwise than in formal worship, chant and sacrifice and prostration:

"This people honoureth me with their mouths, but their hearts are far

from Me." God asks for love and trust, and our litanies should express

and cultivate these. Whatever steals away these from the Lord is really

His rival, and another god. "What is it to have a God? or what is God?"

Luther asks. And he answers, "He is God, and is so called, from Whose

goodness and power thou dost confidently promise all good things to

thyself, and to Whom thou dost fly from all adverse affairs and pressing

perils. So that to have a God is nothing else than to trust Him and

believe in Him with all the heart, even as I have often alleged that the

reliance of the heart constitutes alike one's God and one's idol.... In

what thing soever thou hast thy mind's reliance and thine heart fixed,

that is beyond doubt thy God" (_Larger Catechism_).

And again: "What sort of religion is this, to bow not the knees to

riches and honour, but to offer them the noblest part of you, the heart

and mind? It is to worship the true God outwardly and in the flesh, but

the creature inwardly and in spirit" (_X. Præcepta Witt. Prædicata_).

It was on this ground that he included charms and spells among the sins

against this commandment, because, though "they seem foolish rather than

wicked, yet do they lead to this too grave result, that men learn to

rely upon the creature in trifles, and so fail in great things to rely

upon God" (_Ibid._)

This view of false worship is frequent in Scripture itself. The

Chaldeans were idolaters of an elaborate and imposing ritual, but their

true deities were not to be found in temples. They adored what they

really trusted upon, and that was their military prowess--the god of the

modern commander, who said that Providence sided with the big

battalions. The Chaldean is "he whose might is his god," whereas the

sacred warrior has the Lord for his strength and shield and very present

help in battle. Nay, regarding men "as the fishes of the sea," and his

own vast armaments as the fisher's apparatus to sweep them away, the

Chaldean, it is said, "sacrificeth unto his net, and burneth incense

unto his drag; because by them his portion is fat and his meat

plenteous" (Hab. i. 11, 14-16). Multitudes of humbler people practise a

similar idolatry. They say to God "Give us this day our daily bread";

but they really ascribe their maintenance to their profession or their

trade; and so this is the true object of their homage. They, too, burn

incense to their drag.

Others had no thought of a higher blessedness than animal enjoyment.

Their god was their belly. They set the excitement of wine in the place

of the fulness of the Spirit, or preferred some depraved union upon

earth to the honour of being one spirit with the Lord (Phil. iii. 19;

Eph. v. 18; 1 Cor. vi. 16, 17). And some tried to combine the world and

righteousness; not to lose heaven while grasping wealth, and receiving

here not only good things, but the only good things they

acknowledged--_their_ good things (Luke xvi. 25). As the Samaritans

feared the Lord and served graven images, so these were fain to serve

God and mammon (2 Kings xvii. 41; Matt. vi. 24).

Now, these departures from the true Centre of all love and Source of all

light were really a homage to His great rival, "the god of this world."

Whenever men seek to obtain any prize by departing from God, they do

reverence to him who falsely said of all the kingdoms of the earth, and

their glory, "These things are delivered unto me, and to whomsoever I

will I give them." They deny Him to Whom indeed all power is committed

in heaven and earth.

What is the remedy, then, for all such formal or virtual apostasies? It

is to "have" the true God--which means, not only to know and confess,

but to be in real relationship with Him.

Despite His so-called self-sufficiency, man is not very self-sufficing,

after all. The vast endowments of Julius Cæsar did not prevent him from

chafing because, at the age when he was still obscure, Alexander had

conquered the world. To be Julius Cæsar was not enough for him. Nor is

any man able to stand alone. In the Old Testament Joshua said, "If it

seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will

serve,"--implying that they must obey some one and will do better to

choose a service than to drift into one (Josh. xxiv. 15). And in the New

Testament Jesus declared that no man can serve two masters; but added

that he would not break with both and go free, he was sure to love and

cleave to one of them. Now, he only is proof against apostasy, who has

realised the wants of the soul within him, and the powerlessness of all

creatures to satisfy or save, and then, turning to the cross of Christ,

has found his sufficiency in Him. "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast

the words of everlasting life." Marvellous it is to think that

underneath the stern words "Thou shalt have none other," lies all the

condescension of the privilege "Thou shalt have ... Me."

_THE SECOND COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, ... thou shalt not

bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them."--xx. 4-6.

How far does the second of these clauses modify the first? Men there are

who maintain the severe independence of the former, so that it forbids

the presence of any image or likeness in the house of God, even for

innocent purposes of adornment. But the Decalogue is not a liturgical

directory: what it forbids in church it forbids anywhere; and on this

theory the statues in Parliament Square would be idolatrous, as well as

those in Westminster Abbey. And such Christians are more Judaical than

the Jews, who were taught to place in the very Holy of Holies golden

cherubim overshadowing the mercy-seat, and to represent them again upon

its curtains.

It is therefore plain that the precept never forbade imagery, but

idolatry, which is the making of images to satisfy the craving of men's

hearts for a sensuous worship--the making of them "unto thee." The

second clause qualifies and elucidates the first. And what the

commandment prohibits is any attempt to help our worship by representing

the object of adoration to the senses.

The higher and more subtle idolatries do not conceive that wood or gold

is actually transformed into their deities; but only that the deities

are locally present in the images, which express their attributes--power

in a hundred hands, beneficence in a hundred breasts. But in thus

expressing, they degrade and cramp the conception.

They may perhaps evade the reproach of Isaiah that they warm themselves

with a portion of timber, and roast meat with another portion, and make

the remainder a god (Isa. xliv. 15-17), by urging that the timber is not

the god, but an abode which he chooses because it expresses his specific

qualities. But they cannot evade the reproach of St. Paul, that being

ourselves the offspring of God, we ought not to compare Him to the

workmanship of our hands, graven with art and man's device (Acts xvii.

29).

A truly spiritual worship is intellectually as well as morally the most

elevating exercise of the soul, which it leads onward and upward, making

of all that it knows and thinks a vestibule, beyond which lie higher

knowledge and deeper feeling as yet unattained.

Why is Gothic architecture better adapted for religious buildings than

any Grecian or Oriental style? Because its long aisles, vaulted roofs

and pointed arches, leading the vision up to the unseen, tell of

mystery, and draw the mind away beyond the visible and concrete to

something greater which it hints; while rounded arches and definite

proportions shut in at once the vision and the mind. The difference is

the same as between poetry and logic.

And so it is with worship. We fetter and cramp our thoughts of deity

when we bind them to even the loftiest conceptions which have ever been

shut up in marble or upon canvas. The best image that ever took shape is

inferior to the poorest spiritual conception of God, in this respect if

in no other--that it has no expansiveness, it cannot grow. And in

connecting our prayers with it, we virtually say, 'This satisfies my

conception of God.'

It is not to be condemned merely as inadequate, for so are all our

highest thoughts of deity; nor only because average humanity (which is

supposed to stand most in need of the help and suggestion of art) will

never learn the fine distinctions by which subtle intellects withhold

from the image itself the worship which it evokes, and which goes out in

its direction. It is still more mischievous because, even for the

trained theologian, it is the petrifaction of what is meant to develop

and expand, the solidification of the inadequate, the accepting of what

is human as our idea of the divine.

Nor will it long continue to be merely inadequate. Experience proves

that ideas, like air and water, cannot be confined without stagnating.

Idolatries not only fail to develop, they degenerate; and systems,

however orthodox they may appear at starting, which connect worship with

palpable imagery, are doomed to sink into superstition.

To this precept there is added a startling and painful caution--"For I

the Lord thy God am a jealous God." That a man should be jealous is no

passport to our friendship: we think of unreasonable estrangements,

exaggerated demands, implacable and cruel resentments. It would not

enter the average mind to doubt that one is highly praised when another

says of him, 'I never traced in his words or actions the slightest stain

of jealousy.' And yet we are to think of God Himself as the jealous God.

Upon reflection, however, we must admit that a man is not condemned as

jealous-minded because he is capable of jealousy, but because he has an

unjust and unreasonable tendency towards it. It is a narrowing and

suspicious quality when it operates without due cause, a vindictive and

cruel one when it operates in excessive measure. But what should we

think of a parent who felt no jealousy if the heart of his child were

stolen from him by intriguing servants or by frivolous comrades? Now,

God has called Israel His son, even His firstborn. The truth is that

with us jealousy is dangerous and frequently perverted, because we are

bad judges of the measure of our own rights, especially when our

affections are involved. But some measure of jealousy is the necessary

pain of love neglected, love wronged or slighted by those upon whom it

has a claim. Jealousy is the shadow thrown where the sunshine of love is

intercepted, and it is strong in proportion to the strength of the

light. It operates in the heart exactly like the sense of justice in the

reason. Justice expects a recompense where it has given service, and

jealousy asks for love where it has given affection.

And therefore, when God tells us that He is jealous, He implies that He

condescends to love us, to look for a return, to desire more from us

than outward service. We cannot be jealous concerning things which are

indifferent to us. Even the jealousy of rival competitors for business

or for place may be measured by the desire of each for that which the

other would engross. The politician is not jealous of the millionaire,

nor the capitalist of the prime minister.

Now, if God is jealous when the enemies of our soul would steal away our

loyalty, it surely follows that we shall not be left to contend with

those enemies alone: He values us; He is upon our side; He will help us

to overcome them.

And now we begin to see why this attribute is connected with the second

commandment and not the first. The apostate who betakes himself to

another god is almost beyond the reach of this tender and intimate

emotion: he is still loved, for God loves all men; but yet perhaps the

chord is unstrung which trembles responsive to this plaintive note.

When a man who confesses God begins to weary of spiritual intercourse

with the Lord of spirits, when he can no longer worship One whose actual

presence is realised because His voice is heard within, when the

likeness of man or brute, or brightness of morning, or marvel of life or

its reproductiveness, contents him as a representation of God the

invisible, then his heart is beginning to go after the creature, to

content itself with artistic loveliness or majesty, to let go the grasp

as upon a living hand, by which alone the soul may be sustained when it

stumbles, or guided when it would err.

To those who are within His covenant--to us, therefore, as to His

ancient Israel--He says, "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." Because

I am "thy God."

The assertion of a Divine jealousy is but one difficulty of this

remarkable verse. The Lord goes on to describe Himself as "visiting the

iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth

generation of them that hate Me, and showing mercy unto thousands of

them that love Me and keep My commandments." And is this reasonable? To

punish the child, to be avenged upon the children's children, for sins

which are not their own? We know how often the sceptic has made gain out

of this representation--which is but his own unauthorised gloss, since

in reality God has said nothing about punishing the righteous with the

wicked. It is not true that all sad and disastrous consequences are

penal; many are disciplinary, and even to the people of God some are

surgical, cutting away what would lead to disease and death. Are no

evil consequences probable, if men brought up amid scenes dishonouring

to God were treated exactly like those who have since childhood felt as

it were the hand of a Father upon their head? For themselves it is best

and kindest that so deep a loss could come home to their consciousness

in pain.

At all events, the assertion so early made in Scripture is confirmed in

all the experience of the race. Insanity, idiocy, scrofula, consumption,

are too often, though not always, the hereditary results of guilt. Sins

of the flesh are visited upon the bodily system. Sins of the temper,

such as pride, cynicism and frivolity, are felt in the mental structure

of the race. And the sins which offend directly against God, do they

bring no results with them? Ask of the investigators of the new science

of heredity and transmitted peculiarities, whether it stops short of the

highest and holiest parts of human nature. Or consider the ravages which

victory and consequent wealth have made, again and again, in the

character of whole nations.

There is no doctrine impugned in Scripture, which men have less prospect

of shaking off, even if they close their Bibles for ever, than this. If

it were not there, we should be perplexed at a want of conformity

between the ways of God in nature and what is asserted of Him in His

Book.

But it is either slander or blindness to represent this law, viewed in

its entirety, as other than benevolent. The transmission of the result

of evil is only a part of the vast law which has bound men together in

nations and families, as partners and members with each other. It is

clear that distinctive advantages cannot be bestowed upon the children

of the good, as such, unless the same advantages be withheld from the

evil race beside them. If the prizes of a university are won by

knowledge, the result is that ignorance is "visited," in the withholding

of them. And if, in the vaster university of life, health, affluence,

good repute and a clear intellect are the transmitted results of virtue,

then disease, poverty, neglect and incompetence become the dire bequest

of the unrighteous.

There is no choice, therefore, except either to carry out this law, or

else to bid every man in the world begin life, not as "the heir of all

the ages," but absolutely destitute of all that has been acquired by his

fellow-men.

Sometimes a hint is given us of what this would be. There is brought

occasionally into civilised communities, from the depths of forests, a

creature without language or decency or intellect, with low forehead and

brutal appetites, who in his early childhood had wandered away and been

lost,--brought up, men say, by the strange compassion of some lower

creature, and now sunken well-nigh to its level. To this degradation we

should all come, if it were not for the transmitted inheritance of our

fathers. And so vast is the upward force of this grand law, that it is

steadily though slowly upheaving the whole mass; and the lowest of

to-day, visited for ancestral failings by sinking to the bottom, is

higher than if he had been left absolutely alone.

This over-weight of good is clearly seen by comparing the clauses, for

the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and

fourth generation, but mercy is shown in them that love God upon a

wholly different scale. Even "unto thousands" would enormously

counterbalance three generations. But the Revised Version rightly

suggests "a thousand generations" in the margin, and supports it by one

of its very rare references. It is plainly stated in Deuteronomy vii. 9,

that He "keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love Him and keep His

commandments unto a thousand generations."

Lastly, it is to be observed that in all this passage the gospel is

shining through the law. It is not a question of just dealing, but of

emotion. God is not a master exacting taskwork, but a Father, jealous if

we refuse our hearts. He visits sin upon the posterity "of them that

hate," not only of them that disobey Him. And when our hearts sink, we

who are responsible for generations yet to be, as we reflect upon our

frailty, our ignorance and our sins, upon the awful consequences which

may result from one heedless act--nay, from a gesture or a look--He

reminds us that He does not requite those who serve Him only with a

measured wage, but shows "mercy" upon those who love Him unto a thousand

generations.

_THE THIRD COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."--xx. 7.

What is the precise force of this prohibition? The word used is

ambiguous: sometimes it must be rendered as here, as in the verses

"_Vain_ is the help of man," and "Except the Lord build the house, their

labour is but _vain_ that build it" (Psalm cviii. 12, cxxvii. 1). But

sometimes it clearly means false, as in the texts "Thou shalt not raise

a _false_ report," and "swearing _falsely_ in making a covenant" (Exod.

xxiii. 1; Hos. x. 4). Yet again, it hangs midway between the two ideas,

as when we read of "_lying_ vanities," and again, "trusting in vanity

and speaking _lies_" (Psalm xxxi. 6; Isa. lix. 4).

In favour of the rendering "falsely" it is urged that our Lord quotes it

as "said to them of old time 'Thou shalt not forswear thyself'" (Matt.

v. 33). But it is by no means clear that He quotes this text: the

citation is closer to the phraseology of Lev. xix. 12, and it is found

in a section of the Sermon which does not confine its citations to the

Decalogue (cf. ver. 38).

The Authorised rendering seems the more natural when we remember that

civic duty had not yet come upon the stage. When we have learned to

honour only one God, and not to degrade nor materialise our conception

of Him, the next step is to inculcate, not yet veracity toward men when

God has been invoked, but reverence, in treating the sacred name.

We have already seen the miserable superstitions by which the Jews

endeavoured to satisfy the letter while outraging the spirit of this

precept. In modern times some have conceived that all invocation of the

Divine Name is unlawful, although St. Paul called God for a witness upon

his soul, and the strong angel shall yet swear "by Him Who liveth for

ever and ever" (2 Cor. i. 23; Rev. x. 6).

As it is not a temple but a desert which no foot ever treads, so the

sacred name is not honoured by being unspoken, but by being spoken

aright.

Swearing is indeed forbidden, where it has actually disappeared, namely,

in the mutual intercourse of Christian people, whose affirmation should

suffice their brethren, while the need of stronger sanctions "cometh of

evil," even of the consciousness of a tendency to untruthfulness, which

requires the stronger barrier of an oath. But our Lord Himself, when

adjured by the living God, responded to the solemn authority of that

adjuration, although His death was the result.

The name of God is not taken in vain when men who are conscious of His

nearness, and act with habitual reference to His will, mention Him more

frequently and familiarly than formalists approve. It is abused when the

insincere and hollow professor joins in the most solemn act of worship,

honours Him with the lips while the heart is far from Him--nay, when one

strives to curb Satan, and reclaim his fellow-sinner, by the use of good

and holy phrases, in which his own belief is merely theoretical; and

fares like the sons of Sceva, who repeated an orthodox adjuration, but

fled away overpowered and wounded. Or if the truth unworthily spoken

assert its inherent power, that will not justify the hollowness of his

profession, and in vain will he plead at last, "Lord, Lord, have we not

in Thy name cast out devils, and in Thy name done many marvellous acts?"

The only safe rule is to be sure that our conception of God is high and

real and intimate; to be habitually humble and trustful in our attitude

toward Him; and then to speak sincerely and frankly, as then we shall

not fail to do. The words which rise naturally to the lips of men who

think thus cannot fail to do Him honour, for out of the fulness of the

heart the mouth speaketh.

And the prevalent notion that God should be mentioned seldom and with

bated breath is rather an evidence of men's failure habitually to think

of Him aright, than of filial and loving reverence. There is a large and

powerful school of religion in our own day, whose disciples talk much

more of their own emotions and their own souls than St. Paul did, and

much less about God and Christ. Some day the proportions will be

restored. In the great Church of the future men will not morbidly shrink

from confessing their inner life, but neither will it be the centre of

their contemplation and their discourse: they will be filled with the

fulness of God; out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths will

speak; His name shall be continually in their mouth, and yet they shall

not take the name of the Lord their God in vain.

_THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT._

xx. 8-11.

It cannot be denied that the commandment to honour the Sabbath day

occupies a unique place among the ten. It is, at least apparently, a

formal precept embedded in the heart of a moral code, and good men have

thought very differently indeed about its obligation upon the Christian

Church.

The great Continental reformers, Lutheran and Calvinistic alike, who

subscribed the Confession of Augsburg, there affirmed that "Scripture

hath abolished the Sabbath by teaching that all Mosaic ceremonies may be

omitted since the gospel has been revealed" (II. vii. 28). The Scotch

reformers, on the other hand, declared that God "in His Word, by a

positive moral and perpetual commandment, binding all men in all ages,

hath particularly appointed one day in seven for a Sabbath, to be kept

holy unto Him" (_Westminster Confess._, XXI. vii.). They are even so

bold as to declare that this day "from the beginning of the world to the

resurrection of Christ was the last day of the week, and from the

resurrection of Christ was changed into the first day of the week"; but

this proposition would be as hard to prove as the contrary assertion,

still maintained by some obscure religionists, that the change of day,

for however sufficient and sublime a reason, was beyond the capacity of

the Church of Christ to enact.

Amid these conflicting opinions the doctrinal formularies of the Church

of England are characteristically guarded and prudent; but her

worshippers are bidden to seek mercy from the Lord for past violations

of this law, and an inclination of heart to keep it in the future; and

when the Ten have been recited, they pray that "all these Thy laws" may

be written upon their hearts. There is no doubt, therefore, about the

opinion of our own Reformers concerning the divine obligation of the

commandment.

In examining the problem thus presented to us, our chief light must be

that of Scripture itself. Is the Sabbath what the Lutheran confession

called it, a mere "Mosaic ceremony," or does it rest upon sanctions

which began earlier and lasted longer than the precept to abstain from

shell-fish, or to sanctify the firstborn of cattle?

Does its presence in the Decalogue disfigure that great code, as the

intrusion of these other precepts would do? When we find a Gentile

church reminded that the next precept to this "is the first commandment

with promise" (Eph. vi. 2), can we suppose that the tables to which St.

Paul appealed, and the promise which he cited at full length, were both

cancelled; that in so far as a moral element existed in them, that

portion of course survived their repeal, but the code itself was gone?

If so, the temporal promise went with it, and its quotation by St. Paul

is strange. Strange also, upon this supposition, was the stress which

he habitually laid upon the law as a convicting power, and as being only

repealed in the letter so far as it was fulfilled by the spontaneous

instinct of love, which was the fulfilling of the law.

The position of the commandment among a number of moral and universal

duties cannot but weigh heavily in its favour. It prompts us to ask

whether our duty to God is purely negative, to be fulfilled by a policy

of non-intervention, not worshipping idols, nor blaspheming. Something

more was already intimated in the promise of mercy to them "that love

Me." For love is chiefly the source of active obedience: while fear is

satisfied by the absence of provocation, love wants not only to abstain

from evil but to do good. And how may it satisfy this instinct when its

object is the eternal God, Who, if He were hungry, would not tell us? It

finds the necessary outlet in worship, in adoring communion, in the

exclusion for awhile of worldly cares, in the devotion of time and

thought to Him. Now, the foundation upon which all the institutions of

religion may be securely built, is the day of rest. Call it external,

formal, unspiritual if you will; say that it is a carnal ordinance, and

that he who keeps it in spirit is free from the obligation of the

letter. But then, what about the eighth commandment? Are we absolved

also from the precept "Thou shalt not steal," because it too is

concerned with external actions, because "this ... thou shalt not steal

... and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in

this one saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"? Do we say,

the spirit has abolished the letter: love is the rescinding of the law?

St. Paul said the very opposite: love is the fulfilling of the law, not

its destruction; and thus he re-echoed the words of Jesus, "I am not

come to destroy the law, but to fulfil."

All men know that the formal regulations which defend property are

relaxed as the ties of love and mutual understanding are made strong;

that to enter unannounced is not a trespass, that the same action which

will be prosecuted as a theft by a stranger, and resented as a liberty

by an acquaintance, is welcomed as a graceful freedom, almost as an

endearment, by a friend. And yet the commandment and the rights of

property hold good: they are not compromised, but glorified, by being

spiritualised. As it is between man and his brother, so should it be

between us and our Divine Father. We have learned to know Him very

differently from those who shuddered under Sinai: the whole law is not

now written upon tables of stone, but upon fleshly tables of the heart.

But among the precepts which are thus etherialised and yet established,

why should not the fourth commandment retain its place? Why should it be

supposed that it must vanish from the Decalogue, unless the gathering of

sticks deserves stoning? The institution, and the ceremonial application

of it to Jewish life, are entirely different things; just as respect for

property is a fixed obligation, while the laws of succession vary.

Bearing this distinction in mind, we come to the question, Was the

Sabbath an ordinance born of Mosaism, or not? Grant that the word

"Remember," if it stood alone, might conceivably express the emphasis of

a new precept, and not the recapitulation of an existing one. Grant also

that the mention in Genesis of the Divine rest might be made by

anticipation, to be read with an eye to the institution which would be

mentioned later. But what is to be made of the fact that on the seventh

day manna was withheld from the camp, before they had arrived at Horeb,

and therefore before the commandment had been written by the finger of

God upon the stone? Was this also done by anticipation? Upon any

supposition, it aimed at teaching the nation that the obligation of the

day was not based upon the positive precept, but the precept embodied an

older and more fundamental obligation.

How is the Sabbath spoken of in those prophecies which set least value

upon the merely ceremonial law?

Isaiah speaks of mere ritual as slightly as St. Paul. To fast and

afflict one's soul is nothing, if in the day of fasting one smites with

the fist and oppresses his labourers. To loose the bonds of wickedness,

to free the oppressed, to share one's bread with the hungry, this is the

fast which God has chosen, and for him who fasts after this fashion the

light shall break forth like sunrise, and his bones shall be strong, and

he himself like an unfailing water-spring. Now, it is the same chapter

which thus waives aside mere ceremonial in contempt, which lavishes the

most ample promises on him who turns away his foot from the Sabbath, and

calls the Sabbath a delight, and the holy of the Lord, honourable, and

honours it (Isa. lviii. 5-11, 13-14).

There is no such promise in Jeremiah, for the observance of any merely

ceremonial law, as that which bids the people to honour the Sabbath day,

that there may enter into their gates kings and princes riding in

chariots and upon horses, and that the city may remain for ever (Jer.

xvii. 24, 25).

And Ezekiel declares that in the day when God made Himself known to His

people in the land of Egypt, He gave them statutes and judgments and His

sabbaths (Ezek. xx. 11, 12). Now, this phrase is a clear allusion to

the word of God in Jeremiah, that "I spake not unto their fathers in the

day when I brought them out of Egypt, concerning burnt-offerings or

sacrifices, but this thing I commanded them, saying, Hearken unto My

voice," etc. (Jer. vii. 23). And it sharply contrasts the sacredness of

God's abiding ordinances with the temporary institutions of the

sanctuary. But it reckons the Sabbath among the former.

It is objected that our Lord Himself treated the Sabbath lightly, as a

worn-out ordinance. But He was "a minister of the circumcision," and

always discussed the lawfulness of His Sabbath miracles as a Jew with

Jews. Thus He argued that men, admittedly under the law, baked the

shewbread, circumcised children, and even rescued cattle from jeopardy

upon the seventh day. He appealed to the example of David, who met a

sufficiently urgent necessity by eating the consecrated bread, "which

was not lawful for him to eat" (Matt. xii. 4).

He did not hint that the law of the sabbath had disappeared, but

insisted that it was meant to serve man and not to oppress him: that

"the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mark ii.

27).

Now, there is not in the life of Christ an assertion, so broad and

strong as that the Sabbath was made for the human race, which can be

narrowed down to a discussion of any merely local and temporary

institution. He Who stood highest, and saw the widest horizons, declared

that the Sabbath was intended for humanity, and not for a section or a

sect of it. Not because He was the King of the Jews, but because He was

the Son of Man, the ripe fruit and the leader of the world-wide race

which it was given to bless, therefore He was also its Lord.

And in Him, so are we. Like all things present and things to come, it is

our help, we are not its slaves.

There is something abject in the notion of a Christian freeman, who has

been for a long week imprisoned in some gloomy and ill-ventilated

workshop, whose lungs would be purified, and therefore his spirits

uplifted, and therefore his reason and his affections invigorated, and

therefore his worship rendered more fresh, warm and reasonable, by the

breathing of a purer air, yet whose conception of a day of rest is so

slavish that he dares not "rest" from the pollution of an infected

atmosphere, and from the closeness of a London court, because he

conceives it imperative to "rest" only from that bodily exercise, to

enjoy which would be to him the most real and the most delightful repose

of all.

But there are other things more abject still; and one of them is the

miserable insincerity of the affluent and luxurious, using the

exceptional case of him whose week-days are thus oppressed, to excuse

their own wanton neglect of religious ordinances, accepting at the hands

of Christianity the sacred holiday, but ignoring utterly the fact that

the Lord sanctified and hallowed it, that it is to be called the holy of

the Lord, and to be honoured, and that we are free from the letter of

the precept only in so far as we rise to the spirit of it, in loving and

true communion with the Father of spirits.

Another utterance of Jesus throws a strong light upon the nature and the

limits of our obligation. "My Father worketh even until now, and I work"

(John v. 17) is an appeal to the fact that in the long sabbath of God

His world is not deserted; creation may be suspended, but the bounties

of Providence go on; and therefore Christ also felt that His day of

rest was not one of torpor, that in healing the impotent man upon the

Sabbath He was but following the example of Him by whose rest the day

was sanctified. All works of beneficent love, all that ministers to

human recovery from anguish, and carries out the Divine purposes of

grace for body or soul, rescue from danger, healing of disease,

reformation of guilt, are sanctioned by this defence of Christ.

They need not plead that the commandment is abrogated, but that Jesus of

Nazareth, of the seed of David, found nothing in such liberties

inconsistent with the duties of a devout Hebrew.

_THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT._

"Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon

the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."--xx. 12.

This commandment forms a kind of bridge between the first table and the

second. Obedience to parents is not merely a neighbourly virtue; we do

not honour them simply as our fellow-men: they are the vicegerents of

God to our childhood; through them He supplies our necessities, defends

our feebleness, and pours in light and wisdom upon our ignorance; by

them our earliest knowledge of right and wrong is imparted, and upon the

sanction of their voice it long depends.

It is clear that parental authority cannot be undermined, nor filial

disobedience and irreverence gain ground, without shaking the

foundations of our religious life, even more perhaps than of our social

conduct.

Accordingly this commandment stands before the sixth, not because

murder is a less offence against society, but because it is more

emphatically against our neighbour, and less directly against God.

The human infant is dependent and helpless for a longer period, and more

utterly, than the young of any other animal. Its growth, which is to

reach so much higher, is slower, and it is feebler during the process.

And the reason of this is plain to every thoughtful observer. God has

willed that the race of man should be bound together in the closest

relationships, both spiritual and secular; and family affection prepares

the heart for membership alike of the nation and the Church. With this

inner circle the wider ones are concentric. The pathetic dependence of

the child nourishes equally the strong love which protects, and the

grateful love which clings. And from our early knowledge of human

generosity, human care and goodness, there is born the capacity for

belief in the heart of the great Father, from Whom every family in

heaven and earth derived its Greek name of Fatherhood (Eph. iii. 15).

Woe to the father whose cruelty, selfishness, or evil passions make it

hard for his child to understand the Archetype, because the type is

spoiled! or whose tyranny and self-will suggest rather the stern God of

reprobation, or of servile, slavish subjection, than the tender Father

of freeborn sons, who are no more under tutors and governors, but are

called unto freedom.

But how much sorer woe to the son who dishonours his earthly parent, and

in so doing slays within himself the very principle of obedience to the

Father of spirits!

No earthly tie is perfect, and therefore no earthly obedience can be

absolute. Some crisis comes in every life when the most innocent and

praiseworthy affection becomes a snare--when the counsel we most relied

upon would fain mislead our conscience--when a man, to be Christ's

disciple, must "hate father and mother," as Christ Himself heard the

temptation of the evil one speaking through chosen and beloved lips, and

said "Get thee behind Me, Satan." Even then we shall respect them, and

pray as Christ prayed for His failing apostle, and when the storm has

spent itself they shall resume their due place in the loving heart of

their Christian offspring.

So Jesus, when Mary would interrupt His teaching, said "Who is My

mother?" But imminent death could not prevent Him from pitying her

sorrow, and committing her to His beloved disciple as to a son.

From the letter of this commandment streams out a loving influence to

sanctify all the rest of our relationships. As the love of God implies

that of our brother also, so does the honour of parents involve the

recognition of all our domestic ties.

And even unassisted nature will tend to make long the days of the loving

and obedient child; for life and health depend far less upon affluence

and luxury than upon a well-regulated disposition, a loving heart, a

temper which can obey without chafing, and a conscience which respects

law. All these are being learned in disciplined and dutiful households,

which are therefore the nurseries of happy and righteous children, and

so of long-lived families in the next generation also. Exceptions there

must be. But the rule is clear, that violent and curbless lives will

spend themselves faster than the lives of the gentle, the loving, the

law-abiding and the innocent.

_THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt do no murder."--xx. 13.

We have now clearly passed to the consideration of man's duty to his

fellow-man, as a part of his duty to his Maker. It is no longer as

holding a divinely appointed relation to us, but simply as he is a man,

that we are bidden to respect his person, his family, his property, and

his fair fame.

And the influence of the teaching of our Lord is felt in the very name

which we all give to the second table of the law. We call it "our duty

to our neighbour." But we do not mean to imply that there lives on the

surface of the globe one whom we are free to assault or to pillage. The

obligation is universal, and the name we give it echoes the teaching of

Him who said that no man can enter the sphere of our possible influence,

even as a wounded creature in a swoon whom we may help, but he should

thereupon become our neighbour. Or rather, we should become his; for

while the question asked of Him was "Who is my neighbour?" (whom should

I love?) Jesus reversed the problem when He asked in turn not To whom

was the wounded man a neighbour? but Who was a neighbour unto him? (who

loved him?)

Social ethics, then, have a religious sanction. It is the constant duty

and effort of the Church of God to saturate the whole life of man, all

his conduct and his thought, with a sense of sacredness; and as the

world is for ever desecrating what is holy, so is religion for ever

consecrating what is secular.

In these latter days men have thought it a proof of grace to separate

religion from daily life. The Antinomian, who maintains that his

orthodox beliefs or feelings absolve him from the obligations of

morality, joins hands with the Italian brigand who hopes to be forgiven

for cutting throats because he subsidises a priest. The enthusiast who

insists that all sins, past and future, were forgiven him when he

believed, approaches far nearer than he supposes to the fanatic of

another creed, who thinks a formal confession and an external absolution

sufficient to wash away sin. All of them hold the grand heresy that one

may escape the penalties without being freed from the power of evil;

that a life may be saved by grace without being penetrated by religion,

and that it is not exactly accurate to say that Jesus saves His people

from their sins.

It is scarcely wonderful, when some men thus refuse to morality the

sanctions of religion, that others propose to teach morality how she may

go without them. In spite of the experience of ages, which proves that

human passions are only too ready to defy at once the penalties of both

worlds, it is imagined that the microscope and the scalpel may supersede

the Gospel as teachers of virtue; that the self-interest of a creature

doomed to perish in a few years may prove more effectual to restrain

than eternal hopes and fears; and that a scientific prudence may supply

the place of holiness. It has never been so in the past. Not only Judæa,

but Egypt, Greece, and Rome, were strong as long as they were righteous,

and righteous as long as their morality was bound up in their religion.

When they ceased to worship they ceased to be self-controlled, nor could

the most urgent and manifest self-interest, nor all the resources of

lofty philosophy, withhold them from the ruin which always accompanies

or follows vice.

Is it certain that modern science will fare any better? So far from

deepening our respect for human nature and for law, she is discovering

vile origins for our most sacred institutions and our deepest instincts,

and whispering strange means by which crime may work without detection

and vice without penalty. Never was there a time when educated thought

was more suggestive of contempt for one's self and for one's fellow-man,

and of a prudent, sturdy, remorseless pursuit of self-interest, which

may be very far indeed from virtuous. The next generation will eat the

fruit of this teaching, as we reap what our fathers sowed. The theorist

may be as pure as Epicurus. But the disciples will be as the Epicureans.

Is there anything in the modern conception of a man which bids me spare

him, if his existence dooms me to poverty and I can quietly push him

over a precipice? It is quite conceivable that I can prove, and very

likely indeed that I can persuade myself, that the shortening of the

life of one hard and grasping man may brighten the lives of hundreds.

And my passions will simply laugh at the attempt to restrain me by

arguing that great advantages result from the respect for human life

upon the whole. Appetites, greeds, resentments do not regard their

objects in this broad and colourless way; they grant the general

proposition, but add that every rule has its exceptions. Something more

is needed: something which can never be obtained except from a universal

law, from the sanctity of all human lives as bearing eternal issues in

their bosom, and from the certainty that He who gave the mandate will

enforce it.

It is when we see in our fellow-man a divine creature of the Divine,

made by God in His own image, marred and defaced by sin, but not beyond

recovery, when his actions are regarded as wrought in the sight of a

Judge Whose presence supersedes utterly the slightness, heat and

inadequacy of our judgment and our vengeance, when his pure affections

tell us of the love of God which passeth knowledge, when his errors

affright us as dire and melancholy apostacies from a mighty calling, and

when his death is solemn as the unveiling of unknown and unending

destinies, then it is that we discern the sacredness of life, and the

awful presumption of the deed which quenches it. It is when we realise

that he is our brother, holding his place in the universe by the same

tenure by which we hold our own, and dear to the same Father, that we

understand how stern is the duty of repressing the first resentful

movements within our breast which would even wish to crush him, because

they are a rebellion against the Divine ordinance and against the Divine

benevolence.

Is it asked, how can all this be reconciled with the lawfulness of

capital punishment? The death penalty is frequent in the Mosaic code.

But Scripture regards the judge as the minister and agent of God. The

stern monotheism of the Old Testament "said, Ye are Gods," to those who

thus pronounced the behest of Heaven; and private vengeance becomes only

more culpable when we reflect upon the high sanction and authority by

which alone public justice presumes to act.

Now, all these considerations vanish together, when religion ceases to

consecrate morality. The judgment of law differs from my own merely as I

like it better, and as I am a party (perhaps unwillingly) to the general

consent which creates it; he whom I would assail is doomed in any case

to speedy and complete extinction; his longer life is possibly

burdensome to himself and to society; and there exists no higher Being

to resent my interference, or to measure out the existence which I think

too protracted. It is clear that such a view of human life must prove

fatal to its sacredness; and that its results would make themselves

increasingly felt, as the awe wore away which old associations now

inspire.

_THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt not commit adultery."--xx. 14.

This commandment follows very obviously from even the rudest principle

of justice to our neighbour. It is among those that St. Paul enumerates

as "briefly comprehended in this saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbour

as thyself."

And therefore nothing need here be said about the open sin by which one

man wrongs another. Wild and evil theories may be abroad, new schemes of

social order may be recklessly invented and discussed; yet, when the

institution of the permanent family is assailed, every thoughtful man

knows full well that all our interests are at stake in its defence, and

the nation could no more survive its overthrow than the Church.

But when our Lord declared that to excite desire through the eyes is

actually this sin, already ripe, He appealed to some deeper and more

spiritual consideration than that of social order. What He pointed to is

the sacredness of the human body--so holy a thing that impurity, and

even the silent excitement of passion, is a wrong done to our nature,

and a dishonour to the temple of the Holy Ghost.

Now, this is a subject upon which it is all the more necessary to write,

because it is hard to speak about.

What is the human body, in the view of the Christian? It is the one

bond, as far as we know in all the universe, between the material and

the spiritual worlds, one of which slopes thence down to inert

molecules, and the other upward to the throne of God.

Our brain is the engine-room and laboratory whereby thought, aspiration,

worship express themselves and become potent, and even communicate

themselves to others.

But it is a solemn truth that the body not only interprets passively,

but also influences and modifies the higher nature. The mind is helped

by proper diet and exercise, and hindered by impure air and by excess or

lack of food. The influence of music upon the soul has been observed at

least since the time of Saul. And hereafter the Christian body, redeemed

from the contagion of the fall, and promoted to a spiritual

impressibility and receptiveness which it has never yet known, is meant

to share in the heavenly joys of the immortal spirit before God. This is

the meaning of the assertion that it is sown a natural (= _soulish_)

body, but shall be raised a spiritual body. In the meantime it must

learn its true function. Whatever stimulates and excites the animal at

the cost of the immortal within, will in the same degree cloud and

obscure the perception that a man's life consisteth not in his

pleasures, and will keep up the illusion that the senses are the true

ministers of bliss. The soul is attacked through the appetites at a

point far short of their physical indulgence. And when lawless wishes

are deliberately toyed with, it is clear that lawless acts are not

hated, but only avoided through fear of consequences. The reins which

govern the life are no longer in the hands of the spirit, nor is it the

will which now refuses to sin. How, then, can the soul be alert and

pure? It is drugged and stupified: the offices of religion are a dull

form, and its truths are hollow unrealities, assented to but unfelt,

because unholy impulses have set on fire the course of nature, in what

should have been the temple of the Holy Ghost.

Moreover, the Christian life is not one of mere submission to authority;

its true law is that of ceaseless upward aspiration. And since the union

of husband and wife is consecrated to be the truest and deepest and most

far-reaching of all types of the mystical union between Christ and His

Church, it demands an ever closer approach to that perfect ideal of

mutual love and service.

And whatever impairs the sacred, mysterious, all-pervading unity of a

perfect wedlock is either the greatest of misfortunes or of crimes.

If it be frailty of temper, failure of common sympathies, an

irretrievable error recognised too late, it is a calamity which may yet

strengthen the character by evoking such pity and helpfulness as Christ

the Bridegroom showed for the Church when lost. But if estrangement,

even of heart, come through the secret indulgence of lawless reverie and

desire, it is treason, and criminal although the traitor has not struck

a blow, but only whispered sedition under his breath in a darkened room.

_THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt not steal."--xx. 15.

There is no commandment against which human ingenuity has brought more

evasions to bear than this. Property itself is theft, says the

communist. "It is no grave sin," says the Roman text-book, "to steal in

moderation"; and this is defined to be, "from a pauper less than a

franc, from a daily labourer less than two or three, from a person in

comfortable circumstances anything under four or five francs, or from a

very rich man ten or twelve francs. And a servant whom force or

necessity compels to accept an unjust payment, may secretly compensate

himself, because the workman is worthy of his hire."[37] A moment's

reflection discovers this to be the most naked rationalism, choosing

some of the commandments of God for honour, and some for contempt as

"not very grave" and wholly ignoring the principle that whoever attacks

the code at any one point "is guilty of all," because he has despised it

as a code, as an organic system.

Nothing is easier than to confuse one's conscience about the ethics of

property. For the arrangements of various nations differ: it is a

geographical line which defines the right of the elder son against his

brothers, of sons against daughters, and of children against a wife; and

the demand is still more capricious which the state asserts against them

all, under the name of succession duty, and which it makes upon other

property in the form of a multitude of imposts and taxes. Can all these

different arrangements be alike binding? Add to this variability the

immense national revenues, which are apparently so little affected by

individual contributions, and it is no wonder if men fail to see that

honesty to the public is a duty as immutable and stern as any other duty

to their neighbour. Unfortunately the evil spreads. The same

considerations which make it seem pardonable to rob the nation apply

also to the millionaire; and they tempt many a poor man to ask whether

he need respect the wealth of a usurer, or may not adjust the scales of

Mine and Thine, which law causes to hang unfairly.

It is forgotten that a nation has at least the same authority as a club

to regulate its own affairs, to fix the relative position and the

subscription of its members. Common honesty teaches me that I must

conform to these rules or leave the club; and this duty is not at all

affected by the fact that other associations have different rules. In

three such societies God Himself has placed us all--the family, the

Church, and the nation; and therefore I am directly responsible to God

for due respect to their laws. It is not true that the statute-book is

inspired, any more than that the regulations of a household are divinely

given. Yet a Divine sanction, such as rests upon the parental rule of

fallible human creatures, hallows also national law. I may advocate a

change in laws of which I disapprove, but I am bound in the meantime to

obey the conditions upon which I receive protection from foreign foes

and domestic fraud, and which cannot be subjected to the judgment of

every individual, except at the cost of a dissolution of society, and a

state of anarchy compared with which the worst of laws would be

desirable.

This revolt of the individual is especially tempting when selfishness

deems itself wronged, as by the laws of property. And the eighth

commandment is necessary to protect society not merely against the

violence of the burglar and the craft of the impostor, but also against

the deceitfulness of our own hearts, asking What harm is in the evasion

of an impost? What right has a successful speculator to his millions?

Why should I not do justice to myself when law refuses it?

There is always the simple answer, Who made me a judge in my own case?

But when we regard the matter thus, it becomes clear that honesty is not

mere abstinence from pillage. The community has larger claims than this

upon us, and is wronged if we fail to discharge them.

The rich man robs the poor if he does not play his part in the great

organisation by which he is served so well: every one robs the community

who takes its benefits and returns none; and in this sense the bold

saying is true, that every man lives by one of two methods--by labour or

by theft.

St. Paul does not exhort men to refrain from theft merely in order to be

harmless, but to do good. That is the alternative contemplated when he

says, "Let the thief steal no more, but rather let him labour, working

with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have whereof to give

to him that hath need" (Eph. iv. 28).

_THE NINTH COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour."--xx. 16.

St. James called the tongue a world of iniquity. And against its

lawlessness, which inflames the whole course of nature, each table of

the law contains a warning. For it is equally ready to profane the name

of God, and to rob our neighbour of his fair fame.

Jesus Christ regarded verbal professions as a very poor thing, and

asked, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I command

you?" He aimed a parable at the hollowness of merely saying, "I go,

sir." But, worthless though such phrases be, the act which substitutes

professions for actual service is no trifle; and our Lord felt the

importance of words, empty or sincere, so profoundly as to stake upon

this one test the eternal destinies of His people: "By thy words thou

shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned." Now, the

tongue is thus important because it is so prompt and willing a servant

of the mind within. We scarcely think of it as a servant at all: our

words do not seem to be more than "expressions," manifestations of what

is within us.

But a thought, once expressed, is transformed and energetic as a bullet

when the charge is fired; it modifies other minds, and the word which we

took to be far less potent than a deed becomes the mover of the fateful

deeds of many men. And thus, being at once powerful and unsuspected, it

is the most treacherous and subtle of all the forces which we wield.

And the ninth commandment does not undertake to bridle it by merely

forbidding us in a court of justice to wrong our fellow-man by perjury.

We transgress it whenever we conceive a strong suspicion and repeat it

as a thing we know; when we allow the temptation of a biting epigram to

betray us into an unkind expression not quite warranted by the facts;

when we vindicate ourselves against a charge by throwing blame where it

probably but not certainly ought to lie; or when we are not content to

vindicate ourselves without bringing a countercharge which it would

perplex us to be asked to prove; when we give way to that most shallow

and meanest of all attempts at cleverness which claims credit for

penetration because it can discover base motives for innocent actions,

so that high-mindedness becomes pride, and charity withers up into love

of patronising, and forbearance shrivels into lack of spirit. The

pattern and ideal of such cleverness is the east wind, which makes all

that is fair and sensitive to shut itself up, forbids the bud to expand

into a blossom, and puts back the coming of the springtime and of the

singing bird.

There are very gifted persons who have never found out that a kindly and

winning phrase may have as much literary merit as a stinging one, and it

is quite as fine a thing to be like the dew on Hermon on as to shoot out

arrows, even bitter words.

It is a pity that our harsh judgments always speak more loudly and

confidently than our kindly ones, but the reason is plain: angry passion

prompts the former, and its voice is loud; while the calm reflection

which tones down and sweetens the judgment softens also the expression

of it.

It has to be remembered, also, that false witness can reach to nations,

organisations, political movements as well as individuals. The habit of

putting the worst construction upon the intentions of foreign powers is

what feeds the mutual jealousies that ultimately blaze out in war. The

habit of thinking of rival politicians as deliberately false and

treasonable is what lowers the standard of the noblest of secular

pursuits, until each party, not to be undone, protests too much, raises

its voice to a falsetto to scream its rival down, and relaxes its

standard of righteousness lest it should be outdone by the

unscrupulousness of its rival.

And there is yet another neighbour, against whom false witness is

woefully rife, both in the Church and in society. That neighbour is

mankind at large. There is a prevalent theory of human sinfulness which

unconsciously scoffs at the appeals of the gospel, striving indeed to

influence me by love, gratitude, admiration for the Perfect One, and

desire to be like Him, by the hope of holiness and the shame of

vileness, but telling me at the same time that I have no sympathies

whatever except with evil. The observation of every day shows that man's

nature is corrupt, but it also shows that he is not a fiend--that he has

fallen indeed, but remembers yet in what image he was made. But the

world cannot upbraid the Church for these exaggerations, since they are

but the echo of its own.

"I do believe,

Though I have found them not, that there may be

Words which are things, hopes which will not deceive,

And virtues which are merciful, nor weave

Snares for the failing; I would also deem

O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve;

That two, or one, are almost what they seem,

That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream."

_Childe Harold_, III., cxiv.

Cynicism is false witness; and if it does not greatly wrong any one of

our fellow-men, it injures both society and the cynic. If he is of a

coarse fibre, it excuses him to himself in becoming the hard and

unloving creature which he fancies that all men are. If he is too proud

or too self-respecting to yield to this temptation, it isolates him, it

chills and withers his sympathies for people quite as good as himself,

whom he thinks of as the herd.

As for the more flagrant sins, so for this, the remedy is love. Love

sympathises, makes allowance for frailty, discovers the germs of good,

hopeth all things, taketh not account of evil.

_THE TENTH COMMANDMENT._

"Thou shalt not covet ... anything that is his."--xx. 17.

It will be remembered that the order of the catalogue of objects of

desire is different in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. In the latter "thy

neighbour's wife" is first, as of supreme importance; and therefore it

has been thought possible to convert it into a separate commandment.

But this the order in Exodus forbids, by placing the house first, and

then the various living possessions which the householder gathers around

him. What is thought of is the gradual process of acquisition, and the

right of him who wins first a house, then a wife, servants, and cattle,

to be secure in the possession of them all. Now, between foes, we saw

that the evil temper is what leads to the evil deed, and the man who

nurses hatred is a murderer at heart. Just so the householder is not

rendered safe, and certainly not happy in the enjoyment of his rights,

by the seventh commandment and the eighth, unless care be taken to

prevent the accumulation of those forces which will some day break

through them both. To secure cities against explosion, we forbid the

storage of gunpowder and dynamite, and not only the firing of magazines.

But the moral law is not given to any man for his neighbour's sake

chiefly. It is for me: statutes whereby I myself may live. And as the

Psalmist pondered on them, they expanded strangely for his perception.

"I have kept Thy testimonies," he says; but presently asks to be

quickened,--"So shall I _observe_ the testimony of Thy mouth,"--and

prays, "Give me understanding, that I may _know_ Thy testimonies." And

at the last, he confesses that he has "gone astray like a lost sheep"

(Ps. cxix. 22, 88, 125, 176). Starting with a literal innocence, he

comes to feel a deep inward need, need of vitality to obey, and even of

power to understand aright. If the sacrifices of God are a broken

spirit, it follows that they are a spirit, and inward loyalty is the

necessary condition upon which external obedience can be accepted. The

cheers of a traitor, the flattery of one who scorns, the ritual of a

hypocrite, these are quite as valuable, as indications of what is

within, as a reluctant relinquishment to my neighbour of what is his. I

must not covet. Plainly this is the sharpest and most searching precept

of all; and accordingly St. Paul asserts that without this he would not

have suffered the deep internal discontent, the consciousness of

something wrong, which tortured him, even although no mortal could

reproach him, even though, touching the righteousness of the law, he was

blameless. He had not known coveting, except the law had said "Thou

shalt not covet."