BV 4655 
 Dale, R 
 The ten 
 
 .D27 1871 
 W. 1829-1895 
 commandments 
 
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THE TEN( FEB 3 19L 
 
 COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 R. W. DALE, M.A., 
 
 AUTHOR OF WEEK-DAY SERMOXS. ETC. 
 
 S0itb'0it : 
 
 HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 27 PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 
 MDCCCLXXI. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The Discourses published in this volume were delivered 
 in Carrs Lane Chapel, Birmingham, on successive Sunday- 
 Evenings, at the close of 1870. 
 
 The practical illustrations of the eternal principles of 
 morality which constitute the basis of the Decalogue, were 
 suggested by the circumstances of the congregation, which 
 contains very few professional men, not many manufacturers, 
 but a large number of retail tradesmen, a large number of 
 young men and women employed in retail shops, and a still 
 larger number of working people. 
 
 It has always seemed to me to be a principal part of the 
 work of a Christian Minister not only to insist on the duty of 
 " repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ," 
 but to illustrate in detail the obligations both of private and 
 public moraHty ; and I have felt it right to discuss in the 
 pulpit on the Sunday, all questions affecting the moral life of 
 individuals or of nations, which I knew were being discussed 
 in workshops and at dinner tables during the week. 
 
VI 
 
 I have also endeavoured to encourage and strengthen the 
 interest of my congregation in municipal and national 
 politics. It has been justly said that in a free country, the 
 public business of the nation is the private business of every 
 citizen ; and I cannot see that the will of God is ever likely to 
 be done on earth as it is done in Heaven, if Christian 
 men do not consider how the law of Christ is to be illustrated 
 in the legislation and policy of the State. 
 
 Birmingham, 
 
 April 14, 1 871. 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY I 
 
 THE FIRST COMMANDMENT . . . . 21 
 
 THE SECOND COMMANDMENT . . . . 40 
 
 THE THIRD COMMANDMENT . . . .64 
 
 THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT .... 87 
 
 THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT . . . . I20 
 
 THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT . . . . I46 
 
 THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT . . . 1 7© 
 
 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT . . . . 196 
 
 THE NINTH COMMANDMENT .... 
 
 218 
 
 THE TENTH COMMANDMENT .... 24I 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 And God spake all these words, saying, "I am the Lord thy 
 God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the 
 house of bondage."— Exodus xx., i, 2. 
 
 Most Evangelical Christians, I imagine, fail to ap- 
 preciate the greatness of the contrast between the ancient 
 revelation of God to the Jewish people and His revelation 
 to ourselves through the Lord Jesus Christ. The law of 
 Moses and the ™tings of the Prophets are bound up in 
 one volume wdth the four Gospels and the writings of the 
 Apostles, and many people forget that the Bible is not a 
 single book but a Library. It is the habit of theologians to 
 draw proofs and illustrations of great Christian doctrines 
 — often with a most unscientific want of discrimination — 
 from the old books as well as from the new. Sentences 
 from the Psalms and the Prophets are constantly and very 
 properly taken as texts for sermons which are filled 
 with arguments, appeals, and promises, derived from 
 the discourses of Christ and the epistles of St. Paul. We 
 have become so accustomed to trace the faint anticipa- 
 
 B 
 
2 Introductory. 
 
 tioiis in the Old Testament of the glorious revelations 
 in the New, that many of us seem to have the impression 
 that the coming of Christ made very little difference 
 either to the spiritual knowledge or to the spiritual 
 life of mankind, and our Lord's declaration that the 
 weakest and obscurest Christian man, "the least in the 
 Kingdom of Heaven," is greater than John the Baptist, 
 although John was as great as the greatest of the Prophets, 
 is almost unintelligible to us. 
 
 There are two opposite errors to be avoided ; it is hard 
 to say which is the more mischievous. To refuse to 
 recognise in the Old Testament the record of a true, though 
 elementary and imperfect revelation of God, is to lose 
 a vast amount of most valuable religious teaching. To 
 exalt the Old Testament to the level of the New, is to run 
 the risk of misunderstanding both Moses and Christ; and 
 this is the danger to which most Evangelical Christians in 
 this country are exposed. 
 
 It will assist us to escape this danger if we remember 
 constantly that the various books which have been brought 
 together in the Bible, were written at different times, by 
 different men, for different people, and with different pur- 
 poses, and that the Divine revelations which they contain, 
 l)ecame gradually clearer and fuller. Above all, we should 
 
Introductory. 3 
 
 remember that the whole relationship between God and 
 man has been changed by the Incarnation and the coming 
 of the Holy Ghost. The Apostles, we may be quite sure, 
 were not disposed to undervalue the revelations which God 
 had made to their fathers. Until they became the followers 
 of Christ, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had been 
 devout Jews. They had worshipped in the Temple, and 
 listened to the exposition of Moses in the Synagogue. 
 From their childhood they had been taught to keep the 
 ancient law. The atmosphere which they breathed was 
 filled with the spirit cf the Old Testament. Their religious 
 faith had been formed and their religious life developed by 
 the history of the patriarchs, of the Judges, of the Kings of 
 Israel and Judah, by the Psalms of David and the writings 
 of the Prophets. Notwithstanding all the troubles which 
 had come upon the Jewish people, it seemed to every one 
 of the apostles sufficient glory to belong to a race to which 
 God had so wonderfully manifested Himself, and they would 
 not have exchanged the great traditions and greater hopes of 
 the descendants of Abraham, for all the power and splen- 
 dour of imperial Rome. And yet they all felt that through 
 Christ they had passed into a new world. They had known 
 Moses, David, and Isaiah, before; but when they came to 
 know Christ they exclaimed " the true light now shineth." 
 
 B 2 
 
4 Introductory. 
 
 What the ancient saints had only hoped for, they actually 
 possessed. The Christian Faith may be spoken of as, in 
 some sense, the development of Judaism, but it was 
 infinitely more than a development. To the Apostles who 
 had been Jews themselves, old things had passed away, 
 and all things had become new. The Kingdom of Heaven 
 had at last been established upon earth, and they knew 
 that they had entered into it. They had been born 
 again ; they belonged to a new race, which had received a 
 supernatural life ; they had been made partakers of the 
 Divine nature. 
 
 On the other hand they knew, and we should not forget, 
 that God did not begin to reveal Himself in supernatural 
 ways when Christ came. His government of the Jewish 
 people, the miracles which He wrought when He delivered 
 them from slavery in Egypt, the chastisements which He 
 inflicted on them for their crimes, belong to the history of 
 His relations to mankind. They reveal His character, 
 and have, therefore, an indestructible interest. 
 
 In natural science the investigation of the structure and 
 laws of the higher types of organic life is greatly assisted 
 by the investigation of the simpler organization of inferior 
 types of life, and our knowledge of the richer and more 
 complex revelation given to ourselves, may be assisted by 
 
Introductory. 5 
 
 considering the more rudimentary revelations which God 
 made to the Jews. 
 
 It is not the custom of Nonconformists to paint the Ten 
 Commandments on the walls of their churches. The 
 practice would be most admirable if Christian congrega- 
 tions could be made to remember that these Command- 
 ments represent the claims of God, not on ourselves, 
 but on a comparatively barbarous people; a people whose 
 morality had been corrupted by habitual contact, for 
 several generations, with the vices of a great heathen 
 state, and whose religious thought had been degraded 
 by its superstitions and idolatry ; that to us to whom God 
 has made far nobler revelations and manifested an in- 
 finitely greater love. He has given precepts requiring a far 
 loftier perfection. If we fail to keep these ancient 
 laws — laws so elementary, laws adapted to the human 
 race in almost its lowest and weakest condition — how 
 grievously must we fail to keep those higher laws which are 
 the rule of our higher life, and by which we must at last 
 be judged. 
 
 But these Commandments, as I have already reminded 
 you, hold a conspicuous position in that prolonged revela- 
 tion of Himself, of His Character, His Will, and His 
 Relations to mankind, which God made to the Jewish 
 
6 Introductory. 
 
 people. They can, therefore, never become obsolete. 
 The changing circumstances of the human race cannot 
 destroy the significance and worth of any institutions or 
 facts which reveal the life of God. 
 
 I. The Ten Commandments rest on the principle that 
 God claims authority over the moral life of man. He 
 claimed that authority in the earliest times ; He claims it 
 still. We all confess that God is the moral ruler of our 
 race, but the confession is lightly made, and does not 
 come from the depths of our moral and religious nature. 
 
 Our highest religious conceptions are moulded, in part, 
 by our commonest human experiences. Social and 
 political influences largely determine the development 
 both of religious thought and religious life. In this 
 country there is hardly anything to remind most of us of 
 the majesty and power of Law. We are never confronted 
 by it. We never feel its pressure. It is an idea — not 
 an irresistible Force before which we are compelled to 
 bow. Still less are we disciplined to the conception 
 of a supreme and august Authority — the Fountain of 
 Law — an Authority, awful, stern, secure from all dis- 
 turbance by the passions of common men, and infinitely 
 beyond their judgment and control. We are always dis- 
 
Introductory . 7 
 
 cussing the acts and policy of the highest personages in 
 the State, striving to pass new lav/s and to get old laws 
 amended. The most ancient and powerful institutions 
 are no longer sacred. The reverence with which it 
 is natural for the legislative assembly of a great 
 country to be regarded by the mass of the people is 
 hardly possible to a generation which has grown up amidst 
 cries for Parliamentary Reform. Who can regard with 
 veneration and awe an institution whose imperfections 
 he has heard attacked on a hundred platforms, some- 
 times with bitter sarcasm, sometimes with indignation, 
 som.etimes with contemptuous ridicule, and which has 
 reformed itself at last as the result of popular agita- 
 tion ? Royal princes have no political pov/er, and when 
 we see them, we find that they are young men who wear 
 shooting jackets and smoke cigars like the rest of man- 
 kind. Prime ministers write novels and articles in 
 popular magazines. There is nothing in our political life 
 to develope the spirit of reverence and the habit of 
 submission to authority. 
 
 Even in the Family there is reason to. fear that the old 
 traditions which invested parents with the right to govern 
 their children, and made Obedience the capital virtue of 
 childhood, have begun to disappear. There was a theory 
 
8 Introductory. 
 
 promulgated early in this century which taught that a 
 child's own conscience and reason should be regarded as 
 the sufficient rule of his conduct, and that a parent of forty 
 should never require a baby of four, to do anything which 
 the baby itself did not recognise as expedient and right. 
 I doubt whether anybody was ever foolish enough to try 
 how the theory would work, but it is certain that there 
 is a general indisposition, or inability, to assert and main- 
 tain parental power. The early age at which the children 
 of working people, in most manufacturing towns, are able 
 to earn considerable wages, encourages a spirit of rude 
 independence and insubordination. Prosperous trades- 
 men and manufacturers generally try to give to their chil- 
 dren a better education than they received themselves, 
 and their children, in the conceit of their superficial 
 acquirements, often treat their fathers and mothers with 
 contempt. 
 
 This social disorganization produces disastrous results 
 on our religious life. We are not trained to obedience and 
 reverence, and the conception of God's Authority appears 
 to have no real and effective hold on the intellect 
 and heart even of religious men. From our thoughts 
 of God, the recognition of Him as the moral 
 Governor of our race is almost excluded. God built the 
 
Introdticiory. 9 
 
 world to be our home, and furnished it with comfort and 
 luxury. He ripens our corn and fruit. By day He 
 defends us from harm while we are at work, and at night 
 He watches over us while we sleep. In times of trouble 
 and fear we entreat Him to deHver us, or to give us con- 
 solation and strength. We have been taught to think of 
 the universe chiefly in its relation to ourselves ; and while 
 the ancient Psalmist exclaimed, "The heavens declare 
 Thy glory, and the firmament showeth Thy handiwork," 
 it is our habit to dwell upon the prodigality with 
 which God has provided for the life and happiness of 
 mankind. We think of God rather as our servant than 
 our governor. Even in our theology — in our orthodox 
 Evangelical theology — God's authority has no adequate 
 place. What Fichte said of the religious temper of Ger- 
 many at the beginning of this century, is true of the 
 religious temper of verj- many of ourselves ; our real con- 
 viction is that " the only necessity for a God is that He 
 may look after our interests." 
 
 These Commandments recall us to the better faith of 
 earlier times. It is not God's highest function to maintain 
 the order of the material universe, to provide for the 
 physical wants of His creatures, for their ease, safety, 
 and happiness. It belongs to Him to assert and vindicate 
 
10 Introductory, 
 
 the universal authority of the eternal law of righteous- 
 ness. He has therefore given laws which it is the 
 supreme duty of all His moral creatures to obey. These 
 laws are not arbitrary, but in relation to us they are abso- 
 lute. Righteousness is not right because He commands 
 it ; but everything that He commands is right. Sin is not 
 sinful because He forbids it ; but everything that He for- 
 bids is sinful. Whatever sanctity, whatever majesty, 
 belongs to the eternal law of righteousness, belongs to 
 Him. Of that law His v/ill is the perfect expression. 
 Only in thought can we separate the moral law from God 
 Himself, of whose throne it is the strong foundation, and 
 in whose nature and acts it is perfectly and gloriously 
 illustrated. All the obligations which rest upon us to do 
 right, oblige us to obey Him. 
 
 But it may be asked, does not Conscience render 
 definite Divine precepts unnecessary? Is there not an 
 inner voice, which to every man is absolutely supreme ; 
 and an inner light, in which every man is bound to 
 walk? "What have I to do with outward command- 
 ments, if I have a direct intuition of the eternal law 
 itself ? 
 
 There is one very obvious reply to this objection to 
 the external revelation of moral law. Men do not 
 
In trodiL dory. 1 1 
 
 come into the world with a clear and perfect intuition of 
 all moral obligations ; and it would be utterly anomalous 
 if the moral faculty alone, of all the powers of our nature, 
 were developed solely from within, and could achieve its 
 perfection independently of all external conditions. Those 
 of us who have the deepest reverence for the human con- 
 science, are constantly trying to develope it by appeals 
 and discipline addressed to man's moral nature from with- 
 out. The whole work of moralists, preachers, and 
 reformers, rests on the hypothesis that although men have 
 a faculty for recognising what is right, the faculty requires 
 training and cultivation. Parents authoritatively tell their 
 children that they must not lie or steal. They inflict 
 chastisement for the vices of childhood. Parental com- 
 mands and parental discipline are of the nature of an 
 external revelation of moral law. We may acknowledge 
 this at least — that the commandments of God are among 
 the agencies by which the moral faculty is educated and 
 perfected. 
 
 It must further be remembered that the moral de- 
 velopment of the race has been seriously disturbed by sin. 
 Our very conception of Duty is obscured and degraded. 
 It is only the virtuous man who knows what is virtuous. 
 We must obey the moral law to have a true apprehension 
 
12 Introductojy. 
 
 of it. To perfect light a perfect life is necessary. Super- 
 natural revelation assists man to recover the lost ideal of 
 moral perfection, and that ideal ceases to be supernatural 
 — in the sense of resting for its authority upon any ex- 
 ternal proofs that it came from God — exactly as we more 
 nearly approach it. What was a mere parental law to a 
 child of ten, comes, through the child's obedience to it, 
 to shine in its own light, and to carry with it its own 
 authority by the time the child is fifteen ; and in the 
 same way, laws which at first good men tried to obey, only 
 because God gave them, are at last seen to be so right 
 that if His direct and supernatural sanction were obscured 
 they would be still obeyed. 
 
 But the complete reply to this objection lies in the 
 fact that we do not know God truly unless we know Him 
 as our moral ruler. This Divine relationship we are in 
 constant danger of ignoring. We prefer, in every province 
 of our life, abstract law to the living God. Such com- 
 mandments as these are intended, not merely to train the 
 conscience to a higher conception of righteousness, but 
 to reveal to us that in doing right we are obeying the 
 holy will of a personal God, and that in doing wrong we 
 are disobeying Him. Our unwillingness to receive an 
 external revelation of moral laws arises partly from this : 
 
Introductory , 1 3 
 
 that we resent the authority of a will which claims to be 
 above our own, even though that will is the will of 
 God. We can endure the supremacy of an ideal law but 
 not of a person. But there can be no true worship of God 
 until His moral authority is acknowledged. The confes- 
 sion that He has a right to command us, that it is His 
 function to control and direct our moral life, lies very near 
 the root of a true relationship between ourselves and 
 Him. 
 
 II. There can be no doubt that God intended that 
 these Commandments should be kept. This may seem 
 to be a very unnecessary observation ; but it is my con- 
 viction that there are many religious people who have 
 quite a different theory from this about the intention of 
 Divine laws. They suppose that the Commandments of 
 God are principally intended to bring us to a sense of our 
 guilt, and to suggest to us the sins for which we have to 
 ask God's forgiveness. The thought of actually obeying 
 them, and obeying them perfectly, scarcely ever occurs to 
 them. 
 
 That the laws given to the Jewish nation at Sinai, were 
 really meant to rule their life is indisputable ; the people 
 were not to worship false gods ; they were not to make 
 
14 Introductory. 
 
 any graven image of the true God ; they were not to work 
 on the Sabbath \ the}^ were not to commit adultery or 
 murder. The Commandments required obedience, not 
 merely repentance for disobedience. God has ended as 
 He began. The laws of the New Testament, like the 
 laws of the Old, are given to be obeyed. " If any man 
 love Me, he will keep My words ;" some persons seem 
 to suppose that it is enough if we are sorry that we can- 
 not keep them. 
 
 III. These Commandments deal chiefly with actions, 
 not with mere thought or emotion. Man is not a pure 
 intellect or a disembodied passion. God's laws, therefore, 
 which deal with man as he is, take large account of his 
 external conduct. It is true that one of the characteristic 
 elements of the teaching of Christ consists in the energy 
 and emphasis with which it insists on the wise government 
 of the thoughts, and a right condition of the heart ; but 
 the tendency"which has revealed itself, more than once, in 
 the evil times of the church, to separate inward perfection 
 from outward practice, and to declare that for the spiritual 
 man all external actions are indifferent, is destructive alike 
 of morality and religion. That tendency in its wilder and 
 more profligate results is altogether suppressed among 
 
Introductory. 15 
 
 ourselves, but I am not quite sure whether its subtle 
 influence may not be detected in all Evangelical Churches. 
 Evangelical Christians rather resent sermons on the moral 
 virtues, and greatly prefer to be preached to about the 
 spiritual affections. They know that they must watch 
 against sins of the heart, but appear to imagine that the 
 outward conduct may be left to look after itself. There 
 are, I believe, many good people who when they are be- 
 trayed by a hasty temper into speaking harshly, unjustly, 
 and cruelly, are very much more troubled about the sin- 
 fulness of their "state of mind," than about the wickedness 
 of their words. They seem to suppose that our external 
 conduct is an outlying province over which God does not 
 much care about exercising any strong control; that in 
 claiming authority over the heart He has implicitly sur- 
 rendered His authority over the outward life. The laws 
 which affect our words and actions belong to the sphere 
 of what they call "mere morality," with which they 
 have a secret feeling that spiritual men have no great 
 concern. They forget that the nature of man is an 
 organic unity. His actions are as truly part of his life as 
 his thoughts and passions, his faith or his unbelief, his 
 sorrow for sin, and his joy in the infinite love of God. 
 Lust is a crime as well as adultery ; but our Lord did not 
 
i6 Introductory. 
 
 teach that the act is indifferent, and that only the passion 
 is criminal. He did not repeal any outward law when 
 He required purity of heart and inward righteousness ; 
 the new Commandment was an addition to the old, per- 
 fecting not repealing it. 
 
 IV. Before God gave these Commandments to the 
 Jewish people. He wrought a magnificent series of 
 miracles to effect their emancipation from miserable 
 slavery, and to punish their oppressors. He first made 
 them free and then gave them the law. 
 
 I do not say that this is a type of God's method of 
 dealing with ourselves, because to very many minds a 
 Jewish type suggests a merely artificial and mechanical 
 anticipation of a Christian fact. But it is a type in the 
 true and noble sense of the word. God always acts like 
 Himself. The principles of His government of mankind 
 are unchanging; if they changed, these old Jewish 
 histories would have long ago become worthless. He is 
 the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 
 
 It might not have been absolutely impossible for the 
 Jews to have kept these commandments even in Egypt, 
 but the difficulties would have been almost invincible. 
 The people were in no condition to receive a Divine 
 
Introductory. jy 
 
 revelation. Oppression had broken their spirit, and 
 crushed all the nobler elements of their nature. In 
 the atmosphere which they breathed, purity and virtue 
 could hardly live. They had been degraded by the 
 heathenism, and by the vices, as well as by the 
 severity of their masters. It was impossible for 
 such a race as the Jews seem to have been at this 
 period of their history to have any vigorous faith in 
 the greatness of the God who had revealed Him- 
 self to their fathers. The wealth, the greatness, 
 the power of the world belonged to the Egyptians ; 
 contempt and wretchedness to the descendants of 
 Abraham and the heirs of the promises. The God of 
 their fathers was either not strong enough to defend 
 them from intolerable evils or else was indifferent to 
 their distresses. 
 
 God did not begin by commanding them to acknowledge 
 His greatness and authority, and to show fidelity to Him- 
 self, and to break at once with the vices to which their 
 external condition almost bound them as with fetters of 
 iron. He began by manifesting His greatness in acts 
 which must have appealed most powerfully to their 
 imagination, and made even their passions — which seem 
 to have been almost the only elements of energy left in 
 
 c 
 
1 8 Introductory, 
 
 them — take the side of faith in Himself. There was the 
 wild exultation of satisfied revenge in thousands of Jewish 
 hearts, as terror after terror descended upon the mighty- 
 race which had wTonged them. Why He had slumbered 
 so long they could not tell, but He had awoke at last, and 
 the basest among them was prepared to listen to a God 
 whose thunders and lightnings, and destroying angel, had 
 brought ruin and destruction on their enemies — tears, 
 and agony, and death, into the proudest palaces of 
 Egypt. 
 
 He led them across the sea into the vast solitudes of 
 the desert, and when they were alone with Himself, 
 separated for ever from the idols and temples of Egypt, 
 from its superstitions and vices. He gave them these 
 Commandments. Is not this the way in which He deals 
 with us all ? His Gospel comes to us even before His 
 Law. Our whole life rests on the supreme manifestation 
 of His Love. If He asks us for an impossible perfection, 
 it is only that He may lead us to the great discover)' that 
 the ideal of human holiness is beyond our reach even in 
 its first elements, until He has redeemed us from the 
 world and from ourselves, given us His own life and made 
 us one with Himself in Christ. " This is the work of 
 God" — the earliest work, the great work — that we receive 
 
Introductory. 19 
 
 His Love and His Law together in Jesus Christ our 
 Lord. He gives us freedom before He tells us to be 
 free. 
 
 It is more than three thousand years since these laws 
 were given to the Jews, and a new period began in the 
 history of God's relations to our race. Through all these 
 centuries God has been incessantly struggling with our 
 sin and the sin of our fathers. In that struggle, which 
 reached its critical moment in the life, death, and re- 
 surrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, lies for us the great 
 interest of the universe, for it reveals, as nothing else has 
 revealed, the very mystery and glory of the life of God. 
 Not in the pleasant sunshine, or in the distant stars, or in 
 the beauty of flowers, or in the yellow wealth of the 
 harvest, or in the music of winds and streams, or in the 
 majesty of mountains, or in the peace of silent valleys 
 hidden among the hills, is God's love for mankind most 
 perfectly revealed ; but in the sternness and in the 
 generosity, the anger and the mercy, with which He has 
 striven to win or to terrify us from sin, and to discipline 
 us to perfection. Three thousand years have gone, and 
 He fainteth not, neither is He weary, although even He 
 might long to be released from the burden of the folly, 
 
 c 2 
 
20 Introdiictoiy, 
 
 the madness, the perversity, the ingratitude of our race. 
 It is wonderful how His love clings to us. We grow im- 
 patient if we do not succeed in reclaiming the vicious by 
 a few months intermittent effort. If at the end of a few 
 years a good work achieves no success, we are ready to 
 abandon it. But God loves us too well to abandon us, 
 even though our recovery from evil seems so slow at the 
 best, and sometimes appears to make no progress at all. 
 
 His great end is our perfection. For that end He has 
 permitted the sharpest troubles to come upon individual 
 men, and ai)palling calamities, famine, plague, anarchy, 
 and war, to come upon nations. Our present happiness 
 is to Him of subordinate importance. It was to secure 
 human perfection that prophets received their insi)iration, 
 and that God Himself was manifest in the flesh. Nothing 
 can satisfy Him but this ; and between us and Him no 
 true reconciliation is possible till we accept His great end 
 as ours, and believe in our very hearts that apart from 
 our restoration to the image of God there can be no true 
 blessedness and no enduring glory. 
 
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT. 
 
 " I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land 
 of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other 
 gods before ^.le." — Exodus xx., 2, 3. 
 
 The first Commandment is not a formal declaration of 
 the truth that there is but one God. This truth is formally- 
 asserted in several well-known passages in Deuteronomy, 
 but it cannot be maintained that the Commandment 
 Avhich forbids the Jewish people to serve and w^orship any- 
 other God than the God who had brought them out of 
 the land of Egypt, required them to deny that other 
 divinities exist. It may be said very fairly that the Com- 
 mandment is consistent with the theory that every nation 
 has its own God, on whose protection it should rely, and 
 whose greatness it should honour. Jehovah was the 
 national God of the Jews, and therefore the Command- 
 ment insists on His exclusive right to their service. Other 
 races might worship other Gods ; the Jews were bound to 
 serve Him. 
 
22 The First Commandinent. 
 
 The absence in these fundamental laws of any dogmatic 
 assertion that there is but one God, is a striking illustra- 
 tion of a principle which has determined the whole 
 method of God's revelation of Himself to our race. We 
 are so made that great spiritual truths must be rooted in 
 the life before they can be clearly apprehended by the 
 intellect. In a sense, they must be believed before they 
 can be known. The moral and spiritual nature of man 
 must be formed and disciplined by Laws and Facts, in 
 which the truth to be revealed is present, before that truth 
 can become an abstract proposition and find its place in 
 the creed. 
 
 The Commandment does not tell the Jew that the 
 gods worshipped by other nations have no existence ; it 
 tells him that he must offer them no homage, and that 
 from him they must receive no recognition of their autho- 
 rity and power. The Jew must serve Jehovah, and 
 Jeliovah alone. This was the truest method of securing 
 the ultimate triumph of Monotheism. If I withhold my 
 service from any god, if I observe no ceremonies in his 
 honour, if I never worship in his temples, if I abstain 
 from any acknovdedgment of his Divine claims, he 
 soon ceases to be a god to me. A religious dogma, 
 true or false, perishes if it is not rooted in the religious 
 
The First Conirnandment. 23 
 
 affections and sustained by religious observances. Had 
 the Jew faithfully kept the First Commandment, and re- 
 fused to worship the idols of surrounding nations, Mono- 
 theistic faith would have been secured by Monotheistic 
 practice. 
 
 I have said that it is a law of our nature, illustrated by 
 the whole histor)' of Divine revelation, that great spiritual 
 truths must be rooted in the life before they can be clearly 
 and firmly apprehended by the intellect. This lav/ is strik- 
 ingly illustrated in the revelation of the Divinity of Christ. 
 There are passages enough in the four Gospels to show that 
 our Lord claimed for Himself a mysterious unity with the 
 Father. Peter's confession is the proof that there were 
 times at least when the Apostles recognised Him as the 
 Son of the living God. But those who believed in Christ 
 really adored Him before they had any definite percep- 
 tion of the truth that He vras God manifest in the flesh. 
 The creed of the intellect followed the reverence and 
 trust of the heart. He had become their God before 
 they had any clear apprehension that He was Divine. 
 Nor did the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, as articu- 
 lately developed by the early Church, derive its chief 
 support from the innumerable texts which can be alleged 
 in its support by controversial theologians. It was the 
 
24 TJlc First Commandment. 
 
 logical expression of the Christian life. Such love was 
 claimed for Christ and inspired by Him, all Christian men 
 were conscious that their dependence upon Him was so 
 absolute, the authority which He asserted and exercised 
 over tlieir whole spiritual nature was so august, the bless- 
 ings which they received from Him were so infinite, that, 
 apart from definite texts, it was impossible not to confess 
 that He was God. 
 
 The same principle is illustrated in the development of 
 moral truth. Men hated and condemned falsehood 
 before they arrived at the ethical dogma that f^ilsehood is 
 a vice. Their hearts were thrilled with the beauty and 
 nobleness of generosity and self-sacrifice before they 
 organised a moral theory which gives to these great 
 virtues a place of honour. It is not in the region of the 
 intellect that great moral and s})iritual truths first assert 
 their authority. They govern the moral and spiritual life 
 of men before the intellect defines them. 
 
 But although the First Commandment does not declare 
 that there is but one God, the whole system of Judaism 
 rests on that sublime truth ; and what the Jewish people 
 had witnessed during the great controversy between 
 Moses and Pharaoh in Egypt, and since their escape 
 from slavery, must have done more to destroy their super- 
 
TJic First Covnnandmcnt. 2$ 
 
 stitious reverence for the gods of their old masters than 
 could have been effected by any dogmatic declaration 
 that the gods of the nations are idols. The sacred river 
 and the sacred soil of Egypt, its cattle and its people, had 
 all been smitten by Jehovah's supernatural power. There 
 ]iad been storms of hail and of thunder. The light of 
 Heaven had been darkened. The sea had listened to 
 the voice of their prophet and chief The root of Egyp- 
 tian idolatry was Pantheism, and in these demonstrations 
 of Jehovah's dominion over all the provinces of nature, 
 the people of Israel must have recognised, if not a direct 
 proof of the non-existence of the Egyptian deities, at 
 least a proof of their weakness in the presence of their 
 own God. It is through the imagination and the pas- 
 sions that idolatrous superstitions exert their fatal power 
 over mankind. The traditions which an imperfectly civi- 
 hsed people have inherited from their fathers, the terrors 
 which have haunted them from their childhood, are not 
 to be dislodged by a bare dogmatic statement of truth. 
 The magnificent and terrible miracles which avenged the 
 wrongs of the Jewish people and accomplished their de- 
 liverance, were a great appeal both to their passions and 
 their imagination against idolatry. 
 
26 The First Connnandment. 
 
 Moreover, the very roots of Idolatry were destroyed by 
 that representation of the origin of the universe, which 
 had been transmitted to them from their ancestors, and 
 wliich was subsequently placed at the beginning of the 
 Book which contained the history of their race. The 
 first chapter of the Book of Genesis looks like a frag- 
 ment of ancient tradition, which Moses found ready to- 
 his hand. It is a Psalm rather than a history; a reli- 
 gious creed rather than a scientific theory. Most of the 
 criticisms to which it has been subjected, and most of the 
 attempts to vindicate its authority and value, rest on a 
 misconception of its character and purpose. It is the 
 earliest and one of the noblest expressions of that Faith 
 through which " we understand that the worlds were 
 framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen 
 were not made of things Vv'hich do api)ear." To whom 
 the original revelation of God's true relationship to the 
 Universe was made, who it was that expressed that rela- 
 tionship with such majestic and sublime simplicity, we 
 cannot tell. There can, however, be little doubt that the 
 first chapter of Genesis, very much in the form in which 
 we have it nov,-, had been received by Abraham, and 
 Isaac, and Jacob fi-om still more ancient patriarchs, and 
 that it had been preserved among their descendants 
 
The First Commajtdment. 27 
 
 through all the humiliation and miserj' of their bondage to 
 the Egyptians. To the people generally the wonderful 
 tradition may have been most imperfectly known, but 
 when the great prophet came to them in the name of 
 Jehovah, and led them away into the v/ildeniess, and gave 
 them the laws which God required them to obey, v/e can 
 easily imagine that it vv^ould rapidly spread, and that it 
 soon became known to the whole nation. 
 
 This tradition destroys the most common forms of 
 ancient idolatry. It declares that the sun, the moon, and 
 the stars are not Divine : they are simply the creatures of 
 God. The light is not Divine : it began to shine at God's 
 command. " The sea is His, and He made it, and His 
 hands formed the dry land." All forms of life came into 
 existence in obedience to His word. He is separate from 
 the Universe, and is not to be identified widi it. It may 
 be a vesture in which He has clothed Himself, but He 
 is personally distinct from it. The beauty and the 
 majesty and the terror of visible things are not the neces- 
 sary manifestations of an infinite and eterna.1 and imper- 
 sonal Pov/er. " He commanded and they were created." 
 " By the word of the Lord were the Heavens made, and 
 all the host of them by the breath of His mouth." "He 
 spake and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast." 
 
28 The First Commandment, 
 
 And so these obscure and half-civilised tribes, without 
 intellectual culture, ignorant of science, undisciplined by- 
 philosophy, fugitives from an oppressive and degrading 
 tyranny, became the trustees of the great Truth which has 
 changed the intellectual and moral life as well as the reli- 
 gious faith of mankind. 
 
 How do you account for this ? 
 
 M. Renan suggests that the Jews " would never have 
 arrived at the dogma of the Divine Unity if they had not 
 found it in the most imperious instincts of their mind and 
 heart." He says further, " The desert is Monotheistic." 
 
 There is no easier method of disposing of innumerable 
 historical difficulties than to pronounce the mystic word 
 " Race." No doubt there is very much in blood. What- 
 ever it was which originally determined the characteristic 
 qualities of the great families of mankind, has played a 
 great part in the intellectual and moral development of 
 nations. But that "Race" should be alleged in explana- 
 tion of the Monotheistic faith of the Jewish people, im- 
 plies, to speak moderately, a singular audacity and eccen- 
 tricity of genius. For centuries *^ the most imperious in- 
 stincts of the mind and heart" of the descendants of 
 Abraham betrayed them again and again into the grossest 
 and most licentious form of Polytheism. It seemed im- 
 
TJie First Commandment. 
 
 29 
 
 possible to cure them of their fatal tendency to worship 
 whatever gods were worshipped by any other people. Their 
 whole national organisation was intended to restrain them 
 from idolatry, and yet they were idolaters. They believed 
 that their worst national sufferings were the punishments 
 of idolatry, and they continued idolaters still. All their 
 greatest men, their poets, their orators, their most glorious 
 warriors, the heroes of the popular imagination, struggled 
 in vain against the " imperious instincts" which drove the 
 mass of the people to celebrate strange and forbidden 
 rites in groves and on hills in honour of foreign divinities. 
 Their laws made idolatry a capital crime ; but the laws 
 were powerless. Their patriotism, all their national tradi- 
 tions, should have made them faithful to the One God, and 
 yet they were faithless. It was not till they had suffered a 
 long succession of national calamities, and been exiles 
 from their own land for two generations, that " the most 
 imperious instincts" of this perverse race were at last sub- 
 dued, and Monotheism won its final victory. As for the 
 theory that " the desert is Monotheistic," the whole 
 nation had been living in the desert for I know not how 
 many years when they had to be punished with pestilence 
 for worshipping the gods of the Moabites. 
 
 M. Comte has attempted to explain the transition of 
 
30 The First Cotninajidmcfit. 
 
 s\\ the civilised races of the West from Polytheism to 
 Monotheism — a revolution which he describes as the 
 greatest through which the human race could pass until 
 the hour arrived for the triumph of Positivism, of which he 
 himself is the philosopher and prophet — by ascribing it 
 partly to the influence of Grecian thought, and partly to 
 the influence of Roman conquests and Roman Impe- 
 rialism. In Greece he alleges that the growing apprecia- 
 tion of the unity and uniformity of nature, the recognition 
 of a Supreme Fate to whose blind but irresistible power 
 the very gods were subject, and the development of meta- 
 physical speculation, gradually undermined the foundations 
 of Polytheism. The victories of the Roman arms and 
 the splendid unity of the Imperial Government, by des- 
 troying the political and social independence of the van- 
 quished nations, swept away national religions and ren- 
 dered it inevitable that there should be a general consent 
 to one religious creed, and the acceptance of a common 
 Morality. 
 
 Whether this explanation accounts satisfactorily for the 
 development of Monotheism in modern Europe would 
 lead us into a discussion lying very remote from our im- 
 mediate subject; clearly no similar explanation can be 
 cjiven of the Monotheism of the ^losaic institutions. 
 
The First Conwiaiidment. 3 1 
 
 This was too obvious to escape the consideration of 
 M. Comte. In a curious note he suggests the astounding 
 hypothesis that Judaism may have sprung from an at- 
 tempt of the sacerdotal caste among the Egyptians, and 
 perhaps among the Chaldeans, to estabHsh a colony in 
 which they hoped to secure a perfect ascendency of the 
 sacerdotal over the military power, and a possible asylum 
 for themselves in times of danger and disaster. The 
 Exodus, in that case, must be regarded as the carry- 
 ing out of a scheme arranged by Egyptian priests, who 
 made use of an enslaved and half-barbarous race to found 
 a colony for the defence of a purer and nobler Faith than 
 their civiUsed rulers could be persuaded to receive. A 
 greater contrast than exists between the Pantheism of the 
 profounder tendencies of the religion of Eg}^t and the 
 intense personality of the God of the Jews, or between 
 Egyptian Polytheism and the severity of Jewish Mono- 
 theism, it is impossible to conceive. M. Comte's theory 
 is not only destitute of all historical support ; as a pure 
 hypothesis, it is absolutely grotesque. But even if it 
 were true, he would still have to account for the Mono- 
 theistic Faith of these Egj'ptian and Chaldean priests 
 from whom Moses and the prophets received their ori- 
 ginal inspiration. How was it that they anticipated by 
 
32 The First Coinmandment. 
 
 two thousand years the orderly development of the in- 
 tellect of the race ? M. Comte thinks that in the very 
 midst of a theocracy based on Polytheism, some dis- 
 tinguished men may have had a certain intellectual ten- 
 dency to Monotheism and " a kind of instinctive predilec- 
 tion" for it. This is an arbitrary fancy which is hardly 
 consistent with the rigorously scientific method of the 
 Positive Philosophy. In attempting to evade the super- 
 natural origin of Judaism, the keen penetration and re- 
 markable sagacity which M. Comte often displays quite 
 forsook him. 
 
 The historical preface to the Commandment, "I am 
 the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the 
 land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," has great 
 significance. To the Jews, Jehovah was not a mere idea 
 or a system of attributes. They did not think of Him 
 as the Necessary Cause of the Universe, or as a Being 
 inaccessible to human knowledge, but Whom it was their 
 duty to invest with whatever perfections could exalt and 
 glorify Him — infinite Wisdom, infinite Power, awful 
 /Righteousness, inflexible Truth, the tenderest Love. It 
 never occurred to them to suppose that they had to think 
 out a God for themselves any more than it occurred to 
 
The First Coininand7nent. 33 
 
 them that they had to think out a King of Egypt. They 
 knew Pharaoh as a tyrannical sovereign from whom they 
 had suffered intolerable oppression, and who had been 
 drowned for his crimes in the Red Sea. They knew 
 Jehovah as the God who had held back the waves like a 
 wall while they fled across the sea to escape the ven- 
 geance of their enemies ; they knew Him as the God who 
 had sent thunder, and lightning, and hail, plagues on 
 cattle, and plagues on men, to punish the Egyptians and 
 to compel them to let the children of Israel go ; they 
 knew Him as the God whose angel had slain the first- 
 born of their oppressors, and filled the land from end to 
 end with death, and agony, and terror. He was the 
 same God, so Moses and Aaron told them, who by visions 
 and voices, in promises and precepts, had revealed Him- 
 self long before to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We 
 learn what men are from what they sa y and what they do. 
 A biography of Luther gives us a more vivid and trust- 
 worthy knowledge of the man than the most philosophical 
 essay on his character and creed. The story of his im- 
 prisonment and of his journey to Worms, his Letters, his 
 Sermons, and his Table Talk, are worth more than the 
 most elaborate speculations about him. The Jews learnt 
 what God is, not from theological dissertations on the 
 
 D 
 
34 The First Commandment. 
 
 Divine attributes but from the facts of a Divine history. 
 They knew Him for themselves in His own acts and in 
 His own words. 
 
 If these ancient Jewish books contained nothing 
 more than a systematic account of the religious 
 ideas of Moses and the patriarchs, a representation of 
 what they thought they had discovered concerning the 
 God in whom they lived and moved and had their 
 being, the books would have great speculative interest, 
 but for the purposes of the religious life they would 
 have become obsolete. They have an imperishable 
 value because they contain the record of how God 
 dealt with good and with bad men, with individuals and 
 with nations. Had they contained nothing more than a 
 series of truths expressed in the form of definite proposi- 
 tions, which had been supernaturally revealed to the 
 ancestors of the Jewish race, they would have been infi- 
 nitely less precious. The measure in which Truth can 
 be revealed to men is necessarily determined by the 
 limits of their moral and spiritual development, and by 
 their intellectual capacity. It is aftected by the resources 
 of language. But Divine acts are subject to no such limi- 
 tations. They contain more than can ever be stated in 
 the propositions of dogmatic theology. They are inex- 
 
The First Commatidment. 35 
 
 haustible fountains of Truth. Every new age finds new 
 significance in them. The same sua and the same stars 
 are shining above us now that shone upon the plains of 
 Chaldea two thousand years ago, but even Newton and 
 Laplace have not exhausted astronomical discovery. 
 And so the great acts of God in the early centuries of 
 human history not only reveal more to us than they re- 
 vealed to the men who were immediately affected by 
 them — what they reveal transcends all the limits of human 
 theological systems. We can no more exhaust the truth 
 contained in the history of God's acts than we can ex- 
 haust the truth contained in the phenomena of creation. 
 The history is a perpetual revelation, as new and fresh 
 to-day as when it was first written. 
 
 I This first Commandment may appear to have no direct 
 
 ^ practical value for ourselves. Few of us have ever seen 
 
 I an idol except in a Museum. There is not one of us who 
 
 ^- is in any danger of worshipping an idol. It Avould be a 
 
 I perversion of the obvious intention of the Commandment 
 
 ' if I were to denounce covetousness, social ambition, or 
 excessive love of children. It is quite legitimate to speak 
 
 ^ of men worshipping wealth or social distinction, and 
 
 \ mothers may be very properly warned against making 
 
 D 2 
 
36 The First Commandment 
 
 children their idols. But, after all, these sins are not the 
 sins which this Commandment was meant to forbid. 
 Children are not "gods" in the sense in which the word 
 is used here. Covetousness is idolatry ; but it is not the 
 idolatry which, among the Jews, was to be punished with 
 death. Divine acts have an infinite meaning, but Divine 
 words must be interpreted according to the common 
 usages of language. 
 ^ It must be admitted that there is no reason why God 
 should say to any of us, " Thou shalt have no other gods 
 before me " The sin which is our supreme shame is not 
 the sin against which this law warned the Jewish race. 
 Our religious condition, or the religious condition of very 
 many of us, has sunk below the level which the first Com- 
 mandment was intended to reach. Jehovah said to the 
 Jew, " Thou shalt have no other gods before me." If He 
 were to speak to many of us, it would be necessary to con- 
 demn us for having no God at all. 
 
 We confess in our creed His majesty and greatness as 
 the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, of angels and 
 of men, but the confession is a tradition, not the expres- 
 sion of a real and living faith. There is no devout awe 
 in His presence. His glory docs not subdue us to 
 wonder and fear. When we are professing to worship 
 
The First Commandmeni, yj 
 
 Him our hearts are not hushed with reverence, and there 
 is no fire or rapture in our praise. When we sin grossly 
 we are stung with self-reproach and humiliated by the 
 loss of self-respect, but we do not fear His anger. The 
 hope of winning His approbation is not an active and 
 energetic motive to doing right. Is it not so ? Are not 
 many of us conscious that if we lost God from our creed 
 no element of joy or terror would be lost to us ? Would 
 not the whole current of our life run in its old channels ? 
 Would not our sorrows be the same, our hopes and our 
 fears ? Would not the sunlight and the darkness be the 
 same as before ? The appalling truth is, that many of us 
 have sunk into Atheism. 
 
 The vast majority of mankind have built tem^ples to 
 false gods and worshipped them. Civilised nations and 
 barbarous races have been guilty of the same folly and the 
 same crime. We have escaped from the superstitions by 
 which our fathers were enslaved, and by which millions 
 of men in other lands are enslaved still. The dread and 
 the delight with which idolaters bow before the forms of 
 their gods provoke our pity or our contempt. But that 
 dread and that delight are the signs that the religious life, 
 though corrupted and degraded, still exists. Where are 
 the signs that it exists in us ? Among those who worship 
 
38 The First Commandment. 
 
 false gods there is still a passionate desire for the presence 
 and help of a superhuman Power, and for communion 
 Avith the Divine. With many of us, the last sign of our 
 consciousness that we are akin to a higher form of exist- 
 ence, and that we were made for a greater intercourse 
 than that which we hold with our fellow men, has passed 
 away. 
 
 What right have we to regard ourselves as better men, 
 in relation to God, than the savage who clings to his 
 Fetish, or the civilised idolater who enriches the temples 
 which he erects to grim and terrible divinities, with 
 marbles, and gold, and pearls, and precious stones. They 
 have forsaken the true God, and so have we. In them 
 some of the instincts and emotions which should be 
 stirred by God's transcendent holiness and infinite love 
 are still energetic and intense ; in us they have perished 
 altogether. 
 
 We and they are brethren in sin. Account for it how 
 we may, the wliole development of humanity is corrupted. 
 Our strange reluctance to have to do with God is not an 
 accident It is not an exceptional and surprising per- 
 versity. It must come from some deep and mysterious 
 cause which is beyond the reach of all the external cir- 
 cumstances which affect the civilisation, the intellectual 
 
TJic First Commandment. 39 
 
 progress, and even the morality of nations. We all shrink 
 from contact with God. And yet He loves us. But even 
 His love would be unavailing if He did not inspire those 
 v;ho are filled with shame and sorrow by the discovery of 
 their estrangement from Him with a new and supernatural 
 life; in the power of that life we may pass out of the 
 world which is separated from God, into the Kingdom of 
 Heaven, and even while the imperfections of our mortal 
 condition are still upon us, may find in God's presence 
 fulness of joy, and at His right hand pleasures for ever- 
 more. 
 
THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. 
 
 ' ' Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness 
 of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or 
 that is in the water under the earth : thou shalt not bow down thyself to 
 them, nor serve them : for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, 
 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." — 
 Exodus xx,, 4, 5. 
 
 The first Commandment, " Thou shalt have no other 
 gods before Me," is sustained neither by a penalty nor a 
 promise. The second is invested with special solemnity 
 — first, by the threat that those who are guilty of dis- 
 obedience will provoke His anger and bring down His 
 chastisements on themselves and on their children to 
 the third and fourth generation, — and, secondly, by the 
 declaration that God's mercy will be shown through 
 thousands of generations to the descendants of the 
 men who love Him and keep His Commandments. 
 
 Considerable authority may be alleged on behalf of the 
 
The Second Commandment, 41 
 
 opinion that the Commandment absolutely forbids painting 
 and sculpture, and this view derives some support from the 
 apparent absence of any considerable development of these 
 -arts among the Jewish people. They were poets, orators, 
 and musicians, but they v/ere not painters or sculptors. 
 But, after carefully considering what has been urged in 
 support of this opinion, I see no adequate reason for 
 abandoning the more common and almost universal 
 conviction, that the Commandment simply forbids the 
 carving of images and the painting of pictures with the 
 intention of making them the objects of religious 
 reverence. 
 
 The second Commandment condemns a very different 
 sin from that which is condemned in the first. The first 
 condemns the worshipping of false gods; the second 
 condemns the making of any image or symbol even of 
 the true God. 
 
 It would have been very natural for the Jews to have 
 done this. They had traditions of many Divine 
 revelations which had been made to their ancestors. 
 It would not have been surprising if they had translated 
 into stone their conception of the angels who appeared 
 to Abraham and told him of the approaching destruction 
 of Sodom and Gomorrah, or if they had given visible 
 
42 The Second Commandment. 
 
 expression to their imagination of the august Form that 
 appeared above the ladder which Jacob saw in his dream, 
 and from whose Hps came the promise that the land on 
 which the patriarch was lying should some day belong to 
 his descendants. Still more natural would it have been for 
 them to represent in symbols the great and irresistible 
 power which Jehovah had recently manifested in the 
 plagues with which He had visited Egypt. He had 
 shown Himself to be the God of Thunder and of Hail ; 
 the God of Light and of Darkness; the God of the 
 Sea which had listened to the voice of His prophet, had 
 let His people pass through it in safety, and had then utterly 
 destroyed their enemies. Without the slightest intention 
 of withdrawing their homage from Jehovah, v/ith the 
 intention of manifesting the wonder and gratitude and 
 reverence v/ith which they regarded Him, they might have 
 attempted to perpetuate in a visible and permanent form 
 — in stone, in silver, and in gold — the impressions which 
 His supernatural acts had made upon their imagination 
 and their heart. 
 
 They actually did it. 
 
 Hardly had the thunders, which accompanied the giving 
 of the Law, ceased, when Aaron himself yielded to the 
 irrepressible craving of the people for a visible symbol of 
 
The Second Commandment. 43 
 
 Jehovah. The golden calf was not intended to represent 
 any false God, any deity worshipped by heathen races, 
 but Jehovah Himself. It was the symbol of the God — 
 so Aaron told them — who had brought them out of the 
 land of Egypt The festival in its honour was a festival to 
 Jehovah. But the crime was punished by the destruction 
 of three thousand men. Several centuries later Jeroboam 
 and the tribes vrhich followed him in his revolt 
 against Rehoboam, repeated the offence. The calves of 
 gold, which were set up at Dan and at Bethel, did not 
 represent any other god than the God who was 
 worshipped at Jerusalem. The king did not venture to 
 ask his people to do homage to any strange divinity. He 
 feared the political effect of their going up to Jerusalem, 
 the capital of the rival kingdom, at the annual feasts ; he, 
 therefore instituted a feast at Dan and at Bethel in 
 imitation of the feast of tabernacles, and in honour of the 
 God that brought them out of the land of Eg}'pt. The 
 golden calves represented the God of their fathers. This 
 was a very different crime from that which was committed 
 by Ahab, his successsor ; for " Ahab the son of Omri did 
 evil in the sight of the Lord above all that were before 
 him. And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing 
 for him to walk in the sins of yeroboain, the son of Nebat, 
 
44 The Second Commandment. 
 
 that he took to wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, 
 king of the Zidonians, and went and served Baal and 
 7vorshipped him. And he reared up an altar for Baal in 
 the lionse of Baal, which lie had built in Samaria. And 
 Ahab made a grove ; and Ahab did more to provoke the 
 Lord God of Israel to anger than all the Kings of Israel 
 that were before him." Jeroboam made an image of the 
 true God, and so broke the Second Commandment; 
 Ahab broke the First Commandment, by turning aside 
 the nation to worship Baal, one of the gods of the 
 heathen. 
 
 There is very much to be said in defence of the sin which 
 this Commandment forbids. No one, it may be alleged, 
 supposes that the figure of wood or stone, or gold, is the 
 real God. It is regarded as being only the symbol of an un- 
 seen and awful or gracious or glorious Presence to which 
 the worship is actually offered. The visible form makes 
 the invisible God more real. Further, it may be asked 
 whether even those who reject material representations of 
 God do not form for themselves an intellectual image of 
 Him and worship Him by means of that ? What essen- 
 tial difference is there between worshipping God under 
 the symbol of a material image and worshipping Him 
 
The Second Commandment. 45 
 
 under the symbol of an intellectual conception ? In 
 both cases the representation is remote from the truth of 
 the Divine greatness and glory ; in both cases it is our 
 own work, in one case the work of our hands, in the 
 other case the work of our intellect. 
 
 But as it is a religious offence to make " any graven 
 image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,. 
 or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water 
 under the earth," for the purpose of worshipping it as a 
 symbol of the unseen and eternal God ; it is also a reli- 
 gious offence to worship any representation of Him which 
 we have constructed by logic or imaged in fancy. 
 
 God wished to be thought of by the Jews as He had 
 revealed Himself in His wo£ds_and acts. They were not 
 to make a god for themselves, but to worship Him who 
 had made Himself known as the Creator of the Heavens 
 and of the Earth, as the God who had given promises to 
 their fathers which He was now about to fulfil, as the God 
 who by stupendous miracles had redeemed them from 
 slavery, and was now forming them into a free nation. 
 Throughout their history He sent them — not painters or 
 ^sculptors — but prophets who were perpetually illustrating 
 the infinite significance of the great historical and per- 
 sonal manifestations of Jehovah in previous centuries, and 
 
4^ The Second Commandment. 
 
 confirming the hope of the nation in the certainty of other 
 Divine acts in ihe future which would accompHsh a far 
 more perfect redemption than that from Egyptian bondage, 
 and confer nobler blessings than the "milk and honey" 
 of the Land of Promise. His Tent standing among their 
 tents in the wilderness, His Palace standing among their 
 palaces in Jerusalem, gave them a vivid impression that 
 His home was among them, and that He was a God nigh 
 at hand, and not afar off, but He did not permit His 
 eternal majesty to be represented by any visible fonn. 
 He was to be thought of as He had made Himself known 
 in the vengeance which He inflicted on their enemies, in 
 the chastisements which He inflicted on themselves 
 when they sinned, and in the peace, security, and plenty 
 which He conferred upon them when they kept His 
 laws. 
 
 The fundamental principle of this Commandment has 
 authority for us still. The whole history of Christendom 
 is a demonstration of the peril and ruin which come from 
 any attempt to supplement by Art and by stately and im- 
 pressive Rites, the revelation which God has made of 
 Himself in Christ, and which He is making continually 
 to all devout souls by the illumination of the Holy 
 Ghost. 
 
The Second Commandincnt. 47 
 
 There are many forms in which the principle of this 
 Commandment can be violated. Take the simplest and 
 most obvious illustration. It cannot be denied that the 
 image of our Lord Jesus Christ in His dying agony, with 
 His hands and feet nailed to the cross, the crown of 
 thorns on His brow, and His face lined widi suffering, 
 may produce a very pov/erful impression on the imagina- 
 tion and the heart. There are some who find in the 
 strength of that impression a sufficient justification for 
 the devotional use of the crucifix. They say that no 
 Catholic imagines that the crucifix is Christ. The visible 
 form does but call up the emotions which should be 
 created by the sorrows and anguish in vvhich the Divine 
 love was revealed, and by which the sin of the world was 
 atoned for. It makes the great sacrifice for human salva- 
 tion more intensely real and vivid. 
 
 But precisely the same argument might have been 
 alleged in defence of the golden calf by which Aaron 
 satisfied the craving of the Jev/s for a visible representa- 
 tion of Jehovah. No one supposed that it was the calf 
 itself which had smitten the Egyptians with plagues and 
 divided the Red Sea. It was but a sym.bol of the invisible 
 God. The people exulted when they saw it; they feasted; 
 they sang ; they danced ; their shout was like the shout 
 
48 JJie Second Commandment. 
 
 of battle. But their crime made the wrath of God " wax 
 hot " against them, and in His anger He threatened to 
 consume them. 
 
 Inevitably, by laws of association which we cannot 
 control, whatever is habitually associated with the creation 
 of religious emotion comes to be invested with an 
 artificial sacredness. You may say that you know that 
 the crucifix is not Christ; but, if, when you see the 
 crucifix it calls up the emotions which would be called up 
 by the vision of Christ Himself, though to the intellect it 
 is only a material image, to the heart it is rapidly becoming 
 something more. 
 
 In my college days I had an engraving of our Lord 
 hanging over my mantlepiece. The calmness, the dignity, 
 the gentleness, and the sadness of the face represented 
 the highest conceptions which I had in those days of the 
 human presence of Christ. I often looked at it, and 
 seldom without being touched by it. I discovered in the 
 course of a few months that the superstitious sentiments 
 were gradually clustering about it, which are always 
 created by the visible representations of the Divine. The 
 engraving was becoming to me the shrine of God manifest 
 in the flesh, and I understood the growth of idolatry. 
 The visible symbol is at first a symbol and nothing more; 
 
The Second Commandment, 49 
 
 it assists thought ; it stirs passion. At last it is identified 
 with the God whom it represents. If, every day I 
 bow before a crucifix in prayer, if I address it as though 
 it were Christ, though I know it is not, I shall come to 
 feel for it a reverence and love which are of the very 
 essence of idolatry. 
 
 There are objections of another kind to this prostration 
 of the soul before the image of the dying Christ. It 
 makes our worship and our prayer unreal. We are 
 adoring a Christ who does not exist. He is not on the 
 cross now, but on the throne. His agonies are past for 
 ever. He has risen from the dead. He is at the right 
 hand of God. If we pray to a dying Christ, we are 
 praying not to Christ Himself but to a mere remembrance 
 of Him. The injury which the crucifix has inflicted on 
 the religious life of Christendom, in encouraging a morbid 
 and unreal devotion, is absolutely incalculable. It has 
 given us a dying Christ instead of a living Christ, a 
 Christ separated from us by many centuries instead of a 
 Christ nigh at hand. 
 
 We Protestants, if we do not protest against the crucifix 
 with all the vehemence with which our fathers protested, 
 still protest ; but for the cross we seem to have toleration. 
 I see golden crosses on your hymn books ; crimson 
 
 E 
 
50 The Second Commandment, 
 
 crosses on your bibles; little wooden crosses on your 
 mantlepieces and your drawing-room tables ; golden 
 crosses on gentlemen's watch chains ; and crosses of jet 
 hanging from ladies' necks. Now, of this Romanising 
 trifling, I have to say that no Christian heart, in which 
 the love of Christ is strong, can ever look on the symbol 
 of His passion without emotion. A faded ribbon, a 
 withered flower, an old book of poems, may sometimes 
 move us to tears by recalling the memory of those whom 
 we love, and the awful and pathetic memories which gather 
 round the death of Christ must invest the very form of 
 His cross with infinite sacredness. But if once you 
 permit the deeper religious emotions to become attached, 
 however slightly, to a material symbol, there is the 
 beginning of that very superstition which this Second 
 Commandment forbids. The material symbol has 
 become sacred to you ; there is no real sacredness in it. 
 You remember the keen and contemptuous sarcasm with 
 which Isaiah illustrated the folly of the idolater. " He 
 heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the 
 oak, which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees 
 of the forest : he planteth an ash, and the rain doth 
 nourish it. Then shall it be for a man to burn : . . . 
 He burneth part thereof in the fire ; with part thereof he 
 
The Second Commandment. 51 
 
 eateth flesh ; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied : yea, he 
 warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen 
 the fire : and the residue thereof he maketh a god, even 
 his graven image : he falleth down unto it, and 
 worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, DeHver 
 me ; for thou art my god." Your cross is common wood 
 — part of the same block may have been made into a 
 frame for the portrait of an opera dancer. It is 
 common metal, and the same hands which wrought the 
 trinket into its sacred form, may have made of the same 
 gold the head of a fox which was hanging a few months 
 ago to the chain of some fooHsh lad who has been 
 obliged to pa\vn his watch and his chain to pay the bets 
 he lost on the last Derby Day. If you feel that your 
 cross is sacred, you are beginning to bow down before it 
 and to worship it \ for worship is but the recognition of 
 what is sacred and divine. 
 
 On the other hand, if your cross is not sacred to you, if 
 it is a trinket and nothing more, your religious emotions 
 are sluggish and your heart is very cold. To regard as a 
 mere ornament the visible memorial of the sufierings 
 which are the supreme manifestation of God's love, the 
 great hope of our race, the ground of our deliverance from 
 the pains of eternal death, appears to me either impossible 
 
 E 2 
 
52 The Second Commandment. 
 
 to a Christian heart or a sign of strange insensibility to 
 what ought to stir all the deepest and strongest passions 
 of our nature. 
 
 But still, it may be asked, If a picture, a crucifix, or a 
 cross touches my heart, why may I not use it ? If I feel 
 that Christ is nearer to me when I see on the canvas the 
 infinite sadness, the perfect purity, the yearning love 
 which some devout painter has expressed in His coun- 
 tenance, and when I see in ivory the image of the agonies 
 which He endured for my salvation, why should I reject 
 their aid ? 
 
 I have already reminded you that precisely the same 
 argument might have been used in defence of the golden 
 calf which Aaron, in violation of this Commandment, 
 made to be a symbol of Jehovah. The sight of the calf 
 made Jehovah's presence more vividly real to the half- 
 barbarous people who shouted and danced before it. But 
 was He really nearer to them in that hour of wild excite- 
 ment than He was before ? Was not their religious pas- 
 sion based upon a lie? And what proof can be given 
 that our vivid conception of Christ's nearness to us when 
 our emotions are excited by some miracle of Art is at all 
 more true ? Our hearts ought to be moved by what God 
 has revealed to us of Himself — not by any inventions of our 
 
The Second Commandment. 53 
 
 own. We have no more right to invent a Divine appeal 
 to religious emotion than we have to invent a Divine 
 appeal to the understanding or the conscience. 
 
 No doubt the sensuous excitement produced by the 
 revelation which God has made of Himself in the history 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ, and which is illustrated con- 
 tinually by that supernatural illumination which rests on 
 all devout souls, is not so great as that which can be pro- 
 duced by sensuous means. But shall we venture to say 
 that the story of Christ's miracles of compassion con- 
 tained in the Gospels is not enough ; that the mercy 
 Christ manifested to sinful men when He was on earth 
 bearing with their infirmities and lovingly forgiving their 
 offences is not enough; that the remembrance of His agony 
 and death is not enough ; that the present revelations of 
 the Holy Ghost are not enough; and that we are craving for 
 an emotion which all these do not and cannot awaken ? 
 The almost invariable result of the use of inferior means 
 of producing religious excitement is to make us indisposed 
 to dwell on God's ovm revelation of His character and 
 love. Religious sentiment is so much more easily touched 
 by influences which appeal to it from belov/ than by 
 influences v/hich appeal to it from above, that when once 
 we have yielded to the spell of sensuous or artistic reli- 
 
54 The Second Commandment. 
 
 gious excitement we are likely to find that the actual 
 revelation of God to the conscience, the understanding, 
 and the heart, has lost its power to move us. 
 
 It is not only by pictures and crucifixes that what is 
 falsely supposed to be religious emotion may be 
 stimulated into intense activity. The sermon may 
 become a crucifix. The preacher may paint the sufferings 
 of Christ as vividly as the artist. His " bloody sweat " 
 in Gethsemane, the scourging by the soldiers. His faint- 
 ness and exhaustion under the weight of the cross, His 
 quivering anguish when the nails were driven through His 
 hands, the convulsions of His whole frame when the cross 
 was violently fixed into the ground, the fever and the thirst of 
 His last hours — these have been rhetorically and passion- 
 ately dwelt upon till women and children and even strong 
 men have been tortured into an agony of sympathy and 
 distress. That Roman Catholic preachers, with their taste 
 corrupted by the sensuous traditions of their church, 
 should have mistaken the vehemence of human passion 
 for deep religious emotion is not wonderful ; but too many 
 Protestant preachers have committed the same error. 
 The writers of the New Testament make no attempt to 
 lacerate the heart by insisting on the details of our 
 Lord's sufferings. They tell the story with a severity of 
 
The Second Commandment. 55 
 
 self-restraint which shows that their appeal was not 
 addressed to the imagination, nor to the natural horror 
 inspired by great physical anguish, but to the higher 
 elements and susceptibilities of the soul. To know 
 Christ merely " after the flesh," is not to know Him at 
 all. We may be moved to a passion of tears while 
 listening to a vivid description of all that He endured as 
 the Sacrifice for the sin of the world, and yet feel neither 
 penitence for our own sin nor gratitude for His love. 
 
 The principle which underlies this Commandment 
 condemns many things to which we are strangely 
 incHned. 
 
 I am a Puritan, — not by temperament, not by taste, — 
 but as the result of convictions which have taken 
 possession of my whole intellect and heart, and are 
 inseparable from my whole conception of the revelation 
 of God through Christ. Against my sympathies, 
 I unhesitatingly honour the spirit which prompted the 
 Puritans in their ruthless, unpitying, barbarous de- 
 struction of saintly images, of altars, of crucifixes, of 
 gorgeous painted windows, of all the symbolic forms in 
 which the ancient piety had visibly expressed its devotion 
 and its faith. I say that I honour the spirit which prompted 
 them. So far as they were guilty of the destruction of 
 
$6 The Second Comma7idment. 
 
 what was not their own, and of inflicting a wanton outrage 
 on the rehgious sympathies and sensibiHties of other men, 
 I as vehemently condemn them. But these embodiments 
 of religious thought and feeling had degraded the national 
 t}T3e of religious life, and the men were in the right who, 
 believed that their destruction was the indispensable 
 condition of national regeneration. I remember how a 
 Jewish king brake in pieces the brazen serpent, which 
 Moses had made, because the people burnt incense to it — 
 brake it in pieces, spoke of it contemptuously as a mere 
 thing of brass, though it was made by God's own 
 commandmicnt, though in connection with it God had 
 WTOught a great and most wonderful miracle, and though 
 it was the memorial not of human piety or genius but of 
 the infinite grace and goodness of God; and I see that, like 
 Hezekiah's, the iconoclastic zeal of the Puritans sprang 
 from a noble passion to secure for God, and for God 
 alone, the religious reverence of the people. 
 
 I am a Puritan. Church history makes me a Puritan. 
 The philosophy of the religious life makes me a Puritan. 
 Puritanism appears to me to be the highest expression of 
 the spirit and genius of the Old Testament as well as of 
 the New. I trust that I shall never be weary of protest- 
 ing against every tendency to attach religious sanctity to 
 
The Second Commaiidment. 57 
 
 any material thing. This building — consecrated though 
 it may be to many of us by the holiest and most pathetic 
 associations — is no House of God. Its walls have no 
 sacredness which does not belong to the walls of your 
 warehouse, your counting house, or your shop, to the 
 courts in which magistrates administer justice, the gal- 
 leries in which paintings are exhibited, the hall in which 
 we meet to discuss national politics, or to listen to Handel, 
 Mendelssohn, and Mozart. Do you say that it assists 
 your devotion to feel that this is in a special sense the 
 dwelling-place of God ? Again I say, that the same kind 
 of argument would justify the Jews when they broke this 
 Commandment by making the golden calf. Religious 
 devotion not founded in truth must itself be false. If 
 God is not here in any special sense, that cannot be true 
 devotion which comes from believing that He is. The 
 special presence of Christ is promised to consecrated per- 
 sons, not to consecrated places. It is partly because we 
 have lost our faith in the supernatural prerogatives of the 
 Church itself that we have invented a supernatural sanc- 
 tity for the building in which the Church assembles. 
 
 On -the same principle I repudiate all signs and symbols 
 which visibly invest the ministers of the Church with a 
 sacred character. Even if I believed that Christian 
 
58 The Second Cojmnandme7it. 
 
 ministers have exclusive power to absolve from sin, and 
 power to call the Personal Presence of the Lord Jesus 
 Christ into the sacramental bread and wine, I do not 
 think that I would have them clothed in symbolic vest- 
 ments of silk and satin and velvet, enriched with golden 
 embroidery and with precious stones. Jewish priests who 
 I offered a mere symbolic sacrifice might properly wear 
 j symbolic robes ; but if Christian priests are really em- 
 powered to bring Christ Himself on to the altar, they dis- 
 honour their supernatural functions by appealing to the 
 eye and to the fancy instead of appealing simply to the 
 faith of their people. For us Nonconformists to dress up 
 our ministers in rustling, official silks is effeminate senti- 
 mentalism. It is worse than that ; the official robes encou- 
 rage the disposition to invest the minister with an artificial 
 sanctity. It is an attempt to sustain by sensuous means 
 an authority which is purely spiritual. 
 
 The justice of the penalty which is denounced against 
 those who transgress this Commandment it is very easy 
 to dispute. The crime is to be punished not only in the 
 men who are personally guilty, but in theirdescendants. The 
 objection, however, if it can be maintained, lies not against 
 this Commandment, nor against the Jewish revelation as 
 
The Second Commandmejit. 59 
 
 a whole in which the principle of this threat is repeatedly- 
 asserted, but against the Divine order of human society. 
 Every new age inherits confusion, difficulty, and suffering 
 from the foUies and crimes of the ages which have pre- 
 ceded it. The fathers eat sour grapes and the children's 
 teeth are set on edge. 
 
 We never object, however, to the benefits which we 
 inherit from our ancestors. There is no province of 
 human life in which we are not reaping golden harvests 
 which were sown for us by men of other generations. 
 They cleared the forests and drained the marshes ; ours 
 are the rich pastures and the fenced cornfields. There is 
 no mechanical invention by which the ease and 
 comfort and safety of human life are increased, 
 which has not been slowly perfected by the patient thought 
 and labour — thought and labour which in many cases 
 were quite unrewarded — of the men of remote centuries. 
 Our just laws and the political institutions which secure 
 the freedom and order of the State are not our own work ; 
 we owe them to the courage, the sagacity, and the heroic 
 endurance of a long succession of obscure as well as illus- 
 trious ancestors. Our fathers have created for us a wealthy 
 literature. Even those broad and simple principles of 
 morality which, to us, carry with them their own evidence 
 
6o The Second Commandment. 
 
 of authority and obligation, would have been unkno\\Ti to 
 us but for the virtue of preceding generations. It was not 
 in our boyhood or even in our infancy that the education 
 began by which we have been trained to habits of in- 
 dustry, truthfulness, honesty, and self-control. Whatever 
 virtue exists in England to-day has come from the moral 
 discipline of many centuries. 
 
 But that same unity of race by which the results of the 
 virtue and genius of one age are transmitted to the ages 
 which succeed it, renders it inevitable that the results of 
 the folly and vice of one age should be entailed on the 
 ages which succeed it. The tares which our fathers have 
 sown must be ours as well as the wheat. 
 
 And yet, as the sanction of this Commandment suggests, 
 the righteousness of men endures longer than their sin. 
 "The third and fourth generation" may suffer the penalty 
 of great crimes \ but thousands of generations cannot 
 wholly exhaust the reward of fidelity to God and obedience 
 to His Commandments. The evil which comes from 
 man's wickedness endures for a time, but perishes at last ; 
 the good that comes from man's well-doing is all but in- 
 destructible. The martyrs of the early ages of the Church 
 still sustain our courage when we are tempted to be false 
 to conscience and to God ; the power of tlicir persecu- 
 
The Second Cominandment, 6i 
 
 tors to resist the Faith of Christ has been broken for ever. 
 The treachery of kings and the profligacy of nobles in 
 the evil times of our own history cannot imperil our 
 freedom or corrupt our national morality ; but the sanc- 
 tity, and the learning, and the zeal, of Hooker, and 
 Jeremy Taylor, and Howe, and Baxter, and Owen are still 
 among the strong defences of our religious life, afid John 
 Milton re-kindles the fire of patriotism and of a noble pas- 
 sion for liberty in every new generation. It is the virtue 
 of the remote past which is alive with us in the present ; 
 its vice has passed away. It is the wisdom which re- 
 mains ; the folly is forgotten. 
 
 " I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God." There is 
 an obvious reason why the Divine "Jealousy" should re- 
 sent the crime forbidden in the second Commandment. 
 The Commandment, as I have reminded you again and 
 again, is not directed against the worshipping of false gods. 
 Whatever religious emotion may be excited by the virtues 
 or achievements ascribed to other divinities may be said, 
 in a sense, to belong to them. But for the Jewish people 
 to make an image of anything in Heaven above or in the 
 earth beneath, and to bow before it with the awe and 
 gratitude created by Jehovah's wonderful revelations to 
 
6'2 The Second Commandment. 
 
 themselves and their fathers, was to transfer to a material 
 symbol of Jehovah the religious reverence which belonged 
 to Jehovah Himself. The wild excitement with which 
 they danced before the golden calf was fed and intensified 
 by their remembrance of the plagues of Egypt and the 
 passage of the Red Sea. It was emotion created by what 
 God Himself had done which made their worship of their 
 idol so passionate. It was this which provoked God to 
 " Jealousy." The crime was not to be tolerated. 
 
 I suppose that there are some of you who think that to 
 speak of God as "a jealous God" is to use language un- 
 worthy of His infinite majesty. The longer I live the 
 more clearly I see that the strong, bold, words of the Old 
 Testament writers — words which throb with life, and 
 are coloured through and through with human pas- 
 sion — are the best and truest words in which to speak of 
 God. Be sure of it, that when God comes near to you, 
 these are the only words in which you will find it possible 
 to speak of Him. The pale, dead, epithets of meta- 
 physical theologians who seem afraid to suggest that God 
 is alive, their catalogues of Divine "attributes," may be well 
 enough when God is " afar off," but when He is " nigh at 
 hand " we want words of another sort. 
 
 What, after all, lies at the root of this revelation of God 
 
llie Second Commandment. 63 
 
 as "a jealous God ?" Jealousy is but the anger and pain 
 of injured and insulted Love. When God resents the 
 illegitimate transfer to material symbols of the devotion 
 inspired by His own acts, it is not because His greatness 
 suffers any diminution or because His authority is im- 
 paired. It is His Love which is wounded. He cannot 
 endure to lose any of the affection, trust, or reverence by 
 which He has stirred our souls. It is the energy of His 
 Love for us which makes Him long for all the poor trea- 
 sure of our hearts, and if that treasure is not devoted to 
 Him, He tells us that in His "jealousy" He will visit 
 " the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the 
 third and fourth generation." One of the fairest-looking 
 falsehoods by which men excuse themselves for living a 
 life in which God has no place, is the plea that the infinite 
 God cannot care for the love and reverence of such crea- 
 tures as we are. When will men understand that no 
 Father can ever be great enough to be indifferent to the 
 affection, the obedience, and the confidence of his 
 children ? 
 
THE THIRD COMMANDMENT. 
 
 " Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for 
 the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain."-- 
 EXODUS XX, 7. 
 
 Among ancient nations the names of men were very com- 
 monly significant. It is the same among uncivilised races 
 in our own time. Names were given to children sug- 
 gested by the circumstances of their birth, or expressing 
 the hopes and wishes of their parents in relation to their 
 children's character or fortunes. The name of a man was 
 sometimes changed in consequence of some remarkable 
 event in his history. 
 
 Isaac's name perpetuated the remembrance of Abra- 
 ham's joy and surprise when the promise was made to him 
 that he should have a child in his old age. Samuel's 
 name was given to him because in his birth God had heard 
 his mother's prayer for a son. Jacob's name was changed 
 to Israel because of the urgency and success of his prayer. 
 He was a prince, and had power with God as well as with 
 
The Third Commandment. 65 
 
 men. There was a time when the names which are 
 common among ourselves had their meaning too, 
 but the meaning has been lost or at least is never 
 thought of. The family name passes from father to son. 
 The Christian name, which, by the way, is our real name, 
 we select because it has a pleasant sound, or to express 
 our affection and respect for some one else who has 
 borne it. 
 
 But when this Commandment was given a man's name 
 stood for something. It " connoted," as logicians say, his 
 occupation or something that had happened to him or 
 some great achievement which had made him famous, or 
 some physical peculiarity, or some moral quality. 
 
 In the same way God's name was significant. It was a 
 name and something more. It was a revelation of what 
 God is. It summed up what God had made known of 
 Himself to man. 
 
 There is a curions question suggested by this subject of 
 names. What do they represent ? When I speak of a 
 horse, does that word "horse" stand for a certain collec- 
 tion of quahties which I have observed in an animal or for 
 the animal itself? Those of you who have studied the 
 science of Logic know that there is an ancient contro- 
 versy about this — a controversy which has lasted for cen- 
 
 F 
 
66 The Third Commandment. 
 
 turies, and which, I .suppose, is not yet finally settled. 
 The controversy relates principally to what are called 
 common or generic names — names given, that is, to classes 
 of things ; but it also relates to proper names^ the names 
 of particular persons, places, or things. 
 
 For myself, I believe that the name of a man stands 
 for the man himself, and not for my conception of him. 
 It stands not for any thought in my mind, but for the man 
 to whom it belongs. When I say that Paris is being be- 
 sieged by the Prussian army, I do not mean that an 
 idea which I have in my own mind, and which has 
 been formed from what I have seen and read of a certain 
 great city, is being besieged by another thought which I 
 have, and which has been gradually formed by what I 
 have seen and read of a powerful army. I mean that a 
 collection of magnificent streets, and palaces, and 
 museums, and fortifications is being besieged by a body 
 of men v/hose homes are in Germany and who have 
 already destroyed powerful armies and taken strong 
 cities. 
 
 This may seem to some of you a very trifling and unne- 
 cessary distinction. Questions of great importance to the 
 highest life of man often seem trifling to those who have 
 not had the opportunity of becoming acquainted with 
 
The Third Commandment. 6y 
 
 what they really mean. To a child many thmgs seem of 
 no account, which you know may entail suffering and 
 death. There was a time in the history of Europe 
 when the controversy about what a name represents in- 
 volved issues so grave that men were burnt for taking 
 what was considered the heretical side of this controversy. 
 The whole question of the Roman Catholic doctrine of 
 Trans ubstantiation was involved in it. We look back upon 
 the excitement which it created with something like pity 
 as well as astonishment, and I suppose that most people 
 think that neither the NominaHsts nor the Realists, as 
 the hostile parties were called, had arrived at a true solu- 
 tion of the difficulty. 
 
 But, dismissing that old dispute, I say that a name 
 stands, not for my thought about a man, but for the man 
 himself. The name of Luther does not stand for the 
 moral qualities and intellectual powers which I may attri- 
 bute to the great Reformer. It does not represent the 
 courage, the religious passion, the vehemence, the tender- 
 ness, which I think existed in him. Nor does it represent 
 the immorality, the self-will, the obstinacy, and the impa- 
 tience of just authority; which may be attributed to him 
 by his enemies. It stands for Luther himself, and to 
 know what the name stands for, I must know Luther — 
 
 F 2 
 
6S The Third Commandmeiit 
 
 the words, the acts, the sufferings in which Luther re- 
 vealed his life. So God's name stands for God. It does 
 not represent certain attributes which I think God pos- 
 sesses, but it represents God Himself; and really to know 
 the name of God I must know the acts and words in 
 which God revealed Himself Indeed, for a true and 
 deep knowledge of it, I must have a direct and immediate 
 knowledge of God. When, therefore, we see that God 
 has taken successive names in the supernatural revelation 
 which he has made of Himself to mankind, this suggests 
 to us that, as time has gone on, He Himself has been 
 more and more perfectly revealed to our race. 
 
 To the patriarchs, the name under which God was 
 chiefly known was the name Almighty. When He re- 
 vealed Himself to Moses, it was under the name Jehovah. 
 Christ revealed God under the name of the Father. He 
 said in His last prayer, " I have manifested Thy name 
 unto the men Thou gavest me out of the world," meaning 
 that He had made known to man the kinship between 
 man and God, the wonderful love and compassion 
 implied in the Divine Fatherhood, and the new form 
 which the Divine authority assumes now that God 
 has revealed Himself as being something more to us 
 than our Creator and Ruler. Christ made it possible for 
 
The Third Commandment. 69 
 
 us to call God our Father, and for us to see in God all 
 that the name contains. 
 
 The name of God stands for Himself and for that 
 which He has revealed of Himself, not for our thoughts 
 about Him. 
 
 This Commandment brings us back to the name 
 under which God manifested Himself to Moses, and 
 which we, not very accurately, call Jehovah. There is very 
 strong evidence that this name had stood for God long 
 before the time of Moses, but what the name contained 
 had been very imperfectly made known. The case is very 
 similar to the revelation of the name of the Father by our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. God had been addressed as a Father 
 before Christ came, though very rarely; but there had 
 been no full and rich manifestation of God's Fatherhood. 
 At the coming of Christ the name received new depths of 
 meaning, and we feel now, that it is the truest and noblest 
 name for expressing God's relation to mankind. 
 
 Not only did God, at this time, emphatically call the 
 attention of the Jewish race to all that is included in the 
 name Jehovah, the name became what we call His 
 " proper name," as the God of the nation which He had 
 redeemed from Eg)^t. 
 
 The name "connotes" God's eternity. It affirms that 
 
70 The Third Commandment, 
 
 He is the God that was, that Is, and that will be. There 
 was very much in the actual position of the people which 
 rendered it possible for them to receive this new and 
 great name for God. Several generations had passed 
 avv^ay since God had spoken to Abraham. His descend- 
 ants were now about to be organised into a nation, and to 
 enter upon a new period of their history. Promises which 
 had been given several hundred years before were now 
 beginning to be fulfilled ; hundreds of years might have 
 to pass away before the unkno^vn wealth of those promises 
 would be exhausted. The people must have begun ta 
 feel that they had a History and that they had a Future. 
 A vivid sense of relationship to past generations and to 
 coming generations can hardly be developed among races 
 which have no true national life. It became possible to 
 the Jews when they were being organised into a nation. 
 What had happened long ago was bearing its fruit in their 
 deliverance from slavery ; the Law which they were now 
 receiving was to control the history of their descendants. 
 They were just in the mood which rendered it possible 
 for God to reveal Himself as the First and the Last, the 
 ever-living God, the God whom their fathers had trusted 
 and feared, the God whom their children, to the remotest 
 generations, must obey. A great step was gained in the 
 
The Third Commandment. 7 1 
 
 religious education of mankind — a step the magnitude of 
 which we can hardly estimate. The Past, the Present, 
 and the Future, were bound together in God. All human 
 history and all human hopes now rested in Him. The 
 soul of man rose to the great idea that not only was there 
 but one God, the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, 
 He was also Jehovah, the God that was, that is, and that 
 will be ; He did not inherit His greatness from any God 
 whose power had decayed, and whose ancient glory had 
 sunk into darkness, and He would continue to be God for 
 ever and ever. 
 
 It is not surprising that this great name was soon in- 
 vested with a superstitious sanctity. It is said that the 
 Jews kept it as a wonderful and mysterious secret among 
 themselves, and never used it in their intercourse with the 
 heathen. Even the Jews used it rarely. There is a tradi- 
 tion that it was heard but once a year, when it was uttered 
 by the High Priest on the great day of Atonement. In 
 reading the Scriptures it became customary never to pro- 
 nounce it, but to replace it, wherever it occurred, with 
 another Divine name, which was regarded as less awful 
 and august. The proof of this reverential custom is per- 
 petuated in our Hebrew Bibles. Hebrew used to_^be 
 
72 The Third Commandment. 
 
 written, as some systems of shorthand are written, without 
 the vowels. The vowels were gradually introduced in 
 comparatively recent times to preserve the traditional pro- 
 nunciation. But the name Jehovah is not written with 
 the vowels which belong to it ; it has the vowels which 
 belong to that other Divine name which w^as read in its 
 place. Unfortunately, in our authorised English version, 
 in many passages where the Hebrew writers wrote 
 " Jehovah," the translators have written " Lord," which is 
 the title whose vowels are given to the name " Jehovah" 
 in the present Hebrew text. Sometimes the change 
 greatly obscures the meaning. 
 
 It is not by such observances as these, that we are to 
 show our reverence for God; and the third Command- 
 ment requires something very different from this cere- 
 monial homage to His name. His name stands for Him- 
 self — for Himself in His relations to mankind, and as He 
 has revealed Himself to our race ; it sums up and in- 
 cludes all that He has made known of His nature, His 
 character, and His will. It is to Him that our reverence 
 is due. 
 
 There arc many ways in which we may transgress this 
 Commandment. It is common for those who illustrate 
 
The Third Commandment, 73 
 
 its meaning to insist especially on the guilt of using the 
 name of God to sanction and confirm a lie. Perjury is a 
 most deliberate and daring form of the sin which this 
 Commandment forbids. 
 
 There are circumstances in which a direct and solemn 
 appeal to God in support of the truth of what we are 
 affirming is perfectly lawful. God claims authority over 
 the whole of human life. We have to give account to 
 Him of all our words and deeds. There are times when, 
 by a deliberate act, we may voluntarily recognise the 
 Divine presence and the Divine authority, may declare 
 that what we are saying we are saying with a distinct and 
 vivid sense that God hears us, and may ask those who 
 listen to us to Hsten as in God's sight. To do this is to 
 take an oath; to do this when we are appealed to in 
 God's name by others is to take an oath ; and in this 
 sense the taking of an oath is sanctioned by the example 
 of Christ and the Apostles. 
 
 There is a special propriety in investing testimony given 
 before a court of justice with these solemnities. If, in- 
 deed, a man denies the existence of God it is monstrous 
 that he should lose any civil rights because he refuses the 
 oath which derives all its sanctity from the Faith which 
 he rejects. It is equally monstrous that he should suffer 
 
74 I^J^c Third Connnandment. 
 
 any disadvantage because he doubts the lawfulness of 
 swearing. 
 
 But where there is a general consent in the acknow- 
 ledgment, both of God's existence and of His moral rela- 
 tions to mankind, the Judicial Oath recalls the great fact 
 that Society rests on a Divine foundation. 
 
 Forms of government are constructed and modified by 
 human sagacity or folly. Government itself belongs to the 
 Divine Order of the world. The State is an institution 
 not less Divine than the family. Human magistrates 
 represent the justice of God in the secular and temporal 
 sphere of human life. When a Witness is making his 
 deposition, when a Judge is pronouncing sentence, they 
 are discharging grave functions which arise out of the 
 Divine Order of Human Society. It is fitting that they 
 should both be reminded of the solemnity and dignity of 
 their position. The oath reminds the witness that his 
 evidence must be neither perverted nor coloured by 
 passion or fear, or personal animosity, but that he must 
 tell the bare and naked truth, for through him the Divine 
 will is to be done through " the powers" which are 
 " ordained of God" for the punishment of evil doers and 
 the defence of those that do well. It reminds the judge 
 that he is " the minister of God," and that the Judge of 
 
The Third Commandment 75 
 
 all the earth ^^^ll one day call him to account if he 
 justifies the guilty or condemns the innocent. 
 
 Perjury is a great crime, and is properly punished with 
 severe penalties. If tolerated it would dissolve human 
 society and break up the very foundations of the state. 
 It is a great sin as well as a great crime. To appeal to 
 God with a lie on our lips is most presumptuously and 
 blasphemously to take His name in vain ; it is an insult 
 to His hatred of falsehood; it is to treat His majesty 
 with contempt ; it is to defy the terrors of His judgment- 
 seat, before which He has declared that we must give 
 account of all our words and deeds. 
 
 Of the guilt of common profanity, by which I mean 
 the flippant and reckless use of the Divine Name in 
 ordinary conversation, it is not necessary for me to say 
 much. There was a time when this practice seems to 
 have been the mark of a fine gentleman. It is now the 
 sign of vulgarit>^ There is something appalling in the 
 consideration that we have a greater dread of violating 
 the conventional maxims of good society than of trans- 
 gressing the laws of God. When profanity was only a 
 sin against God it was a common offence ; it has disap- 
 peared since it became " vulgar." If men are guilty of 
 
76 The Third Commandment. 
 
 it now, it is inferred that they are accustomed to live in 
 coarse and brutal company, and it is acknowledged that 
 whatever their social rank may be, they can hardly claim 
 to be gentlemen. 
 
 Except among the very lowest order of society, the 
 offence is now almost confined to very young men who 
 want to make it understood that they are no longer 
 children, and who think that the best way to do this, is to 
 show their contempt for the habits of decent reverence 
 which they learnt from their parents and teachers. "It is 
 difficult," as Robert Hall has said, "to account for a 
 practice, which gratifies no passion, and promotes no 
 interest, unless we ascribe it to a certain vanity of 
 appearing superior to religious fear, which tempts men to 
 make bold with their Maker. If there are hypocrites in 
 religion" — he continues — "there are also, strange as it may 
 appear, hypocrites in impiety, men who make an ostenta- 
 tion of more irreligion than they possess. An ostentation 
 of this nature, the most irrational in the records of human 
 folly, seems to lie at the root of profane swearing. It 
 may not be improper to remind such as indulge in this 
 practice, that they need not insult their Maker to show 
 that they do not fear Him ; that they may relinquish this 
 vice without fear of being supposed to be devout ; and 
 
The Third Commandment. jy 
 
 that they may safely leave it to the other parts of their 
 conduct to efface the smallest suspicion of their piety." 
 
 A far more common form of irreverence in our own 
 time is the practice of finding material for jesting in 
 Holy Scripture. A very little wit will go a long way if 
 we can only make up our minds to trifle with what is 
 sacred. 
 
 I do not believe that wit and humour are to be excluded 
 from God's service, or that there is no place for them in 
 the illustration of Divine truth. You remember Pascal's 
 famous sentence in the Provincial letters in reply to the 
 Jesuits, who charged him with turning sacred things into 
 ridicule. "There is a vast difference," he says, "between 
 laughing at religion and laughing at those who profane it 
 by their monstrous and extravagant opinions. In 
 making a jest of your morality I am as far from sneering 
 at holy things, as the doctrine of your casuists is from the 
 doctrine of the gospel." 
 
 In the exposition of truth, as well as in the refutation 
 of error, I see no reason why wit should be forbidden to 
 render its service as well as logic, fancy, and imagination. 
 Why should any faculty of that nature, which God made 
 in His image, be forbidden to glorify Him ? Who will 
 venture to call it common and unclean ? If any part of 
 
^S The Third Commandment. 
 
 my nature is withdrawn from the service of God, I am, 
 so far as that is concerned, not completely His. 
 
 The traditional exclusion from the pulpit of humour and 
 wit, dates from the worst and most artificial times of its 
 history. The ancient preachers, the great preachers of 
 the middle ages, the Puritan preachers, when they had the 
 faculty, used it ; and used it with wonderful effect. They 
 did not think it necessary to be dull in order to be 
 devout. 
 
 But as it is possible to use wit as the friend and ally of 
 Divine truth, it is also possible to make Divine truth itself 
 the mere material of wit. 
 
 Nothing is m.ore easy than to create a laugh by a 
 grotesque association of some frivolity with the grave and 
 solemn words of Holy Scripture. But surely this is 
 profanity of the worst kind. By this Book the religious 
 life of men is quickened and sustained. It contains the 
 highest revelations of Himself which God has made to 
 man. It directly addresses the conscience and the heart, 
 and all the noblest faculties of our nature, exalting our 
 idea of duty, consoling us in sorrow, redeeming us from sin 
 and despair, and inspiring us with the hope of immortal 
 blessedness and glory. Listening to its words, millions 
 have heard the very voice of God. It is associated with 
 
The Third Commandment. 79 
 
 the sanctity of many generations of saints. Such a book 
 cannot be a fit material for the manufacture of jests. 
 For my own part, though I do not accept Dr. Johnson's 
 well known saying, that *' a man who would make a pun 
 would pick a pocket," I should be disposed to say that 
 a man who deliberately and consciously uses the words of 
 Christ, of Apostles, and of Prophets, for mere purposes 
 of merriment, might have chalked a caricature on the 
 wall of the Holy of Holies, or scrav/led a witticism on 
 the sepulchre in Joseph's garden. 
 
 Nor is it Holy Scripture alone which, from its relation- 
 ship to God, is invested with a sanctity which it is profanity 
 to violate. Wherever God reveals Himself we should 
 reverence Him, and it is a transgression of this com- 
 mandment to bring into contempt any manifestation of 
 His character and will. 
 
 I do not know that our own age is distinguished from 
 all preceding times by the wantonness and frivolity with 
 which it treats all that is grave, solemn, and august ; but 
 whatever may be our comparative guilt, it is incontestable 
 that very much of our literature is utterly destructive of 
 that serious earnestness with which human life has always 
 been regarded by men of any depth of moral nature ; and 
 this universal flippancy is ruinous to the spirit of reverence, 
 
So The Third Conmiandment. 
 
 and betrays us too often into gross profanity. There is, 
 no doubt, a profound sadness, a sorro\vful sense of the 
 vanity of all earthly things, which often underlies the 
 most brilliant wit and the most cynical humour. The 
 men in whose writings these qualities have been most 
 conspicuous, have often been the victims of the deepest 
 melancholy. It was their sense of the frivolity of the 
 objects which create the greatest and most passionate ex- 
 citement among men, the utter worthlessness and triviality 
 of a thousand pursuits to which men devote their genius 
 and their energy, the transitoriness of all human glory, 
 which made them mock at the pomps and splendours, the 
 pleasures and even the griefs of mankind. They made 
 merry with what other men regard as most serious, not 
 because their hearts were light, but because they saw the 
 vanity and the unreality of the honours, and the wealth, 
 and the greatness of the world. The sadness was often 
 morbid ; it was not the less deep and real. 
 
 But the literature of which I complain is of a very dif- 
 ferent kind. It is not written by men who are so over- 
 shadowed by the dark and gloomy aspects of the universe 
 that they cannot but laugh at the misplaced earnestness 
 of those who arc spending money for that which is not 
 bread, and labour for that which satisficth not, but by 
 
The Third Commandment. 8i 
 
 men who seem utterly incapable of recognising the dif- 
 ference between what is most frivolous and what is most 
 appalling or Divine. 
 
 I have read letters in some newspapers during the last 
 few weeks from war correspondents, who seemed so 
 absorbed in their solicitude to say something smart and 
 clever, that they were altogether untouched by the agonies 
 of wounded soldiers, the miseries of starving and home- 
 less peasants, the tears of wives who had become 
 widows, and of children who had become fatherless. 
 They seem to have followed the march of great armies, 
 and to have recorded the siege of cities, and the burning 
 of villages, with only one desire, the desire to find a new 
 stimulant for their feeble and exhausted wit. 
 
 I remember too to have seen a book, which may indeed 
 be better than its title — a book called "The Comic 
 History of England." I declare that I can hardly con- 
 ceive of anything more monstrously profane. To a 
 devout heart, there appears throughout our history the 
 perpetual manifestation of the wonderful power and good- 
 ness of God. We have as much reason to thank God for 
 the statesmen and heroes that surrounded the throne of 
 EHzabeth, for the courage and genius of Cromwell, for 
 the sagacity of William III, as ever the Jews had to 
 
 G 
 
82 The Third Commandment, 
 
 thank God for Joshua, for Jepthah, or for Gideon ; I see 
 His hand as clearly in the storms which raged round our 
 coast when the Spanish Armada made its descent upon 
 us, as in the destroying angel that smote the army of the 
 Assyrians, encamped around Jerusalem. The life and 
 history of a nation are too great to be degraded and dis- 
 honoured by being made the material for mere amuse- 
 ment and fun. The spirit which renders that possible is 
 inconsistent with reverence for God Himself. If we love 
 not our brother whom we have seen, we cannot love God 
 whom we have not seen ; and if we feel no wonder and 
 awe in the presence of the tragedy of human life we are 
 incapable of the devout and reverential fear which should 
 be inspired by the majesty of God. 
 
 There is another habit which is more obviously and 
 directly a violation of this command, I mean the habit of 
 scoffing at those who profess to live a religious life and 
 taking every opportunity of sneering at their imperfections. 
 It is easy enough, no doubt, to discover grave infirmities 
 and faults in most Christian people. It is because they 
 know that they are sinful men that they are trusting in 
 Christ to save them. Their very confession of faith in 
 Him is a confession of their own sinfulness. They do 
 not profess to be better than other men ; they acknow- 
 
The Third Commandment. 83 
 
 ledge that they have no strength to do the will of God, 
 and that they are continually breaking God's Command- 
 ments. It would be brutal cruelty to make a jest of the 
 weakness and sufferings of the patients in a hospital — to 
 sneer at one man because he is prostrate with fever, at 
 another because his broken arm is bound up and useless, 
 at another because his face is still disfigured by an 
 explosion which nearly destroyed his life. It is because 
 they have been injured by accidents, or smitten down by 
 disease, that they are there. And it is because Christian 
 men are conscious of their sin, and of their inability to 
 escape from it mthout supernatural help, that they are 
 clinging to Christ to save them. You, who speak so 
 contemptuously of our failings are probably not quite free 
 from imperfection. The difference between us is very 
 simple ; we have learnt that our sins have provoked 
 the anger of God, and have entreated Him to 
 pardon us — you have not ; we are conscious that 
 apart from the immediate inspiration of the Holy 
 Ghost we can never recover the image of QxO^,—you 
 appear to believe that whatever virtue is necessary to 
 you is within the reach of your own strength. If 
 there are faults on both sides, we have a better right 
 to scoff at you than you have to scoff at us. We, at 
 
 G 2 
 
84 The Third Commandment. 
 
 least, acknowledge our weakness and guilt; you do not 
 acknowledge yours. 
 
 Whatever may be the imperfections of Christian people, 
 they are trying to vindicate and assert the authority and 
 greatness of God. Their aim is that God's will may be 
 done on earth as it is done in Heaven. If you yourselves 
 are doing nothing to maintain the remembrance among 
 men of God's infinite majesty, take care how you scoff at 
 those who, with whatever vacillation and infirmity of pur- 
 pose, are trying to maintain it. The real effect of your 
 scoffing is to dishonour religious faith itself, and to bring 
 God and the service of God into contempt. 
 
 It is not enough that we avoid the sin of profanity ; we 
 are bound to cultivate and to manifest that reverence for 
 God's majesty and holiness which lies at the root of all 
 true religion. We have to worship Him. It is very pos- 
 sible to be regular in our attendance at the services of 
 the Church and yet to neglect this duty. We may have 
 a keen, intellectual interest in the discussion of the doc- 
 trines, the ethics, and tlie history of the Christian Faith, 
 and yet offer to God no true worship. Our hearts may 
 be touched by the pathos and solemnity of prayer, and 
 may be thrilled by the exultation and triumphant joy of 
 
The Third Commandment. 85 
 
 some great hymn of praise, while we are altogether in- 
 sensible to the brightness of the Divine glory. The awe 
 and the fear which have filled the hearts of saints in the 
 presence of God are very different from the transient reli- 
 gious sentiment created by the venerable associations 
 which consecrate an ancient liturgy, or by the beauty, 
 tenderness, and grace, the passion, and the fervour, which 
 are sometimes found in the free prayer of our own churches. 
 I am not sure that the increased importance which, during 
 the last few years, has been given to the devotional part 
 of Nonconformist services, is a satisfactory proof that we 
 are at all more devout than our fathers. We have made 
 the form of our services more beautiful ; it is not certain 
 that we bow before God mth a deeper reverence, and 
 wonder, and awe. It is the " pure in heart" who see God, 
 and only when we see God face to face can we worship 
 Him in spirit and in truth. I am not sure that we are 
 holier than our fathers were, and, therefore, I am not sure 
 that we offer to God a devouter worship than theirs. We 
 must know God in order to worship Him, and the habits 
 of our times are unfriendly to that prolonged and quiet 
 communion with God without which the knowledge of 
 Him is impossible. We shall not deepen the spirit of 
 devotion in our churches by adding to the beauty and 
 
86 The Third Commandment. 
 
 solemnity of our public services. What we need is a 
 clearer vision of God and a profounder and more constant 
 sense of the truth of the ancient words that " the High 
 and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, whose name is 
 Holy," is really near to them that are of a contrite and 
 humble spirit, rejoices in their thanksgivings and answers 
 their prayers. 
 
THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 ' ' Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou 
 abour, and do all thy work ; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the 
 Lord thy God ; in it thou shall not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor 
 thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor 
 thy stranger that is within thy gates ; for in six days the Lord made 
 heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is, and rested the seventh 
 day : wherefore the LoRD blessed the se vont h day and hallowed it." — 
 Exodus xx, 8-ii. 
 
 You will remember that in the second chapter of the 
 book of Genesis, in immediate connection with the story 
 of the creation, it is said that " on the seventh day God 
 ended His work which He had made ; and He rested on 
 the seventh day from all His work v/hich He had made. 
 And God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it; 
 because that in it He had rested from all the work which 
 God created and made." 
 
 It has been hastily inferred from this, that the Sabbath 
 was imposed as a law upon Adam himself, as some think, 
 in Paradise, or, as others think, immediately after the 
 
SS The Fourth Coimnaiidment. 
 
 Fall. But this early reference to the Sabbath in the book 
 of Genesis, is no proof of its early institution. 
 
 There can be no doubt that in the Pentateuch, Moses 
 ■ — if, as I believe, he partly edited, and partly wrote it — 
 embodied traditions and documents which had been pre- 
 served from the earliest times, and had descended to the 
 Jewish people through the patriarchs ; but there can be 
 just as httle doubt that Moses felt himself at perfect 
 liberty to introduce additions, explanations, and comments 
 of his own. 
 
 Suppose that I were writing a life of Christ : I should 
 begin with an account of His birth, and I might very 
 naturally add that Christmas Day was instituted to 
 commemorate it, without meaning to imply that the 
 institution of Christmas Day dates from the time of 
 Christ, or even from the time of the apostles. We know 
 that it had a much later origin. And so it is perfectly 
 intelligible that when Moses was writing the account of 
 God's resting on the seventh day, he should add that this 
 was the ground and reason of the institution of the 
 Sabbath, although the Sabbath may not have been 
 instituted till many centuries later. 
 
 That the Sabbath was instituted immediately after the 
 creation of man is supposed to be proved by the indica- 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 89 
 
 tions which are tolerably numerous in the book of Genesis, 
 that the custom of dividing time into weeks of seven 
 days, existed in the very earliest periods of the world's 
 history. But this does not affect the question. There 
 were many ancient nations which divided time in this 
 way. The Egyptians did it. The Chaldeans did it. 
 The Greeks, who at first divided the month into three 
 periods of ten days, afterwards found it more convenient 
 to adopt the week of seven days. The Romans who, 
 almost till the time of Christ, had a week of eight days, 
 made the same change. The same division of time has 
 found its way into India, though whether it was carried 
 there by the Mahometans, or by the Buddhists, is 
 uncertain. Curiously enough the week of seven days — 
 or something very near to it — was found to exist among 
 the nations of Peru. But though there is this general 
 concurrence in the practice of dividing time into periods 
 of seven days, there is no such agreement in the custom 
 of observing one of these seven days as a Sabbath. If 
 in a document or an inscription referring to the habits of 
 some ancient people you discovered a reference to the 
 existence among them of this convenient grouping of 
 days into sevens, it would be altogether illegitimate to 
 conclude that they had a day of rest or of worship, either 
 
90 The Fourth Comma7idme7it. 
 
 at the beginning, or at the end, or in the middle of the 
 week. 
 
 Although there are very many references to weeks in 
 the book of Genesis, there is not a solitary passage which 
 even suggests that the patriarchs kept the seventh day or 
 any other day as a Sabbath. There is nothing about a 
 weekly rest There is nothing about the consecration of 
 one day in every week to worship. 
 
 I have very little doubt that in the earliest times God 
 revealed Himself to man as the Creator of all things, 
 and in condescension to the limitations of the human in- 
 tellect gave to man that representation of the creative 
 work which constitutes the basis of the wonderful 
 Psalm contained in the first chapter of the book of 
 Genesis. That revelation, I also believe, suggested the 
 thought of dividing time into weeks of seven days each ; 
 and this division of time has gradually extended over a 
 very large part of the world. But, I repeat, the practice 
 of dividing time into weeks is one thing ; the practice of 
 keeping one day in every week as a Sabbath is a very 
 different thing ; and of this there is not the faintest trace 
 till after the exodus of the Jewish people from Egypt. 
 
 In behalf of the earlier origin of the Sabbath it is alleged 
 that the suspension on the seventh day of the supply of 
 
-i,*.. 
 
 The Fourth Comma7idme7it. 91 
 
 manna proves that the Sabbath was recognised as a day 
 of rest before the giving of the Ten Commandments, but / 
 
 it proves nothing more than this, that God began to pre- {Xyl 
 pare the people for the Sabbath before its actual institution. Qjul, 
 
 It is also alleged that the word "Remember" in the "^"^^^ 
 Fourth Commandment implies that the Sabbath was 
 known before the Commandment was given, since they 
 could not " Remember " the Sabbath, if this was the first 
 time it was instituted. This is certainly a most curious 
 argument. Its force is broken by our most familiar habits 
 of speech. When I say to a friend who is going to 
 London, " Remember to call at such and such a book- 
 seller's, and get me such and such a book," I do not mean 
 that I ever asked him to render me this service before ; 
 and if he said, " I cannot ' remember ' it, because this is 
 the first time you have spoken about it," I should probably 
 think that he had gone mad. I should answer, " I do not 
 want you to remember now, at this moment, anything I 
 asked you yesterday ; but when you are in London, and 
 you have the opportunity of calling at the bookseller's, I 
 want 'you to remember then what I ask you nowy And 
 so this Fourth Commandment is a Commandment re- 
 quiring the Jewish people to "remember," when the 
 seventh day came round, to keep it holy. 
 
92 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 There is another ground on whidi it is sometimes 
 alleged that the Sabbath must have been instituted imme- 
 diately after the creation of man. Our Lord said, " The 
 Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath," 
 and I have no doubt that there have been many sermons 
 preached on that text, in which the preacher has vehe- 
 mently exclaimed, " Yes, for man ; not for the J^ciu, but 
 for man, whatever his race, whatever his colour, whatever 
 his language ; all men need the Sabbath, and it was made 
 for all men." But clearly that was not what Christ meant. 
 He did not say that the Sabbath was made for man, not 
 for the Jew merely, but that " the Sabbath was made for 
 man, not man for the Sabbath," meaning, to quote the 
 felicitous language of Mr. Rogers, " to inculcate the great 
 principle, illustrated by a special instance, that all ritual 
 and positive ordinances of religion must be for the sake 
 of the worshipper, not the worshipper for the sake of 
 them. Had he, therefore, been speaking of any such in- 
 stitution as on all hands was acknowledged to belong ex- 
 clusively to the Jews and in which the Christians had no 
 part, it would have been equally natural and appropriate 
 for Him to use just the language He did. For example, 
 had it been the Passover or Circumcision that was in 
 question, it would have been equally natural to remind 
 
The Foitrth Commandment, 93 
 
 his auditors that these were made for man (for the Jew?,, 
 indeed, in this case, but still as they were men), and not 
 man for the Passover or Circumcision." 
 
 There is yet another — motive — I must call it rather L 
 than argument, which induces some excellent christian 
 people to assert that the Sabbath was instituted im- 
 mediately after the creation. They see that there is no 
 commandment to keep the Sabbath in the New Testa- 
 ment. The Fourth Commandment was given to the 
 Jews, and they have some difficulty in determining how 
 it can be shown to have authority for us \ and therefore 
 they are anxious to believe that Adam himself ' was 
 required to keep the Sabbath, supposing that this would 
 make the Sabbath of universal and perpetual obligation. 
 Of course, no real proof that Adam received a com- 
 mandment to keep the Sabbath can be founded on the 
 alleged necessity of such a commandment, for the support 
 of the present obligation resting on all men to keep a 
 weekly day of rest. But if such a commandment had 
 been actually given and distinctly recorded in Holy 
 Scripture, I do not know why it should have any greater 
 authority for us than the Commandment given to the 
 Jews. The Jewish revelation has become obsolete 
 because a nobler revelation has been made in Christ ; but 
 
94 ^^^^ Fourth Commardment 
 
 the Jewish revelation itself was nobler than any previous 
 revelation, and if Moses has vanished in the diviner 
 glory of Christ, all that preceded Moses must have 
 vanished too. 
 
 Dismissing, therefore, all arbitrary fancies about a 
 primitive Sabbath, let us consider the characteristics of the 
 Sabbath given to the Jews. 
 
 (i). The JewisJi Sabbath was founded on a definite 
 Divine command. About the duty of keeping it there 
 could be no doubt. It was instituted by the same 
 authority that instituted the Feast of the Passover and 
 the Rite of Circumcision. It was invested with excep- 
 tional solemnity by being placed among the fundamental 
 laws of the nation. 
 
 (2.) The particular Day 7vhich was to be kept as a 
 Sabbath was authoritatively detennijied. The nation was 
 not left at liberty to make the first day of the week a 
 Sabbath, or the second, or the third. For a Jew to have 
 rested on the first day and worked on the seventh would 
 have been a presumptuous violation of the Divine law. 
 
 (3.) The purpose of the day was expressly defined. It 
 was a commemoration of the great work of Creation, and 
 a profession of religious faith in Jehovah as the Maker of 
 the heavens and the earth. 
 
TJie Foui'th Commandment, 95 
 
 In Deuteronomy, singularly enough, Moses omits this 
 reason for the institution of the Sabbath, and reminds the 
 people of their bondage in Egypt, partly to enforce the 
 duty of giving the Sabbatic rest to their servants and partly 
 to connect the remembrance of their rest -from the sordid 
 and intolerable labours of their Egyptian bondage with the 
 weekly rest of the Sabbath. " The seventh day is the 
 Sabbath of the Lord thy God j in it thou shalt do no 
 manner of work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, nor 
 thy man servant, nor thy maid servant, nor thine ox, nor 
 thine ass, nor any of thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is 
 within thy gates, that thy man servant and thy maid ser- 
 vant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou 
 wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord 
 thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand 
 and a stretched out arm. Therefore the Lord thy God 
 commanded thee to keep the Sabbath day." — Deut. v. 
 
 14, 15- 
 
 (4.) TJie manner in which the Sabbath was to be kept 
 was very distinctly stated. The Commandment was 
 definite — " Li it thou shalt do no manner of work." 
 
 The Commandment does not forbid recreation. From 
 the earliest to the latest times, the Jews seem to have 
 regarded the Sabbath as the proper day for family parties 
 
96 The FoiLTtJi Commaitdmeitt. 
 
 and friendly festivals. The early Christian Fathers taunt 
 them with their luxurious and self-indulgent manner of 
 spending the day. Angustine tells them that it would be 
 better to plough on the Sabbath than to dance. "Whether 
 as a moralist he was right or wrong, it is quite clear 
 that dancing on the Sabbath v/as not forbidden to the 
 Jew, but ploughing was forbidden. 
 
 It was not lav/ful to kindle a fire on the Sabbath, and, 
 as Mr Rogers says in the article from which I have 
 already quoted, " When the Jews gave a Sabbath dinner 
 party the collation was probably cold," but he adds that 
 " in the climate of Syria this was no great matter." 
 Michaelis, however, tells us that the later Jews had a 
 method of keeping hot for very many hours, the dishes 
 which were prepared before the Sabbath began ; and this 
 ingenious invention may have come down to them from 
 very early times. Some of the Rabbis made it a religious 
 duty to have at least three meals on the Sabbath j so far 
 from supposing that the law required that the day should 
 be kept as a fast, they insisted — and, as I think, rightly — 
 that the very idea and purpose of the day required that 
 it should be kept as a festival. 
 
 There is a passage in Isaiah, about the Sabbath, which 
 has been very much misunderstood. The prophet, 
 
TJie Foicrth Commandment, gy 
 
 speaking in God's name, promises his countrymen large 
 and glorious blessings, if they will faithfully obey this 
 Fourth Commandment. " If thou turn away thy foot 
 from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy 
 day ; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the 
 Lord, honourable ; and shalt honour Him, not doing 
 thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor 
 speaking thine own words;" then joy in God, security, and 
 glory will be the crown and reward of obedience. It 
 is supposed that Isaiah required the Jews to keep 
 what has been called a Puritanical Sabbath. I believe 
 that this is a complete misconception of the prophet's 
 meaning. 
 
 Their "own ways" which the people were forbidden to 
 follow on the Sabbath were the common secular labours 
 of the week. Doing their " o^vn pleasure" has no reference 
 to recreation or amusement. Some translators render it 
 doing their " own business ;" but it probably means here, 
 as it constantly means elsewhere, doing "what they 
 liked." Luther translates it admirably doing their " own 
 will." They were to spend the Sabbath, as God had 
 commanded them, in Rest ; they were not at liberty to 
 follow their o^vn inclination, by carrying on their ordinary 
 trade. Their " own words" which they were not to speak 
 
 H 
 
98 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 on the Sabbath, were the words in which their business 
 was transacted, words which, Hke the business itself, 
 belonged to the other days of the week. What the 
 prophet forbids on the seventh day is what the Command- 
 ment forbids — not Pleasure but Work. 
 
 The stricter rabbinical schools built upon this general 
 prohibition of all work, innumerable minute precepts, 
 many of which are so grotesque that to quote them would 
 be to answer no other purpose than to amuse you. One 
 ingenious commentator, who happily appears to have had 
 only a very few disciples, insisted that as it was a duty to 
 rest from the beginning to the end of the Sabbath, all 
 ^ muscular exertion was sinful ; and that, therefore, strict 
 fidelity to the Commandment required that a man should 
 remain during all the twenty-four hours of the Sabbath in 
 exactly the same position, without moving a limb or a 
 finger, a kind of " Rest" which must have been very much 
 more exhausting than hard work. 
 
 Nothing is said in the Commandment about the duty 
 of celebrating public worship on the Sabbath. The 
 reason is very simple ; there was no public worship out of 
 Jerusalem till after the Captivity. The law required that 
 on the Sabbath the sacrifices in the Temple should be 
 doubled, and this observance seems to have included 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 99 
 
 the whole of the religious duties which were autho- 
 ritatively connected with the consecrated day. 
 
 No doubt the Day itself reminded the people that 
 Jehovah was the Creator of all things, and reminded them, 
 too, of the great manifestations of His power and good- 
 ness in delivering their fathers from Egypt and giving the 
 nation " Rest" in the Land of Promise. A devout Jew 
 would be likely to spend part of the leisure which the day 
 brought with it in silent meditation on the supernatural 
 history of his race. Parents would show to their 
 children " the praises of the Lord, and His strength, and 
 His wonderful works which He had done . . . that 
 the generation to come might know them, even the chil- 
 dren which should be bom, who should arise and declare 
 them to their children ; that they might set their hope in 
 God, and not forget the works of God, but keep His 
 Commandments." But if a man's own heart did not in- 
 cline him to spend any part of the Sabbath in religious 
 observances, he could not be charged by priest or prophet 
 with the sin of breaking the Commandment. The Law 
 required Rest ; it did not require Worship. 
 
 It is probable that the use of the word " Holy" in con- 
 nection with the Sabbath confirms what I suppose is a 
 common mistake about the manner in which the Jewish 
 
 H 2 
 
100 The Fourth Coimnandnieiit. 
 
 Sabbath had to be kept. A moment's consideration will 
 enable you to perceive that this word implies nothing 
 more than the "separation" of the day from common 
 uses. Vessels employed in the service of the Temple 
 were " holy," though, of course, it was impossible that they 
 should have any moral or religious character at all. 
 Priests, even when their moral and religious character was 
 altogether bad, were "holy" too. The "holiness" of the 
 seventh day consisted in this, that it was fenced round 
 against the intrusion of common work as a perpetual 
 memorial of the Divine rest after the creation of all things. 
 (5.) TJie sanction which defe?tded the law of the Sabbath 
 was most sa>ere ; the Sabbath-breaker was to be put to 
 death. 
 
 The institution, as I have already said, was unique. 
 Nothing like it, so far as I know, has ever been found 
 among any other people. It was in harmony with the whole 
 system of Judaism, and was a most characteristic expres- 
 sion of one of the great ideas of which Judaism was the 
 development. A nation was " set apart " from all other 
 nations, was invested with special prerogatives, and en- 
 trusted with special duties ; within that elect nation itself 
 a tribe — the tribe of Levi — was " set apart" from all the 
 
TJie Fourth Commandment loi 
 
 other tribes and similarly distinguished; in that sacred 
 tribe a priestly family — the family of Aaron — was " set 
 apart" from all other families ; in that family of priests an 
 individual — the High Priest — was "set apart" from all 
 other priests, and in him this idea of personal consecration 
 to God was represented in its highest form. A sacred 
 building — the Temple — was " set apart" from all other 
 buildings as being God's dwelling-place ; the inner court 
 was "set apart" from the rest of the Temple as being 
 especially God's home; and in that inner court the 
 Holy of Holies was " set apart" from the Holy Place 
 itself, as the very chamber of the Divine presence. 
 In the same way, the first fruits of the harvest were 
 "set apart" for God, and the firstlings of the catde; 
 then a tithe was "set apart" from the rest of the crops 
 and the rest of the flocks and herds; and probably a 
 second tithe was taken from what remained, and similarly 
 consecrated. 
 
 In harmony with these remarkable customs, the Seventh 
 Day in every week was " set apart" as a day in which no 
 work was to be done ; the seventh year was " set apart" 
 as a year in which no seed was to be sown ; and at the 
 end of seven times seven years there was a great festival 
 during which the whole land was to rest, and when debts 
 
102 The Fourth CommmidmenU 
 
 were to be cancelled, alienated estates to return to their 
 owners, and slaves to be set free. 
 
 Consecrated Men, consecrated Property, consecrated 
 Space, consecrated Time, declared that God still claimed 
 the world as His own, and that in all the provinces of 
 human life He insisted on being recognised as Lord 
 of all. 
 
 The separation of the Sabbath from the common uses 
 of other days was an essential part of a vast and com- 
 plicated system for the assertion and maintenance of 
 certain great spiritual ideas. I do not wonder at the 
 severity of the penalty attached to the crime of Sabbath- 
 breaking. The High Priest himself was forbidden, under 
 the penalty of death, to enter the Holy of Holies on any 
 other day than the day of Atonement. To violate the 
 sanctity of that mysterious chamber was a profanation of 
 the Space which God claimed as His own ; to violate the 
 Sabbath was a profanation of the Time which God claimed 
 as His own. The defence of the sanctity of the Sabbath 
 was exceptionally necessary in the early times of Jewish 
 history. Before Synagogues were built and public worship 
 was celebrated in every part of the country, the vast 
 majority of the people, but for the institution of the 
 Sabbath, would have been seldom reminded of God, 
 
The Fourth Commandment 103 
 
 except when they went up to Jerusalem to keep the 
 great feasts. The weekly rest from their common labour 
 was a constantly recurring appeal to them to remember 
 the God of their fathers. 
 
 The Sabbath was a singularly beneficent institution. 
 The law simply required abstinence from work. That 
 this should ever be regarded as a severe and intolerable 
 requirement is quite unintelligible. It was a law which 
 gave freedom instead of imposing bondage. Human life 
 indeed, was probably not so hard among the Jewish^ 
 people in the better periods of their national history as it 
 is among us. Their climate was kindly, and a great part 
 of their soil fertile. There was a more equal distribution 
 of wealth, and their wants were comparatively few and 
 simple. There were not large masses of people congre- 
 gated in great towns, many of them on the edge of 
 starvation, and a vast proportion of the rest defending 
 themselves from the same misery only by incessant and 
 monotonous labour. No clouds of smoke hung over the 
 cities of Judah and Israel. Nor was the roar of 
 machinery heard in them. None of them were so large 
 that the people were imprisoned in a wilderness of dreary 
 and melancholy streets. They saw the sun ; olive trees 
 and vineyards were within reach ; the mountains were not 
 
104 ^^^^ Fourth Cominafidmejtt 
 
 far away ; near to many of them were green pastures, and 
 still waters, and the music of torrents, and the peace of 
 lonely glens, to give them refreshment and joy. And yet 
 with the Jewish people, as with us, the greater part of life 
 had to be spent in work, and in hard work too. Many a 
 back ached through bending hour after hour over the 
 vines ; and the heat of the corn harvest and the vintage 
 exhausted them. The shepherd had to walk over the 
 rough hills after his wandering sheep, and the fisherman 
 got weary of casting his net. An agricultural and a pas- 
 toral life, though it seems to us a life of romance and 
 delight, brings the sweat to the brow and makes the limbs 
 long for repose; and God in His goodness took the side 
 of man against the inevitable hardships of his lot, and 
 made rest from work a religious duty. 
 
 The Sabbath was a perpetual witness that though, under 
 the actual conditions of our Hfe in this world, severe toil 
 may be absolutely inevitable, it is not God's will that 
 all our days should be spent in drudgery. We were made 
 for something better than that — for peace, for joy, and for 
 freedom, and not for perpetual enthralment to the inferior 
 necessities of our nature. 
 
 It was specially beneficent in relation to slaves. To 
 them, at least, we may be sure that the Sabbath was 
 
The Fourth Commaridment 105 
 
 always "a delight." It was beneficent, too, in rela- 
 tion to the animals which man has subjected to his 
 service, and for which rest is as necessary as for our- 
 selves, if their life is to have any freshness, elasticity, 
 and vigour. 
 
 There were some, no doubt, to whom the Sabbath was 
 an offence and a constant source of vexation, men who 
 were eager to accumulate wealth and who could not 
 endure any suspension of business. Such men when the 
 Sabbath came round looked upon their sons and their 
 daughters and their slaves and their cattle taking their 
 ease, and calculated how much they lost by this fantastic 
 and absurd institution, reckoning, no doubt, in their folly, 
 that if they could only make their people work seven 
 days instead of six, they would increase their profits by 
 the worth of the additional day's labour, and forgetting 
 that they worked more efiectively on the six days because 
 they rested on the seventh; men who, to quote the words 
 of Amos, asked impatiently, " When will the new moon 
 be gone, that we may sell corn ? and the Sabbath that we 
 may set forth wheat?" If you have any pity for the 
 sufferings inflicted on such men as these by the compulsory 
 weekly rest, I have none. That they were obliged, on 
 one day in seven, to suspend all common work was a 
 
io6 The Fotcrth Commandment, 
 
 singular proof of God's goodness both to them and to the 
 people under their power. 
 
 In what relation does the Jewish Sabbath stand to our 
 Lord's Day? This is not a necessary part of my subject ; 
 for I am speaking about the Fourth Commandment, and 
 it is quite clear that however rigidly or devoutly we may 
 spend Sunday, we are not keeping the Sabbath. The 
 Christian Sunday and the Jewish Sabbath are absolutely 
 different institutions, different in almost every particular 
 that constitutes a characteristic of either. 
 
 Let me remind you of the characteristics of the Sabbath 
 which I enumerated just now : — 
 
 (i.) The Sabbath was founded on a specific Divine 
 command. We can plead no such command for the 
 obligation to observe Sunday. 
 
 (2.) The Sabbath was to be observed on a particular 
 day which was determined by Divine authority ; the 
 Jews were commanded to keep " holy " the seventh day 
 of the week. Among us the seventh is a common day, 
 and it is the first day of the week that we celebrate as a 
 religious festival. 
 
 (3.) The purpose of the Sabbath was to commemorate 
 the manifestation of God's power in the creation of all 
 
The Foitrth Commandment 107 
 
 things, and of His goodness in redeeming the Jews from 
 their misery in Egypt. The Christian Sunday com- 
 memorates the Resurrection of Christ from the dead. 
 
 (4.) Obedience to the law of the Sabbath required 
 physical rest and nothing more ; neither public nor 
 private worship constituted any part of the obligation 
 which was imposed upon the Jews by the Fourth Com- 
 mandment. The great object for which the Christian 
 Sunday is set apart from other days, is to secure 
 opportunity for religious thought, for thanksgiving, and 
 for prayer. 
 
 (5.) The penalty for breaking the Sabbath was Death. 
 There is not a single sentence in the New Testament to 
 suggest that we incur any penalty by violating the 
 supposed sanctity of Sunday. 
 
 The only similarity between the Lord's Day and the 
 Sabbath is that both recur once a week, and that both are 
 religious festivals. But if you change the Day of a festival, 
 change the Facts which it commemorates, and change the 
 Manner of celebrating it, if one festival is instituted by 
 the immediate authority of God and the other not, if one 
 is protected by the Penalty of Death and the other by no 
 Penalty at all, it is difficult to see how the two can 
 be regarded as identical. 
 
io8 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 It was the grim custom of some of the old Noncon- 
 formists to celebrate the thirtieth of Januaiy, the 
 anniversary of the beheading of King Charles, by a dinner. 
 Suppose now that a man had directed in his will 
 that this day should be kept by his children according to 
 the traditions of Nonconformity. And suppose that his 
 children, in their old age, had given up the dinner on the 
 thirtieth of January in commemoration of the beheading 
 of King Charles I, and, instead of that, had gone to 
 church on the twenty-ninth of May to thank God for the 
 return of King Charles II — thus changing the day of the 
 festival, changing the event which the day commemorated, 
 and changing the manner of celebrating it, — do you think 
 that the mere fact that in both cases a day was kept as an 
 annual holiday, and as a holiday in celebration of a great 
 national event, would have made the two days, in any 
 rational sense, the same ? Could they have appealed to 
 their fathers' authority which required them to celebrate 
 the first day as a sanction for their celebration of the 
 second ? 
 
 Now I do not mean to say that the spirit and idea of 
 the Christian Sunday are as absolutely different from the 
 spirit and idea of the Jewish Sabbath, as was the thanks- 
 giving service at church for the return of Charles II, from 
 
The Fourth Commattdment, 109 
 
 the Nonconformist dinner in commemoration of the 
 beheading of Charles I, but I do say that between the 
 two reHgious institutions, as such, the differences are not 
 less flagrant. Their direct origin is different ; they are 
 kept on different days ; they are kept in a different 
 manner ; they commemorate different things. 
 
 At what time the early Jewish Christians ceased to keep 
 the seventh day as a Sabbath is doubtful. At first, some 
 of them appear to have made an effort to induce the 
 Gentile converts to keep it, an effort which St. Paul 
 firmly resisted. Is is probable that the practice gradually 
 died out like the practice of attending the Temple Service. 
 The Apostles were in no haste to break up the ancient 
 traditions and customs of their countrymen. They did 
 not promulgate a new law abolishing the old. They per- 
 mitted the old law to be gradually displaced and super- 
 seded by the growing strength of the life and spirit of the 
 new faith. But for several centuries, both in the East and 
 in the West, the seventh day continued to receive special 
 recognition, even after it had ceased to be kept as a 
 Sabbath ; in the East it was kept as a fast because on 
 that day Christ lay in the sepulchre ; in the West it was 
 still kept as a festival. 
 
no The Fotcrth Commmidment. 
 
 As it is difficult to determine the exact time when 
 Jewish Christians ceased to rest on the Sabbath, it is also 
 difficult to determine the exact time when Christians 
 generally began to rest on the Sunday. But the origin of 
 the Christian Sunday is very explicable. Our Lord Jesus 
 Christ was not merely a great religious teacher who came 
 into the world to promulgate certain new religious truths. 
 He established a church. The supernatural life which 
 He communicated to His disciples created a system of 
 supernatural relationships between His disciples them- 
 selves as well as between His disciples and Him. 
 The organisation of a supernatural society was the 
 necessary expression of these relationships. The perfection 
 of Christian strength, wisdom, and joy was not to be 
 possible to Christian men apart from communion with each 
 other. It was not enough that the solitary soul should be 
 brought into fellowship and union with Christ ; it was 
 necessary in a far higher sense than that in which the 
 \vriter of the Acts of the Apostles used the words that 
 " all that believed" should be " together" and have " all 
 things in common." Free and habitual communion with 
 each other was almost as necessary for the development 
 of the new life as free and habitual communion with God. 
 
 But this rendered it necessary that Christian Churches 
 
The Fourth Commandment. iii 
 
 should appoint fixed and frequent times for meeting, and 
 the instincts of Christian men led them to adopt the 
 first day of the week. The most memorable appear- 
 ances of our Lord to the apostles after His Resurrection 
 from the dead were on that Day. On that Day the Holy 
 Ghost descended on the church. These external events 
 confirmed the disposition of the Church to commemorate 
 the Day of Christ's Resurrection by consecrating it to 
 worship. It was felt that the supreme event in the 
 history of the human race was not the Creation but the 
 Resurrection of the Lord. The first was the commence- 
 ment of the natural life of the race; the second of its 
 supernatural life. Christian men knew that they had 
 risen with Christ and entered with Him into the kingdom 
 of heaven. Old things had passed away ; all things had 
 become new. For them, the most sacred day of the week 
 was not that which commemorated the completion of 
 the old Order but that which commemorated the begin- 
 ning of the new. The spiritual instinct of the church 
 determined its duty. According to the ancient prophecy, 
 under the new Covenant the law was to be written on the 
 heart, and as to the heart of the Church, Christ's Resurrec- 
 tion had an infinitely greater interest than the creation of 
 the material universe and seemed a far more glorious 
 
112 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 manifestation of the power and love of God, the 
 meetings of the church for worship were fixed on the first 
 day of the week instead of the seventh. Wherever 
 churches were founded this custom was estabHshed. On 
 the first day of the week they met to " break bread " and 
 to offer worship and to receive instruction in Christian 
 truth and duty. 
 
 But there is no reason to beHeve that the apostles 
 required their converts to keep the first day of the week 
 as a Day of Rest. In the whole of the apostolic epistles 
 there is only one commandment, so far as I know, about 
 the way in which the Sunday was to be observed, and 
 this is a commandment which I am afraid that nine 
 Christian people out of ten habitually violate both in its 
 letter and its spirit. St. Paul did not tell the Corinthian 
 Christians to do no common work on the Sunday; the 
 commandment which he gave them was one which most 
 of us have forgotten — " Upon the first day of the week 
 let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath 
 prospered him," that he may have money to devote to 
 purposes of charity and religion. This is the only precept 
 about Sabbath observance in the New Testament. 
 
 It is clear that for a long time the Sunday, though part 
 of it was consecrated to worship, was not kept as a day of 
 
The Fourth Commandment, 113 
 
 rest by the Christian Jews, who continued to rest on the 
 seventh day of the week, nor by the Gentile Christians, 
 for they had inherited no weekly Sabbath from their 
 heathen ancestors, and there is no trace of any obligation 
 having been imposed upon them by the Apostles to com- 
 memorate the Resurrection of Christ by abstinence from 
 their ordinary occupations- They met for worship before 
 the day's work began, and, perhaps, after the day's work 
 was over. " 
 
 But as time went on Christian men came to feel that it 
 would be expedient to secure larger opportunities for 
 Christian communion by protecting one day in the week 
 against the intrusion of common business and care. As 
 the Church grew stronger it became more and more able 
 to do this. The remembrance of the gracious and bene- 
 ficent character of the Jewish Sabbath intensified the 
 craving for a similar break in the monotony and weariness 
 of life. In the weekly rest which had passed away with 
 Judaism God had revealed that man was not made merely 
 for exhausting labour ; and though the old Sabbath was 
 no longer obligatory, the revelation which it contained was 
 felt to be permanent. In the time of Constantine this 
 craving for rest had become so general that the Emperor 
 was able to promulgate a decree requiring the closing of 
 
114 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 the courts of law and the suspension of all work on the 
 Sunday. The Emperor, however, or his advisers, felt 
 themselves at liberty to use their own judgment about the 
 extent to which this interruption of common business 
 should be enforced. The Jewish law absolutely forbade 
 all work. If a crop of wheat had been cut on Friday, 
 and when the Sabbath commenced was ready to carry, the 
 Jewish farmer was not permitted to carry it though a 
 thunderstorm might be gathering which was certain to 
 destroy it. In Palestine this restriction inflicted very 
 little inconvenience, as the weather in harvest was uni- 
 formly clear and steady, and a storm was so rare as to be 
 regarded as almost preternatural. But it was very diffe- 
 rent in many of the provinces of the empire, and Constan- 
 tine, therefore, made a special exception in favour of 
 agriculturists; they were to be permitted to work on 
 Sunday if they thought it necessary. 
 
 Constantine's decree was the first of a series of imperial 
 acts which secluded the first day of the week from ordi- 
 nary uses, and so the weekly rest was gradually established 
 as a secular as well as a religious institution for all Chris- 
 tendom. 
 
 The contrast, as illustrated by this historical review. 
 
TJie Fourth Commandment. 115 
 
 between the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday is 
 very striking. 
 
 The Sabbath was originally nothing more than a day of 
 physical Rest. After the Captivity, it was the day on 
 which devout Jews met in their synagogues for worship ; 
 but this was because the day was already free from ordi- 
 nary business. But the Sunday originated in the meetings 
 of the Church for Worship ; the Rest was secured after- 
 wards, in order that the Worship might be possible. In 
 the history of the Jewish Sabbath the Rest came first and 
 the Worship followed; in the history of the Christian Sun- 
 day, the Worship came first and the Rest followed. To 
 the idea of the Jewish Sabbath, Rest was essential, Wor- 
 ship was an accident ; to the idea of the Christian Sunday, 
 Worship is essential and Rest is an accident. 
 
 The Rest of the Sabbath was prescribed by a law which 
 made Rest a duty. The law was beneficent and gracious, 
 but still it was a law, and the consciences of men were 
 " exercised" in determining what the law permitted and 
 what it forbade. The Rest of the Sunday is protected by 
 no law ; it has been gradually won as a privilege, and is 
 now to be protected as a right. 
 
 The Jewish Sabbath was a Divinely ordained discipline 
 intended to enforce the remembrance of God's creative 
 
 I 2 
 
Ii6 TJic Fourth Coininandmcnt. 
 
 acts and to check by an authoritative institution, man's 
 complete absorption in secular business. The Christian 
 Sunday is the expression of the exulting joy of Christian 
 hearts in the Resurrection and Glory of Chrfst, and of 
 their desire to vindicate their place in the Kingdom of 
 Heaven. 
 
 If I were to say anything about the questions of casuistry 
 by which some good people are perplexed in relation to 
 the manner of observing Sunday, it would not be with the 
 intention of discussing them, but to show that they ought 
 never to be raised at all. It is a direct inversion of the 
 whole idea and theory of the Day to ask. What common 
 things may I do upon it and yet be blameless ? The true 
 question for every Christian man is. How far is it possible 
 for me to escape from the common cares and common 
 joys of my ordinary life, and how completely can I dwell, 
 for one day in the week at least, in a fairer world than 
 this, breathe a purer air, and rejoice in the light of a 
 Diviner heaven ? The observance of the Sunday as a reli- 
 gious institution is a question of privilege, not of duty. 
 
 When we consider the weekly Rest as a social and 
 moral institution, the case is somewhat different. There 
 are innumerable reasons which make it desirable to have 
 
The Fottrth Commandment. 117 
 
 a break in the world's business at least one day in seven. 
 Physical health suffers and the vigour of the body declines 
 without it. When in the fierce heat of the first French 
 Revolution it was determined to abolish every trace and 
 memorial of the Christian Faith in France, the revolu- 
 tionists still felt that it was necessary to provide for a 
 regular interval of Rest, and they therefore appointed a 
 week of ten days with a regularly recurring holiday. After 
 twelve years experience, they abandoned the week of ten 
 days and returned to the older and more kindly custom of 
 resting one day in seven. The institution is so invaluable 
 to the physical well-being of nations, that to break it down 
 by engaging in unnecessary business, or by unnecessary 
 travelling, or by encouraging exciting public amusements, 
 is not so much a religious as a social ofience. 
 
 It has its intellectual uses, even though as is too often 
 the case, the day is spent in intellectual idleness. Mere 
 rest renews the vigour of the brain. 
 
 It is also a check on that feverish and insane devotion 
 to secular business which is one of the most serious perils 
 to the moral life of our own country. There are too 
 many people in England on whose gravestones the 
 French epitaph might be written, " He was born a man 
 and died a grocer." Apart altogether from the higher 
 
Ii8 TJie Fourth Comrnandinent. 
 
 relationships of man, it is for the interest of the nation 
 that tradesmen, manufacturers, and merchants should find 
 the doors of their shops, their works, and their counting- 
 houses, locked and barred against them during one day 
 in seven, and that for twenty-four hours they should be 
 emancipated, by a comjoulsory law, from the bondage 
 which they love too well, and should be compelled to 
 spend their time with their children and friends. 
 
 As a social institution, the Sunday imposes upon us an 
 obligation to keep it as free as possible from ordinary 
 work ; but as a religious institution it does not so much 
 impose obligation as offer privilege. The great question 
 we have to ask, in relation to any possible infraction of its 
 religious sanctions, is not, Shall I, by doing this, break a 
 law ? but. Shall I, by doing this, miss a blessing ? Every- 
 thing will fall into its right place and every question will 
 receive its true answer, if we once seize the true idea of 
 the Day. It is a Day to rejoice in; a Day not of bondage 
 but of freedom, not of gloom but of gladness ; a Day in 
 which we declare that we are not merely merchants, 
 mechanics, shopkeepers, and lawyers, but men — children 
 of God and heirs of immortality ; a Day in which we 
 assert our position as the rulers and lords of the material 
 universe, and refuse to be in tlu-aldom to it, and in which 
 
The Fottrth Commandment. 119 
 
 we claim to be the citizens of an invisible and Divine 
 commonwealth. It perpetuates the memory not of our 
 rescue from slavery in Egypt but of a still nobler 
 redemption. It bears witness to the Resurrection of 
 Christ, and to our resurrection with Him — it is "an 
 Easter Day in every week." It reminds us, not of the 
 completion of the Old Creation but of the commencement 
 of the New, in which at last the sins and sorrows which 
 have marred and desolated the fair beauty of this world 
 shall be known no more, but in which the glory of God 
 shall be man's inheritance, because in the life of man 
 the life of God shall be perfectly manifested ; and in this 
 weekly Rest, which has not been imposed upon us by any 
 external law but has been demanded and won by an 
 inward spiritual instinct, w^e anticipate the blessedness of 
 the new Heavens and the new earth in which righteousness 
 shall dwell — the everlasting Sabbath of the regenerate 
 and glorified sons of God. 
 
THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 " Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long 
 upon the land which the Lord thy God givetli thee." — ExODUS xx, 12. 
 
 The commonest things in the world are also the 
 strangest; the most familiar are the most perplexing. Of 
 all the mysteries in the universe I hardly know of any 
 which is more wonderful than the kind of relationship 
 existing between all of us and our parents. It is that 
 relationship, indeed, which creates some of the greatest 
 mysteries in the moral constitution of the world. Here 
 am I — conscious of my personal responsibility for my 
 character and my actions. There is nothing in the whole 
 range of my knowledge of which I am more certain than 
 that I am justly held accountable for my habits, my 
 words, and my deeds. 
 
 The universal consent of mankind sustains the authority 
 of my conscience, and declares that I — I alone — must be 
 held responsible for whatever evil I commit ; and that I am 
 to be praised if I do well. And yet nothing can be plainer 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 121 
 
 than that it is easy or difficult for me to do well, according 
 as my father and my mother, my grandfather and my 
 grandmother — and I know not how far back I may go — 
 were, or were not, temperate, virtuous, upright, good 
 people. As there is this singular and most mysterious 
 relationship between my moral life and the moral life of 
 my parents, there is a relationship equally intimate 
 between my physical and intellectual life and theirs. My 
 voice, the length and shape of my limbs, my height, the 
 colour of my hair, the strength and clearness of my sight, 
 the soundness of my brain, my muscular vigour, whatever 
 constitutes my weakness or my power, was largely 
 determined for me by what my parents were. 
 
 Nor is this all. For years I was dependent upon them 
 for the food and clothing and care, without which I 
 should have died. I was dependent on their wisdom 
 or caprice, on their harshness or kindness, for my 
 happiness ; and for what is of very much greater 
 importance than happiness ; for all the influences which 
 gave the original direction and form to the development 
 of my character. 
 
 The mystery lies here : — I alone am responsible for my 
 actions ; the guilt of them is mine; and, excluding for a 
 moment all reference to God, the glory of them is mine. 
 
122 The Fifth Commandment. 
 
 There is an element of personal freedom in me which 
 invests me with all the dignity and peril of having my 
 conduct and my fate in my own hands. About that I 
 have no doubt. And yet I was not asked whether I would 
 come into existence or not. The question was deter- 
 > mined for me by my parents. I owe it to them that I exist 
 at all. And I owe to them my physical organisation, the 
 rudiments and limits of my intellectual powers, and the 
 temperament which has so much to do with my moral 
 and physical life. 
 
 Some of us, perhaps, are sometimes ready to say, that 
 our birth was a calamity. It is not necessary to endure 
 hunger and cold and physical torture, in order to be 
 driven to the wish that the dangerous gift of existence 
 had never been conferred on us. To many of us, I 
 imagine, who live in pleasant homes, and are surrounded 
 by kind friends, life is sometimes so wearisome, its fairest 
 hopes seem sometimes so completely blighted, its highest 
 purposes so disastrously defeated, the past has left behind 
 such keen regrets and the future is overshadowed with 
 such gloomy fears, that we wish that we had never seen 
 the light. 
 
 In that case, however, we should never have had the 
 satisfaction of knowing what evils we had escaped. And 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 123 
 
 it is only in ignoble and unworthy moods that any of us 
 yield to this discontent. To yield to it with a knowledge 
 of the infinite love of God and of the glorious destiny 
 which lies beyond death for all who receive the life that 
 is in Christ, ought to be impossible. What is there of 
 melancholy and want, of disappointment and pain, which 
 I can endure in this world that is to be compared with 
 the transcendent blessedness I may win in the next ? Let 
 my earthly life be extended far beyond the limits of the 
 customary threescore years and ten ; let every fresh year 
 bring with it some new sorrow, every fresh month remove 
 some old solace, ever)' day be clouded with the shadow of 
 some real grief, and every night be made wretched with 
 dreams of imaginary woe ; let me be homeless and friend- 
 less, let me endure want and pain; deprive me of the com- 
 monest consolations of life ; let me suffer all that I can 
 fear, and lose all that I hope ; and yet in God there is a 
 blessedness possible to me hereafter, which must make me 
 regard existence as an infinite blessing. I^ owe to my 
 parents that life which makes it possible for me to live 
 with God and His angels for ever. 
 
 The relationship in which we stand to our parents, a 
 relationship based upon the fact that we owe our existence 
 to them, that we are made in their image, that for so long 
 
124 ^-^^^ Fifth Commandment. 
 
 a time we depend upon them for the actual maintenance 
 of life, and that as the necessary result of all this, and of 
 their greater experience and knowledge of the world, we 
 are completely under their authority during childhood, — 
 this relationship is very naturally made the highest symbol 
 of our relationship to God Himself. 
 
 The parental relationship has perhaps its ultimate 
 ground and root in the very nature of God and in the 
 modes of the Divine existence ; it is, perhaps, a revelation 
 to us of some of the great mysteries of the Divine life ; but 
 that is a region too remote for us to travel into it just now, 
 and the speculations which it involves are perhaps more 
 subtle than some of you might care to pursue. This ele- 
 mentary truth is obvious to us all, and may assist us in the 
 ^ discharge both of parental and filial duties. The father 
 is to be the type of God Himself to the child, and the 
 child is to honour the Father as the highest human symbol 
 of what God is to us all. 
 
 That truth, firmly apprehended, would do very much to 
 assist us on both sides — to assist parents and to assist 
 children — to discharge their duties to each other. There 
 are obvious modifications and limits of the truth, resulting 
 from the infirmity of human nature, but the ultimate idea 
 of the relationship between parents and children, is to be 
 
TJie Fifth Commandi?tent. 12$ 
 
 found in the relationship between God and all mankind ; 
 and this constitutes the moral^round of the command, 
 Hqnour thy Father and Mother. 
 
 I am no t sure that it is of very much use attempting to 
 define exactly what is meant by Honouring parents. 
 Where there is the heart to fulfil the duty, no definition will 
 be necessary; where there is not, no definition will be 
 useful. 
 
 It clearly includes, however, respect, love, and obedience 
 as long as childhood and youth continue, and the gradual 
 modification and transformation of those affections and 
 duties into higher forms as manhood and womanhood 
 draw on. 
 
 There is a very obvious difficulty meeting us at the very 
 threshold of this subject. 
 
 Some young people may say that their parents are not 
 loveable, and that therefore they cannot love them; not 
 wise, and that therefore they cannot respect them ; that 
 they are unreasonable, capricious, and selfish, that they 
 have vices of temper and speech, and, perhaps, vices of 
 a still grosser kind, and that therefore it is simply impos- 
 sible to honour them. I think that there are not a few 
 children in our days who are disposed to take this ground 
 and to maintain as a principle — Our parents have a right 
 
126 TJie Fifth Commandment. 
 
 to just that measure of respect and affection from us, which 
 they can claim on the ground of their inteUigence and 
 worth, no more and no less. 
 
 At first sight this looks reasonable enough. There is 
 very much to be said for that view of matters. How can 
 I love anyone who has very little in her to love, simply 
 because she happens to be my mother ? How can I res- 
 pect any one in whom there is nothing to respect, simply 
 because he happens to be my father ? The movements 
 of the heart and the decisions of the judgment are and 
 must be altogether independent of mere relationship, and 
 are determined by the character and power of the people 
 with whom we have to do. 
 
 That looks very philosophical no doubt. But, my phi- 
 losophic young friend, how would it have fared with yoic 
 if your father and mother had had the same ideas about 
 your claims on them ? You want your parents to stand 
 on the same ground as other men and women, and to be 
 loved and respected according to their personal merits, 
 just as if they had no natural relationship to you ; what 
 would have happened if they had been equally philoso- 
 phical and impartial, and if they had given you only as 
 much affection and care as you seemed to deserve or as 
 you claimed on the ground of your helplessness ; if, in 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 12/ 
 
 short, they had justified themselves in ignoring any special 
 obligation to love you and to care for you, beyond the 
 obligation which would have rested on them to love and 
 care for any child that happened to come into their hands ? 
 We were not very loveable — some of us — I suspect 
 when we were children. All of us were not angelically 
 beautiful. To nearly every one but our parents we were, 
 for the most part, I imagine, very uninteresting and, per- 
 haps, very troublesome. But, happily, our fathers and 
 mothers thought us wonderful. . Surprising as it seems to 
 some of us, I have very Httle doubt that they were under 
 the delusion that we were exceptionally good-looking, and 
 that we were singularly bright and clever. They found 
 a grace in our movements, a music in our voice, a mt in 
 our childish impertinences, which no one but themselves 
 ever discovered. We were nearly all heroes once, and 
 some of us, perhaps, were saints. The honest truth about 
 most of us was, that our faces were very plain, that our in- 
 tellects were very dull, that our tempers were far from 
 amiable, that we were fretful and selfish. But our parents "^ 
 loved us because we were their own children, and their 
 love transfigured us. We were as ugly as a rain cloud, 
 but the light and glory of their affection shone on us, and 
 to them at least we were clothed with a rainbow. That is 
 
128 . The Fifth Comrnandmeiit 
 
 the only way by which parents come to endure the care 
 and self-sacrifice and suffering which children bring upon 
 them. There is an instinct in their hearts which makes 
 them lavish affection on the most uninteresting, which 
 blinds them to the greatest weaknesses and the most 
 flagrant faults, which enables them to cling even to the 
 profligate and the scoundrel with a love which will not be 
 thrown off, but becomes sometimes only the more intense 
 as there is less to deserve it. 
 
 A mother does not argue that it is possible to love only 
 the loveable child; a father does not say that his boys 
 and girls can claim from him only what their worth 
 merits ; the whole structure of society would fall to pieces 
 if philosophical folly of that sort were alleged in defence 
 of deficiency of paternal affection; and to allege it in 
 defence of the deficiency of filial affection is equally 
 perilous. You must love your parents and honour them 
 because they are yours ; and the absence of that love and 
 honour should be confessed as a sin. 
 
 I find that there is no steady proportion between the 
 real substantial virtues and good sense of parents, and the 
 honour and affection with which their children regard 
 them. It is not the best fathers and mothers whose 
 children care for them most. There are men whose boys 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 129 
 
 and girls idolise them, but who are destitute of all solid 
 claim to respect. They have a way with them which 
 charms and fascinates. Their temperament is generally 
 strongly sympathetic. There are gushes of kindness 
 now and then which intoxicate their children's hearts. 
 Usually they are entertaining talkers, and they give their 
 children many a merry hour by their fun. But there are 
 men of this kind who are absolutely without self-restraint ; 
 they drink and are wild when the drink is in them. Not 
 through their misfortune but through their fault, their 
 children are ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-educated. They 
 deny themselves no indulgence for their children's 
 sake; are, in reality, spite of all their good humour, 
 intensely selfish ; and sacrifice the happiness and well- 
 being of all who are dependent on them to their 
 vices ; but I repeat, that I have known such men whom 
 their children regarded with a passionate affection, 
 and with an admiration which was almost blind to all 
 their sins. On the other hand there are men who, 
 simply for their children's sake, spare no labour, refuse to 
 themselves the most innocent pleasures ; men who have 
 their tempers and their passions under strong control; 
 who never say a harsh word or do an unjust act ; men 
 whose children, as the result of tlieir virtue and prudence, 
 
 K 
 
130 The Fifth Commandment, 
 
 are surrounded in childhood with every comfort, and are 
 educated for an honourable and successful life, for whom 
 their children seem to have no affection at all. 
 
 I do not mean to say that this is inexplicable. The 
 men who are loved have something in them which is 
 loveable, spite of their vices ; and in the men who are 
 not loved there are some grave deficiencies, spite of their 
 virtues. 
 
 But what I mean to say is that, by and bye, some of 
 you will have a very different estimate of your father and 
 mother from that which you have now ; and you will see 
 that even where much that is captivating and charming is 
 absent, there may be a noble and truly heroic devotion 
 to you and to your highest well-being ; and the memory 
 of this, will make you shed scalding tears that you did not 
 recognise it sooner. Aye, and if you had that true filial 
 affection, which your coldness, or your selfishness, or your 
 vanity stifles and represses, you would see it now. 
 
 There are no doubt certain circumstances in our social 
 condition which greatly interfere with the true and ideal 
 relations between children and parents. Here in Birming- 
 ham, among a very large proportion of our people, the 
 absolute dependence of a child on his parents often 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 131 
 
 ceases at a very early age. Wages are earned at fifteen 
 or sixteen which make a foolish boy and girl think that 
 they owe almost nothing to their father and mother. 
 They are too young to understand their long arrears of 
 obligation \ and as soon as they have the few shillings 
 a week which cover the cost of their food and clothes, 
 they seem to forget that their parents are anything 
 more to them than other people. If there are any of 
 you who are pained by seeing in your own children 
 folly of that sort, take comfort in this, that unless 
 they are thoroughly bad, it will pass by before long; 
 their unnatural conduct is owing partly to the un- 
 fortunate but inevitable circumstances which have caused 
 their dependence on you to cease before the right time. 
 As to the children themselves, I do not know that anything 
 that I can say to them is likely to make them ashamed 
 of their folly. In a few years more they will have sense 
 enough to be astonished at it ; for the present it must be 
 borne with. 
 
 But there is another aspect of our social condition 
 which is still more serious and which leads to more 
 permanent mischief. You know that during the last 
 seventy or eighty years, there has been a great 
 loosening of the strong and permanent distinctions which 
 
 K 2 
 
132 The Fifth Commandment, 
 
 once existed between the different classes of society. 
 This change has been brought about very much in con- 
 sequence of the effect produced in the social condition 
 of nearly all European nations by the great French Revo- 
 lution. In its immediate political aims the Revolution 
 appeared to be a failure. The Republican organisation 
 of France disappeared after a few stormy and terrible 
 years, and the Empire succeeded. But the spirit of the 
 Revolution was Democratic rather than RepubHcan. 
 It was a violent effort to destroy, not the mere political 
 institutions of France, but its ancient social order. In 
 this effort it was successful, and its success extended far 
 beyond the boundaries of France. Napoleon, even when 
 he had destroyed political liberty, was still " the armed 
 soldier of democracy." The principle of the Revolution^ 
 that all careers should be open to talent, that the acci- 
 dents of fortune must give place to the indefeasible rights 
 of genius, he adopted as his own. In the middle ages, 
 the chances were a million to one that a man would die in 
 the same position in which he was born. The son of the 
 farm labourer became a farm labourer ; the son of a car- 
 penter or a smith became a carpenter or a smith ; the son 
 of a merchant became a merchant. The Church was the 
 only democratic institution in Europe. If he became a 
 
TJtc Fifth Commandment 133 
 
 priest the child of a mechanic might become a prince 
 and receive the homage of nobles and kings. 
 
 All this has passed away, if not altogether, yet to such 
 an extent that nothing is more common, especially in great 
 manufacturing towns, than to see men rise in twenty or 
 five-and-twenty years from poverty to considerable wealth. 
 With increased wealth there comes a corresponding change 
 in what is called a man's " social position," a change which 
 is not always for the happiness of those whose triumphs 
 provoke the envy or the admiration of their less successful 
 friends. 
 
 The manufacturer who began life in the workshop, 
 but has had the skill and the sagacity necessary to 
 create a large business and build up a considerable fortune, 
 sends his boys to the university, gives his girls not, perhaps, 
 a very good education, but the best he knows how, and 
 at least it costs him a great deal of money; and these 
 young gentlemen and ladies, who owe all their real culture 
 or artificial refinement to the virtue and energy of their 
 parents sometimes find that their father and mother are 
 hardly the kind of people with whom it is pleasant to asso- 
 ciate. Their grammar is far from being immaculate ; they 
 are a little confused about the use of their H's ; some of 
 their personal habits are not perfectly elegant ; they make 
 
134 TJ^^ Fifth Commandment. 
 
 the oddest blunders in company, blunders which reveal 
 the obscurity of their origin ; and the young people are 
 very apt to give themselves airs and to be a little ashamed 
 of the old folks and to treat them with rudeness and con- 
 tempt. And yet in many cases every sensible man would 
 infinitely prefer to talk to the father than to the sons, to the 
 mother than to the daughters. With the young people, there 
 is often nothing more than a merely conventional refinement, 
 very excellent in its way, but not worth very much, and they 
 have not even the sense to see how much more real vigour 
 of intellect and character there is in their parents than in 
 themselves. And even when the old people are rather 
 foolish, vulgarly vain of their success, ignorant of every- 
 thing except the way to make money and to keep it, 
 surely their children, at least, though wiser and more 
 intelligent than they, should loyally cover the follies and 
 weakness of their parents and remember where all their 
 own advantages have come from. 
 
 And in other ranks of life it is necessary to remember 
 the same duty. There are some of you whose parents 
 -were little tradesmen or working-people. They kept 
 you at school long enough to give you a much better 
 education than they received themselves. • They could 
 not have done this without great self-denial ; they 
 
The Fifth Coinmaiidment. 135 
 
 would not have done it if they had not loved you 
 well. For you to turn against them the very advantages 
 which you have derived from their virtuous and sagacious 
 solicitude for your welfare, to take every opportunity of 
 humiliating and annoying them by the display of your 
 superiority, is one of the meanest, most graceless, and 
 most dastardly vices of which human nature can be guilty. 
 
 There is one vice or folly of young people condemned 
 by this precept which is common to all progressive con- 
 ditions of society. The new generation always thinks 
 itself much wiser than the old, and is apt to treat the old 
 contemptuously. Nothing can be more natural than this 
 conviction ; nothing, very often, can be more false. 
 
 No doubt we are making way in very many directions, 
 although the great conditions of all our progress were 
 achieved for us by ages which have long gone by, and the 
 triumphs of our own time are insignificant compared with 
 the triumphs of earlier generations. Mr Disraeli, in that 
 curiously characteristic preface which he has just written 
 to his Collected Novels, has said some things of which it 
 is very necessary that we should be reminded. He says 
 very justly that the invention of written language was a 
 very much more wonderful thing than the invention of the 
 electric telegraph, and that the original contrivance of 
 
130 The Fifth Comniand^neni. 
 
 some of the commonest conveniences of civilised life, 
 which are now known to every race that is not posi- 
 tively barbarous, was far more remarkable than many 
 of those discoveries which have filled our own age 
 with such unmeasured self-admiration. In our boundless 
 self-conceit v/e forget that there was splendid genius 
 among people who were ignorant of physical science, and 
 would have been confounded by those applications of scien- 
 tific discovery with which we are familiar. On the whole I 
 think that it was a considerably greater achievement to write 
 the Platonic dialogues than to invent a steam engine, to 
 construct the AristoteHan Logic than to pierce the 
 Isthmus of Suez. I think that John Milton was at least 
 as wondeiful a person as any modern scientific discoverer, 
 and that Shakespeare was something more than the equal 
 of any of the scientific idols of our time. I, at least, 
 would rather have been able to ™te Comus or Hamlet 
 than see my name attached to the most brilliant paper in 
 the transactions of the Royal Society. 
 
 Our fathers and our grandfathers were not all fools. 
 The sun did not begin to shine when you and I came 
 into the world, and though I trust that wisdom will not 
 die with this generation, depend upon it — wisdom was not 
 born with us. 
 
The Fifth CommandmenU 137 
 
 The wonderful ease with which some young people dis- 
 pose of all the gravest questions which can tax the powers 
 of man, the frankness with which they play the part of 
 Omniscience, the swift decision with which they pro- 
 nounce on the errors and prejudices, and narrow tradi- 
 tional creeds of their elders is infinitely amusing, and 
 might, perhaps, irritate older people if we did not remem- 
 ber that in our time and when life was fresh with us, we 
 were very much disposed to the same folly. But it is surely 
 probable that men and women who have lived in the 
 world twenty or thirty years longer than yourselves have 
 found out some things worth knowing, of which you know 
 nothing ; if you are silly enough to dispense with all 
 their experience, you are tolerably certain to suffer for your 
 pains. Anyhow, if you have any modesty, or any religion, 
 " honour your father and mother" thus far at least, — do not 
 express habitual contempt for what you, perhaps rashly, 
 suppose to be their ignorance and their prejudices, and 
 sometimes entertain the suspicion that if you knew 
 a little more of the world you might possibly see in 
 them a power and a wisdom which, as yet, you have not 
 the sagacity to discover. 
 
 There is a practical difficulty which sometimes occurs — 
 
138 The Fifth Commaiidment. 
 
 it occurs, indeed, very often among the young people of 
 this Church. How is a religious son or daughter to act 
 towards an irreligious parent ? 
 
 To answer that question in detail would require a long 
 discourse. Circumstances sometimes make the duty of 
 a child very perplexing. Wlien a father comes home 
 drunk three times a week, violently abuses his 
 daughter who opens the door for him half dead \vith 
 weariness and fright, curses her, sometimes strikes her, 
 drinks half her wages and nearly all his own, what ought 
 she to do ? The principle which determines her duty is 
 clear. The obligation to honour her father is not relaxed. 
 You are not released from a debt because the man to 
 whom you owe it is a drunkard or a profligate ; and so irre- 
 ligion, or even vice in a parent, cannot release a child 
 from filial duty. The application of the principle to par- 
 ticular cases is, I acknowledge, sometimes extremely 
 difficult. Parental cruelty occasionally becomes intoler- 
 able. For a child to remain in some houses is to suffer 
 perpetual misery. But the noble and Christian course, as 
 long as your strength is not utterly exhausted, is to manifest 
 the Charity which " endureth all things." If your religion 
 makes you more sensitive to the vices which disgrace the 
 character of your parents, it should also enable you to bear 
 
The Fifth Commandment, 139 
 
 their ill-treatment with more meekness and patience. The 
 consciousness of your own sins should make you more 
 merciful to theirs. 
 
 The case of children who have grown up to manhood 
 and womanhood, but who continue to live with their 
 parents, gives rise to another set of difficulties. It does 
 not seem easy for parents to understand that their children 
 have become men and women. It does not seem easy 
 for grown-up children to remember that their parents are 
 their parents still. 
 
 This seems clear — I am speaking to the children, not 
 to the parents — the house is not yours but theirs. Yet 
 there are some young men and women who appear to 
 think that they have a right, because they are grown-up, 
 to disregard all their parents' wishes and regulations ; to 
 rise at what hour in the morning they like, to invite what 
 company pleases them, and to come home at any hour of 
 the night. I admit that parents ought to give considerable 
 liberty to children when they are children no longer. But 
 how much liberty the children should take is altogether 
 another question. While you are dependent upon your 
 parents it is ungracious, and worse than ungracious, to 
 assert independence. The true solution of your difficul- 
 ties will be found in acting as though you were living in the 
 
140 The Fifth Commaftdment 
 
 house of a friend. Show the same consideration to your 
 parents that you would show to the master and mistress 
 of any house in which you happened to be a guest. 
 Doing this, you will claim less freedom than your parents, 
 if they were wise, would give you ; but by claiming less 
 than they would wisely give, you will probably obtain 
 more than by claiming all that you might reasonably 
 expect ; and, anyhow, you will discharge your filial duty. 
 
 Among the Jewish people there were special reasons for 
 cultivating and maintaining reverence for parents. The 
 machinery for the maintenance of public order and for 
 the administration of civil and criminal justice was ex- 
 tremely simple. The national polity rested on the basis of 
 the Family. Parents were virtually mayors and magistrates; 
 their absolute power of putting their children to death 
 was limited by the Mosaic Law, but death was the penalty 
 for the wanton and persevering defiance of parental 
 authority, just as death is the penalty among ourselves for 
 the crime of high treason, and for similar reasons. Among 
 a people with the social organization of the Jews, especially 
 in the early periods of their history, the resolute assertion 
 of the authority of the parent was necessary to the security 
 of the State. 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 141 
 
 In the absence of a rich and various popular literature 
 and of the complicated institutions of our western Hfe, the 
 transmission of the accumulated knowledge and experience 
 of former ages, the gradual development of civilization, 
 and the maintenance of those moral traditions, which are 
 more powerful in their influence than any written laws, 
 depended far more largely than among ourselves upon the 
 vigour and sagacity with which parents governed and in- 
 structed their households. Parents were the religious 
 teachers of their children, and if they neglected their 
 functions, or if their teaching was listened to without due 
 reverence, there was very little to prevent the whole nation 
 from drifting back to heathenism. 
 
 These considerations explain the special promise 
 attached to the Fifth Commandment. It depended on 
 the strength of the spirit of filial obedience whether the 
 State should be preserved from disorder. If parental 
 authority came to be generally disregarded, the whole 
 structure of Society would be dissolved. The discharge 
 of filial duty was the condition of the permanence of 
 national existence. " Honour thy father and thy mother 
 that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord 
 thy God giveth thee." 
 
 Bur it is still true that a due respect for the judgment 
 
1 42 The Fifth Commandment, 
 
 and traditions of the Past is necessary for the peace and 
 stability of nations. That nation will be exposed to con- 
 
 \ tinual peril which has no reverence for its ancestors. The 
 political and social institutions which exist among any 
 people are intimately related to their intellectual and 
 moral life, and to the circumstances of their material con 
 dition ; and as the economical condition of any genera- 
 tion can hardly ever be absolutely unlike the economical 
 condition of the generation which preceded it, as its in- 
 tellectual and moral life can never be absolutely new, it is 
 always unsafe to make any sudden and fundamental 
 changes in the political and social organisation of the 
 State. The life of nations changes gradually ; the reform 
 and modification of national institutions should also be 
 gradual. We ourselves were created by the Past. Intel- 
 lectually, morally, religiously, we have been formed by its 
 authority and influence; we cannot, even if we would, 
 dissolve our relationship to it, and, therefore, the Insti- 
 tutions under which our fathers lived, must be, within 
 certain limits, the best and safest institutions for ourselves. 
 We never feel that we can dispense with the experience 
 
 T" of former times except in the region of political and reli- 
 gious speculation. We are content to learn from our 
 fathers how to build houses, to cultivate the ground, and 
 
The Fifth Commandment 143 
 
 tQ _steer s hips. For what improvements we are able to 
 make in house-building, agriculture, and navigation we are 
 grateful ; but we know that we have learnt more than we 
 liave discovered. If in such things as these we determined 
 to neglect all that the experience of the past has verified 
 and to start afresh for ourselves, we should impoverish our 
 jesources, and render all real progress impossible. It is 
 equally foolish to suppose that the Past has nothing to 
 teach us in relation to political wisdom, social organisation, 
 methods of intellectual culture, and religious truth. 
 
 True Liberalism does not consist in the incessant 
 attempt to reconstruct from its foundations the political 
 constitution of the State, or to introduce sudden and 
 revolutionary changes into the relations which exist be- 
 tween the various classes of society; but in working 
 patiently and quietly towards a noble ideal of national 
 justice, unity, intelligence, and freedom, by the gradual 
 modification of existing social and political arrangements, 
 and by the wise and persevering use of all those means 
 by which such changes shall be wrought in the life of the 
 nation as shall render a more perfect national organization 
 at once possible and inevitable. K I thought of the Past 
 with contempt I should think of the Future with despair. 
 Among ourselves, as among the Jews, a just reverence for 
 
144 1^^^ Fifth Commandment. 
 
 /V ancestors is one great condition of the security and 
 permanence of national life. 
 
 The promise, as it stands in the Commandment, is a 
 ^ promise of prolonged national stability ; St. Paul, slightly 
 • cli changing its form, makes it a promise of long life to indi- 
 viduals. Common experience justifies the change. Apart 
 from any " special providence," reverence in childhood for 
 the authority of parents is usually followed by a virtuous 
 manhood, and a virtuous manhood is likely to be crowned 
 with an honourable old age. Disregard of parental advice, 
 and disobedience to parental authority, commonly lead to 
 a life of vice, misery, and shame, and to a premature grave. 
 
 There is one consideration which may induce us to obey 
 this Commandment that does not apply to the other nine. 
 The time will probably come when it will be no longer 
 possible for us to obey it. Other moral laws we can 
 continue to keep to the end of our days, but, in the course 
 of nature, our parents usually die before us, and if we 
 are guilty of withholding from them in our youth the 
 honour which they have a right to claim, repentance may 
 come too late. 
 
 Nor do any of us understand, before the calamity 
 arrives, liow great and how irreparable is our loss when 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 145 
 
 our parents are taken away. Other relationships may be 
 formed, but they cannot altogether fill up the void. If we 
 are successful in life, success loses more than half its joy 
 and triumph if our parents are not alive to witness it. 
 The happiness of Joseph was not complete till he was able 
 to say to his brethren " Ye shall tell m^ father of all my 
 glory in Egypt, and all that ye have seen." In our sorrow, 
 and even in our sin, our parents cling to us to the last. 
 Theirs is a love on which we can rely when all other love 
 fails us. While they live, we are always sure that even our 
 worst faults will not wholly deprive us of human affection, 
 and that in our worst miseries — miseries brought upon us 
 by our own folly and sin — we shall not be altogether for- 
 saken by human consolation and sympathy. 
 
 But the Divine compassion is still more enduring than 
 theirs, and the Divine love still more magnanimous. We 
 may weary even a father's mercy, and a mother's de- 
 votion and forbearance may be at last exliausted, but 
 even then — when we have worn out the constancy of the 
 strongest human affection, and changed the tenderest 
 human love into bitterness — ^we may still turn with confi- 
 dence to Him whose " compassions fail not" and whose 
 " mercy endureth for ever." " When my father and my 
 mother forsake me then the Lord will take me up." 
 
 L 
 
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 " Thou shalt not kill." — Exodus xx. 13. 
 
 The crime forbidden in this commandment is one on 
 the magnitude of which it is hardly necessary that a 
 Christian preacher should insist. In this country murder 
 is comparatively rare, and, apart from religious motives 
 altogether, we regard it with horror. 
 
 It was not always so. It is not so everywhere even 
 now. St. Peter, ™ting to Christian men, says, " Let none 
 of you suffer as a murderer or as a thief" Among the 
 Jewish people, to whom these commandments were origi- 
 nally given, several generations of slavery, the absence 
 of those traditions which control the life of a people long 
 accustomed to a just and strong government, the fierce- 
 ness of passion common to half-civiUsed races, must have 
 made human life very insecure, and it was necessary to 
 give this Commandment a conspicuous place among their 
 laws. 
 
 The legislation of Moses — I am referring now to his 
 
The Sixth Commandment, 147 
 
 civil and criminal legislation — was, of course, very imper- 
 fect if judged by the circumstances and necessities of a 
 nation like our own. But all legislation must recognise 
 the habits and traditions of the people for whom it is in- 
 tended. No system of law, no judicial arrangements, can 
 be pronounced good in the abstract ; they are good 
 just in proportion as they secure the firm and prompt and 
 inexpensive administration of justice ; and the methods 
 by which this end is to be obtained must vary with the 
 varying conditions of national communities, their social 
 institutions, the number of the population, their intelli- 
 gence and morality. Our own legal and criminal system, 
 though it may be in many respects much more perfect 
 than that which Moses gave to the Jews, would have been 
 utterly useless to such a race as that which he organised 
 into a nation. 
 
 It may appear to us to be a very extraordinary and 
 monstrous law, that when murder had been committed, the 
 nearest male relative of the murdered man should have 
 been required to pursue the criminal and take his life. 
 We believe that the infliction of legal penalties for crime 
 should belong to appointed officers of justice \ although, by 
 the way, we have not carried that principle out so far as to 
 have a public prosecutor. But Moses found this institu- 
 
 L2 
 
148 The Sixth Commandment, 
 
 tion already in existence. It was only by some such 
 method as this, that murder could possibly be punished 
 among a race which, had not been accustomed to public 
 tribunals, to police, to judges, and to executioners. 
 
 In the old patriarchal times, the traditions of which 
 continued to exist among the Jewish people, the responsi- 
 bility of maintaining the laws which are necessary to the 
 existence of human society even in its simplest form, 
 could not be vested exclusively in any separate class : the 
 nearest male relative was held responsible for avenging 
 the death of his kinsman. This custom Moses did not 
 abolish ; he was satisfied with imposing upon it certain 
 salutary limitations and restraints. He established Cities 
 of Refuge to which a man who had killed another might 
 flee, and in which he might be safe, if he had been guilty 
 only of what we call justifiable or accidental homicide and 
 not of murder. With the details of this law I need not 
 trouble you; but there were two or three remarkable 
 provisions in it. 
 j^ The altar of God itself was to be no sanctuary for a 
 man who was an actual murderer. The awful sanctity 
 which was associated with the immediate presence of 
 the invisible King of the nation, was to be no protec- 
 tion against the penalty of this supreme crime— a 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 149 
 
 principle which might have saved Europe, in comparatively 
 recent times, from great and shameful disorders. The 
 safety of the state, the repression of grave offences — this 
 was the principle of the Mosaic law — must not be im- 
 perilled under cover of the sanctity of religion. 
 
 There was another remarkable provision in the Mosaic 
 law. It was the custom among some eastern races to 
 permit the avenger of the crime of murder to accept k 
 compensation in money instead of inflicting death on the 
 criminal. The obvious result of this was to give license 
 to the revengeful passions of the rich, while it left the 
 poor exposed to the extreme penalty of their crimes. 
 Moses, therefore, absolutely forbade the taking of satis- 
 faction for the life of a murderer, and insisted that " he 
 shall surely be put to death." This is another principle 
 which might well have been recognised more fully in 
 modern legislation. The recognition of it would make 
 our administration of justice more fair and equal. 
 There are many offences which are punished by a fine, or, 
 in default of pa)Tnent, by imprisonment. To a rich man 
 the fine is practically no punishment at all ; to the poor 
 man it may be a very grave punishment, even if he is able 
 to pay; and if he is not, the alternative of being im- 
 prisoned for seven days, fourteen days, or a month, is a 
 
ISO TJie Sixth Commandment. 
 
 penalty out of all proportion to that which is inflicted on 
 the rich for the same offence. 
 
 There is a third provision of the Mosaic Law which is 
 worth mentioning, "If an ox gore a man or woman that 
 they die ) then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh 
 shall not be eaten ; but the owner of the ox shall be quit. 
 But if the ox were wont to push with his horns in time 
 past, and it hath been testified to the owner, and he hath 
 not kept him in, but that he hath killed a man or a 
 woman ; the ox shall be stoned and the owner thereof 
 shall he put to deaths 
 
 Moses, recognising the possibility that the nearest male 
 relative of theperson who had been killed by an infuriated ox 
 might shrink from inflicting death on the owner, permitted 
 a pecuniary compensation, the amount of which, except 
 in the case of a slave, was apparently to be determined at 
 the will of the avenger. 
 
 But if an ox was known to be vicious, the owner was 
 clearly to be regarded as a murderer ; if any one was killed, 
 through his criminal carelessness, he might be put to 
 death; and though it was possible for him to escape the 
 capital penalty, the amount of the compensation to be paid 
 was to be fixed by the relative of the victim. If Moses 
 had to regulate our legislation in reference to railway 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 151 
 
 accidents he would put it on altogeher a new basis. 
 If half a dozen people were killed and a score seriously 
 injured through the mail running into a goods train, 
 and Moses found that the engine driver who missed the 
 signal had been on his engine twelve or fourteen hours, 
 or that the pointsman who turned the mail into the goods 
 siding had been kept at his post for, perhaps, a still longer 
 period, I cannot help thinking that managers and 
 directors would stand a chance of having a much sharper 
 punishment than they commonly receive now. 
 
 And if criminal carelessness which might be fatal to life 
 was punished by Moses with death, I think that fraudulent 
 acts which are certain to injure the health and perhaps 
 the life of the community, would have been punished by 
 him not less severely. He would certainly have approved 
 the sentence under which a few months ago a large farmer, 
 greatly to his own astonishment and the astonishment of 
 his friends, was put in prison for sending diseased meat to 
 market ; only I think that the old Jevv'ish legislator would 
 have inflicted a still heavier punishment, — a few years' penal 
 service instead of a month or two's imprisonment. 
 Chemists, who adulterate the drugs on which the rescue 
 of life depends — the rescue of the life not only of ordinary 
 members of the community like ourselves, whom also 
 
152 The Sixth Commandment 
 
 Moses would have protected, but of men of science, poets, 
 and statesmen, whose death would be a calamity to the 
 nation, and to the world, — would I think, have been made 
 responsible by him for the death of those who perished 
 through their fault; and if they were not stoned or hung 
 for murder, which I think would have been possible, a 
 criminal penalty so heavy would have been inflicted on 
 them, and they would have been branded with such 
 infamy, that other evil-disposed persons would have feared 
 to repeat the crime. 
 
 The methods of this ancient legislation may be very 
 defective, but I imagine that they were the best possible 
 in the actual circumstances of the Jewish race, and some 
 of its principles might with advantage find their way into 
 our own criminal law. 
 
 How it has come to pass that in this country and in 
 most other Christian states, the crime of murder, in its 
 gross and violent form, has become so uncommon, is an 
 inquiry which deserves pursuing. 
 
 It is to be ascribed partly, no doubt, to the vigour and 
 equity with which for many generations our criminal law 
 has been administered. Just laws executed fairly and 
 with unrelaxing energy, do very much to educate the 
 
The Sixth Commandment. \ i^^ 
 
 moral sense and to form the moral habits of a nation'. 
 And yet no laws can maintain their authority unless they 
 are in harmony with national sentiment. Whatever 
 penalties you threaten against crimes, you cannot repress 
 them, if the crimes are sheltered by a popular passion, or 
 if your penalties are not generally recognised as just. A 
 few years ago our tribunals were altogether unable to 
 prevent the shooting of landlords and their agents in 
 Ireland, because vast numbers of the Irish people 
 believed, truly or falsely, that they were suffering great 
 injustice, and every Irish cabin gave shelter to the 
 criminal, and every Irish peasant was in a conspiracy to 
 protect him from the law. At the beginning of this 
 century it was a capital offence to commit forgery or 
 steal a horse, but hanging men for forgery and for horse- 
 stealing did not stop the crimes j the nation refused to 
 regard these offences as deserving of death. 
 
 The ultimate foundation of the security of human life 
 in any country, lies in reverence for man, however 
 that reverence may be produced. Respect for what is- 
 called the sacredness of human life requires this as 
 its basis and root. Only as a nation comes to feel that 
 man has something m)rsterious and infinite about him : 
 something which separates him, by a distance which can- 
 
154 ^-^^^ Sixth Coniinandi7tent. 
 
 not be measured, from all living creatures in the world 
 besides, will man's life be more sacred than theirs. 
 Wherever, therefore, the wonderful dignity of human 
 nature is not recognized, and just in proportion as it is 
 not recognized, life will be insecure, and murder will be 
 committed whenever passion becomes violent. 
 
 Hence in barbarous countries, where nearly all that 
 distinguishes man from the brutes disappears, human life 
 is never sacred, and men are killed without compunction. 
 In countries where the institution of slavery exists — 
 countries where large numbers of men are regarded as the 
 mere property of their owners, living machines for the 
 creation of wealth — not only is the life of the slave insecure, 
 but there is a general insecurity of life, and crimes of 
 violence are certain to be common. For the same 
 reason such crimes are frequent and will continue to be 
 frequent among the rongh and neglected classes of the 
 most civilised states. Elevate them by the influence of 
 religion, or even by the influence of education, make them 
 capable of feeling that there is a greatness in man, which 
 in their ignorance they have not suspected, and you will 
 at once surround human life with new and invisible 
 defences — defences infmitely stronger than the most 
 righteous or terrible penalties of the law. And this 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 155 
 
 reverence for man is the true basis of the sixth command- 
 ment. It is because man is so great that he must not be 
 killed. 
 
 The ultimate principle of the law does not consist in 
 what is commonly called " the sacredness of human life," 
 but in the dignity and greatness of man, who was made in 
 the image of God, and whom it is therefore a kind of 
 sacrilege wantonly to destroy. 
 
 What is meant by the common phrase " the sacredness 
 of human life " it is not easy to understand. There are 
 many things which, for me, are more sacred than my life. 
 "The sacredness of life!" My loyalty to Christ is 
 infinitely more sacred. Rather than deny Him, I must 
 surrender myself to the most cruel death. The authority 
 of Truth is more sacred. I must die rather than abjure 
 a single article of my creed. Honesty is more sacred. 
 Rather than be guilty of the slightest fraud, I myself 
 must perish, and I must see those I love best perish too. 
 The moral, the intellectual, yes, and the physical well 
 being of my fellow men must be more sacred to me 
 than life. The philanthropist whose strength is 
 wasted and who comes to a premature grave through 
 the ardour of his devotion to the ^vretched and the 
 suffering, is honoured by all men; the scientific man 
 
156 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 » 
 
 who scorns danger in his enthusiastic investigation of the 
 mysteries of nature and who perishes in his pursuit, is not 
 a criminal but a hero ; the physician who at the voice of 
 duty remains among a people stricken with pestilence, and 
 dies himself through his fidelity to them, — who condemns 
 him for being indifferent to " the sacredness of life ?" — the 
 hearts of all men confess that he is faithful to what is 
 more sacred still. It is not man's life which is sacred biit 
 man himself, and if, for the maintenance of the true worth 
 and dignity of man, it is necessary that life should be surren- 
 dered, it must be surrendered without shrinking. Man's life, 
 I repeat, is precious only for the sake of what man is, and if 
 the preservation of life requires the sacrifice of all that 
 gives to man his true greatness and glory, there can be no 
 hesitation as to what our choice should be. My life is 
 not so sacred as myself. 
 
 The principle which requires me to sacrifice my own 
 life when it cannot be retained without the loss of all that 
 constitutes the honour and greatness of human nature, 
 requires me to consent to the sacrifice of the lives of other 
 men when the same alternative is presented to me. Thefe 
 are objects for which we must choose to die ourselves 
 when it is in our power to live, and there are objects for 
 which we must be willing to surrender other men to death. 
 
The Sixth Conimandment.^ 157. 
 
 There are some persons who, with what I cannot but 
 regard as a rabbinical habit of mind, insist that this Com- 
 mandment forbids the taking of human life under any 
 circumstances. They argue that the words of the Com- 
 inandment are plain and unambiguous : — " Thou shalt 
 not kill ;" — the law is direct, absolute, peremptory. Is 
 our country invaded by hostile armies, and are we pre- 
 paring to repel them ? They vehemently protest ; they 
 incessantly reiterate the Commandment " Thou shalt not 
 kill." Has a murderer been caught red-handed, and is the 
 judge about to pronounce a capital sentence? They tell 
 the judge that he is about to repeat the crime which he 
 condemns, and appeal to the law " Thou shalt not kill." 
 
 I remember making speeches of that kind in Debating 
 Societies, I am afraid to say how many years ago — 
 speeches which I hoped w^ere eloquent, and which I felt 
 sure were unanswerable. I suppose that other lads 
 sometimes make speeches of the same sort now. 
 
 But if the Commandment is to be interpreted on these 
 rigid and rabbinical principles, if we are to accept Portia's 
 interpretation of Shylock's bond as the model and perfec- 
 tion of exegetical method, w^e shall be in some difficulty. 
 " Thou shalt not kill :" — does it mean that we are never 
 to put a man to death in any circumstances, to punish any 
 
158 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 crime, to avert any intolerable evil ? Yes, some of you 
 reply, for there is no limitation or exception to the 
 Commandment, expressed or implied. But, in that 
 case, what right have you to put a limit to it? Do 
 you tell me that you put no limit? Well then, the 
 Commandment must prevent you from killing an ox, 
 as well as a man ; if you must not kill at all, you 
 must not kill a sheep for food, nor poison a mad dog, 
 nor shoot a wild beast. The Commandment does not 
 read " Thou shalt not kill a man," but " Thou shalt not 
 kill." As soon as you put any limitation to it, you must 
 be prepared to listen to those who put a different limi- 
 tation from your own. By the eternal principles of moral 
 law the life of a murderer may, perhaps, be as justly de- 
 prived of the shelter of this precept as the life of a rattle- 
 snake ; and it may be as right and as necessary to destroy 
 a hostile army, in order to save the life of a nation, as to 
 shoot down a tiger, in order to save the life of an 
 individual man. 
 
 That the Commandment was intended to forbid the in- 
 fliction of capital punishment is inconceivable ; the Mosaic 
 Law itself inflicted death for murder. Sabbath-breaking, 
 and the selling of a Jew into slavery. The root of the 
 Commandment lies in the greatness of human nature ; 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 159 
 
 man is invested with a supernatural and Divine glory ; to 
 maintain the greatness of man it may sometimes be neces- 
 sary that the murderer, who in his malice or impetuous 
 passion forgets the mystery and wonderfulness of the nature 
 of his victim, should be put to death. Whether in all con- 
 ceivable conditions of human society the infliction of 
 death for murder is expedient, is a question which I 
 have no occasion to discuss. 
 
 That it was expedient and necessary in the condition of 
 the Jewish people, when the Mosaic institutions were 
 established, is certain ; and it may be maintained that 
 this tremendous vindication of the sanctity of human 
 nature cannot be dispensed with in any nation which has 
 not reached a high degree of civilisation and morality. 
 Its absolute and unconditional abolition in any condition 
 of society seems hardly practicable. You say Inflict on 
 the murderer the heaviest possible penalty short of death; 
 imprison him for life, and, without treating him with 
 positive cruelty, subject him to a severe discipline. But, 
 suppose, as sometimes happens, that after he is imprisoned 
 he kills a gaoler, what will you do then? You have 
 already inflicted the heaviest penalty, short of death, for 
 his original oflence; you have exhausted your resources of 
 punishment; for the new crime there is no new penalty. 
 
l6o- The Sixth Commandment, 
 
 ' But, dismissing considerations of expediency, a nation 
 may well say, — We believe that man is akin to God, and 
 we will assert the dignity of man by inflicting on Murder 
 a penalty which shall be awful in its unique terror ; other 
 offences may be punished by other and inferior sentences; 
 but he who forgets that his fellow man is something more 
 than a brute, shall be swept away into infinite darkness ; 
 he has committed an offence which human laws cannot 
 adequately punish ; he shall be sent swiftly to account 
 for his crime before a higher and more august tribunal 
 than ours. This is the very argument of the ancient law: 
 " Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be 
 shed : for in the image of God made He man." 
 
 If I were lecturing on theoretical ethics, I should now 
 proceed to show how the principle of this Commandment 
 justifies governments, on the one hand, in inflicting death 
 for treason and crushing rebellion by force of arms ; and, 
 on the other hand, justifies an oppressed and injured 
 nation in resorting to civil war to rid itself of unrighteous 
 and tyrannical rulers ; but for us, these questions have 
 happily only an abstract interest, and I pass tliem by and 
 proceed to another question of a more immediately prac- 
 tical kind. 
 
The Sixth Commandment. i6i 
 
 Does the Commandment absolutely forbid War 
 between nations ? The awful tragedy which has filled the 
 heart of Europe with horror during the last three or four 
 months, will I trust do something, as long as it is vividly 
 remembered— though I am not sure that it will do very 
 much — to make nations and governments resolve, at 
 almost any price, to preserve mankind from a recurrence 
 of calamities so vast, and of such intolerable agonies. 
 The moral influence of a great war on both the victorious 
 and the vanquished, is more terrible than its physical 
 sufferings — more terrible than the famine inflicted on 
 inoffensive peasants and citizens ; than the tortures of the 
 wounded ; than the dying anguish of the slain ; than the 
 desolation of women who are made widows, and of chil- 
 dren who become fatherless. 
 
 It must be granted that the existence of great armies 
 and navies, whether for attack or defence, is a visible and 
 terrible demonstration of the evil passions which still 
 retain their hold on the heart of Christendom. But is it 
 quite certain that armies should, therefore, be disbanded 
 and ships of war turned into merchantmen ? I think not. 
 While crime still exists in this country the police are 
 necessary, judges are necessary, gaols are necessary; 
 the existence of all these is a proof that evil passions and 
 
 M 
 
1 62 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 evil deeds still disgrace our national life, but while the 
 crimes continue the means of repressing them must not 
 be surrendered. And while nations or their rulers 
 continue capable of still more gigantic crimes than 
 individuals can commit, the means of repressing these too 
 must by a sad necessity be sustained. 
 
 Clearly the commandment was not intended to forbid 
 AVar. The nation to which it was given had a strict 
 military organization, constituted by the very authority 
 from which the Commandment came. The wars in which 
 it engaged were, many of them, conducted by men who 
 cannot be supposed to have been ignorant of what 
 the Commandment meant. Moses himself prayed to 
 God that the hosts of Israel might be victorious over their 
 enemies. 
 
 The principle of the Commandment must again be 
 appealed to. Man is made in the image of God ; has 
 received a life which invests him with mysterious greatness, 
 and therefore he must not be killed. But, for the un- 
 folding and development of that life, — for the existence of 
 all those virtues, and the free culture and exercise of all 
 those powers, which constitute the glory of human nature, — 
 it is necessary that nations should exist with their definite 
 territories, their social order, their systems of Lav/, their 
 
The Sixth Commaiidme7it. 163 
 
 recognized Governments. Man, without the institutions 
 of national life, would cease to be man. He would have 
 no true history. Break up all national organizations, and 
 he must drift back into a condition like that of the brutes. 
 The stability of national institutions is necessary for man 
 to be truly himself, for the development of his intelligence 
 and the formation and exercise of all moral virtues. 
 Hence the greatness which belongs to man himself passes 
 on to the nation, which is indispensable to man's dignity. 
 The nation too, is sacred and inviolable. To defend its 
 soil against invasion, to protect its independence, becomes 
 a duty which cannot be abandoned without exposing to 
 fatal injury that higher life which alone makes us superior 
 to the brutes around us. Wars of ambition, wars of re- 
 venge — these are crimes. Wars to avenge a real or fancied 
 insult, or to achieve or maintain political supremacy, are 
 crimes; wars originated to save a dynasty, or prolonged 
 to humiliate a vanquished enemy, are crimes. The Nations 
 — the Governments — which are guilty of them merit the 
 execration of the human race, and will be visited with the 
 righteous judgments of God. But the moral sense of the 
 purest and noblest of mankind has sanctioned and 
 honoured the courage and heroism which repel by force 
 of arms an assault on a nation's integrity, and the great 
 
 M 2 
 
164 The Sixth Cominandmcnt. 
 
 principle which underUes this Commandment sanctions 
 and honours them too. 
 
 The greatness of man is the uhimate principle of tlie 
 law, and the words of our Lord Himself in giving that new 
 Commandment, by which this is, not repealed, but deve- 
 loped and perfected, clearly rest on tliat foundation. 
 "Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, 
 Thou shalt not kill ; and whosoever shall kill shall be in 
 danger of the judgment; but I say unto you, That who- 
 soever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be 
 in danger of the judgment." (Matt. v. 21-2.) If our 
 Lord had said nothing more, it might have been supposed 
 that He forbade unjustifiable anger, because if the inward 
 passion were repressed the outward crime would be pre- 
 vented. It is the man who is angry with his brother 
 ** without a cause" who is most likely to be guilty of 
 violent offences. Repress causeless anger and there will 
 be very little danger of murder. But our Lord goes on to 
 say, " And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall 
 be in danger of the council; but whosoever shall say, 
 thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire" — (v. 22.) These 
 words suggest, at once, that the great principle which our 
 Lord is affirming in place of the old external law, is not 
 
The Sixth Comma^idinent. 165 
 
 intended merely or mainly to prevent the infliction of 
 physical injury on our brother. According to our Lord's 
 interpretation of the Commandment, the same principle 
 which forbids us to murder our fellow man forbids us to 
 treat him contemptuously and to refuse to acknowledge 
 his claims to our consideration and respect. We are to 
 remember that he is a man, and that he has a right to our 
 reverence and homage. Whatever his infirmities, what- 
 ever his foUies, whatever his sins, we are to recognise in 
 him the very image of God. If we do this we shall not 
 be angry with him " without a cause." For who are the 
 people against whom we are guilty of this offence ? Our 
 superiors ? Our equals ? No ; they are our children, or 
 our servants. They are persons whose equality with our- 
 selves, by virtue of our common relationship to God, we 
 ignore. Let me truly reverence a man, and though I may 
 sometimes be angry with him, and justly angry, I shall 
 not be angiy with him "without a cause." My recogni- 
 tion of his kinship to God will repress hasty judgment, and 
 will lead me to place a charitable interpretation on am- 
 biguous words and deeds, and I shall be angry with him 
 only if there is perverse folly, which justly provokes my 
 indignation, and sin, which makes it my duty to resist him 
 vehemently. This spirit of reverence will save me from 
 
1 66 The Sixth Commandment, 
 
 the supercilious contempt and the bitter scorn which our 
 Lord condemns as a violation of the spirit of the Com- 
 mandment. It will also make me long for the restoration 
 of broken friendship. For what is it that indisposes me to 
 seek reconciliation with an "adversary?" Is it anger 
 merely ? Is it not rather the pride which makes us unwilling 
 to make any approaches to the man whom we have wronged? 
 But if when we bring our gift to the altar, we remember 
 that our " brother " — the child of the very God whom we 
 are about to worship — " hath aught against us," we shall 
 feel it to be no undue humiliation to leave our gift before 
 the altar, to seek reconciliation to our brother, and then 
 to come and offer our gift. If we had wronged a prophet 
 or an apostle, our reverence for their sanctity would make 
 it easy for us to acknowledge our offence and to entreat 
 them to forgive and to forget it; and it is because we do 
 not reverence our brethren that we shrink from confessing 
 our fault when we have injured them, and asking their 
 forgiveness. 
 
 The Commandment " Thou shalt not kill," is a Divine 
 vindication of the greatness and sanctity of man ; and in 
 our Lord's development of the principle which underlies 
 the Commandment this vindication is made complete. 
 
The Sixth Commandment 167 
 
 It was an old charge against the Christian faith that it 
 wronged and dishonoured human nature. That charge 
 can hardly be maintained in the presence of the actual 
 tendencies of European thought. In these days it is not 
 to philosophy or to science, but to revelation, that we 
 must look for a recognition and defence of the regal 
 dignity which belongs to us as men. The Christian 
 Church has to maintain not only " the faith once delivered 
 to the saints," but all the nobler hopes and convictions of 
 past ages, against opinions which destroy the mystery and 
 grandeur of our nature. About the issue of that conflict 
 I feel no apprehension. It may be demonstrated that the 
 physical nature of man is only the last and highest form 
 of a long series of developments which may be traced 
 back to the obscurest and most elementary types of life. 
 Link by link of the chain may be verified which associates 
 us with creatures to which we seem least akin, and the 
 gradual unfolding of the rudimentary brain and the rudi- 
 mentary limbs to their perfect form may be conclusively 
 established. I have nothing to say in reply to those men of 
 remarkable genius, and still more remarkable patience and 
 industry, who tell us that the proof of this theory is nearly 
 complete. As a matter of sentiment I might wish that 
 the investigations of the professors in this new Herald's 
 
1 68 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 College had permitted them to assign me a more illus- 
 trious ancestry ; but no moral or theological interests 
 dispose me either to contest their theory or to hesitate in 
 accepting it. It must stand or fall by its appropriate 
 evidence. 
 
 But if it be said that this scientific history of our 
 physical organisation constitutes a theory of human 
 nature, that it explains our position in the universe, that it 
 solves those questions concerning our destiny by which 
 the hearts of the wisest men in all ages have been per- 
 plexed, I can only reply that it explains nothing that I 
 am most anxious to understand. My moral life remains a 
 mystery still. My consciousness of moral freedom is 
 unaccounted for. The scientific theory of my origin 
 illustrates my relation to that region of existence which is 
 under the control of natural law ; it does not touch those 
 elements of my life from which my personal history 
 derives its deepest significance, and which invest the 
 history of the race with all its tragic and glorious interest. 
 It does not explain the horror with which I regard the 
 crime which this Commandment forbids. It does nothing 
 to illustrate those claims which my conscience recognises 
 in the meanest of mankind, to my reverence and liomage. 
 The region of moral freedom belongs to ethics and to 
 
The Sixth Commandment 169 
 
 theology, not to science. It is from this region that the 
 greatness of man receives its irresistible demonstration ; 
 and while the hearts of men are still softened by penitence 
 and agonised by remorse, while heroic virtue stirs us to 
 an enthusiasm of admiration, and disgraceful vice moves 
 us to indignation and contempt, the old faith in the dig- 
 nity of human nature cannot be destroyed. Science may 
 prove that physically we have sprung from an ignoble 
 parentage ; but conscience will still assure us that, morally, 
 we are akin to God. 
 
THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 "Thou shalt not commit adultery."— Exodus xx, 14. 
 
 The penalties which were to be inflicted by the Jewish 
 state for the transgression of some of these Command- 
 ments are not given in connection with the Command- 
 ments themselves. They appear in other parts of the 
 Books of Moses. 
 
 The first seven were protected by the heaviest and 
 sternest punishment which human law can inflict. The 
 worship of any other god than Jehovah was punished with 
 death. The worship of any image of Jehovah Himself was 
 punished with death. Blasphemy was punished with 
 death. Sabbath-breaking was punished with death. 
 Determined resistance to the authority of parents, and 
 the flagrant want of reverence for them, were punished 
 with death. Murder was punished with death. Adultery 
 was punished with death. The first four commandments 
 assert in various forms the unity, spirituality, and greatness 
 of God ; and as the very purpose for which the Jewish 
 
The Seventh Comrnandment. 171 
 
 state existed was to express and maintain by external and 
 political institutions certain great truths concerning God 
 and His relations to mankind, it was only in harmony with 
 the genius of Judaism that every violation of these four 
 fundamental laws should be made a capital crime. That 
 the fifth, sixth, and seventh commandments should have 
 been sustained by the same tremendous sanction, suggests 
 to us the greatness of those Divine ideas which constitute 
 the ultimate ground and reason of every one of them. 
 According to the Divine order, the recognition of parental 
 authority is indi_spensable to the regular development of 
 human virtue, to the maintenance of the stability of 
 poHtical society, and to the formation of those moral 
 habits, out of which, in the normal condition of man, 
 religious reverence would, in a sense, be naturally de- 
 veloped. The dignity and sanctity of human nature, and 
 the consequent inviolability of human life, are protected 
 by a penalty, not less severe than that which vindi- 
 cates the majesty of God. And as there is a Divine 
 idea to be fulfilled in the relations between parents and 
 children which makes that relationship sacred — as there is 
 a Divine idea to be fulfilled in the character and history of 
 every individual man which makes man and man's life 
 sacred — so there is a divine idea to be fulfilled in mar- 
 
172 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 riage, in all the offices of mutual love and service which it 
 creates, and in all the happiness which it renders possible ; 
 and therefore marriage is sacred too. 
 
 If I refuse to marriage the name of a sacrament, it is 
 not because I deny the sacredness of the institution ; but 
 partly to preserve a separate name for Baptism and the 
 Lord's Supper, which are ordinances absolutely peculiar 
 and unique ; and partly because the religious mystery, 
 with which that description invests it, appears to me to 
 remove the institution of marriage from the region of 
 human affections and delight, as though that region were 
 unblessed with the light of the Divine presence and 
 approbation. 
 
 Marriage, like the family which springs from it, and like 
 the state, has, I say, underlying it a Divine idea ; and as 
 a rule it is essential to the development of the highest 
 perfection of human nature. To this rule, indeed, there 
 are innumerable exceptions — exceptions, however, which 
 do but reveal the operation of a higher law, which can 
 work out its results independently of all common means 
 and common methods. There have been men and 
 women who in a single life have exhibited a beauty as well 
 as a strength of character which has never been sur- 
 passed. Most of us, however, require marriage to redeem 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 173 
 
 us from selfishness, to fomi us to habits of self-abnegation 
 and self sacrifice, to develop tenderness of affection, to 
 subdue wilfulness, to teach us in the common human 
 sphere the ultimate and Divine secret which God reveals 
 to angels and to saints, the secret of living not for_our- 
 selves but for another. We are to be restored to God's 
 image 3 this is the great^end of our earthly existence ; and 
 in this all the institutions of society and the state have 
 their ultimate reason and their religious sanction. The 
 relationship of marriage, beyond all others, unfolds within 
 us that perfect and self-sacrificing love which is the crown 
 of God's perfections ; and by the love and care of 
 children, to which the sacredness of marriage is indis- 
 pensable, we are formed to the image of God's father- 
 hood. The institution is, therefore, related to the supreme 
 destiny of our race ; it has a moral idea for its basis, an 
 idea which is to be found in the special virtues and 
 perfections which it is calculated to develope. 
 
 That some men and innumerable women have 
 achieved in a solitary life a perfection not inferior to 
 that which marriage is especially intended to form, is not 
 to be regarded as a proof that the institution has no moral 
 significance and worth. It proves only this, that the soul 
 is not absolutely dependent on any external conditions. 
 
174 1^^^^ Sevejtih Commandment. 
 
 There are other aids and influences to assist the growth of 
 virtue and of spiritual strength and grace, besides those 
 on which most of us, according to the Divine organization 
 of human life, have largely to depend. 
 
 If for any reason some of us have to live in solitude, 
 these exceptions teach us not to despair of the highest 
 and fairest forms of moral and spiritual excellence. We 
 may make the cares of others our own, though they are 
 not one with us in the most intimate of earthly unions. 
 We may watch over them in their sickness, help them in 
 their poverty, cling to them through their sin, and rejoice 
 with such tears of gladness as angels shed when a sinner 
 is brought to repentance over their return to God. Such 
 ministries of charity — especially necessary, alike for men 
 and women, in the solitary state — may compensate for 
 their loss of the common aids to an unselfish perfection. 
 
 It is, however, necessary to assert the nobleness of this 
 institution against two theories which have a very different 
 origin, but both of which appear to deny it. 
 
 What has been said and written during the last three 
 hundred years about one of these theories— the theory 
 which lies at the basis of the Romish doctrine of the su- 
 perior sanctity of celibacy — is tolerably familiar to many of 
 you. The dogma that the religious life in the highest sense 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 175 
 
 is the solitary life is plainly inconsistent with the full and 
 cordial recognition of the Divine idea of Marriage. 
 
 There is another theory which seems equally to conflict 
 with that idea. At the bottom of the agitation for what 
 are called woman's rights there is very much justice, but 
 it is unfortunate that what may be described as the phi- 
 losophy of the movement has been created by writers and 
 speakers whose system of thought is not controlled by 
 the Christian revelation. Many of the discussions and 
 arguments on this question seem to me to rest on a 
 principle which is closely akin to the Romish doctrine of 
 celibacy. 
 
 They appear to imply — what an intelligent Christian 
 thinker must definitely refuse to accept — that the normal 
 idea of woman, and of her rights and duties, is to be de- 
 termined by considering her simply as an individual, and 
 that, therefore, woman is only her true self when her life 
 has a separate and independent development. The 
 method of those who attempt to unfold a theory on which 
 to rest their protest against the many forms of injustice to 
 which woman is subjected appears to be this : To consider 
 what she has a right to ask for on the hypothesis that she 
 has to work out her destiny apart from the interests and 
 claims of man, and that it is universally true that she may 
 
176 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 achieve the highest perfection possible to her in the soH- 
 tary Hfe. 
 
 I beheve that such a theory of man would be utterly 
 false, and that such a theory of woman is utterly false too. 
 We are not individuals merely. There are indeed regions 
 of our life in which we must refuse all human limitations 
 and restraints. There are other regions in which these 
 restraints and limitations, with the duties which arise from 
 them, are necessary both for woman and for man. I 
 shall altogether fail to reach a true idea of man, and of 
 what man's life ought to be, if I think of him as standing 
 apart and alone; I shall altogether fail to reach a true 
 idea of woman, and of what woman's life ought to be, if I 
 think of her as standing apart and alone. In the case of 
 man, I must not attempt to work out an ethical and 
 social system on the hypothesis that, as a rule, he has to 
 live a life of celibacy, and that marriage, with whatever it 
 may involve, is to be treated as having only an accidental 
 and subordinate place in my theory ; and in the case of 
 woman, I must not attempt to determine what her educa- 
 tion should be, and what forms of employment the customs 
 of society should permit to be open to her, and what 
 should be her relations to municipal and national govern- 
 ment, on the hypothesis that, as a rule, she has to live a 
 
The Seventh Commandment, 177 
 
 life of celibacy, and that in her case, marriage, with all 
 that it involves, is a mere parenthetical question. A true 
 idea of the institution of marriage lies very near the founda- 
 tion of every true philosophy of human life, and affects the 
 whole theory of the rights and duties both of man and of 
 woman and of their relations to each other. 
 
 A hundred and fifty years ago an attempt was made by 
 Rousseau to construct a social and political theory by com- 
 mencing with the consideration of man in what was absurdly 
 called a state of nature, that is, as an individual, apart 
 from all social and political relations and previous to the 
 existence of those relations ; that attempt, though it fasci- 
 nated the intellect and imagination of a great part of 
 Europe for a time, brought disaster and misery on those 
 who endeavour ed to translate it into practice ; and any 
 attempt to construct a theory of the social and political 
 rights of woman on a similar basis, is likely to end in 
 similar confusi on and disaster, if any nation should attempt 
 to give it re ality and to invest it with the force of law. 
 
 But to return to the Commandment. In its form — like 
 most of the other Commandments — it only restrains 
 certain external acts which violate the idea on which the 
 Commandment rests; but it requires for its true and per- 
 
 N 
 
178 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 feet fulfilment the realization of the idea itself. To 
 attempt to trace the institution of marriage to its ultimate 
 root, and so to place it in relation to the eternal laws of 
 the universe and the nature of God, would lead us into 
 remote regions of speculation. It is enough that we should 
 accept and recognise the institution as obviously and 
 necessarily belonging to the moral order of the world 
 and to the moral development of individual men, and 
 consider what it is in its most perfect form. 
 
 For myself, I do not believe that the world has lasted 
 so long, and that through generation after generation men 
 have married and given in marriage, without catching any 
 glimpse of the true idea of the institution. I believe 
 in the wisdom which lies in the old traditions of the race 
 and the natural instincts of the heart. The details of the 
 relationship may have to be re-adjusted in order to bring 
 them into more perfect harmony with that ideal which 
 has only to be presented to the soul in order to be 
 acknowledged as lofty and true, but I have no more belief 
 in the necessity of re-constructing, from its foundations, 
 our conception of what marriage ought to be, than in the 
 necessity of re-constructing our conception of integrity 
 and truth. The institution rests on the possibility of the 
 absolute mutual surrender to each other of man and 
 
The Seventh Co7nmandment, 179 
 
 woman — a surrender in which nothing is reserved but 
 loyalty to God and to those supreme moral duties, 
 which no human relationship can disturb or modify. It 
 rests not only on the possibility of that perfect blending of 
 life and interest — but on the strength and blessedness 
 which come from it. And any theory of marriage which 
 would impair the completeness of the resolution of two 
 individual lives into a higher though complex unity, is a 
 departure from that ideal which in our highest, noblest, 
 and happiest hours asserts for every one of us its authority 
 and truth. 
 
 Marriage is to be the result of a mutual devotion, 
 which from its vehemence, and fervour, and tenderness, 
 has appropriated to itself the name of Love, as though 
 there were no other form of affection which had a right to 
 bear the name. When that passion comes to man or 
 woman, suddenly or gradually, in a moment or as the 
 slow result of months and years of friendship, the soul 
 passes through what — if the term did not already belong, 
 in its most exact sense, to a still higher experience — might 
 be called a second birth. It makes all things new. The 
 soul feels as though only now it had begun to live. Ytry 
 often it is redeemed at once from intellectual sluggishness ; 
 and the moral life reveals itself in nobler and more 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 gracious forms. In its complete surrender of its life to 
 another, the soul becomes conscious, for the first time, of 
 its true self, and discovers unsuspected capacities and 
 powers. The great saying which is vindicated in so many- 
 ways becomes true — he that loseth his life finds it. Never 
 sneer at what you call the delusions of young lovers \ 
 their fancies are probably much truer than the soberest 
 judgments of men whose hearts have grown prosaic and 
 cold. You think that they are blind to each other's 
 faults ; it may be so, but it is only because their love has 
 made them clear sighted to see in each other not only all 
 actual virtues but all latent possibilities of virtue. It is 
 partly this, which fills those sunny hours with so strange and 
 perfect a joy. The lover may not understand the mystery, 
 but if he did, he would say — I have found at last an ideal 
 beauty and goodness and grace in another, and this, next 
 to the finding of God Himself is the supreme blessedness 
 of the soul ; and another has found in me — not what I 
 am now, but something far better — has seen in me my 
 truest and highest self — all the goodness, and nobleness, 
 and power which are mine, not in fact as yet, but ac- 
 cording to the idea which ought to be fulfilled in my indi- 
 vidual life and character, and so I anticipate the ultimate 
 perfection of my nature; there is one who sees me already 
 
The Seventh Commandment. i8i 
 
 transfigured and glorified. Do not tell me that such ex- 
 periences as these are follies and delusions. Which, after 
 all, is the truest and deepest estimate of a man — that 
 which is based upon his actual imperfections and failures 
 — or that which penetrates through all these and sees only 
 the Divine idea of the man, the glorious strength, and 
 incorruptible truth, and stainless purity, and unselfish de- 
 votion, which are possible to him ? If the soul is not 
 separated altogether from God, remember that the Divine 
 idea will at last be \vrought out, and the lover's dream will 
 prove truer than the shrewdness of worldly experience. 
 That which is seen in a man is temporal ; that which is 
 unseen, or seen only to the heart that loves him, is 
 eternal. So far from regarding this early extravagance of 
 affection, if so it must be called, as a folly to be sneered 
 at, and as resting on delusions which should be got rid 
 of and forgotten as soon as possible, I think that 
 the only pity is that it does not last much longer, 
 and that the romance and poetry of courtship too 
 often disappear as soon as the days of courtship 
 are over. It is in the glow and glory of that young 
 affection that the true idea of marriage is to be found ; 
 and the intensity of the love must remain if that idea 
 is to be fulfilled. 
 
1 82 The Seventh Commandment, 
 
 It must remain and show itself in the mutual recognition 
 and honour of all that is fairest and noblest which it 
 enabled each to find in the other before marriage. To 
 the husband, the wife should always have more of beauty, 
 and grace, and good sense, and moral worth, than she 
 seems to have to all the world besides. And in the hus- 
 band, the wife should continue to see a virtue and a 
 strength which all the world besides is unable to recognise. 
 They should continue to sustain to each other that re- 
 lationship which was originally founded in the discovery 
 by each, of what no one else had ever discovered in the 
 other. If any of you say that you have married a fool, 
 and cannot help seeing it, I am sorry for you ; your con- 
 fession should make other people careful not to repeat 
 your mistake ; but how was it that you did not make the 
 discovery before it was too late ? There was a time, I 
 suppose, when what now seems to you folly and stupidity, 
 seemed something very different; and, perhaps, the 
 reason was that your love was stronger then than now. 
 Or you may say that you have found that you have 
 married a man or a woman whose temper is sullen or 
 irritable, or who is coarse, selfish, indolent, and weak ; but 
 there was a time — was there not ? — when you had eyes to 
 see what fascinated your heart and won all your love ? 
 
The Seventh Commandment 183 
 
 Why has that vision faded ? If it remained, it would 
 enable you to overcome the annoyance, perhaps the dis- 
 gust and contempt, which are eating away, like a canker, 
 all your peace and joy. The mischief is, that too often 
 marriage does not rest on its only true and enduring 
 foundation. Vanity, mere weariness of a solitary life, 
 ambition, what is called prudence, selfishness in a hun- 
 dred forms, are too often the reasons why men and women 
 bind themselves together in this high and wonderful re- 
 lationship. They were never transfigured and glorified to 
 each other. There was no such discovery as that which 
 I have spoken of — by the wife of a certain ideal of man- 
 hood in the husband — by the husband of a certain ideal 
 of womanhood in the wife. Mere accident and a passing 
 whim determined the whole question. Fifty other women, 
 fifty other men, would have been equally acceptable. 
 The man thought of litde or nothing except getting a 
 house-keeper; the woman of little or nothing except 
 getting a house to keep. From the very first the relation- 
 ship was profaned. It never had a true root. Young 
 people who see how the lofty idea of the institution is 
 thus degraded in the lives of some whom they may know, 
 should lay to heart the warning which comes from the 
 weariness, vexation, and misery of an unreal marriage, 
 
184 The Seventh Commandment. - 
 
 and determine to achieve the perfection of ceHbacy rather 
 than be betrayed into a similar fault. 
 
 As for those who are already involved in the unhappi- 
 ness of a relationship founded on an inadequate basis, 
 they should endeavour, even now, to make it a truer and 
 better thing. There is — ^be sure of it — something in every 
 man and in every woman, which God can love, and He 
 sees in every one possibilities of worth and nobleness, 
 which only a love like His own can discover. You ought 
 to have caught some glimpse of that loveableness, and of 
 those possibilities of goodness and strength, before you 
 were married at all ; and your only safety lies in trying to 
 discover them now. Think of your wife, think of your 
 husband, as they appear in their best and highest 
 moments, when genial influences are upon them which 
 repress their selfishness, their vice, and their folly, and 
 develope all that is wisest, most kindly, and most beauti- 
 ful in their souls. These are the moments in which their 
 true self is revealed ; try to forget all the rest. You do 
 not root up the rose tree in your garden because through the 
 dreary months of winter there is neither beauty upon it 
 nor perfume ; you do not despise it because it looks so 
 bare and ungracious ; you think of the shining weeks of 
 summer, when it crowns itself with loveliness, and fills the 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 1S5 
 
 air with sweetness. The hfe out of which all this springs 
 is in it all the winter through. You have faith in it while 
 it is unseen. Most of us require the same forbearance 
 and the same faith ; and the more of it we have — like 
 flowers which need the heat and light to bring out their 
 blossoms — the more fully we are able to manifest the per- 
 fection, poor perhaps, at the best, of which our life is 
 capable. 
 
 AVhere there is this mutual recognition of an ideal 
 excellence, and the love which is inseparable from it, every- 
 thing else will follow which is necessary to a perfect mar- 
 riage. There will be an habitual suppression on the part 
 of each, of all personal tastes and preferences which 
 conflict with the happiness of the other j there will be no 
 weighing and measuring of the amount of concessions on 
 either side ; there will be no thought of concession, but a 
 greater delight in the mutual surrender than could come 
 from any assertion of personal rights ; both will find it 
 more blessed to give than to receive. In all the details of 
 life it will be plain that each is dearer to the other, than 
 wealth, or honour, or pleasure, or kindred, or friends. 
 There will be nothing even in manner to suggest that to the 
 husband any other woman seems more than his wife — or 
 to the wife that any other man seems more to her than her 
 
r86 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 husband. There will be a certain reserve, not assumed, 
 but natural and inevitable, in the relations of each to all 
 the world, indicating that with no one else can there be 
 the intimacy and freedom which are possible between 
 themselves. There will be, what seems to me absolutely- 
 indispensable to the true realization of the strength and 
 happiness of the relationship, perfect mutual trust. I do 
 not mean that the merchant or the tradesmen must come 
 home and tell his wife all that has happened in the shop 
 or the countinghouse during the day; that the la-vvyer 
 should talk to her about the affairs of his clients, and the 
 doctor about the symptoms of his patients. Nor do I 
 mean on the other hand that the wife is to be required to 
 explain to her husband every night all the details and 
 difficulties of her household administration. Perfect 
 trust will repress exacting curiosity on both sides. But in 
 every thing that really affects their common life, and in 
 every thing that either cares to know concerning the life 
 of the other, excepting of course those professional and 
 business affairs in which a man is the depositary of public 
 or private confidence, there will be the utmost openness 
 on both sides ; and in all matters which lie beyond the 
 reach of either, there will be absolute faith in the other. 
 By such a life will the true idea of marriage which 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 187 
 
 underlies this Commandment be fulfilled, and all peril of 
 violating this particular precept be kept far away. And 
 through a vivid apprehension of this noble ideal on the 
 part of the unmarried, ^vill all approach to kindred sins 
 be shunned and feared. 
 
 It is said, I know not with what truth, that among the 
 great and noble of this country there has been some 
 return to those evil habits, which were checked, partly by 
 the increasing influence of religion among the higher 
 classes at the beginning of this century, and partly by the 
 high moral influence of the Queen's court during the 
 years which preceded her seclusion. If it be so, then the 
 ancient privileges and honours of the English aristocracy 
 are threatened hy perils more serious than those which 
 they have to fear from the growing strength of democracy. 
 
 However this may be, among ourselves — among the 
 people with whom many of you are in constant association, 
 — there is an amount of sin not suspected by many, — but 
 known to some of us, — which fills me with sadness and 
 dismay. The influence which masters have over the 
 vanity and over the interests of the girls whom they 
 employ, and the power of foremen over the girls in their 
 shops, are used sometimes for the worst purposes. Do 
 any of you masters or foremen who are guilty of these 
 
1 88 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 offences, think that your sin will never be known ? 
 You are fatally deceived. Suspicion dogs your steps. 
 You betray your guilt, you know not how. It may be 
 hidden for a time, but the chances are innumerable that it 
 will bring you to public shame. It may sleep for months 
 and years, but will wake up, you know not when ; and 
 like the Frankenstein of fiction, haunt you with ceaseless 
 terrors and refuse to disappear. It will come across you, 
 perhaps on your marriage morning. Perhaps it will reveal 
 itself when you lie on your death bed j and, after years 
 of apparently blameless living, make your name and your 
 memory a cause of bitter humiliation to those you love 
 best. Concealed on earth, it cannot be concealed for 
 ever ; and, before the Judgment Seat of God, you must 
 answer for your crime. ^ 
 
 As for you who are exposed to temptation — repel with 
 hard and cold reserve every freedom and familiarity; 
 however harmless it may seem in the judgment of those 
 about you, nothing is harmless which betrays a want of 
 respect for womanly dignity. Resent — whatever may be 
 the consequences — resent with bitter contempt, with 
 indignation, with scorn, every equivocal act and every 
 ambiguous word. Whoever may be the offender — ^your 
 lover, your master, a man honoured for his integrity, 
 
The Seventh Cofnmandment, 189 
 
 honoured for his religious profession, a church member, a 
 church officer — pour upon him a storm of fire, and let his 
 soul, if he has one, be withered up with terror and shame j 
 if it is impossible for you to escape altogether from con- 
 tact with him, let the remembrance of your anger and 
 horror fill him, whenever he sees you, with humiliation 
 and fear. 
 
 There are some symptoms in the general habits and 
 common thoughts of society which seem to me somewhat 
 ominous. 
 
 Our literature is free from the coarseness and grossness 
 which once disgraced it, but there are books, and very 
 popular books too, in which, notwithstanding their refine- 
 ment, a delicate taste recognises a taint which cannot but 
 corrupt the purity of the soul. There is an unwholesome 
 curiosity in some directions about sins of which it were 
 better to know nothing. What is worst of all, some 
 philanthropic people appear to me to regard with senti- 
 mental interest and with a sympathetic kindness which 
 enfeebles their hatred of wickedness, those who make a 
 trade and profession of iniquity. We are almost asked to 
 reverse the traditional judgment of society on those who 
 have fallen. I will never be a party to sheltering me?i 
 
1 90 The Seventh Commandment, 
 
 who sin from the scorn and condemnation of society ; the 
 scorn ought to become infinitely more intense, the con- 
 demnation infinitely more heavy : and I will tell them too 
 that unless they repent they will perish everlastingly. But 
 I will never be a party to diminishing the dishonour — the 
 absolute exclusion from all claim to consideration — the 
 stern, relentless repulsion with which women have been 
 visited for the same crime until they repent. I utterly 
 reject the palliations which are pleaded for them. I look 
 with dismay upon the disposition to diminish the loathing 
 with which their sin is regarded. They too, unless they 
 turn from their evil ways, must perish everlastingly. 
 
 Nor can I regard with perfect satisfaction the tendency 
 which I think is becoming strong among us, to obliterate 
 the distinctions which lie deep in our nature and which 
 belong to the Divine idea of the human race, between 
 men and women. That these distinctions have been 
 aggravated — or, rather, have been developed in mis- 
 chievous forms by the Institutions and traditions of society, 
 is only too obvious. Women have a clear right to a free 
 development of all the resources of their nature ; only I 
 doubt whether there should be any artificial attempt so to 
 discipline a woman's life as to suppress the distinctions 
 
The Seventh Commandment 191 
 
 between her life and the life of man. If she wishes to 
 have the political franchise I would not deny it to her. 
 I would open to her most freely the avenues to every 
 profession in which her characteristic powers and genius 
 can have free exercise. Let her be an artist, an author, 
 a physician. The whole world — and not women alone — 
 will be the richer for it. If she has anything to say and 
 can say it, I cannot understand why she should not take 
 her place on the platform ; or why, in the present circum- 
 stances of society, she should not speak in the church. 
 There are places of public trust in which she might serve 
 the State. 
 
 And yet I am conservative enough to cling to the old 
 idea that the circumstances and conditions of a woman's 
 life should develope those gentler graces and perfections 
 which the rougher, wilder work of the world quite 
 destroys. I do not think that she becomes her true self 
 unless she is surrounded with something of that 
 chivalrous regard and consideration which, I believe, are 
 repudiated by those who are agitating for reform. I may 
 be wrong; but I cannot help thinking that some shelter from 
 the east wind, and some kindly warmth of temperature, are 
 favourable to the unfolding of her perfect grace and noble- 
 ness. Uniformity of outward circumstances and influences 
 
192 The Seventh CommandmenU 
 
 is likely to lead to a dull monotony of character. There 
 are men enough in the world already ; most of them are 
 too much alike ; one gets weary of the sameness among 
 them ; and I do not think that the world would be the 
 better or the more cheerful if the women became men 
 too. 
 
 But, if it must be so, and if justice requires that 
 society should be re-organised on the theory that equality 
 between man and woman means that they are to live the 
 same life and sustain precisely the same relation to the 
 State; if, instead of the wives and daughters of agricultural 
 labourers being rescued from the necessity of rough labour 
 in the fields, and instead of the wives and daughters of work- 
 ing men, in towns like this, being liberated from the factory 
 and the workshop, which I am half ashamed to confess, in 
 the presence of those of you who belong to the party of 
 movement and progress, is the dream which I am weak 
 enough to cherish in private, — if, instead of this, the 
 women of all classes are to be yoked to that huge and 
 cumbrous machine of commercial and political life which 
 men have hitherto tried to drag almost alone, — and if, as 
 the result of this, there comes, as there must come, a 
 complete change in the relations between the sexes, — if 
 equality of rights means the disappearance of the homage 
 
The Seventh Commandment 193 
 
 which gentle traditions and the sweet verses of poets and 
 what have seemed to me the better instincts of the heart 
 have taught men to feel in the presence of women, and 
 the disappearance, too, of that reserve, and tenderness, 
 and ineffable refinement which have hitherto been our 
 ideal of womanhood, — then on the whole, I think, that I am 
 content to have lived before the old order had quite 
 passed away ; before the poetry of human life had given 
 place to prose, and all the fair blossoms of fancy and 
 sentiment had fallen from the tree. 
 
 I cannot tell — I may be wrong — ^but it seems to me that 
 womanly grace, and delicacy, and refinement, qualities 
 which must be at least imperilled if all the old dis- 
 tinctions of employment and position are abolished, are 
 among the defences and securities at once of manly and 
 womanly virtue. 
 
 But of theories of the world and of human life, we 
 learn, as years go on, to be increasingly distrustful. The 
 race which God loves so well, and into which He Him- 
 self, in the person of His Son, has entered, God has 
 in His own keeping. He alone can know the final 
 solutions of the problems by which our age is perplexed, 
 and the forms and circumstances in which our life will 
 clothe itself, when at last His will shall be done on earth 
 
 o 
 
194 '^^^ Seventh Commandment, 
 
 as it is in heaven. We cannot predict our millennium. 
 The blossoms of the Spring-time have but the faintest 
 visions of the Summer's pomp and the wealth of Autumn. 
 Of the perfect future of our race on earth as well as of its 
 transcendent blessedness above, we can but say '^we 
 know not what we shall be." In our own time, what 
 remains for us, is to fulfil, in the highest and most perfect 
 form, what seems to us to be the Divine ideal of virtue 
 and sanctity ; to translate as nearly as we can into the 
 actual circumstances of our condition what appears to us 
 the law of God. Let the morrow take thought for 
 the things of itself; if the work and life of to-day are 
 honest and true, the morrow will bring with it a larger 
 and deeper wisdom and crown our fidelity with nobler 
 results than we dared to hope for. 
 
 The re-organization of society has hitherto proceeded 
 not so much under the inspiration and guidance of a far- 
 off theoretical perfection of its external institutions and 
 polity, distinctly present to the intellect of those who 
 have achieved enduring reforms; but rather under the 
 inspiration of courageous loyalty to great principles, for 
 which it was an obvious duty to secure recognition and 
 honour. It is in following this same line, and only in 
 following this line, that I have hope for the future. Men 
 
The Seventh Conimandmetit. 195 
 
 and women alike are children of God, created in His 
 image, heirs of glory, honour, and immortaHty; for both, the 
 highest end of existence is not to secure in this transient life 
 ease, reputation, distinction, but to be true to the moral 
 instincts of their nature, and to that Divine law of which 
 those instincts are the voice and the expression. Whatever 
 restrains, in either, that incorruptible fidelity to conscience, 
 or obscures the fair vision of ideal perfection, can claim no 
 Divine sanction, and is perilous to the interests of the race. 
 Only let us not forget that our perfection is to be sought 
 not in isolation but in fellowship, and that we are mem- 
 bers one of another. Genius loses its true glory when it 
 shines for itself and not for mankind. Strength becomes 
 tjnranny when it forgets to be the servant of weakness. 
 Learning becomes pedantry when it secludes itself from 
 the common life of man, and forgets that its highest 
 function is to make all truth the property of all mankind. 
 And so, whatever may be the characteristic perfection of 
 man and whatever the characteristic perfection of woman, 
 neither will ever be attained, unless both man and woman 
 remember that God made them both, first for Himself, 
 and then for each other. 
 
 02 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 "Thou Shalt not steal."— ExODUS xx, 15, 
 
 The principle on which this Commandment rests is 
 obvious. The institution of Property is recognised and 
 sanctioned by the authority of God. If it is a crime to 
 steal, those social arrangements must be right, if not in 
 their details at least in their ultimate principle, which 
 provide that there are some things which a man may call 
 his own, over the use of which he has control, and which 
 the law will not suffer other men to touch. 
 
 It must be acknowledged that the sufferings and crimes 
 which are incident to the institution of Property are so grave 
 as sometimes to provoke the inquiry whether, after all, the 
 institution itself can be defended. Selfishness, covetous- 
 ness, dishonesty, fierce and angry contention, are among 
 the worst vices of which men can be guilty ; and it may 
 almost seem as though we might escape from them all by 
 abolishing the rights of Property. Only less serious than 
 the moral evils which are associated with this institution, 
 
The Eighth Commandment. igy 
 
 are the evils of another kind which arise from the unequal 
 distribution of wealth. Millions of men are scarcely able 
 to obtain for themselves the bare necessaries of existence ; 
 a few thousands live in splendour and luxury. One man 
 has a mansion for his home, and surrounds it with a park 
 of five hundred acres ; and within a few miles there are a 
 hundred thousand people, living in narrow streets and 
 dismal courts, and in houses so small and mean that 
 health, comfort, and decency are almost destroyed. The 
 remedy seems obvious. Let there be a fair distribution of 
 all the wealth of the nation among all its inhabitants. Land, 
 houses, furniture, food, clothing, books, everything which 
 is necessary to life, or which contributes to happiness — 
 let us divide them all among the whole people ; and if the 
 old inequalities begin to re-appear, as they certainly 
 would at the end of a twelvemonth, let us divide again. 
 Let no man have any exclusive right to anything. Destroy 
 the institution of Property, and many of the vices and 
 very much of the wretchedness of the world would 
 disappear. 
 
 That, of course, would be the extreme remedy, the kind 
 of remedy which suggests itself to men when they are 
 very young, very ignorant, very enthusiastic, or very 
 miserable. There are other schemes — during the last fifty 
 
198 The Eighth Commandment. 
 
 or sixty years speculative men have invented a large 
 number of schemes — which look less wild and more prac- 
 ticable, for the mere re-adjustment of the rights of 
 property, In order to redress some of the more obvious 
 evils of existing social arrangements. All of these more 
 moderate schemes recognise, in some form, the necessity 
 of the institution itself; and are therefore, to that extent, 
 in harmony with the principle on which this Command- 
 ment rests. Whether any of these communistic proposals 
 are practicable or not, whether it would be possible to 
 establish them without gross injustice, how long any of 
 them would be likely to last, what would be their effect 
 on the production of material wealth, and on the intellec- 
 tual and moral condition of mankind, are questions of 
 great speculative interest, and, perhaps, some day they 
 may become questions of great practical interest; but 
 they are not raised by this Commandment, which 
 simply recognises and protects the rights of Property in 
 whatever form they may exist among any particular 
 people. 
 
 What are the grounds, then, on which the maintenance 
 of these rights, in some form or another, can be de- 
 fended ? Archdeacon Paley in one of the chapters of 
 his Moral Philosophy — a book which is as charming 
 
The Eighth Commandment. 199 
 
 and sagacious in its details as it is mean and false in its 
 fundamental principle — has illustrated some of the 
 advantages of the institution of Property, with his usual 
 clearness and felicity. " It increases" he says " the pro- 
 duce of the earth. The earth, in climates like ours, 
 produces little or nothing without cultivation ; and none 
 would be willing to cultivate the ground, if others were to 
 be admitted to an equal share of the produce. The same 
 is true of the care of flocks and herds of tame animals. 
 Crabs, and acorns, red-deer, rabbits, game, and fish, are 
 all that we should have to subsist upon, if we trusted to 
 the spontaneous productions of the soil; and it fares 
 not much better with other countries." 
 
 He says further that the institution of Property preserves 
 the produce of the earth to maturity. " We may judge," 
 he continues, " of what would be the effects of a com- 
 munity of right to the productions of the earth, from the 
 trifling specimens we see of it at present. A cherry tree 
 in a hedge-row, nuts in a wood, the grass of an unstinted 
 pasture, are seldom of much advantage to anybody, 
 because people do not wait for the proper season of 
 reaping them. Com, if it were sown, would never ripen ; 
 Iambs and calves would never grow up to sheep and cows, 
 because the first person that met them would reflect that 
 
200 The Eighth Commandment. 
 
 he had better take them as they are than leave them for 
 another." 
 
 The argument seems unanswerable, and it admits of a 
 much larger development than the Archdeacon has given 
 to it. Houses, ships, furniture, clothes, machinery, 
 pictures, statues, books, require a great amount of labour 
 to produce them; the stimulus to production would be 
 altogether destroyed if after they were produced they 
 belonged to nobody, and if people who had done no work 
 were as free to use them as those by whose self-denial and 
 labour they were produced. No mines would be worked, 
 no fields would be cleared, no waste land would be brought 
 into cultivation, no marshes would be drained, unless the 
 men who did the work had the hope either of owning the 
 Property which they created, or of receiving in some other 
 form compensation for their labour. The material wealth 
 of the world would almost disappear, and the poorest and 
 most wretched would have even less than they have now, 
 if the rights of Property were abolished. 
 
 But there are other grounds on which the institution 
 may be defended. The rights of Property are essential 
 not only to the creation and preservation of material 
 wealth, but to the cultivation and development of the 
 nature of man. Apart from those rights, as I have said, 
 
The Eighth Commandment. 201 
 
 all motive and stimulus to labour would disappear. It is 
 only because com belongs to the farmer, and coal to the 
 mine proprietor, and bread to the baker, and meat to the 
 butcher, it is only because clothes belong to the tailor, and 
 houses to the builder, and because the law protects every 
 one of them in the possession of his property until he is 
 willing to part with it, that men work in order that they 
 may get coal, and com, and bread, and meat, and clothes, 
 and house room. The Indian would sit idle in his cabin 
 if the game he hunted did not become his own. 
 
 Excessive physical labour is no doubt a great evil ; but 
 the evils of indolence are still greater. There are parts of 
 the world where it is hardly necessary for men to work at all 
 in order to get the bare necessaries of life, and the result is 
 a miserable want of physical vigour and a portentous de- 
 velopment of vice. We were made to work. It is by 
 work that muscle is created and the whole body kept free 
 from disease. Work as a rule is good for health, and 
 good for morality and happiness too. There are times 
 when through depression of trade large numbers of men 
 in our great manufacturing towns are thrown out of em- 
 ployment ; ask them whether they do not become utterly 
 weary of idleness. Apart from the loss of wages and all 
 that that means, the mere loss of employment makes their 
 
202 The Eighth Commandment. 
 
 life a burden to them. Their temper is less kindly. Their 
 blood gets stagnant. Their sleep is no longer healthy 
 and sound. It is by work that the eye is made keen, the 
 hand dexterous, the touch delicate, the arm vigorous, and 
 that the whole physical nature of man is developed and 
 perfected. 
 
 For the intellectual development of man, the institu- 
 tion of Property is not less necessary. It is not by books 
 alone that the intellectual faculties are disciplined and 
 invigorated. The common business of life, the learning 
 of a trade, the conduct of a manufactory, the keeping of a 
 shop, are among the educational processes which develope 
 and strengthen certain powers of the mind. 
 
 One of the great difficulties of all who are trying to raise 
 the general condition of mankind is to induce men to 
 think. No exercise is so hard and unwelcome. Most 
 men never think except when they are obliged; and 
 most men rather than think strenuously for an hour would 
 greatly prefer — except for the shame of it — a couple of 
 hours on the treadmill. It is not very often in these days 
 that we ministers venture to preach a sermon which 
 requires much active thought on the part of our congrega- 
 tions ; our constant effort is so to state the truth which it is 
 our duty to explain and enforce as to save you the trouble 
 
r The Eighth Commandment, 203 
 
 of thinking; but if now and then, once perhaps in three 
 months, we happen to preach a sermon which we had not 
 the time, or did not know how, to make perfectly simple 
 and easy, the majority of our hearers give up listening to 
 us after the first ten minutes, and most of those who listen 
 to the end, think that they have been rather hardly dealt 
 with. 
 
 One of the chief ends of education is to provoke and 
 accustom the mind to think, and so to redeem children 
 from a merely animal life. If a teacher succeeds in doing 
 that, then even though the scholar may have learnt very 
 little that will be what you call " useful " to him in after 
 life, he has done very much. Some of you cannot under- 
 stand why so many of us think it worth while for our 
 children to learn languages which they will never have to 
 speak, and which very few of them will continue to read 
 when they have left school. You ask what can be the 
 good of all this labour which seems to come to nothing. 
 You might just as well ask what is the good of all the 
 trouble that your little child of eighteen months or two 
 years old expends in running iDackwards and forwards 
 half the day, tumbling down a dozen times and wearying 
 itself out by its exertion. It fetches nothing, carries 
 nothing, earns no money, and might as well lie still. But 
 
204 ^-^^^ Eighth Commandment. 
 
 the child is learning to walk, getting the mastery of its 
 muscles and strengthening them; and this exertion which 
 for the present seems to end in nothing, is making it 
 possible for the child to use its limbs to practical purpose 
 with ease and even with pleasure in future years. It is 
 more difficult to develope the powers of the mind than to 
 develope the limbs and muscles of the body; and to a 
 man in whom these powers are not developed, thinking is 
 as difficult and troublesome as walking to a man who has 
 seldom stood on his feet. Even after the mind has be- 
 come active and vigorous, severe and continuous thinking 
 requires exertion from which many men shrink. I think 
 it was Dr. Johnson who said that he should never have 
 "written a book if it had not been for hunger. 
 
 Now the institution of Property supplies a most powerful 
 motive to intellectual exertion. We want food, clothing 
 and a thousand other things ; but they belong to people 
 who will not part with them, except for the results of our 
 own work. Inventive genius is stimulated to improve the 
 processes of manufacture; administrative skill is exercised 
 in lessening the cost of production ; merchants watch the 
 rise and fall of the markets in remote countries, estimate 
 the effect of good and bad seasons and of poUtical events 
 on the probable price of commodities. There is not a 
 
I 
 
 The Eighth Commandme7it. 205 
 
 counting house however small, there is not a workshop 
 in a back court, where the business can be carried on 
 without thought. Every retail tradesman, every huckster, 
 every costermonger has to use his brains, more or less, as 
 well as his hands. Painters, sculptors, musicians, 
 surgeons, physicians, architects, journalists, authors, are 
 all induced to qualify themselves for their professions and to 
 work at them, because the existence of the rights of 
 Property requires that if they are to live they must work. 
 And as Archdeacon Paley justly says in the chapter I have 
 already quoted, — and I quote him again partly for the de- 
 light I have in the ease and grace and clearness of his 
 style — " It enables mankind to divide themselves into dis- 
 tinct professions, which is impossible unless a man can ex- 
 change the productions of his own art for what he wants 
 from others, and exchange implies property. Much of the 
 advantage of civilised over savage life depends upon this. 
 When a man is, from necessity, his own tailor, tent maker, 
 carpenter, cook, huntsman, and fisherman, it is not 
 probable that he will be expert at any of his callings. 
 Hence the rude habitations, furniture, clothing, and 
 implements of savages ; and the tedious length of time 
 which all their operations require." The Archdeacon 
 with what, I suppose, would be called his '^practical" 
 
2o6 The Eighth Commandment. 
 
 turn of mind, thinks mainly of the increased wealth and 
 material comfort which this separation of men into 
 different professions produces : its effect on the develop- 
 ment of the intellectual nature of man and of all the 
 resources of human genius, is not less important. The 
 institution of Property secures an amount and variety of 
 intellectual activity for which, perhaps, we have never 
 given it credit. 
 
 It has also very important relations to the moral 
 life of man. The whole organisation of the world is 
 intended to discipline our moral nature ; and the 
 very variety of the sins to which the existence of Property 
 gives occasion, illustrates the variety of the virtues which 
 it is intended to exercise. So far as a very large propor- 
 tion of mankind are concerned it may be said that their 
 fidelity to conscience is tested chiefly by the way in which 
 they act in relation to Property — the way in which they 
 get it, and the way in which they use it. 
 
 Their selfishness or their generosity, their truthfulness 
 or their falsehood, their integrity or their dishonesty, their 
 indolence or their industry, their self-restraint or their 
 want of it — are all brought out and intensified by this 
 single institution. 
 
 How a man gets Property — and by property of course 
 
 \ 
 
The Eighth Commandment. 207 
 
 I mean whatever he can call his own, whether it be much 
 or little, — is one of the surest tests of what he is. If he 
 gets it by fair means and by fair means only, if he resists 
 every temptation to get it illegitimately, the habit of 
 honesty and the love of it are strengthened, and many of 
 the meaner passions and tendencies of his nature are 
 suppressed. Men are under a constant temptation to 
 steal — to get what belongs to others without giving them 
 the return for it which they are led to expect. To break 
 into a house and carry off the plate, to rob a till, to pick 
 a pocket, are very, coarse modes of theft. For a clerk to 
 forge a signature to a bill, for a trustee to appropriate and 
 employ for his own purposes the money which has been 
 placed in his keeping, are modes of theft only a little less 
 gross. Whoever gets into his possession what belongs to 
 another man, on false pretences, without giving what he 
 led or permitted that other to expect, is guilty of the same 
 crime, though in a less flagrant form. 
 
 If a manufacturer charges you Twenty Pounds for a 
 hundred yards of cloth and sends you only half the 
 quantity, he as really steals Ten Pounds as though he 
 broke open your cash box and took out a Ten Pound 
 note. If he engages to send you cloth of a certain 
 quality and charges you for it, and then sends you 
 
2o8 The Eighth Commandment, 
 
 cloth which is worth in the market only two-thirds the 
 price, he is just as much a thief as though he stood 
 behind you in a crowd and robbed you of your purse. 
 No one disputes this. The same principle holds in every 
 business transaction. To give short weight or short 
 measure, is to steal. To supply an article of inferior 
 quality to that which it is understood that the buyer 
 expects, is to steal. To take a Government contract and 
 send to Weedon or Portsmouth articles which you know 
 will be worthless, or which you know are of a worse kind 
 than it was understood that you would furnish, is to steal. 
 To take advantage of your superior knowledge in order 
 to pass off on any man articles for which he would never 
 give the price that he pays for them but for his confidence 
 in your integrity, is to steal. To start a company and to 
 induce people to take shares in it by false representations 
 of the amount of the subscribed capital and of its probable 
 success, is to steal. But during the last ten or fifteen 
 years so much has been said and written about commercial 
 immorality, that one has become weary of speaking of it. 
 There is a very common reply to what is said in 
 reference to the dishonesties of retail trade, to which I 
 cannot attach much value. It is urged that the trickeries 
 to which tradesmen are driven, are really chargeable on 
 
 1 
 
The Eighth Commandment. 209 
 
 the public, who will not give a fair price for what they 
 buy ; and that if people will insist on having things cheap 
 they must take the consequences ; tradesmen must live, 
 and they cannot live if they are to sell the articles, which 
 their customers expect, at the inadequate price which 
 they are mlling to give. The answer is obvious. People 
 generally cannot know the cost of producing everything 
 they purchase. A bootmaker may know what good boots 
 can be made for ; a grocer may know the lowest price at 
 which tea and sugar can be sold, and yet give a fair profit 
 to the seller; a printer may know the lowest figure at 
 which a book can be produced, so as to cover the cost of 
 the paper and the printing 3 but the public cannot know 
 these things. They naturally go where they think that 
 they can get what they want cheapest; and I suppose that 
 if people generally acted on any other principle it would 
 check improvements in the processes of manufacture, by 
 which the cost of production is diminished, and would 
 lessen the inducements to the economical organisation of 
 business which enables a tradesman to sell at lower price 
 than his rivals, and yet to clear the same profit. For 
 people to purchase goods which they know cannot be 
 honestly sold at the price which they give for them, is 
 precisely the same crime as the keepers of a thieves' 
 
 p 
 
210 The Eighth Commandment, 
 
 receiving house are guilty of, — who take what is brought 
 them and ask no questions. But for the most part we 
 cannot know what is the price which will give the pro- 
 ducer of the raw material, the manufacturer, and the re- 
 tailer, a fair profit for their work. We must take for 
 granted that the price which a tradesman asks is the 
 price which will cover the real cost of what we buy, 
 and make it worth while for him to carry on his trade. 
 I am inclined to think, however, that retail tradesmen 
 have probably been very hardly dealt with in much of the 
 criticism which they have recently had to bear. I should 
 indignantly deny the possibility of dishonesty on the part 
 of very many of them whom I personally know, and 
 who are as just and honourable as any men that breathe ; 
 if they are able to conduct their business, and to live out 
 of it, without resorting to the evil practices which are 
 sometimes spoken of as though they were universal, 
 there is plainly no reason why other men in the same 
 business should not be honest too. To fling out indis- 
 criminate charges of dishonesty against a whole class is to 
 encourage the belief that their very position renders 
 honesty impossible. That belief is utterly fiilsc ; it must 
 be firmly and vehemently denied, or else weak men will 
 justify themselves in yielding to temptation, by the plea 
 
The Eighth Commandment. 211 
 
 that they are but following the common and recognised 
 and inevitable practices of their trade. 
 
 There is a kind of theft which has received less 
 attention than that which has been recklessly, and indis- 
 criminately, and unjustly charged upon tradesmen. We. 
 sell our labour and service to each other, as well as the 
 products of our labour. A workman sells his labour to 
 his master; a shop-assistant sells his services to his 
 employer; a domestic servant sells her services to her 
 mistress. In some cases the time which is sold is 
 definitely fixed; in others, the contract from the very 
 nature of the case is extremely indefinite. There is just 
 as much possibility of dishonesty in the sale of labour and 
 service as in the sale of anything else. If a workman, 
 who is paid to work ten hours, takes advantage of the 
 absence of the master or foreman to smoke a pipe and 
 read the newspaper for one hour out of the ten, he steals 
 one tenth of his day's wages. He does the very thing 
 that a shopkeeper would do who gave him fourteen ounces 
 of butter or sugar instead of a pound, or nine yards of 
 calico when the bill charged ten. An assistant in a shop, 
 who instead of caring for his master's interests as if they 
 were his own, puts no heart into his work, exercises no 
 
 p 2 
 
212 The Eighth Commandment. 
 
 ingenuity, treats customers carelessly instead of cour- 
 teously, and so diminishes the chances of their coming 
 again, — gets his salary on false pretences, does not give 
 the kind of service which he knows his employer expects, 
 and which he would expect if he were an employer him- 
 self. He cannot but know that his services are not worth 
 half what they would be if he did his best ; instead 
 of earning the Thirty or Forty Pounds a year, for 
 which he is engaged, he does not earn more than 
 Fifteen Pounds or Twenty Pounds, — and he practically 
 steals the rest. The same principle holds in respect 
 to domestic servants. The understanding is that they 
 should be as careful about what belongs to their 
 mistress, when her eye is not upon them as when it is, 
 that they should do their work as thoroughly behind her 
 back as when she is present, that they should do their 
 best always ; and if they are careless, indolent, and 
 wasteful — then they do not give what they are paid to 
 give, and this is very much like stealing. 
 
 But it is impossible to pursue into detail all the duties, 
 or all the sins to which the institution of Property gives 
 rise. To grasp a principle is of more real practical use 
 than to remember a precept. And the principle which 
 
The Eighth Commandment, ii'^^ 
 
 would guide us safely through all the difficulties which 
 may appear to surround this subject is that Property is a 
 Divine institution ; and that it exists to increase the 
 material wealth of mankind, to develope the intellect, and 
 to exercise innumerable virtues. The laws of nations 
 should be brought into harmony with that fundamental 
 idea, and the customs of business, and the habits of 
 individual men. No Acts of Parliament or courts of 
 justice, nor the opinion of society, can determine 
 for a Christian man how Property is to be acquired 
 or how it is to be employed. He is under a higher 
 law. He has to try, so far as he is concerned, to 
 get God's will, in relation to Property, done on earth 
 even as it is done in relation to other things in 
 Heaven. That the institution imposes upon all men the 
 duty of industry in their calHngs, the duty of maintaining 
 independence, the duty of avoiding any, even the least, 
 invasion of the rights of others, the duty of self-restraint 
 in expenditure, as well as of honesty in acquisition, is 
 obvious. 
 
 That the institution rests on a Divine idea involves 
 other duties too. The use of the power which is 
 inseparable from the possession of Property is to be 
 determined, not by human, but by Divine laws. To use 
 
214 ^^^^ Eighth Commandment. 
 
 it for the oppression of the consciences of men, for the 
 violation of their moral freedom, must be plainly a con- 
 tradiction of the Divine purpose. The rough and im- 
 perfect regulations of human governments may be unable 
 to repress and punish the crime, but it will be punished by a 
 more august tribunal than administers the laws of nations, 
 and with sterner penalties than those laws can inflict. 
 When the " rights of Property " are perverted to expel a 
 man from a farm and to condemn him to ruin because his 
 political opinions are not the same as his landlord's; 
 when the settlements of a great property are so drawn as 
 to make leases void if a tenant permits a Nonconformist 
 service to be celebrated in the buildings he has erected ; 
 when a Duke, who owns a whole county, uses his power 
 to exclude strangers from the sight of noble and beautiful 
 scenery ; the Divine idea of property is outraged ; and if 
 this abuse of its rights cannot be avenged by human laws, 
 I repeat that it will be avenged by laws more awful in 
 their majesty and more terrible in their might. 
 
 If Property is a Divine institution, founded on a 
 Divine idea, protected by Divine sanctions, then in the 
 use of it God should be remembered, and those whom 
 - God has entrusted to our pity and our care. 
 
The Eighth Commandment. 215 
 
 In the actual constitution of society, perhaps in every 
 possible constitution of society, it is inevitable that 
 Property should be most unequally distributed. It is not 
 always the least deserving who are the least fortunate; 
 some of the noblest men have been the poorest. The 
 rights of Property were never intended to carry the moral 
 right to refuse assistance to the miserable and destitute. 
 It is one of their incidental moral advantages that they 
 render it possible to manifest in a thousand beautiful and 
 gracious forms the spirit of Charity ; if an inferior law did 
 not secure to me the absolute control of the material 
 wealth which I have created or have been fortunate enough 
 to inherit, I should be unable to show my allegiance to 
 that higher law which requires me voluntarily to relieve 
 the sufferings of other men. 
 
 Nor is it in the relief of poverty alone that I am bound 
 to recognise the obligations of Charity. There are a 
 thousand good works which appeal to me for sympathy 
 and have a moral right to demand my aid. Definite 
 provision should be made for discharging the duties of 
 Charity as well as for meeting the inexorable demands of 
 Justice. In the old Jewish times every seventh day was 
 alienated from common uses by the authority of a positive 
 law, and a positive law required the Jew to devote at 
 
2i6 The Eighth Commandmeftt. 
 
 least a tenth of his property to sacred purposes. These ex- 
 ternal obligations have passed away. But if we did not 
 protect one day in seven from the intrusion of secular 
 business we should have no secure opportunity for public 
 worship, and for protracted meditation on the glory and 
 goodness of God. If we gave to these duties only the 
 time that we were able to " spare," if in the arrangements 
 of our life we did not definitely reserve Sunday for 
 purposes of religion, we should probably find that the 
 imperious claims of secular business would hardly ever 
 permit us to be present at public worship, and the time 
 that we devote to solitary communion with God, already 
 too contracted, would become more contracted still. 
 Now that the old law which required the separation of a 
 definite portion of our Time from common business has 
 become obsolete, we are a law to ourselves. It is equally 
 expedient, equally necessary, to redeem and to protect a 
 definite portion of our Property for the service of God and 
 the poor. If we give only what we can " spare," we shall 
 be able to give ver}- little. The old law in relation to the 
 Sabbath, though no longer obligatory, has re-appeared in 
 a nobler and higher form in the free consecration of one 
 day in seven to the special service of God ; the conse- 
 crated day is essential to the maintenance of the spirit of 
 
The Eighth Commandment. 217 
 
 devotion. Until the old law in relation to tithes, which is 
 also no longer obligatory, is re-established by the free 
 operation of the affections of the Christian heart, there 
 will be no adequate security for the maintenance of the 
 spirit and the discharge of the duties of Christian 
 Charity. 
 
THE NINTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour." — 
 Exodus xx, i6. 
 
 This Commandment is not to be restricted to false 
 testimony given in courts of justice. It prohibits slander, 
 calumny, misrepresentation at any time, in any circum- 
 stances. On the other hand, we shall miss the moral 
 significance of the Commandment if we regard it as a 
 prohibition of lying in general. It is a specific kind of 
 falsehood which is forbidden — " false witness against our 
 neighbour." 
 
 The Ten Commandments were not intended to con- 
 stitute a complete code of morals. There are many 
 sins which they do not condemn, and there are many 
 virtues which they do not enforce. The symmetrical 
 completeness of human systems of ethics is not to be 
 found either in the Old Testament or the New; and 
 certainly we have no right to expect that these laws, given 
 to a race which must have suffered the gravest moral 
 
The Ninth Commandment, 219 
 
 injury from protracted slavery to a heathen nation, should 
 cover the whole ground of moral duty. 
 
 It is true, indeed, that lying of every kind is one of 
 the very worst sins of which men can be guilty. 
 Crimes of violence and of passion, and crimes against 
 property, may in their immediate results be more injurious 
 to society, and may justly be visited witli heavier 
 penalties, but even these offences may be less ominous 
 as symptoms of a man's moral character than lying. 
 Lying is sometimes malicious ; it is always cowardly ; 
 and the old instinct was true which identified manly 
 courage with virtue ; for a want of moral courage is in 
 some respects worse than many individual vices, just as 
 constitutional debihty is more dangerous to life and less 
 curable than fever, or rheumatism, or other specific forms 
 of disease. 
 
 But just as the Seventh Commandment does not forbid 
 sensual sin in general but only a particular form of 
 sensual sin j so the Ninth Commandment does not forbid 
 lying in general but only a particular form of lying. 
 
 On what grounds then does the Commandment fasten 
 on this particular kind of falsehood, instead of condemn- 
 ing falsehood of every kind ? It may be suggested that 
 the bearing of false witness against our neighbour is the 
 
220 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 most frequent and the most injurious form of falsehood ; 
 that the sin of bearing false witness in favour of others is 
 not so common and not so mischievous ; and that lying 
 to our own advantage is a sin which if it does not cure 
 itself — for nothing is more monstrous than the theory that 
 any sin can cure itself — will soon cease to have any effect; 
 men wll listen to lying of that kind, at first with incredulity, 
 and then with contemptuous unbelief. 
 
 It is, however, a mistake to suppose that the sins for- 
 bidden in these ten Commandments are forbidden chiefly 
 because they are more mischievous than others which are 
 left uncondemned. These Commandments are part of a 
 Divine revelation by which the moral and spiritual nature 
 of the Jewish people was to be developed and disciplined. 
 Their reason is not to be found in those maxims of expe- 
 diency which may determine the course of human legisla- 
 tion, but in certain great Divine ideas, the recognition of 
 which is necessary to the true life of nations and of indi- 
 vidual men. The particular precept — in every case — is 
 intended not so much to enforce a specific duty, or to 
 prevent a specific act of sin, as to train the conscience 
 and heart of the people to recognise and honour the prin- 
 ciple on which the duty rests or which the sin violates. 
 Murder is forbidden not merely because it injures the 
 
The Ninth Commandment, 221 
 
 victim, but also in order to train the people to the 
 acknowledgment of the sanctity and dignity of human 
 nature. Adultery is forbidden not merely because of the 
 misery and shame which come from it, but also to vindi- 
 cate the sanctity of marriage. And since a particular 
 form of lying is forbidden we may be certain that there is 
 some other reason for this besides the harm which the 
 particular offence inflicts on individuals. 
 
 The crime which this Commandment condemns is, as 
 I have said, the bearing of false witness against our neigh- 
 bour, whether in public or in private, in courts of justice 
 or in the common intercourse of society. 
 
 But its very terms suggest the idea of a tribunal and of 
 an authority with power to censure or to punish the 
 offences upon which it is called to pronounce judgment, 
 and I think that we shall do well to keep this idea dis- 
 tinctly before us. I find in this Commandment, therefore, 
 first of all, a recognition of those tribunals which are 
 necessary to the peace and to the very existence of the 
 State. I am a liberal, as most of you know, in politics 3 
 and have a very strong faith in the old liberal principles 
 that the rights and interests of a nation are safest when it 
 has a firm control over its rulers, and that the great end 
 
222 The Ninth Commandment, 
 
 of government is to enable people to govern themselves. 
 There is a sense, no doubt, in which the power of kings, 
 and parliaments, and magistrates is derived from the will 
 and consent of the people ; but while this is true in re- 
 lation to the particular individuals who are entrusted 
 with power, and the terms on which their power is exer- 
 cised, it is not true in relation to legislative, administra- 
 tive, and judicial power itself Governments exist by 
 virtue of the Divine constitution of the world. As society 
 — according to the Divine order — is necessary for the 
 perfect development of human nature, and for the ends 
 of man's creation, so according to the same Divine order 
 Government is necessary, without which society is im- 
 possible. If Government exists by the will of God, then 
 the powers which are necessary for the maintenance of 
 Government are sustained by the will of God. The 
 power of making laws, of levying taxes, of appointing 
 judges, of inflicting penalties for crime, of deciding 
 differences between individuals as to the rights of property, 
 of repressing violence, of providing for the defence of the 
 country by armies and navies, and whatever other 
 powers are necessary to preserve the integrity, the peace 
 and security of the State, and to protect individuals against 
 being injured by the violence, the fraud, or the careless- 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 223 
 
 ness and neglect of others, do not rest on any explicit or 
 implied " social contract," between the Government and 
 the nation, nor upon ancient custom and consent ; their 
 ultimate foundation is to be found in the Divine consti- 
 tution of the world. There are times of national con- 
 fusion and peril, when the powers which belong to 
 Government may be justly exercised by men who have 
 not inherited their authority under any law of succession, 
 nor been appointed to it by any of the common methods 
 by which nations elect their rulers. The circumstances of 
 their position may determine their right to rule, and the 
 duty of a nation to obey. Not only what are sometimes 
 called legitimate Governments, which claim to govern on 
 the ground of hereditary right, not only constitutional 
 Governments, but Governments which have sprung into 
 existence no one can tell how, composed of men whose 
 only claim rests on the necessity of acknowledging their 
 authority if public order is to be preserved, and if great 
 national perils are to be averted, are among " the powers 
 which be" and which are " ordained of God." 
 
 In our own country, happily, there has been no dispute 
 for many generations as to the right of the Government to 
 exercise all the authority necessary to the defence and 
 preservation of society. We and our fathers have lived 
 
224 ^^^ Ninth Commandment 
 
 under a constitution consecrated by the traditions of 
 centuries, having its foundations in the affections, the con- 
 fidence, and customs of the nation, modified and 
 improved from time to time by the sagacity of statesmen 
 and in conformity with the experience and the demands 
 of the people. The succession of our sovereigns has 
 been uncontested, and as a rule our kings have been as 
 loyal to the constitution as the people themselves have 
 been to the throne. Laws have been enacted by the free 
 consent of Parliaments, which have gradually come to 
 represent all classes in the state, and they have been 
 administered by judges whose incorruptible integrity is 
 the admiration of the world. We may be far enough as 
 yet from having a perfect political organisation, our 
 legislation may still require amendment, some institutions 
 and customs defended by public law may seem to many 
 of us unjust and oppressive, but by all the titles on which 
 a Government can rest its claims to the free and hearty 
 submission and support of a people, the British 
 Government can appeal to all ranks and conditions of 
 men in this country. 
 
 In these circumstances it is most obvious and certain 
 that its authority is sustained not merely by the over- 
 whelming material force at its command; "Whosoever 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 225 
 
 reslsteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God." "Ye 
 must needs be subject not only for wrath but also for 
 conscience sake." 
 
 And when you stand before any of its tribunals to bear 
 witness for or against any of your fellow citizens, you are 
 bound to remember that the judge or the magistrate is 
 not only invested with the dignity which the nation 
 confers, but that he is fulfilHng a function which, accord- 
 ing to God's own idea of the order of the world, is 
 necessary to the peace and security of society. Equivoca- 
 tion, falsehood, concealment of what you are required and 
 expected to tell, is a crime not against men merely but 
 against Him from whom judges and rulers derive their 
 power. You do not lie unto men merely but unto God. 
 The judge is " a minister of God — a revenger to execute 
 wrath upon him that doeth evil," and when by false 
 witness you endeavour to turn aside the penalties which 
 he is commissioned to inflict on the criminal, or to involve 
 the innocent in undeserved condemnation, you are at- 
 tempting to defeat the ends of a Divine appointment and 
 to deceive the representative, not merely of human laws, 
 but of the Justice of God by which the world is governed. 
 
 It is not, however, before courts of justice alone that 
 
 Q 
 
226 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 we " bear witness " for or against our neighbour ; and 
 this Commandment, which forbids us to bear false witness 
 at any time or in any circumstances, recognises, I think, 
 the existence and authority of another tribunal whose 
 sentences are less formal but hardly less serious in their 
 effect on the honour and happiness of men. The crime 
 of misleading juries, judges, and magistrates is universally 
 condemned. But there are very few of us who are ever 
 brought to the bar of a police court or who have to plead 
 " guilty or not guilty " at the Assizes. There are none of 
 us who are not being judged from day to day by the 
 people about us, by our friends, and by our enemies. 
 We have as much right to a just sentence from them as 
 from a Judge on the Bench \ and there are some men on 
 whose character, principles, and public services — not 
 their neighbours alone, their famiUes, their acquaintances — 
 but great communities are called upon to pronounce. 
 However wide or however contracted may be the circle by 
 which a man is judged, he has a right to claim that no 
 false witness shall be borne against him through which he 
 may have to suffer an unjust sentence. Whether the 
 favourable or adverse decision is to be given by our shop- 
 mates, or by the people with whom we do business, or by 
 the neighbours that live in the same court or street with 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 227 
 
 ourselves, or by the friends with whom we have been 
 accustomed to dine, or by the men with whom we have 
 worked in the advocacy of great principles or in the public 
 service, or by the burgesses of a town, or by the whole 
 nation, we have every one of us — from the most illustrious 
 statesman in the country do^vn to the obscurest labouring 
 man— a right to demand that before the tribunal of what 
 to every one of us is Public Opinion, no false witness 
 shall be either maliciously or carelessly given. The pro- 
 ceedings before this tribunal are often very irregular and 
 sometimes very tumultuous ; its decisions are often un- 
 certain and sometimes inconsistent; but these decisions 
 are not the less grave, nor is it the less necessary that all 
 whose testimony goes to shape them should speak as on 
 their oath. The penalties which the Court of Public 
 Opinion is able to inflict on those who are brought up 
 for judgment are not executed by the gaoler or the hang- 
 man, nor can they affect the life or even the liberty of 
 those on whom it pronounces an adverse sentence ; but it 
 can destroy their peace of heart, the comfort of their 
 homes, their reputation and their usefulness ; it can rob 
 them of their friends and ruin their fortunes, and blast all 
 the joys of life — all except the highest, which are safe 
 alike from the violence, the treachery, the carelessness, 
 
 Q2 
 
228 The Niiith Commandment. 
 
 and the malice of mankind — the joys which arise from the 
 approval of conscience, from communion with God, and 
 from the hope of immortality. 
 
 It may be thought that our true wisdom is to defy and 
 to despise the opinion of Society, — that the judgment of 
 other men on our actions rests often on such imperfect 
 knowledge, is so often determined by mistake and mis- 
 apprehension, is so often invalidated by prejudice and 
 passion, that our only safety lies in regarding it with 
 cynical and contemptuous indifference. 
 
 It is one of the great perils which beset all who are 
 engaged, to any extent, in public life, that they come to 
 be so hardened against misrepresentation that they are 
 almost insensible even to just criticism. Indignation at 
 the reckless and unscrupulous statements into which our 
 opponents are so often betrayed, in the excitement of 
 political, municipal, and especially ecclesiastical contests, 
 often ends in making us not only absolutely careless 
 about what they say of us, but in making us un- 
 conscious of the very slightest pain when, either justly 
 or through judging us on false principles, or through 
 an imperfect acquaintance with facts, they regard our 
 course with the strongest moral disapprobation. We are 
 in danger of being amused rather than troubled even 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 229 
 
 when good men loudly proclaim that we are the enemies 
 of the truths which are dearer to us than life, that we are 
 destroying the foundations of national morality, that we are 
 provoking men to deeds of violence, that we are doing 
 our best to undermine and to ruin the Christian faith of 
 \ our country. The danger is that public life so accustoms 
 us to such charges as these, that they cease to give us a 
 moment's discomfort ; we become so indifferent to them 
 that they do not even provoke anger : they produce less 
 impression than the shadow of a passing cloud on the 
 sea. 
 
 Now, I am quite sure that this is not the spirit which a 
 Christian ought to cherish. Just in proportion as a man 
 is filled with the spirit of Christ will it be impossible for 
 him to regard with scornful indifference the judgment of 
 other men. We may despise the opinions formed of us 
 by those whom we do not love, but if we love all men as 
 Christ means us to love them, if we recognise in all men 
 the shining of that inner light which, however it may be 
 darkened and obscured, is never wholly extinguished, 
 except, perhaps, in the case of those who are altogether 
 depraved, we cannot help being pained by their ill 
 opinion of us, though we may be obHged firmly and 
 sometimes passionately to resist what we believe to be 
 
230 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 their injustice, and though we must refuse to turn a 
 hair's breadth from what seems to us the Hne of duty, 
 to avert their censure and their anger. 
 
 We ourselves shall not become the more careful in 
 bearing witness concerning our neighbours, if we despise 
 the tribunal, of what to every one of them is Public 
 Opinion, before which our testimony is given and whose 
 decisions our testimony is intended to affect. 
 
 In this Commandment there is, I think, a divine 
 recognition of the importance of the moral judgments 
 which men pronounce on each other, the judgments 
 which individual men form on other men, as the result of 
 the testimony to which they have listened whether it was 
 true or false, the judgments which large classes of men, or 
 whole communities form on individuals, and which con- 
 stitute what we call the opinion of Society concerning 
 them. 
 
 Nor is it in this Commandment alone, that we find 
 proof of the great part which God intends the moral judg- 
 ments of other men to play in the moral life of every one 
 of us. It is a fact, recognised by every school of ethical 
 philosophy, that the conscience of man is formed partly 
 by his circumstances and the moral atmosphere which 
 surrounds him. That does not mean that our moral 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 231 
 
 convictions are absolutely determined by external in- 
 fluences, and that the distinction between right and 
 wrong, is therefore purely accidental. The kind of 
 cultivation which a flower receives, the nature of the soil 
 in which it is planted, the amount of heat and moisture 
 by which its inner life is stimulated, have a very great 
 effect on its growth, determine the size of its leaves, the 
 tint, and, to some extent, even the form of its blossom ; 
 but a rose, however you cultivate it, remains a rose. It does 
 not depend on the accident of culture whether a par- 
 ticular tree shall bear fuchsias or red currants ; if it 
 it bears at all, it will bear a particular kind of flower or a 
 particular kind of fruit. And so there are limits beyond 
 which external influences cannot determine what the 
 moral convictions of men shall be ; no circumstances 
 could lead a man to call every vice virtuous, and every 
 virtue vicious. But the degree to which a man's moral 
 perceptions shall become true and clear and just does 
 depend upon the moral influences which surround him; 
 and these influences may in some cases appear to suppress 
 the growth of his moral life altogether ; you cannot 
 change a rose into a pear tree by cultivation, but you may 
 by cultivation, or the want of it, prevent the rose from 
 blossominsf at all. 
 
232 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 Now one of the chief influences by which the moral 
 principles of men are formed is the current opinion of the 
 Society in which they live. That is a divine law. Let a 
 man be born among thieves, and live among them, and it 
 is very likely that, whatever else he may regard as wrong, 
 he will regard thieving as a very proper way of earning a 
 livelihood. Let a man be born among people and live 
 among them, who think that it is right to use the material 
 power of the State to suppress false religious beliefs, and 
 he is likely to think that whoever puts a heretic to death 
 " doeth God service." I have very little doubt that to 
 many electors in corrupt boroughs, such as Yarmouth and 
 Bridgewater, it seems just as fair and honourable a thing 
 to sell a vote as to sell a horse or a house. 
 
 A right and pure public opinion is therefore of the 
 greatest importance to the moral life of every individual 
 man. None of us can help being influenced by it. 
 If it is unsound it must injure us, just as foul air injures 
 our physical health ; if it is just and pure it must do us 
 good, just as the air of the mountains inspires us with 
 new life and vigour. 
 
 But the general moral opinions of Society are made up 
 very largely of its judgments on individual men and on the 
 men who represent particular political or religious parties ; 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 233 
 
 just as English law has been created, not merely by general 
 Acts of Parliament, but by the decisions of the judges in 
 individual cases. The splendour and romance which 
 have been thrown around the lives of great generals 
 have created the conviction among innumerable men 
 that the profession of arms is the noblest of pro- 
 fessions. The enthusiastic admiration of the English 
 people for Nelson has made thousands of EngHsh boys 
 believe that there is no glory comparable to that of 
 serving in the English navy and sinking the ship of a 
 Frenchman. 
 
 The false witness which was borne against the Puritans 
 by the profligate wits of the court of Charles II, produced 
 in the mind of this country a strong antagonism to the 
 great principles for which the Puritans contended. The 
 calumnies which, during the first two centuries, were flung 
 at the Christians, made many upright heathen believe 
 that Christianity itself was an execrable superstition. 
 Slander a clergyman and you help to make the principle 
 of an Established Church odious, and you try to win the 
 cause of ecclesiastical freedom before the tribunal of 
 Public Opinion by " false witness " against your neighbour. 
 Slander a Nonconformist and you help to make Noncon- 
 formity odious, and you try by "false witness" against your 
 
234 T^J^^ Ninth Commandment. 
 
 neighbour to induce the tribunal of Public Opinion to 
 pronounce in favour of religious establishments. Pick up 
 and circulate any scandal you may happen to hear — no 
 matter how untrustworthy the authority for it — to the dis- 
 honour of a religious man, and you do what lies in your 
 power to create a conviction in the public mind that all 
 religious men are hypocrites, and that religion itself is an 
 imposture. It is by the opinion which Society forms on 
 individuals that its general opinions on all questions, 
 moral, religious, and political, are to a very large extent 
 created ; and to bear " false witness " either for or against 
 any man is to attempt to deceive and to mislead that great 
 Tribunal — whose decisions affect not merely the happi- 
 ness and the reputation of particular men, but the formation 
 of the conscience and the judgment of the whole nation. 
 
 I will not dwell on the keen and agonising suffering 
 which some sensitive people endure through the careless 
 or malicious gossip of their acquaintances and neighbours ; 
 on the broken friendships, the destruction of confidence 
 and the creation of jealousy between husbands and wives, 
 the ruin of domestic peace, brought about not merely by 
 wilful lying but by the idlest and most thoughtless mis- 
 representation. These things are sufficiently common to 
 make every one who is not absolutely inliuman careful to 
 
The Ninth Comma7idment. 235 
 
 avoid the reckless slanders by which such misery may be 
 inflicted. 
 
 To illustrate in detail the ways in which we may avoid 
 bearing false wdtness against our neighbour, is, perhaps, 
 hardly necessary. If we have an honest desire not to 
 commit the sin we shall be in no great danger of com- 
 mitting it. There are, however, two or three very obvious 
 and commonplace suggestions which seem to me worth 
 consideration. 
 
 (i) We should try to form a true and just judgment of 
 other people before we say anything against them. A 
 witness ought to be sure of the facts to which he bears 
 testimony. In forming our judgment of others we should 
 remember how often our own actions have been misin- 
 terpreted, and we ourselves misjudged; how often our most 
 innocent words have been misunderstood or ingeniously 
 perverted ; and we should be careful not to inflict on others 
 the Avrong of which we ourselves indignantly complained. 
 We have no right to strain their words to their disad- 
 vantage, nor to catch at any unfortunate expression which 
 slipped from them accidentally, nor to ascribe their actions 
 to the worst possible motive. If any reasonable hypo- 
 thesis ^vill relieve their conduct from blame they ought to 
 receive the benefit of it. 
 
236 The Ninth Commandmenf. 
 
 (2) We have no right to give our mere inferences from 
 what we know about the conduct or principles of others as 
 though they were facts. From the direction which we 
 saw a man taking we might conclude that he was going to 
 a certain house ; but we have no right to say that he went 
 there if we did not see him go in. We may be unable to 
 understand how some poor woman can afford the dresses 
 she wears; but we have no right to say that she gets them 
 dishonestly; we have no right even to say that she is 
 extravagant, for perhaps she has friends who send them to 
 her. We have no right to say that a man whose name 
 seldom appears in a subscription list gives nothing away ; 
 he may prefer private to public charity. 
 
 In all political, moral aud religious controversy it is one 
 of the temptations to which controversialists are inces- 
 santly exposed, to draw an inference themselves from 
 the opinions which their opponents hold, and then to 
 charge their opponents with holding the inference; or 
 they declare that, since their opponents approve certain 
 abstract principles, they will therefore certainly commit 
 certain concrete acts which, perhaps, seem to others to be 
 the necessary expression of their principles. Men forget 
 — what I think Archbishop Whateley said — that people 
 are very illogical ; and you can never be sure that because 
 
The Nmth Commandmetit. 2'^'j 
 
 some one holds a particular doctrine, he also holds a 
 second doctrine which is perhaps logically the necessary- 
 result of the first. Archbishop Whateley adds that men 
 forget that there is very commonly a considerable differ- 
 ence between men's creed and their practice ; it does not 
 at all follow that because a Roman Catholic may believe 
 that it is right to persecute heretics, he will, therefore, 
 persecute them. Our own experience ought to show that 
 we cannot infer a man's conduct from his convictions. 
 It surely does not follow that you never get into a 
 passion because you believe you ought to keep your 
 temper. 
 
 But what, perhaps, is more important still — it is very 
 seldom that the members of one Church or of one 
 political party can ever arrive at such a vital knowledge of 
 the convictions of the members of another Church or 
 political party, as to be able to infer with any certainty 
 what conclusions — practical or speculative — will appear to 
 follow from those convictions to the minds of the persons 
 who hold them. 
 
 It may seem to us that on the principles of the Roman 
 Catholic Church no Roman Catholic can be loyal to a 
 king who is a heretic ; but to conclude that every Roman 
 CathoHc must believe it to be his duty to try to destroy 
 
238 TJie Ninth Commandment. 
 
 the authority of an heretical sovereign, which was the 
 theory of the opponents of Roman Catholic emancipation, 
 and that he will be eager to enter into every conspiracy 
 which promises success, would be unjust ; and to declare 
 that every Roman Catholic is by virtue of his faith a 
 traitor, is to bear " false witness " against our neighbour. 
 
 From our own principle that the distinction between 
 Church and State should be firmly maintained, there are 
 many who infer that v/e want to ignore the authority of 
 Christ In the conduct of our national affairs ; but the men 
 who say that this Is our desire and Intention bear false 
 witness against us. 
 
 What we have a right to do is to charge men with the 
 opinions which they actually hold, not with the con- 
 sequences which we draw from those opinions. We may 
 say that, in our judgment, their principles necessarily 
 involve certain odious conclusions ; but if they repudiate 
 these conclusions, we bear "false witness" against them, if 
 we try to make the men" odious by declaring that these 
 conclusions of ours are part of their creed. 
 
 (3) If we find that with the most honest intentions we 
 are continually making statements about other men which 
 prove to be false, we ought to leave oif talking about other 
 men altogether, or, at least, we should take care to say 
 
The Ninth Commandment, 239 
 
 nothing to their disadvantage. Some years ago it was 
 discovered that oiie man out of every twenty employed on 
 certain great EngHsh raihvays was suffering, more or less, 
 from colour-blindness. If the signalman showed a red 
 lamp, they swore with perfect good faith that it was green. 
 It is very .singular and rather surprising how many people 
 are affected by this curious imperfection of vision. 
 Clearly, no man who knows that he is suffering from it 
 ought to apply for the situation of engine-driver, signal- 
 man, or pointsman. It is equally clear that if we have 
 discovered that we are suffering from some intellectual . 
 defect which prevents us from appreciating accurately the 
 words and the doings of our neighbours, we ought 
 never to criticise them. There is a colour-blindness 
 of the intellect for which I believe men are as little 
 responsible as for the inabiHty of many persons to 
 distinguish between the colour of a rose-blossom and 
 the colour of rose-leaves. We may not be responsible 
 for the intellectual defect, but we are responsible if we 
 presumptuously undertake duties for which it disqualifies 
 us. / 
 
 (4) There is another temptation to false witness to be V 
 avoided. We have no right to spread an injurious report 
 merely because somebody brought it to us. It is a crime 
 
240 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 to pass bad money as well as to coin it. We are bound 
 to consider whether the person, from whom we heard the 
 report, had opportunities of knowing the truth; was likely 
 to form a sound judgment of the facts which came under 
 his knowledge ; and whether we should have believed 
 him if he had said the same thing to us about some 
 person to whom we bore no ill-will. There would be 
 very much less scandal manufactured if there were less 
 disposition to circulate it. 
 
 We shall have to give account not only of the deeds 
 done in the body, but of the words which we have 
 spoken, and which are often more significant than actions. 
 Words spoken carelessly, in heat of temper, in envy, 
 jealousy, and malice, — we shall some day know what hopes 
 they have blighted, what evil passions they have pro- 
 voked, to what sin and to what enduring misery they 
 have given the occasion. Life and death are in the 
 power of the tongue. By our words we wound as mth 
 a sword, not the bodies but the spiritual nature of men ; 
 by our words we may bind up the broken-hearted, and 
 soothe, and quiet, and charm to peace the bitterest agony 
 of tlie soul. *' By thy words thou shalt be justified, and 
 by tliy words thou shalt be condemned." 
 
THE TENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 ' ' Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet 
 thy neighbour's wife, nor his manserv'ant, nor his maidservant, nor 
 his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's." — 
 Exodus xx. 17. 
 
 A WELL-KNOWN and popular commentator quotes the 
 following sentence in illustration of the intention of this 
 Commandment: "This is a most excellent moral precept; 
 the observance of which will prevent all public crimes ; 
 for he who feels the force of the law that prohibits the 
 inordinate desire of anything that is the property of 
 another, can never make a breach in the peace of 
 Society, by an act of wrong to any of even its feeblest 
 members." That observation is, no doubt, perfectly true j 
 but it rests upon a most superficial theory of the purpose, 
 not only of this particular Commandment, but of the 
 whole Decalogue. It implies that the law against covet- 
 ing was intended to repress "public crimes," — that its 
 ultimate purpose was to prevent murder, adultery, and 
 theft by forbidding men to cherish the evil passions by 
 
242 The TentJi Commandment. 
 
 which they are impelled to commit these external 
 acts. 
 
 I have attempted to show that even the Command- 
 ments, which prohibit definite acts of crime, had a far 
 higher purpose than the protection of life and property, 
 and are not to be regarded as mere regulations of police. 
 Much less can this law, which touches the unrevealed 
 impulses of the heart, be regarded as nothing more than 
 an additional security against the evil and suffering which 
 certain outward offences inflict on Society. These Command- 
 ments occupy a great place in a series of Divine revelations. 
 A moral and spiritual purpose underlies them all. The}' 
 were given to a particular nation ; but they are related to 
 that " Kingdom of Heaven " which our Lord Jesus 
 Christ has established on earth, and for which the whole 
 history of Judaism was a preparation. 
 
 I can illustrate my meaning best by referring to certain 
 principles which should control our ordinary national legisla- 
 tion. We shall be in danger of doing infinite mischief if we 
 suppose that the sole or supreme object of national 
 institutions and laws is to prevent, by the most direct 
 means, the external evils from which Society is suftering. 
 In the punishment of crimes and in the alleviation of 
 misery, we have to look beyond the particular oftenccs 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 243 
 
 which the law is intended to repress, and the particular 
 sufferings which remedial measures are intended to 
 diminish. We may do more harm than good, if we do 
 not consider the probable effect of our policy on the 
 spirit and temper and habits of the nation. It would, no 
 doubt, be possible, by a strong central administration, to 
 remedy many evils which our system of local government 
 leaves untouched. Parish authorities, boards of health, and 
 town councils often show an utter incapacity or an 
 invincible indisposition to make adequate regulations for 
 the health and security of the community. Either through 
 ignorance, or through want of courage to levy a rate, or 
 through petty personal quarrels, they very often leave the 
 work which they are charged to do undone. Towns are 
 badly lighted and badly drained ; the water is hardly fit 
 to drink; nuisances and filth, which cause disease and 
 death, are left unpunished ; the number of the police is 
 inadequate to prevent crime. The remedy seems simple 
 and obvious. Let these incompetent authorities be swept 
 away. Invest the Home Secretary with power to dis- 
 charge by well-trained and independent officials all the 
 functions which are now discharged so imperfectly by the 
 representatives of local ignorance, prejudice and weak- 
 ness. Under such a system and with a man of genius 
 
 R2 
 
244 ^^^^ Tenth Commandment. 
 
 and courage in the Home Office, the whole aspect of the 
 country might be changed in ten years. Our towns and 
 villages might be made decent, clean, and healthy ; every 
 sanitary improvement suggested by men of science might 
 be enforced in every city, town, village, and hamlet from 
 Northumberland to the Land's End; water from pure 
 mountain springs might be carried into every house ; the 
 police might be so increased in number, and their 
 organisation so improved, as to render the detection and 
 punishment of every crime almost certain ; and innumer- 
 able evils from which we are likely to suffer for a century 
 to come would vanish at once and for ever. 
 
 This is the kind of argument relied upon by those who 
 desire to see the infirmities of local government give 
 place to the intelligence and energy of a central adminis- 
 tration. The beneficent results which might be expected 
 from the change are probably greatly over-estimated ; but, 
 however that may be, there is one consideration which is 
 absolutely ignored. Such a course might, perhaps, produce 
 a wonderful improvement in the outward conditions of 
 life, but what would be its effect on the national spirit and 
 habits ? The disappearance of local government would 
 be inevitably followed by a universal indifference to public 
 affairs. No man would feel that he had anything to care 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 245 
 
 for except his own business and pleasure. " In France," 
 said a lady whom I know, writing the other day from Paris 
 to her children in England — " we have noble theories of 
 liberty, but we have not the habits and discipline which 
 are necessary to the possession and maintenance of 
 liberty." These habits are formed, however imper- 
 fectly, by the necessity which is laid upon Englishmen of 
 all ranks and in every part of the country, to care for the 
 public interests ; that discipline is gained in contests for 
 local offices and in the administration of local affairs. 
 Local government may fulfil its direct intention very in- 
 adequately, but its effect on the spirit and life of the 
 people is so inestimably precious that we cannot afford to 
 surrender it, even in order to secure the greatest material 
 advantages. 
 
 I might further illustrate this principle by a reference to 
 our judicial system. Trial by jury is, in many cases, 
 a very uncertain method of getting a true verdict; but 
 perhaps the benefit of obtaining the concurrence of the 
 people in the administration of justice may outweigh 
 the evil of an institution which too frequently permits 
 the guilty to escape punishment. An unpaid magistracy 
 may administer the law less intelligently than professional 
 judges, but it is possible that by investing a large number 
 
246 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 of country gentlemen, merchants, and manufacturers with 
 judicial responsibilities, certain great social and moral 
 advantages are secured, which would be sacrificed if our 
 legal system were altogether in the hands of la\vyers. AVe 
 might make more complete and satisfactory provision for 
 the treatment of the diseases of the poor by organising 
 hospitals which should be supported by a rate or by grants 
 from the Consolidated Fund, than by leaving these insti- 
 tutions to be founded and sustained by voluntary charity ; 
 it is questionable, however, whether such a policy might 
 not so repress the spirit of sympathy and benevolence 
 which finds a thousand means for lessening human suffer- 
 ing, that the prosperous would become less generous, and 
 that, as the result of this, the poor would on the whole be 
 less efficiently cared for. 
 
 Now if wise human governments always consider not 
 merely the particular purpose which any institution is 
 intended to serve, and not merely the particular crime 
 which any law is intended to repress, but the general 
 effect of its policy on tlie national character, we may be 
 (juite certain that tliese Commandments were intended to 
 train the higher life of the people as well as to protect the 
 State from mere external evils. These great laws, like 
 the ritual of Judaism and all its civil and political institu- 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 247 
 
 tions, were meant to cherish a certam national spirit, to 
 develope certain moral ideas, to lead the mind and heart 
 of the people to a living apprehension of certain spiritual 
 truths. This principle, which it is necessary to remember 
 in considering the other Commandments of the Deca- 
 logue, should be distinctly present to us in considering 
 the Tenth Commandment, which is in some respects the 
 greatest and most significant of all the Ten. 
 
 " Thou shalt not covet." The violations of this law may 
 assume many forms. As it was given in the first instance 
 to a nation, it is natural to consider some of the ways in 
 which a nation may violate it. 
 
 The history of the world is stained and darkened by 
 the crimes to which nations have been driven by the spirit 
 of covetousness. A great and prosperous people with a 
 beautiful country rich in all the material resources which 
 contribute to national wealth and splendour, cannot 
 endure that the cornfields, and the vineyards, and the 
 noble river which can be seen from its frontiers should 
 belong to a neighbouring power. Or an inland state with 
 hardly any sea-board looks upon the indented coast of 
 some insignificant and feeble neighbour, and dreams of 
 the formidable navies which could ride in safety in those 
 
248 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 secure harbours, and of the vast commercial • cities which 
 might be built if those convenient sea-ports were its own. 
 Or a strong and masculine and enterprising race speculates 
 on the wealth it might win if it could appropriate by 
 policy or by force rich and fertile territories on the other 
 side of the world, governed by a decaying empire and 
 possessed by an unwarlike and imperfectly civiHsed 
 people. Sooner or later, it is almost certain that in every 
 case this national covetousness will end in a war of aggres- 
 sion and conquest. Some pretext will be found for a 
 quarrel ; there will be an insult to avenge ; or an ancient 
 wrong to redress, or a frontier to rectify ; or the idea of 
 national unity to vindicate ; or punishment to inflict and 
 compensation to claim for the violation of a commercial 
 treaty; by some means or other there will be a justifica- 
 tion discovered or created for seizing, by force of arms, 
 what the heart of the nation longed for. 
 
 But I repeat that it is the covetousness itself which this 
 Commandment forbids ; and the covetousness is forbidden 
 not merely to prevent the miseries, and horrors, and 
 crimes of aggressive war, but to train the spirit of nations 
 to the recognition of God's own idea of their relations to 
 each other. If one nation is forbidden to covet what 
 belongs to another, and if it honestly strives to obey the 
 
The Tenth Commmidment. 249 
 
 law, it win come to regard all countries as constituting 
 one great and magnificent Confederation of States. For 
 the freer and richer development of the life of humanity it 
 may be necessary that there should exist separate king- 
 doms and commonwealths, with their separate govern- 
 ments and their peculiar customs and laws ; but they are 
 all intended to bear their part In accomplishing the pur- 
 poses for which the world and man were created. The 
 strong are to use their strength, not to enrich themselves 
 at the expense of the weak, but to defend them from in- 
 justice and oppression. Highly civilized nations are not 
 to employ their superior resources to exterminate bar- 
 barous or less civilized races, but to train them to a higher 
 form of social and Intellectual life. Countries which 
 happen to possess inferior physical advantages than others, 
 should find in their inferior material wealth the suggestion 
 of the special virtues which they are intended to illustrate, 
 and if they cannot equal other nations in material pros- 
 perity should strive to equal or to surpass them in intel- 
 lectual culture and in a noble temperance and self- 
 restraint. 
 
 Nations should see, underlying this Commandment, the 
 Divine idea of the unity of the human race. They exist, 
 not to repress, but to develope and perfect each other's 
 
250 The Tenth Coimnandment, 
 
 life. They are the separate members of a living and 
 organised body ; if one member suffer all the members 
 suffer with it; if one member rejoice all the members 
 rejoice with it. Neither courts of arbitration, nor 
 elaborate treaties guaranteed by all the great powers of 
 Europe, nor the interests of Commerce, nor the sorrowful 
 lessons taught by the sufferings inflicted by great wars, 
 will ever render the peace of the world certain for many 
 years together. Nations must learn that they cannot 
 fulfil their national destiny by increasing their riches and 
 power at the expense of their neighbours ; that their true 
 glory lies in frankly accepting and endeavouring with 
 perfect loyalty to fulfil God's own idea, that nations like 
 men are brethren, and that they should seek greatness by 
 ministering to each other's peace, security, prosperity, and 
 honour. 
 
 Individuals, as well as nations, may violate this law. 
 It is violated by the ambition which looks with a restless 
 and hungry heart upon the fame and the power of a suc- 
 cessful rival, and longs to secure his greatness for itself. 
 It is violated by the discontent and envy with which we 
 are apt to think of the pleasant homes and the luxurious 
 comfort of men who are wealthier than ourselves. It is 
 \iolated by the desire to win from another man the love 
 
The Tenth Commandmejit. 2$i 
 
 which is the pride and joy of his life. It is violated by 
 the evil passion which has appropriated to itself the word 
 ^' lust," which once had a much wider meaning, a passion 
 which unless subdued, will lead us to invade the sanctity of 
 marriage, and involve what may be a happy household in 
 misery and disgrace. It is violated by the desire to put 
 ourselves into the place of a fellow-servant who has an 
 easier or more remunerative position than ourselves; if 
 we yield to that desire, instead of crushing it, it will lead 
 us to resort to mean and disgraceful methods of destroy- 
 ing the confidence reposed in him, to base insinuations, 
 to slander, and to treachery. 
 
 The wicked and injurious external actions which men com- 
 mit when the covetous spirit is unchecked we all condemn. 
 When a statesman, coveting the place and power of his 
 rival, subordinates the interests of his country to his 
 personal aggrandisement, he achieves not glory but 
 infamy. The social disorders and crimes which have 
 come from the violent efforts of the poor to seize the 
 property of the rich are among the saddest and most 
 disgraceful passages in the history of the human race. 
 The trickery and fraud of which men have been guilty in 
 trying to deprive others of their rights, the falsifying of 
 wills, the forging of title deeds, the lying in private, the 
 
252 The Tenth Commandment, 
 
 l^erjury In courts of justice, are among the basest and 
 most ignoble of crimes. But I must remind you again 
 that it is not these external acts which this command- 
 ment condemns, but the covetousness itself, even when it 
 is checked by conscience or by fear. We are forbidden, 
 not merely to attempt to get for ourselves by illegitimate 
 means what belongs to our neighbour, but even to desire 
 that it should be ours rather than his. The statesman 
 must not wish that the glory of his successful rival were 
 his own ; nor we who are poor, that the mansions and 
 parks and libraries of the wealthy were ours. The dis- 
 appointed lover must not look upon the wife he hoped to 
 win but has lost, and regret that she is not his ; nor the 
 servant secretly covet the happier fortune of his master, 
 or the larger income of a man who is higher in place than 
 himself 
 
 It may be said that this is a hard saying, and that it is 
 one of the impossible precepts of which there are so many 
 in the Old Testament and the New. But what is the 
 moral idea on which it rests ? It is only another form of 
 the great commandment: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour 
 as thyself" If we can obey that law we can obey this. If 
 I love the rich man as I love myself, I shall have no 
 desire to live in his house instead of him, and to drive 
 
The Tenth Commandment, 253 
 
 his carriages, and to enjoy his income. If a statesman 
 loves his rival as well as he loves himself, he will not 
 envy his rival's triumph, and desire his rival's honour; 
 the only motive which will induce him to strive for power 
 will be the conviction that he is better able to serve the 
 State. 
 
 Do you say again that this is an impossible precept? 
 I reply that for those whom we love we gladly surrender 
 our personal comfort and ease. Their happiness and 
 prosperity are dearer to us than our own. What father 
 covets his son's wealth? What mother covets her 
 daughter's beauty? A generous-hearted brother rejoices 
 in his brother's success and fame, and would not, if he 
 could, strip him of a single honour in order to increase 
 his o\vn importance and greatness. It affords us more 
 pleasure to see those who are dear to us prosperous than 
 to be prosperous ourselves. 
 
 I venture to say that if any man who had himself been 
 senior wrangler had a son who achieved the same honour, 
 he would have greater pride in his son's success than in 
 his own; and that a prime minister would listen with 
 greater delight to the cheers with which his son was 
 received on entering the House of Commons, after being 
 appointed to a high political office, than to the cheers 
 
254 ^^^^ Tenth Cornmandment. 
 
 which he himself received when he first took his seat as 
 leader of the House. We never covet what belongs ta 
 those whom we love. This Commandment has its root 
 in the Divine idea of the mutual relations which should 
 exist among mankind. God means us to love our 
 neighbours as we love ourselves. 
 
 Yes, this, which is the last of the Commandments, is In 
 some respects the greatest. It is the Commandment 
 which perhaps beyond any of the rest was likely to deepen 
 in the hearts of devout and thoughtful men In the old 
 Jewish times, that sense of their inability to do the will of 
 God, and to fulfil the Divine idea of what human life 
 ought to be, which is indispensable to the surrender of the 
 soul to God, in order to find In Him :i. supernatural 
 strength. 
 
 You remember the great place which this Command- 
 ment had in the spiritual history of the Apostle Paul.^ 
 The other Commandments the Apostle might have 
 thought that he had kept from his youth up. He had 
 never worshipped any God but Jehovah ; had never done 
 homage to any representation or symbol of God; nor taken 
 His name in vain; nor worked on the Sabbath; he had 
 honoured his father and mother ; he had never been guilty 
 of murder, adultery, or theft. But when he began to 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 255 
 
 reflect on this law which forbade him to covet that which 
 belonged to his neighbour, he discovered that he had 
 broken it most flagrantly. He was continually coveting 
 what was not his own. The more he struggled against 
 the evil passion which possessed him, the more conscious 
 he became of his inability to master it. His vehement 
 nature refused to submit to the control of his will, and, as 
 the conflict went on, it seemed that his desire to make his 
 own what belonged to another became more and more 
 violent. It was then that he became conscious of sin. 
 Here was a law which came from God and he could not 
 keep it. The righteousness of the law he could not con- 
 test. It was invested with the awfulness of Divine 
 authority, before which it was the habit of his nature to 
 bow with unquestioning reverence. His own conscience, 
 perhaps, caught some glimpse of the great moral grounds 
 on which the law rested. But to obey it seemed impos- 
 sible. He writhed and struggled in vain. He was in the 
 coils of an evil power which he could not escape. He 
 was " sold under sin." 
 
 He found freedom in Christ. The Death by which the 
 sins of the world were atoned for, was the most glorious 
 manifestation of the spirit of perfect love and self-sacrifice. 
 He learnt that to all who trust in Christ for the forgive- 
 
256 The Tenth Commandment 
 
 ness of past sin, there is granted that very life which was 
 in Christ. The Apostle was passionately longing to be 
 redeemed from himself, and in Christ this redemption was 
 possible. He was created anew in Christ Jesus; died 
 with Christ, and with Christ rose again. 
 
 The law of self-sacrifice was now written in his heart ; 
 and he fulfilled it as few men had ever fulfilled it before, 
 as few men have ever fulfilled it since. Like Christ he 
 looked habitually, not on his own things, but also on the 
 things of others. He checked his desire to die and to be 
 at rest in the presence of Christ from suffering and labour, 
 because his continuance in life was necessary to the 
 Churches which he had founded. He was ready to wish 
 himself "accursed from Christ" for the sake of his 
 kinsmen according to the flesh. 
 
 There are people who sometimes tell us that the 
 Christian Faith is but another form of selfishness, that it 
 is perpetually appealing to the dread of suffering, and 
 promising crowns, and thrones, and happiness, and glory 
 as the reward of well-doing. If they can show us any 
 good reason why we should not warn men that sin will 
 certainly be punished, and why we should not try to 
 subdue the false and fading splendours of this world by 
 telling them of the transcendent brightness and blessed- 
 
The Tenth Commandment 257 
 
 ness of the world to come, we shall not refuse to' consider 
 what they have to say. But it is possible, as we believe, 
 to paralyse some evil passions by the power of terror, and. 
 to give hope and energy to the better instincts and im- 
 pulses of the soul, by the assurance that the sharpness and 
 severity of present conflicts with temptation will be more 
 than recompensed by the peace, and purity, and rapture 
 of the ultimate triumph. It was God who made us sus- 
 ceptible to hope and to fear ; and we have not learnt that 
 any of the original instincts and passions of our nature 
 are common or unclean. But the allegation that Christi- 
 anity intensifies the selfishness of the human heart is a 
 slander, so wild, so extravagant, so monstrous, that it 
 deserves no reply. The history of the Church is its suf- 
 ficient confutation. 
 
 The very end for which Christ came into the world was 
 to redeem us from selfishness, to reveal to us the infinite 
 love of God and to restore us to God's image. The last 
 of the Ten Commandments, '• Thou shalt not covet," 
 touches the characteristic precept of the New Law, — 
 " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." This perfect 
 love, the spring of all individual virtue, is the only sure 
 and effective remedy for all social and political disorders. 
 It is in the victory of the Christian Faith, and in that 
 
 s 
 
258 The Tenth Cofnmandment, 
 
 alone, that I see any hope for the rescue of mankind from 
 the sorrows, and confusion, and conflicts which make 
 human Hfe so desolate. It is man himself that requires to 
 be changed. No change in the mere external organisa- 
 tion of society will redeem him from the evil passions 
 which are the root of all his miseries. The redemption is 
 to be wrought by the supernatural power of Christ. 
 " Love worketh no ill to his neighbour : therefore Love is 
 the fulfilling of the Law." These ancient Commandments, 
 written on stone, shall some day be written on the heart 
 of man. God is Love, and when all men are made " par- 
 takers of the Divine nature," the Moral Law, as an autho- 
 ritative restraint on human passion and an external rule of 
 life, will, in a sense, have become obsolete. It v/ill no 
 longer be revealed to us in definite precepts, sanctioned 
 by awful penalties and glorious rewards ; it will be revealed 
 in all the instincts, affections, and impulses of the heart. 
 As the Law is the expression of the infinite perfections of 
 God, it is the proi)liccy of tlie ]icrfe(^tion whicli we our- 
 selves shall attain wlicn our union with God tln'ough 
 Christ is consummated. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PRINTED r.Y UUnSUN AND HON, UIRMIXflll AM. 
 
Date Due