A.M. Z 
 
 LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 BV 4655 .M42 1866 
 
 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 
 
 1805-1872. 
 The commandments considered 
 
 as iiistrum^ents of national 
 
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 M. 
 
 
THE COMMANDMENTS 
 
 CONSIDEEED AS INSTEUMENTS OF NATIONAL 
 
 EEEOEMATION. 
 
THE 
 
 COMMANDMENTS 
 
 COISTSIDEEED AS INSTEUMENTS OF ^-ATIONAL 
 EEFOEMATIOR 
 
 I BY 
 
 F. D. M A U E I C E, 
 
 PEOFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IX THE UXITERSITY OF 
 CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1866. 
 
 [The right of Translation and Rcirrodudion is reserved.] 
 
LONDON : 
 
 R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, TEINTERS, 
 
 BRSAD STREET HILL. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 This little work was written before I had 
 any expectation of the honour which the 
 University of Cambridge has done me, in 
 appointing me to its Chair of Moral Philo- 
 sophy ; before I had even a dream of seeking 
 for that honour. It is simply a book of prac- 
 tical morality and divinity, and has not the 
 least of a scientific character. But I am not 
 sorry that it should go forth as a witness that 
 I desire, in whatever task I am engaged, to 
 keep the interests of practical morality and 
 divinity in sight, as paramount to all others. 
 
 London, October^ 1866. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 THE FIRST COMMANDMENT . 
 THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 
 THE THIRD COMMANDMENT . 
 THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 
 THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT . 
 THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT . 
 THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 
 THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 
 THE NINTH COMMANDMENT . 
 THE TENTH COMMANDMENT . 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 18 
 
 35 
 
 50 
 
 76 
 
 87 
 
 100 
 
 116 
 
 127 
 
 138 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 THE EEV. NORMAN MACLEOD, D.D. 
 
 GLASGOW. 
 
 My deah Sir, — 
 
 Many months ago you did me the honour 
 to send me a copy of your speech on the Sab- 
 bath, which has now become celebrated in 
 England as well as Scotland. I admired the 
 eloquence and manliness of that speech, as 
 much, I think, as any one could have done who 
 sympathised with all the sentiments of it. I 
 did sympathise with many of them. So far as 
 it was a protest against opinions and practices 
 which religious teachers in your country or 
 ours have grafted upon the Eourth Command- 
 ment, it seemed to me as useful as it was 
 honest and courageous. 
 
 b 
 
X Dedication. 
 
 But the more I have reflected on your 
 arguments, the less have I been able to accept 
 your doctrine respecting that Commandment, 
 or respecting the Commandments generally. 
 Coming from the lips of an eminent preacher 
 in the Kirk of Scotland, those arguments were 
 entitled to the gravest consideration. Apart 
 from their intrinsic ability, they indicated a 
 movement in the country most remarkable 
 for Sabbatical strictness, which portend great 
 changes there, and which may affect all lands. 
 I have weighed them with all the preposses- 
 sion in their favour which arises from dislike 
 to Presbyteral as well as to Prelatical as- 
 sumptions, from respect for those who main- 
 tain an unpopular opinion ; and I have 
 come deliberately to the conviction that the 
 Commandments are now, and ever have been, 
 the great protectors against Presbyteral and 
 Prelatical assumptions, and that if we do not 
 receive them as Commandments of the Lord 
 God spoken to Israel, and spoken to every 
 
Dedication. 
 
 XI 
 
 people under heaven now, we lose the greatest 
 witnesses we possess for the national morality 
 and the civil freedom which these assumptions 
 are undermining. 
 
 Your speech has been continually in my 
 mind whilst I have been writing this book; 
 but I have not alluded to it, or attempted an 
 answer to any part of it. I was led to speak 
 on the subject by some remarks which I heard 
 from a very able and excellent clergyman of 
 the English Church, in condemnation of our 
 practice of reading the Commandments in our 
 Communion Service. No Presbytery will 
 blame any one for complaining of such a 
 practice, or will applaud any one for defending 
 it. I have that security, and many others, 
 that if I have the misfortune to dissent from 
 you, I shall not win any favour from your ad- 
 versaries. I hope I have said nothing which 
 can induce any one who thinks ill of you to 
 speak well of me. 
 
 But, though the occasion of these pages 
 b 2 
 
xii Dedication. 
 
 was the one to which I have referred, they 
 are not chiefly occupied with reflections on 
 the reasonahleness or nnreasonahleness of pas- 
 sages in our Liturgy, or of the opinions which 
 are maintained by those who dislike Liturgies. 
 It is possible, I know, for divines to become so 
 wrapped up in such questions as to forget all 
 which is passing around them in their own 
 land and in other lands. To me this indiffer- 
 ence has presented itself as a great sin, which 
 I must confess before God. What, I have said 
 to myself, is my theology good for, when I 
 can behold with so little of anxious hope and 
 fear Italy rising out of its chrysalis and 
 bursting into a new life — new, but restoring 
 to it the days of old; Germany, by strange 
 processes, passing from a collection of little 
 principalities, each with its castes of soldiers, 
 artists, professors, into a living and united 
 nation ; when I can look with so little of 
 shame and amazement on the spectacle which 
 England is presenting to the world of citizens 
 
Dedication. xiii 
 
 who offer their consciences to the highest 
 bidder, and rich men who buy the right to 
 legislate, or to make their sons legislators, at 
 that price ? 
 
 And while I am saying for myself and my 
 brethren who call themselves ministers of 
 God, "Oh that we were more like those old 
 prophets who never separated their well-being 
 for a moment from the well-being of their 
 nation, who felt its sins and miseries as their 
 own, who learnt through it the purpose of 
 God, to educate and bless all nations ! " — while 
 I am saying this, I am met with the cry, 
 " We are so Judaical ; our great effort should 
 be to throw off our Semitic associations, and 
 to show that we belong to the modern Aryan 
 world." Why, that is the very thing we have 
 been doing so diligently for a number of years. 
 That is what all our different schools under 
 one pretence or another are doing. Our 
 Catholic school cannot bear the secularity of 
 the Nation ; it interferes with the rights and 
 
xiv Dedication. 
 
 privileges of the Church. Our Evangelicals 
 affirm that it is very well to have establish- 
 ments for promoting religion, but that religion 
 itself is altogether an individual thing and has 
 nothing to do with the Nation. Our Liberals 
 echo the maxim, though some of their infer- 
 ences from it are of the most opposite kind. The 
 Old Testament, they say, is a national history, 
 and therefore only concerns us so far as we are 
 able to extract some religious sentiments out 
 of it. Thus, when any of us venture to ex- 
 press an interest in the movements of the 
 Continent, we must either link them to some 
 special scheme of prophetical interpretation, or 
 else apologize for our earnestness by saying 
 that we cannot quite cease to be men though 
 we are Christians and preachers of the Gospel. 
 If we express, timidly and reservedly, our 
 opinion that bribery and corruption are objec- 
 tionable (especially when brought to light), we 
 qualify that opinion by saying that we speak 
 as politicians. There are sins which it be- 
 
Dedication. xv 
 
 hoves us to denounce professionally ; Avhicli we 
 are to regard as hateful in the sight of God : 
 but these are of a different order, these only 
 bring nations to ruin, these only indicate that 
 we have sold ourselves to money, and worship 
 that as the supreme Lord ; why should theolo- 
 gians trouble themselves about these ? 
 
 In the late American war, we did hear ever 
 and anon words of a very Judaical character, — 
 words which reminded one of old Puritan and 
 Covenanting times. They mingled strangely 
 and incongruously with the loud boasts of the 
 American newspapers, which indicated the 
 highest development of a purely "Aryan" 
 civilization. They were received with much 
 derision by the newspapers which represent the 
 Aryan civilization of England. But, I do not 
 think that He who sitteth in the heavens, and, 
 as old Jewish writers speak, laughs at many 
 of the plots of kings and peoples, held those 
 cries to Him in derision. I think the prayer 
 that He would come forth and defend the 
 
xvi Dedication. 
 
 right, and put strength into the weakest 
 who were struggling for it, being first in- 
 spired by Him, brought an answer from Him ; 
 that the courage was bestowed, that noble 
 lives and noble deaths proved that He is the 
 same now as in the generations of old. I am 
 not afraid to use this language, however much 
 it may be open to the charge of cant — or, since 
 that is a favourite variation of the phrase, 
 of profaneness, — from our popular writers; 
 because you as the successor of those who 
 believed in a God of nations will understand it ; 
 because you will confess that the worst cant 
 of our days comes from those who wish by all 
 means to uphold a Religion, and have no faith 
 in a God who upholds justice and truth. 
 
 It is the certainty that you are in your 
 heart a genuine representative of these fore- 
 fathers, — that you are doing manfully the work 
 which they would most rejoice in, — that if you 
 depart in any degree from their maxims and 
 practices it is only because you would enforce 
 
Dedication, xvii 
 
 and expand their principles, — which emboldens 
 me to implore that you will reconsider your 
 theory about the Commandments. I have no 
 theory to substitute for it. I have no desire 
 that you should accept any doctrines which 
 bear an Anglican stamp. I believe that the 
 reverence for an unchangeable Law and a 
 living Lawgiver has given to the Scotch cha- 
 racter its strength and solidity ; whatever any 
 of us may discover in it of hardness and nar- 
 rowness, has proceeded, I think, not from the 
 excess of that reverence, but from the loss of it 
 through the substitution of glosses, opinions, 
 traditions for the divine Commandments — 
 through the attempt to fulfil them by artificial 
 rules of men's devising, which obscure the 
 divine fulfilment of them. To part with the 
 Commandments is, it seems to me, to put 
 yourself out of harmony with the best habits 
 and the deepest convictions of your people, 
 and to lessen your power of reforming what 
 is feeble and false in them. 
 
xviii Dedication. 
 
 And what I say of Scotland, I would say- 
 also of England, and of every nation under 
 heaven. Those who think that God has left 
 the nations to the care of diplomatists or 
 journalists believe that it is very desirable for 
 us to have a Christianity. They wish us to 
 have it in any form we like. It may even 
 take the form of the Sermon on the Mount, 
 provided only there is none of whom the 
 people who hear the sermon shall say, " He 
 speaketh as one having authority, and not 
 as the Scribes." The Scribes, of one sort or 
 another, must make the Christianity. And so 
 there will be a Christianity for E^ome, fashioned 
 by the Cardinals; a Christianity for Paris, 
 fashioned by the salons; a Christianity for 
 London, fashioned by the Stock Exchange. It 
 will be stationary and dead in the hands of Con- 
 servatives; entirely fluctional when managed 
 by the men of Progress. It will be for a long 
 time harmless, and chiefly ornamental; bear- 
 ing witness against no oppression, threatening 
 
Dedication. xix 
 
 no abuse : then it will suddenly assume the 
 form of a fierce fanaticism, mingling with the 
 dissonant cries of hungry and savage men. It 
 will be, for a while, almost entirely material- 
 istic ; then it will combine itself with all the 
 dreams of an unseen world, which can never 
 be extinct in the breasts of any human beings. 
 As the religion of prosperous men, it will be a 
 Christianity, with a dead Christ to give it its 
 name. As the religion of sufPering men, it will 
 be a Christianity, with an incendiary leader 
 making himself the Christ. As a religion for 
 Materialists, it will try to galvanize ethical 
 maxims and opinions till they look like powers. 
 As a religion for Spiritualists, it will recognise 
 all spirits, except the Holy Spirit. In one and 
 all its forms, it will be onlv a human con- 
 ception, leading naturally to the doctrine that 
 the Christ never has been, never can be any- 
 thing else; thence, for those who still want 
 a religion, to the worship, theoretically, of 
 humanity itself, practically, of any specimen 
 
XX Dedication. 
 
 of humanity for which the worshippers may 
 have a fancy. 
 
 Such visions as these, to which no one who 
 contemplates the present state of the world, 
 religious or irreligious, Catholic or Protestant, 
 can close his eyes, answer an objection which 
 many will make to what I have said in this 
 volume about national faith. " You are taking 
 us back," it will be said, "to an older period 
 in the world's history. At the Reformation, 
 men were busy about national distinctions in 
 connexion with faith. Now all admit that we 
 must have a Catholic faith, whatever sense 
 they may give to that phrase." I demand a 
 Catholic faith, not in any new sense, but in 
 the old sense ; that old sense satisfying, as I 
 maintain, all the newest demands of the con- 
 science and reason of man. A Pather in 
 heaven must be the root of it — a Eather of 
 all mankind in the Son of His Love — a Pather 
 who bestows His Spirit upon His children, 
 that they may serve Him truly and freely : 
 
Dedication. xxi 
 
 here is the Catholic faith which we have been 
 taught in the Lord's Prayer and the Creed. 
 Modern Papal Catholicism, modern Liberal 
 Catholicism, assume another basis. The 
 Church, not God, is the ground of the one; 
 humanity, not God, is the ground of the other. 
 These opinions must combine at last ; one 
 must be absorbed into the other. The Jewish 
 Commandments are the abiding witness against 
 both. I admit that there is a cry for a Catho- 
 lic faith and Catholic unity now which there 
 was not in the sixteenth century. Just be- 
 cause I recognise the cry as the most genuine 
 one of our century, I turn to these Command- 
 ments with the same affection as our fathers 
 felt for them then — if possible, with a greater 
 affection. The struggle for Catholicity will be 
 a delusive and mischievous struggle, if it is 
 severed from the struggle for national freedom 
 and order. To connect it with that is to estab- 
 lish in the most living and practical sense, the 
 union of Gospel with Law. 
 
xxii Dedication, 
 
 I must add one word on a subject upon which 
 I am very little qualified to speak, but to which 
 no one in these days can be indifferent, how- 
 ever careless he may be about the order or 
 freedom of Nations. You feel, I am sure, how 
 mad and godless are the efforts of Christian 
 preachers or laymen to put any check upon 
 the freest physical investigations, or in any way 
 whatever to determine the direction which 
 they shall take. Such efforts, like all other 
 things which are weak and wrong in our 
 divinity, are attributed to its " Judaical " 
 element; if that can be cleared away, we 
 shall have no religious obstacle, it is said, in 
 the way of scientific progress. That is to 
 say, if we cease to believe in fixed and per- 
 manent laws governing the moral world, we 
 shall at once spring to the conviction that 
 there must be fixed and permanent laws in the 
 natural world, and that it is worth while to 
 devote our energies to the search for them. 
 " Stop ! " some logician will say, " you are 
 
Dedication. xxiii 
 
 taking the word ' law ' in two different senses. 
 You are confounding, as Hooker and Montes- 
 quieu confounded, the laws which depend for 
 their validity on rewards and punishments, 
 with the laws which are generalizations from 
 phenomena." I reply, "It is true that I am 
 using the word ' law ' as Hooker and Montes- 
 quieu used it. I am using it so deliberately . 
 Por I believe tliat those who make moral laws 
 depend upon the rewards and punishments 
 which enforce them are destroying morality; 
 and that those who make physical laws into 
 mere generalizations from phenomena, are 
 doing their utmost to hinder the search for 
 physical laws ; are resolving that we shall 
 have no more Newtons, or Paradays, or Watts ; 
 are striving that the student may be crushed 
 under the phenomena which he fancies he can 
 classify." It was when the Commandments of 
 God were hidden under the traditions of men, 
 that science was impossible, because pheno- 
 mena were worshipped. The assertion at the 
 
xxiv Dedication. 
 
 E^eformation of a right to appeal from men to 
 God, being the rebellion against phenomena, 
 was the commencement of brave scientific 
 investigation. 
 
 I trust you will accept the frank statements 
 and complaints of this letter, as a proof of the 
 very sincere and cordial respect which I feel 
 for your character and your work. 
 
 Believe me. 
 
 My dear Sir, 
 
 Very faithfully yours, 
 
 E. D. MAURICE. 
 
THE COMMANDMENTS. 
 
 THE FIEST COMMANDMENT. 
 
 God spake all these words, saying, I am the Lord thy God, vjhich 
 have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of 
 bondage. Thou shalt ham no other gods before me. 
 
 We read this sentence (with the omission of 
 one clause) every Sunday in our Communion 
 Service. Many clergymen and many laymen 
 say that such a practice is Judaical : we are 
 returning to the Law; we are not claiming 
 the freedom with which Christ has made us 
 free. 
 
 I ask myself, " Are the words true ? Did 
 God speak these words ? " If not, there is a 
 much greater objection to them than that 
 they are Judaical ; they are blasphemous and 
 wicked. We ought to repent in dust and 
 ashes that we have used them for so many 
 
 B 
 
2 The First Commandment, 
 
 generations. The curse of a frightful lie is 
 upon our heads. 
 
 I ask myself, again, " If they were true 
 once, are they true now? Is God speaking 
 these words to Englishmen as He spoke them 
 to Jews ? " If not, I have nothing to do with 
 them. I may not be lying so grossly, as on the 
 other supposition ; hut I am suggesting a lie. 
 I am leading the people who hear me to fancy 
 that One is uttering commands to them who 
 is uttering no such commands. That is the 
 very mildest form which the complaint can 
 take. The phrase " Judaical " is utterly in- 
 adequate. If I introduced Siva worship into 
 an English Church, would you charge me with 
 deviating a little too much into an imitation 
 of the Hindoos ? 
 
 I certainly do not wish that any one who 
 thinks that God did not speak these words 
 once, or that He does not speak them now, 
 should he compelled or induced to use lan- 
 guage which to him must he so shocking. I 
 trust that I should refuse to take it into my 
 lips, though it had the authority of all Chris- 
 tendom in its favour, if I believed it to involve 
 a mockery and a deception. Why I do not 
 
The First Commandment, 3 
 
 believe it to involve a mockery and a decep- 
 tion — why I have used it, and mean to use 
 it — I will explain. 
 
 That these words are Jewish, that they are 
 contained in Jewish books, that the Jews sup- 
 pose God to have spoken them to their fathers, 
 we are all agreed. The Jewish books say that 
 God, the God whom none could see, discovered 
 Himself to a poor shepherd of Mesopotamia; 
 made him know that He was his Guide in his 
 wanderings ; the Lord of the land in which he 
 dwelt ; the Giver of his children ; the Pro- 
 tector of his household; the God who would 
 be with his seed from generation to genera- 
 tion; the God who would make his seed a 
 blessing to all the families of the earth. The 
 Jewish books say that Abraham's family lived 
 under the care of the Lord God; that He 
 remembered them, though they forgot Him. 
 The Jewish books say that the descendants of 
 Abraham became slaves in Egypt ; that the 
 Lord God revealed Himself to another shep- 
 herd of their race, as the God of his fathers, 
 as the God who cared for his brethren in their 
 bondage, as the Deliverer out of their bondage, 
 as the I AM, the same in all generations. The 
 
 b2 
 
4» The First Commandment. 
 
 Jewish books say that this Lord God did 
 actually deliver the Israelites out of their 
 bondage ; that thus He taught them what He 
 was; that all His acts were the acts of a 
 Deliverer, and at the same time of a Ruler 
 and a Judge; that those whom He delivered 
 did not believe Him or trust Him; that all 
 His discipline was to bring them to belief and 
 trust in Him. The Jewish books say that He 
 made these slaves into a Nation; that He 
 gave them Laws ; that He spake these laws ; 
 that they saw no similitude; that they only 
 heard a Voice ; that thunders and lightnings 
 confirmed the voice. The Jewish books go on to 
 say, that, in all subsequent generations, their 
 people were continually forgetting this King, 
 this Deliverer, and setting up other gods in 
 the place of Him; that so they came into 
 slavery ; that they lost the strength and man- 
 liness of a nation — the sense that they were a 
 nation; that He governed them still, using 
 their trials and their captivities for the cure 
 of their heartlessness and cowardice ; that He 
 delivered them and restored them, showing 
 Himself to be at all times what He had been 
 at first. 
 
The First Commandment. 5 
 
 What proofs have I that these Jewish books 
 are authentic books ; that they are not lying 
 books ? I do not know the proofs ; I have 
 forgotten them if I once learnt them. They 
 made little impression upon me. I believe 
 they made no impression whatever upon the 
 ignorant nations of Christendom which ac- 
 cepted these Commandments. They hated the 
 Jews— regarded them as an accursed people, 
 whom it was lawful in every possible way to 
 insult and persecute. They broke these Com- 
 mandments continually, set up images, were 
 guilty of perjury, murdered, committed adul- / 
 tery, stole, bore false witness against each 
 other. Yet they confessed them to be Com- 
 mandments, — Commandments whichit behoved 
 the rulers of nations to enforce, which must 
 be at the root of their laws, without which 
 their laws would be of no worth. I find that 
 in Christendom there has been a hierarchy of 
 priests, who have striven continually to set 
 up their decisions and traditions as divine 
 decisions and traditions ; that this hierarchy of 
 priests has exercised a great tyranny over the 
 minds of men in virtue of this pretension ; 
 that it has invaded the sanctitv of domestic 
 
6 The First Commandment. 
 
 life ; that it has treated nations either as merely 
 its ministers or as a secular economy, which 
 those who are husy ahout the kingdom of 
 heaven should despise, or else as exercising 
 a rival power and jurisdiction to its own 
 which it is to resist. I find that when the 
 inhabitants of a land have felt strongly con- 
 vinced that they are a nation, — that this 
 name imports a reality and not a fiction, — 
 they have risen against the claims of this 
 hierarchy, they have appealed to a Lord God, 
 a Deliverer from those who were using His 
 Name to support their oppressions ; they have 
 turned to His commandments for a protection 
 from the Commandments of men. Then they 
 have become worshippers of the Lord God, 
 who, as the Jews say, revealed Himself to 
 their fathers ; then they have said, " This Lord 
 God is our Lord ;" then they have maintained 
 that He did not merely speak once in old 
 times on Sinai, but is speaking now every- 
 where ; then they have declared that the thun- 
 ders and lightnings confirm His Yoice in the 
 West as much as they did in the East ; then 
 they have confessed a God of Eighteousness, 
 whose might is the instrument of His Right- 
 
The First Commcmdment, *t 
 
 eousness ; then they have begun to believe that 
 all kings and all men must bow to a Lord of 
 Righteousness, or be broken to pieces ; then 
 they have exchanged freedom for slavery, a 
 manly and womanly morality for a morality 
 which is determined by the opinions of priests 
 and doctors, of sects and schools, or by the 
 habits and fashions of a particular age. 
 
 There is my evidence for the substantial 
 veracity of the Jewish records, — for their 
 veracity, so far as I and my people are con- 
 cerned with them. I need not go back into a 
 distant antiquity, into an uncertain criticism, 
 to find arguments for it. The arguments 
 which show that their history does not stand 
 on a monstrous ghastly invention — that they 
 did not call on One whom they described as the 
 living and true God to vouch for a falsehood — 
 belong to modern experience ; they are about 
 us. We have assumed another ground for our 
 existence .than that which these Command- 
 ments set forth to us. E;eligious men have 
 taught us to assume another ground, — to be- 
 lieve in them first, and in a god or gods on 
 their authority. This ground we have dis- 
 covered to be no ground. It does not sustain 
 
8 The First Commandment, 
 
 our life as a nation ; it undermines our life as 
 a nation. In later times philosophers, discon- 
 tented with the sacerdotal ethics, have tried to 
 frame ethical systems on different bases, — on 
 the fitness of things, on the usefulness or mis- 
 chieyousness of actions to individuals or the 
 community ; on sympathies or antipathies. 
 There is a cry, I perceive, everywhere for some- 
 thing beyond these systems, to give them effi- 
 ciency, to secure any obedience to the principle 
 which they declare to be supreme. Rewards 
 and punishments, present or future, are called 
 in to make the man choose what is fit, or what 
 is useful, or what agrees with his constitution. 
 Thoughtful men demand some stern necessity 
 existing in the nature of things or of men — 
 some logical obligation which shall be stronger 
 than the choice which seems to set it at nought. 
 One of these systems may be good, perhaps all 
 of them may be good; but I cannot wait till 
 it is settled which is good, or how, if all arc 
 good, they are to become operative. I cannot, 
 in defiance of many of them, subject myself 
 or my fellows to the tyranny of motives which 
 are weaker than the man who has the motives, 
 and yet which degrade him. I see in these 
 
The First Commandment. 9 
 
 Commandments what the logicians require 
 and do not provide. I find the announce- 
 ment of a living God, who governs men and 
 who makes them free. It is He who speaks 
 to us as He spoke to the Jews, " I am the 
 Lord thy God." 
 
 Those words I thankfully hear and repeat, 
 believing them to have been true originally ; 
 believing them to be true now ; believing that 
 the English nation needs them as much as 
 the Jewish nation needed them ; learning what 
 they meant to the Jews by our experience 
 as much as theirs. 
 
 But am I not diverting them from the 
 original signification? Is not the Speech 
 which I mean a different kind of speech from 
 that which is described in the books of Exodus 
 and Deuteronomy ? Was not that a miraculous 
 speech, an exceptional speech, heard once on 
 Sinai, to be heard no more ? 
 
 I believe those who ask these questions are 
 unconsciously bringing a number of heathen 
 impressions with them, and imputing them to 
 the books, which are specially bearing witness 
 against such impressions. Let us hear what 
 those books say. 
 
10 The Fh'st Commandment. 
 
 The greatest pains are taken to remind us 
 that there was no similitude seen on Sinai. 
 The lightnings which are said to have accom- 
 panied the voice were, of course, visihle to the 
 outward eye; the thunders were, of course, 
 audihle to the outward ear. The speech of 
 the Lord God is distinguished from hoth. 
 That was to remain when the lightnings and 
 thunders had ceased. The letters were to he 
 written on tahles, preserved in a book ; tile 
 voice of the Lord God would come fresh from 
 Him to the nation of Israel — to each Israelite 
 in every age. It was to he received as His 
 "VYord, uttered by Him. There was the value 
 of the signs. They associated the sounds with 
 a Living Being. They would cease ; but there 
 would always be signs of that kind, or of some 
 other kind, which would show that He was 
 not silent. The Word itself was addressed at 
 first, would be addressed always, to the Con- 
 science of the nation, and of the individual. 
 
 I believe, then, that I take this speech to 
 mean just what Psalmists and Prophets took 
 it to mean, — just what the idolatrous Jews, 
 who never trembled at the word of God, never 
 obeyed it, but only trembled at outward 
 
The First Commandment, 11 
 
 terrors, did not take it to mean. They could 
 only suppose it to be a sound in the ears, just 
 as so many wiser people in our Christian age 
 suppose it to have been. I grant that no 
 Psalmist or Prophet supposed the Word to 
 come from the conscience of a man. That 
 opinion overthrows all their teaching. I be- 
 lieve it overthrows all sense of national unity, 
 all belief in a One God. Every man's tastes, 
 and impulses, and judgments, then, are exalted 
 into a law. There is no common law binding 
 all. And there is, in reality, no conscience, 
 for a conscience which does not own a ruler 
 and a Judge has lost its meaning and defijar^ 
 tion. "When we proclaim a Lord God of the 
 nation, who is speaking to it and delivering it, 
 the conscience awakens to recognise the mes- 
 sage. It is not found to be a turbulent asser- 
 tion of each man's right to think and believe 
 what he likes ; but the acknowledgment of an 
 Eternal Euler, who can break the bonds which 
 have chained men to visible things, to tempo- 
 rary authorities, to their own delusions. 
 
 But while I cannot be too thankful that the 
 Church, of which I am a minister, authorizes 
 me to proclaim every Sunday that the Lord 
 
12 The First Commandment, 
 
 God who spoke to the Jews speaks the same 
 words to the English people, saying to them, 
 "I am the Lord your God," I am quite un- 
 able to justify the mutilation of that sentence 
 in our Service. The omission of the words 
 '' which have brought thee out of the land of 
 Egypt, out of the house of bondage," seems to 
 me a perilous and a vital omission. Could the 
 compilers of the Service suppose that they 
 made it more fit for a later time, and for other 
 nations, by suppressing the terms which give 
 it a special and a local character? But the 
 terms are there ; we cannot deny the Jewish 
 origin of the commandment ; if we do not 
 suppose the Jewish nation was chosen to be a 
 specimen of God's dealings with nations, to 
 show forth Him to all nations, we give up the 
 whole history. Who is the Lord God, whom 
 alone I am to worship ? Is it not One who 
 delivered His people out of the house of bond- 
 age ? " Yes ; in some typical sense : but Egypt, 
 what is that to us ? " Divines may speak to us 
 in typical senses. Who cares for such senses ? 
 If God speaks, it is in an actual sense, to 
 actual nations, to nations who are crying out 
 for an actual Deliverer. If He has not actually 
 
The First Commandment, 13 
 
 delivered a nation in the old time out of its 
 bondage, what is He to England and Italy 
 now? If He has delivered a nation out of 
 bondage, that is a revelation of what He is 
 now. That revelation a nation can receive 
 when all arguments about books, all proofs of 
 the Being of God from nature or from meta- 
 physics, have lost their power, if they ever 
 possessed any. 
 
 Whatever may have been the original mo- 
 tives for this change in the sentence, we have 
 suffered and are suffering grievously for it 
 now. Our people do not really understand 
 that they are to worship a God who delivers 
 out of bondage, and no other. They easily 
 drop into the confession and dread of a 
 God who is the very reverse of this, of One 
 who is Himself the author of bondage. If 
 permission is given to any who cannot 
 honestly repeat the Commandments to omit 
 them, let us, who do repeat them gladly and 
 thankfully, have permission to rectify this 
 defect. At all events, let us labour sedulously 
 to teach our people the original form of the 
 Commandment; let us tell them that they 
 are violating it, and depriving all the other 
 
14 The First Commandment. 
 
 Commandments of their sanction, if the Lord 
 God who hreaks the yoke of the oppressor is 
 not their God. 
 
 Suhject to this grave exception, I can con- 
 ceive nothing more admirable or more instruc- 
 tive than the use which is made of the Com- 
 mandments in our Service, or than the place 
 which is chosen for them. The Communion at 
 once suggests the New Covenant; the prayer 
 that God will write His laws in our hearts is a 
 claim to be under that New Covenant. Here 
 is that fulfilment of the Commandments which 
 I hope to trace in each one of them — a fulfil- 
 ment which is the very reverse of the destruc- 
 tion of them. He who delivered one nation/ 
 out of bondage reveals Himself in His Son 
 as the Deliverer of all nations out of their 
 bondage; He who bids them worship Him, 
 and Him only, baptizes the nations with His 
 free Spirit, that they may worship Him, and 
 Him only. They will worship other gods^ — 
 gods, not of salvation, but of damnation — if 
 they do not accept that Revelation of Him in 
 the Eedeemer of the world; the Command!- 
 ments will be a dead letter — nay, a killing 
 letter — to them, if they do not yield them- 
 
The First Commandment, 15 
 
 selves to that quickening Spirit of Truth and 
 Liberty. If they separate Christ's E/edemption 
 from the old Commandment, there is immense 
 danger of their looking upon it as a E^edemp- 
 tion from the God of Righteousness, not a 
 Redemption by Him from the power of Evil. 
 If they separate the gift of the Spirit from the 
 old Commandment, there is immense danger 
 that they will regard the Spirit as some trea- 
 sure of their own ; then they will not worship 
 the Lord God, but themselves. 
 
 PEAYEE. 
 
 O Lord God, we bless Thee that Thou didst 
 speak of old to Thy people of Israel, when 
 they had forgotten Thee, and had fallen under 
 the power of earthly tyrants. We bless Thee 
 that Thou didst reveal Thyself to them as their 
 Deliverer out of the house of bondage. We 
 bless Thee that Thou didst command them to 
 serve no God but Thee. We bless Thee that 
 Thou speakest to all nations as Thou didst 
 speak to that nation. We bless Thee that 
 Thou hast been the same in every generation 
 and to every people. We bless Thee that, by 
 
16 The First Commandment, 
 
 great signs and wonders, Thou hast again and 
 again testified to our nation that Thou art 
 our Deliverer. We bless Thee that thou hast 
 broken the yoke of visible tyrants who have 
 oppressed us, and of false gods which we had 
 made for ourselves. We bless Thee that, when 
 priests told us that we could only hear Thy 
 voice speaking through them. Thou didst 
 testify that poor men might take refuge in 
 Thee from their injustice and falsehood. O 
 God, we have strayed from Thy ways; we 
 have not believed that Thou art indeed speak- 
 ing to us and caring for us ; we have not 
 believed that Thou art the Deliverer. We, 
 our Eulers, our priests, our people, have asked 
 how we might be saved from Thee, instead of / 
 turning to Thee, and asking Thee to save ujs' 
 from our enemies and from those that hate tis. 
 We have all broken this Commandment of 
 Thine. O God, we know that we must be a 
 feeble and divided nation whilst we worship 
 other gods before Thee, the living and true God. 
 Thou only canst restore us ; Thou only canst 
 convert us to Thyself, and canst give us trust 
 in Thee. O God, we bless Thee that Thou art 
 giving clear testimonies that Thou hast not 
 
The First Commandment, 17 
 
 forgotten tlie difPerent peoples of the earth, if 
 they have forgotten Thee. We bless Thee 
 that Thou art raising up Thy great power, 
 and coming amongst them, and asserting Thy 
 eternal Laws against those who have set up 
 their own decrees in place of Thine. We bless 
 Thee that, in wonderful ways, and by men who 
 know not that they are Thy instruments. Thou 
 art bringing nations out of the bondage into 
 which they have fallen through loss of faith in 
 Thee. O God, show them that it is from Thee, 
 and not from the skill of men, or the might of 
 armies, except as Thou guidest them, that 
 their freedom comes. Let them not fall into 
 the worship of cunning or of force, which has 
 ever been the source of slavery. Teach them 
 to believe in Thy everlasting Righteousness 
 and Truth ; then will they discern and honour 
 righteous men and true patriots, and scorn all 
 baseness, and become great and wise and brave 
 nations in Thy sight. Hear us, O God, our 
 Pather, in the name and for the sake of Him 
 in whom Thou hast redeemed all the nations, 
 and who is the Head of all nations, Jesus 
 Christ our Lord. Amen. 
 
THE SECOND COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness 
 of any thing 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 shewing mercy unto thousands of them thai love me, and 
 keep my commandments. 
 
 Heke is emphatically the Jewish Command- 
 ment. By observance of it the Jewish nation 
 was distinguished from the people of all other 
 lands. The Jewish nation disobeyed this 
 Commandment, yielding to the same inclina- 
 tions which were working in the people of all 
 other lands. Against this Commandment the 
 countries in modern times which have been 
 included in the Catholic Church have striven 
 vehemently. " Christ's coming," they have 
 said, "must in some sense have repealed it. 
 The incarnation of the Word must have sanc- 
 tified outward likenesses of the human form. 
 The image is, of course, not the final object of 
 
TJie Second Commandment, 19 
 
 the devotion ; but it may help devotion : a 
 certain homage may be paid to it." 
 
 It is needless to say that not a part of 
 Jewish history and Jewish prophecy, but the 
 whole of it, is pointed against the invasions 
 of this Commandment. The record of the 
 effects of the neglect of it is always of the 
 same character. It is always that the people 
 sold themselves to idols, and that they were 
 sold into the hands of the tyrants round about 
 them. They would not serve God joyfully 
 in their own land. They must serve other 
 gods in a land that was not theirs. It is 
 national degeneracy, national slavery, which is 
 the punishment from generation to generation 
 of worshipping the works of men's hands, 
 which had mouths but they spoke not, ears 
 but they heard not, eyes but they saw not. 
 
 And every deliverance which is recorded to 
 the people is also of the same character. 
 Bitter suffering brings them to discover that 
 these dumb idols cannot help them ; they re- 
 member the unseen Deliverer who brought 
 their fathers out of bondage ; they turn to 
 Him. Those who first turn are bitterly 
 denounced by their neighbours : they are 
 
 c 2 
 
20 The Second Commandment. 
 
 irreligious and profane ; the powers above will 
 be avenged on them. But the Lord God hears 
 them, and puts strength into them. The yoke 
 of the oppressor is broken. Israel serves Him 
 again. It rises to be a nation again. 
 
 In nearly every case, the priests are chief 
 in these acts of disobedience. They yield, in- 
 deed, often, as the first of them did, to a 
 popular impulse. The people must have a 
 visible god ; what has become of him who 
 told them of the invisible God they wot not. 
 Many of the kings co-operate with the priests. 
 It was inconvenient for the ten tribes to go up 
 to Jerusalem : a calf in Eethel would be far 
 more desirable. Or Ahaz sees an altar at 
 Damascus which takes his fancy ; or he thinks 
 he may make amends for his transgressions 
 by sending his children through the fire to 
 Moloch. 
 
 A national reformation begins with over- 
 throwing the images ; whether it is conducted 
 by the prophet Elijah or the king Josiah, the 
 religion of the people is shaken to its centre ; 
 the priests are treated with an indignity 
 which they suppose is fatal to all order and 
 reverence. Eut the Scriptures sj)eak of the 
 
The Second Commandment. 21 
 
 destruction of images as a sacred effort, though 
 seldom effectual, to terminate disorders, to 
 restore the reverence of the true God. 
 
 I think the parallel in modern times is very 
 exact. The image worship has been adopted 
 and defended on the pleas to which I have 
 alluded. Whatever the pleas have been worth, 
 the effects have been manifest. The hearts of 
 the people have been drawn to the visible 
 things. The God of Eighteousness has become 
 to them an object of dread. The priest, no 
 doubt, might approach Him at the altar. The 
 mediators of whom the images spoke, if not 
 the images themselves, were invoked to keep 
 Him at a distance ; to deprecate His evil pur- 
 poses against them. The fear of the Lord 
 God, which psalmists and prophets believed 
 to be the strength of a nation, the beginning 
 of all wisdom to men, is exchanged for the 
 fear of what He may do against His creatures 
 to destroy them. The priests have a morality 
 of their own — a morality admired by the 
 people, because totally unintelligible to them, 
 almost entirely unconnected, it would appear, 
 with those maxims of fidelity and justice 
 which they are expected to follow in their 
 
22 The Second Commandment. 
 
 common dealings. The struggle against this 
 morality has been a struggle to recover the 
 morality which is needful for the existence of 
 a nation and of a family ; it has involved 
 many shocks to the popular religion; it has 
 ended either in anarchy or in the discovery 
 of a Lord God Avho may be trusted; who 
 cares for nations ; who is their Deliverer out 
 of bondage. 
 
 The history of the E^eformation in the 
 sixteenth century, of its successes, its de- 
 feats, its virtues, its crimes, its blessings, its 
 mischiefs, is the history of nations fighting 
 
 to assert their own existence. Thev are 
 
 «/ 
 
 crushed under a multitude of visible objects 
 of worship, under the weight of a priesthood, 
 which appears itself to determine what shall 
 be the objects of worship — nay, to create 
 them. They hear the words of the Old Law. 
 They hear of a God who hates idols, who 
 treats them as abominations. They hear what 
 came to the Israelites when they yielded to 
 the abominations. They find written in sun- 
 beams the tale of their own acts, of their own 
 sufferings. The old record comes to them with 
 an evidence which it could not derive from all 
 
The Second Commandment, 23 
 
 the arguments of all the doctors in the 
 world. They read of a jealous God who 
 watched over Israel ; who forhad it to take 
 the first step in this downward course; who 
 punished it for each successive step ; who sent 
 trials of all kinds to wean the land from its 
 idols ; who only said at last, ''It is joined 
 to them, let it alone." They said, ''Is not 
 this jealous God watching over us too ? Is 
 He not seeking to draw us from those tyrants 
 to whom we have yielded up our hearts ? Is 
 He not seeking, by these trials, to hind us to 
 Himself ? May we not call upon Him as our 
 Deliverer ? " 
 
 That is the way in which these reformers 
 became such strong believers in the Old Testa- 
 ment. They could not help believing in it. 
 They found in it the very tidings which they 
 wanted to hear. It told them of Him whom 
 they had forgotten, and who had not forgotten 
 them. It told them of a God of their fathers ; 
 of one who would be the God of their children. 
 We dislike the word "jealous." It sounds to 
 us, in our dainty, and also learned, phraseo- 
 logy, '^ antliropomorpMc.''^ It sounded to them 
 honest, blessed language ; they did not dislike 
 
24 The Second Commandment. 
 
 it because it was human ; any language that 
 was not human would have been nothing to 
 them. It might have been finer; it would 
 have been ineffectual and false. But so far 
 as anthropomorphism implies submission to 
 visible images, human or brutal, this divine 
 jealousy was precisely that which they were 
 sure could alone raise them out of it. If there 
 was no such jealousy, no God who felt it, and 
 felt it about them, they must continue slaves 
 for ever. 
 
 But have not we, in the nineteenth century, 
 risen above the need of this language ? If we 
 have risen above the temptation to visible 
 worship ; if we are not as other men are — as 
 those who surround us, as those who went 
 before us — we may not need a Lord God to 
 save us from it, a Lord God to keep our hearts 
 united to Him. I feel that I am as other men 
 are, that we in England are as other men are, 
 that if the jealous God do not keep us from 
 sinking into idolatry, we shall sink into 
 perhaps the very grossest forms of it. I do, 
 therefore, cling very closely to the old Com- 
 mandments, to this specially Jewish Com- 
 mandment. I cling to the very letter of it. 
 
The Second Commandment, 25 
 
 And by doing so, I rise above the letter of it. 
 Those must become enslaved to the letter who 
 read it simply as a passage in a sacred book. 
 Those who hear it as a word coming forth, age 
 after age, from the living God, the jealous 
 God, will connect it with all living facts, with 
 all events that are befalling their own nation 
 and other nations, in this day. Those who 
 receive it as a part of a Communion Service 
 must ask about this as about the last Com- 
 mandment, how it has been fulfilled by Him, 
 in whom the Communion between heaven 
 and earth, between God and man, has been 
 established. That inquiry will bring them 
 directly into contact with the pleas for idolatry 
 which have been urged' both for the old world 
 and the new. 
 
 We may admit with awe and wonder that 
 the tendency to worship graven images— like- 
 nesses of things in heaven and earth and 
 under the earth — points to a deep demand in 
 the human spirit. " Oh Lord God, Thou canst 
 not be so far from us as Thou seemest to be. 
 There must be some image in which we can 
 apprehend what Thou art. Is it above ? is it 
 around us ? is it beneath us ? is it in all things 
 
26 The Second Commandment. 
 
 we see ? " A deep demand ! How shall it be 
 met ? Each race tries to meet it. Let us do 
 their attempts all honour. Think not of the 
 low animal worship of the Egyptians. Think 
 of the grand repose of the statue of Rameses. 
 But it is the repose of death. How glorious 
 is the astral and solar worship of the Persian ! 
 Very glorious if he can but believe the Man 
 has some elevation of his own, a glory as 
 great as that of the stars. The Greek does 
 believe that. Beautiful human forms are in 
 the sun and stars — may be imaged by the 
 sculptor on earth. Very marvellous these 
 forms are assuredly ! But is there a reality 
 which answers to them ? Or are they dreams ? 
 Is the artist higher than that he conceives ? 
 '' Certainly not," cries the Boman. " The 
 Jupiter of the Capitol has in him a justice 
 and authority beyond any dream of ours. It 
 is the fatherly authority, which reaches its 
 highest point there." If there is such an 
 authority, must it not come forth and show 
 itself ? What will become of Boman justice if 
 it does not ? The nations will feel the justice, 
 and yet groan. Bome itself will become venal 
 and slavish. 
 
The Second Commandment. 27 
 
 We have been taught, and believe, that the 
 Jew was forbidden to worship images of God 
 because he was waiting for the perfect image, 
 for Him who was to reveal the truth of all 
 that men had been dreaming of ; to gather up 
 in Himself all that their consciences had told 
 them must be in Him after whom they were 
 formed ; to scatter the partial conceptions 
 which had kept them apart, and lowered Him 
 to their level. 
 
 This image, we are told, the Jews refused to 
 acknowledge. The Man Jesus could not be the 
 image of the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and 
 Jacob. It was blasphemy to say He was. He 
 must be a blasphemer because He called God 
 His father. That was the claim for which He 
 was pronounced guilty of death. That was 
 the claim which Christendom believes that His 
 death and resurrection established as true. He 
 was declared to be the Son of God. He came 
 from the Eather. He ascended to the Pather. 
 
 And having adopted this revelation as the 
 fulfilment of the old Covenant— the name of 
 the Father as the great discovery which Christ 
 made to mankind, the baptism with the Spirit 
 in whom the Tather and the Son are one, as the 
 
28 The Second Commandment. 
 
 great gift to mankind — the defenders of the 
 Catholic faith dare to maintain that it has re- 
 pealed the old Commandment, that it has given 
 men a right which they had not hefore to 
 bring the Godhead under likenesses which they 
 have conceived ! I say that if we accept the 
 revelation of Christ as the true revelation, we 
 must suppose that He has unfolded to us the 
 very depth of the Godhead in declaring us to 
 the Eather ; that we must say with the Creed, 
 He has taken the Manhood into God. So He 
 has satisfied the desire of nations. So He 
 has taught them that they form one family. 
 And every image or picture which men have 
 been induced to worship, every saint who has 
 been put between man and God, has been a 
 denial of this revelation, a refusal to acknow- 
 ledge that the way to the Pather has been 
 opened through the Son, that the Pather is 
 drawing men through the Spirit to Himself. 
 Thanks be to God that His jealousy has burnt 
 hot in all ages against this degradation of His 
 glory, against the restoration of this great 
 source of all curses and divisions among His 
 creatures. Thanks be to God for the testi- 
 monies of Jews, of Mahometans, however 
 
TJie Second Commandment, 29 
 
 little they have confessed His true Image, 
 against the false images that have usurped its 
 place. Thanks be to Him that that jealousy- 
 was never more manifesting its power than 
 now ; that it will wax fiercer, as we trust, till 
 it has utterly abolished the idols of Christen- 
 dom, till it has cast down the father on earth 
 who has been exalted to his throne in defiance 
 of His command who revealed the Pather in 
 Heaven. 
 
 PEAYEE. 
 
 O Lord God, we bless Thee that Thou hast 
 inspired all men with an insatiable longing to 
 behold Thy image. We bless Thee that Thou 
 givest this proof to us that there is a bond 
 between us and Thee which cannot be broken. 
 We bless Thee that we cannot separate our 
 justice from Thy justice, our mercy from Thy 
 mercy, our truth from Thy truth. But, O 
 God, Thou knowest that the temptation of us 
 all is to make Thee after our image, not to 
 confess that we are made in Thy image. We 
 thank Thee that Thou didst in Thy great 
 mercy choose out a nation in the old world, 
 
30 The Second Commandment. 
 
 and didst forbid it to make any image of Thee, 
 and didst show, by bitter experience, what 
 misery came to it from breaking that Com- 
 mandment. We bless Thee tliat Thou didst, 
 by Thy punishments of this transgression, 
 bear witness of Thy loving jealousy over 
 that nation, of Thy desire to reclaim it from 
 its slavery to visible things, and to bind it to 
 Thee. We bless Thee that in the fulness of 
 the time Thou didst manifest Thy true and 
 perfect image in One born of a w^oman. We 
 bless Thee that Thou didst raise Him from the 
 dead, and declare Him to be Thy Son with 
 power ; and didst send Thy messengers to turn 
 all nations from the images which they had 
 worshipped, to this Image, in whom they 
 might behold the glory of Thy nature, and 
 the glory of their own. We bless Thee that 
 Thou didst enable the nations which had served 
 the works of their own hands, and had bowed 
 to things in heaven, and earth, and under the 
 earth, to own Thy well-beloved Son as the 
 only Image of Thee, as the Image after which 
 Thou hadst created them. We bless Thee 
 that Thou didst receive those nations into 
 Thy covenant of Baptism, and didst command 
 
The Second Commandment, 31 
 
 tliem to tell all the nations of Thy Son, that 
 they might, through Him, turn from their 
 dark idols and their evil gods to Thee, the 
 living and true God. But, Pather ! these 
 baptized nations, instead of bearing that wit- 
 ness, have themselves fallen down before 
 images, the works of their own hands. O 
 God, they have thought to honour the flesh 
 and form of Thy Son by rebelling against 
 Thy ancient Commandment. So from genera- 
 tion to generation they have wandered further 
 from Him, and have sought creatures like 
 themselves to trust in and adore, and have 
 asked these creatures to save them from Thee. 
 We bless Thee, O God, that Thou hast been 
 jealous over these baptized nations, as Thou 
 wast over the nation of Thy old Covenant, 
 and hast again and again testified by Thy 
 sore punishments, how evil and bitter a thing 
 it is to forsake Thee and serve idols.* We bless 
 Thee, O God, that Thou wert jealous over our 
 nation, and didst recover our fathers from 
 many of their idols, and didst teach them 
 that Thy Son is the One Mediator in whom 
 Thou revealest Thyself to men, and in whom 
 men may draw nigh to Thee. We bless Thee, 
 
32 The Second Commandment. 
 
 that we have been a free and brave nation, 
 only so far as we have observed Thy Com- 
 mandment, and have kept ourselves from 
 idols. Eut Thou knowest, O God, we have 
 not kept ourselves from them. We do not 
 bow to wood and stone, or set up the images 
 of human creatures, or the image of Thy 
 glorified Son. But we worship the lowest 
 and meanest of all Thy creatures — the money 
 with which Thou hast entrusted us to use for 
 Thy gloryj and for the good of the land, 
 and for the help of those that dwell upon it. 
 And, O God, from generation to generation 
 this idolatry increases upon us, and debases 
 us more. Thou hast, in Thy mercy, delivered 
 us from some of the crimes into which it had 
 led us, from buying men and women, and 
 using them as our chattels. We bless Thee 
 that Thou didst stir the hearts of Thy true 
 servants to hate and loathe that iniquity, 
 and to fight against all the power which 
 upheld it. But, O God, our rich men buy 
 the souls of the poor; they persuade their 
 fellow creatures to sell their consciences, 
 that they may sit in high places, and rule 
 the land. And we think Thou dost not care 
 
The Second Commandment, 33 
 
 for this wickedness. Our priests do not 
 mourn over it, our preachers do not lift up 
 their voices against it. We do not feel 
 degraded in the sight of men, or humbled 
 in Thy sight by reason of it. O God, 
 awaken Thy servants to go forth against 
 these abominations, and to break them in 
 pieces, and stamp them small, as Thy ser- 
 vants the king and prophets of Israel 
 did of old the images to which their 
 countrymen were bowing down. And set 
 all the nations free from the idols which 
 are dividing them, and enslaving them, 
 and defacing Thy true Image in them. 
 Bring them into Thy clear light, into Thy 
 glorious liberty. And may Thy ancient 
 people, whom Thou hast preserved so won- 
 derfully amidst the persecutions of Christians 
 and their own worship of Mammon, confess 
 Thy true Image, and be once more a living 
 nation, bearing witness to all nations of 
 Thee, the everlasting Lord — saying, as Thy 
 prophet said, '' Doubtless Thou art our Eather, 
 though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Isaac 
 acknowledge us not." O Pather of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, the Lord of Jew and Gentile, of 
 
 D 
 
34 The Second Commandment, 
 
 Barbarian and Scythian, of bond and free, 
 may Thy Spirit, the Spirit of the Pather and 
 the Son, save Israel out of its bondage, and 
 make it a blessing to all the families of the 
 earth. Amen. 
 
THE THIED COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Thou shalt not tahe the name of the Lord thy God in vain ; for the 
 Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. 
 
 What does this Commandment prohibit ? 
 Some will say, perjury in a court of justice. 
 Some will say, profane swearing anywhere. 
 Some will say, any trifling with what is holy 
 and sacred under any pretext. 
 
 It may prohibit perjury, profane swearing, 
 trifling with what is sacred. But if it does, 
 it brings perjury, profane swearing, trifling 
 with what is holy, under the title, ''taking 
 the name of the Lord thy God in vain." They 
 must be interpreted by that definition; it 
 cannot be resolved into any one of them, or 
 into all of them. 
 
 We who read the Psalms day by day in our 
 worship, must know how this Name of God 
 is spoken of in them; how it is described as 
 very near, as very great and terrible ; as the 
 
 D 2 
 
36 The Third Commandment, 
 
 refuge and high tower ; as that in which the 
 righteous find all their delight and hope. 
 
 We who repeat the Lord's Prayer, and 
 teach our youngest children to repeat it, 
 cannot suppose that this Name merely he- 
 lonsrs to the Old Testament. '' Hallowed be 
 Thy Name," is the first petition which is 
 sent up to the Father in heaven from every 
 city in Christendom. 
 
 We who read the seventeenth chapter of St. 
 John, as the record of the Lord's Prayer in 
 the highest sense — of that Prayer which He 
 offered to His Pather on the Passover night, 
 just before He was to be sacrificed, cannot 
 quite forget that these are the last words of it, 
 " And I have declared Thy Name unto them, 
 and will declare it, that the love wherewith 
 Thou hast loved them may be in them, and I 
 in them." 
 
 And yet, if a divine in our days is asked 
 the significance of this word, — which recurs so 
 continually in all the deepest devotions of the 
 holy men of every age, which is jout forward 
 so prominently in the simplest of all forms, 
 which was adopted in the most awful of all 
 hours, by Him whom we believe to be the Son 
 
The Third Commandment. 37 
 
 of God, the High Priest of the Universe, — he 
 prohably mutters something about " a Hebraic 
 form of expression, which answers very nearly 
 to what we mean by the divine attributes." 
 
 What we mean by the divine attributes I 
 never quite understood. But if we mean what 
 the word would seem to convey, that we 
 ^' attribute " certain qualities to God, then 
 I say, that not only the Hebrew form of ex- 
 pression does not answer very nearly to what 
 we mean, but that it directly contradicts what 
 we mean. The devout Hebrew believed that 
 his nation was called out of all nations, to 
 bear witness against those who attribute their 
 thoughts to God — to bear witness of that 
 which He reveals Himself to be, of that 
 Righteousness which men are created to trust 
 and to obey. When we talk of God's attri- 
 butes, we assume, however unconsciously, that 
 our conceptions are the ground of His being ; 
 when we fear His Name, we confess that His 
 being is the ground of our conceptions. This 
 " Hebraic form of expression " therefore seems 
 to me the true form of expression for human 
 beings. I dare not use it, be it Hebraic or 
 anything else, if I did not think so ; as I do 
 
38 The Third Commandment. 
 
 think so, I hold no Commandment to be more 
 permanent or more necessary for my nation, 
 and for me, than this one. 
 
 It does not only speak to me of an awful 
 Name. It speaks to me also of Guilt. This, 
 at least, we cannot treat as an obsolete notion 
 of the old world. It has something to do 
 with the modern ages, with the legislation of 
 every State, with the heart of every individual. 
 What it has to do with either, it concerns us 
 greatly to know. Guilt certainly affects the 
 order of nations and the life of each person 
 very marvellously. Where shall v/e find an 
 explanation of it ? 
 
 "Not here," many will say : " here we have 
 only an outward law; a law of penalties. 
 Guilt has to do with the conscience." Most 
 heartily do I respond to that assertion. If 
 these are merely Commandments which decree 
 certain penalties against wrong-doers, if they 
 are not addressed to the conscience, I acknow- 
 ledge that they can never help us to any 
 understanding of the nature and misery of 
 guilt. But I should say that this Command- 
 ment was absolutely free from any, the 
 remotest, allusion to penalties. It merely 
 
The Third Commandment. 39 
 
 assumes tliat there is a Lord God who speaks, 
 a man who is created to hear His word. It 
 testifies that the man who speaks as if there 
 were such a Lord God, and yet as if He were 
 not actually present, knowing what His crea- 
 ture means, is the guilty man. It is not said 
 how much he feels the guilt. The Command- 
 ment only affirms that the Lord holds him 
 guilty; treats him as at war with Him. He 
 is found out ; the light is upon him, when he 
 is most trying to hide himself from it. 
 
 When a man vouches the Name of God for 
 a lie, all tribunals declare that he is guilty of 
 perjury. Smaller acts of indifference or trifling 
 may not lead the person who commits tliem 
 to that issue. Eut so far as he is weakening 
 the awe of the people who surround him for 
 the Name, so far as he is teaching them that it 
 signifies little, so far he is diffusing the temper 
 which produces the false oath. And what is 
 there that restrains perjury in a land ? No 
 one doubts that punishments should be ap- 
 pointed for it, that they should be steadily 
 enforced, that the utmost vigilance should be 
 exerted to discover who have incurred them. 
 But judges acknowledge that the punishments 
 
4^0 The Third Commandment. 
 
 wliicli the best legislators invent are insuffi- 
 cient to overpower the motives which tempt 
 to the crime; and that the criminal con- 
 tinually eludes their detection. They seek to 
 strengthen themselves with the terrors of 
 another world ; they hold out to the perjurer 
 the punishments which God has appointed for 
 him after death. Are these terrors effectual ? 
 Do these threats check the habit of perjury in 
 a country ? The test should be those countries 
 in which they are resorted to most, in which 
 there is the most skilfully devised machinery 
 for enforcing them, in which that machinery 
 is most recognised by the mass of the people 
 as a divine one. Ireland, Italy, Spain — these 
 ought to be the lands in which there is least 
 of false swearing, in which the testimony of 
 witnesses may be relied upon with the greatest 
 security. Will they abide that proof ? Praise 
 the virtues or the religion of the inhabitants 
 of these lands as you please, I do not deny 
 their virtues or their religion — I ask whether 
 their religion has brought forth this virtue, 
 whether it teaches them not to take the 
 name of the Lord God, the God of Truth, 
 in vain ? 
 
The Third Commandment. 41 
 
 I dare not conceal my opinion, that just 
 so far as we have used these future terrors 
 for the purpose of assisting the operation of 
 the law against perjury, just so far we have 
 diminished the awe of that Name which is 
 nigh to man at every moment, just so far we 
 have made the sense of God's judgments less 
 clear, just so far we have caused men to dread 
 punishment more than guilt, to count con- 
 cealment the greatest blessing, to deem the 
 discovery of the truth that which is chiefly to 
 be avoided. And these influences, which are 
 so ineffectual in deterring from crime, tend to 
 deprave the mind and conscience of the whole 
 nation. They diffuse through it that feeling 
 which the Jewish prophets said was destroy- 
 ing their nation; distrust in the Name on 
 which the nation stands, a suspicion that the 
 Deliverer is our enemy. 
 
 Here, again, I find in that old Judaical 
 faith, of which we have such dread — which 
 we are told that it is desirable to sever as 
 much as possible from Christianity — the pro- 
 tection against some of the worst evils and 
 corruptions which have grown up in the heart 
 of our Christianity, as well as the explanation 
 
42 The Third Commandment, 
 
 of the very principles which are developed 
 in the New Testament and which constitute 
 its Gospel. The Name of the Lord God, the 
 righteous Name which He had revealed, was 
 taken in vain by the Jewish people ; they 
 trifled with it and mocked it as we do. And 
 the prophets showed them what had come, 
 what would come, of this indifference and 
 mockery. The Lord did not hold the Ration 
 or the man guiltless who yielded to it ; the 
 nation and the man would find that He did 
 not. What was tlie great misery to both ? 
 The loss of confidence in the true God, the 
 preference of untru.e gods, of gods that led 
 them deeper and deeper into untruth. What 
 was the remedy ? Nothing but return to 
 trust ; nothing but the acknowledgment of the 
 God who had made them a nation, who kept 
 them a nation, who had been with them from 
 age to age. Nothing but belief in the great 
 Name — the Name of the God of their salva- 
 tion — could raise them out of their guilt, 
 could restore them to their healthful and 
 honest state. Every event that happened to 
 the nation was the Lord God's call to them 
 to own that they had not trusted Him, His 
 
The Third Commandment. 43 
 
 proof how great is the curse of distrust. The 
 guilt, the cowardice, came from that; there 
 was no imioceuce, no manliness, but in turn- 
 ing to Him and putting their trust in Him. 
 
 The psalmists, the prophets, had need to 
 learn in their own experience the lesson which 
 they taught others. They forgot the Lord God 
 of their fathers ; they distrusted Him. Then 
 there was no evil thing, no adultery, no 
 m.urder, which the best of them — the man 
 after God's heart — might not commit. There 
 was no state of lying into which he might 
 not fall. And he only arose again when he 
 believed in the Name of the Lord God of the 
 whole land — the Lord God of David, and 
 Uriah, and Bathsheba ; when he trusted in that 
 eternal, impartial E^ighteousness, which the 
 guilty man had counted his enemy, from which 
 he had sought to hide himself. He came forth 
 into the light — he fled to that Name as a high 
 tower, and a refuge from which he had fled 
 away : so he was set free from his guilt ; it 
 was his no longer ; he had disclaimed it. He 
 was a new man, because he confided in Him 
 who does not change, who is, and who was, 
 and who is to come, the same. 
 
44 The Third Commandment. 
 
 The Apostle of the Gentiles builds his doc- 
 trine of forgiveness and freedom from guilt on 
 these Jewish examples. He desires that Gen- 
 tiles, as much as Jews, should enter into the 
 meaning of them, should know that freedom 
 from the conscience of sin which David won 
 after he had sinned. He proclaims that the 
 Righteousness of God was manifested in Christ 
 for the forgiveness of sins, to Gentiles as well 
 as to Jews ; that all alike may believe in that 
 Name which He has revealed; that all who 
 believe in it have the remission of sins, which 
 they can obtain in no other way. They cease 
 to take the Name in vain ; they claim it as 
 their tower and resting-place ; they run into 
 it, and are safe. For God has justified, not 
 this man or that, but all alike — men of every 
 nation and kindred — by raising His Son, their 
 Prince, from the dead; therefore all may re- 
 joice in His holy Name — all may share the 
 freedom from guilt which confidence in that 
 Name gives. 
 
 This was the Gospel to which men listened 
 in the sixteenth century ; it was emphatically 
 a Gospel to nations; those who received it 
 took up their place as citizens; the priestly 
 
The Third Commandment. 45 
 
 indulgence was felt to be worth nothing to the 
 man, for it did not deliver him from guilt, — to 
 be of the most deadly injury to the nation, for 
 it promoted crime. The priestly terrors the 
 man could set at defiance, for he could trust 
 in the Lord God whose Name had been re- 
 vealed to the whole land for its salvation. We 
 have been robbed of this Gospel, not by the 
 Jewish faith which has entered into it, but by 
 the loss of that faith. We hear no more of 
 a Name in which all may trust, but only of a 
 Name in which those who believe may trust. 
 It is not itself a ground of confidence, but 
 those who are fortunate enough to have the 
 confidence may exercise it for their own com- 
 fort. Deliverance from punishment is, again, 
 substituted for deliverance from guilt. And 
 this because the Lord God, who does not hold 
 them guiltless that take His Name in vain, is 
 pictured to Englishmen, as well as to Italians 
 and Spaniards, to Protestants as well as Eo- 
 manists, as a Being from whom they have 
 need to be delivered, not as the Deliverer : as 
 One from whose wrath Christ justifies those 
 who will accept Him, not as One whose Right- 
 eousness Christ reveals for the justification of 
 
46 The Third Commandment, 
 
 mankind; not as One of whom we say, in 
 St. Paul's language, " It is God that justifieth ; 
 who is he that condemneth ? " 
 
 I fear that all of us are in this sin. Legis- 
 lators have done much to lessen the awe of 
 God's Name, hy multiplying oaths till the 
 sanctity of oaths has vanished, and till many 
 think that we shall honour God best hy abo- 
 lishing them altogether. Judges lessen the 
 awe of God's Name, by depriving it of its 
 present force, by leading poor men to suppose 
 that it will be the horror of all horrors to die, 
 because, when they die, they shall meet God. 
 Above all, we priests do ourselves take the 
 Name of God in vain more than all others, 
 by conjuring with it, when we want to frighten 
 wrong-doers, or to put down some person 
 whom we think God's enemy ; whereas it is 
 our duty to hold it up to all men and to all 
 nations as the object of their undoubting 
 trust, to warn all men and all nations 
 what befalls them when they lose their trust 
 in it. In plagues of fire and of blood, our 
 Lord God may teach the nations of Chris- 
 tendom the truth of that old Jewish lesson 
 which they have deemed so vulgar and un- 
 
The Third Commandment. 47 
 
 meaning. They may find that they have heen 
 very vain, but that the Commandment is not 
 vain, that it has an everlasting might for us 
 and for all men. 
 
 PEAYEE. 
 
 Lord our God, we bless Thee that Thou 
 didst teach Thy ancient people that Thy Holy 
 Name is the foundation of all Laws and Cove- 
 nants, and that they could only be a people 
 while they feared it and trusted in it. We 
 bless Thee that Thou didst teach them that 
 Thou lookest into the hearts of all men, and 
 knowest when they are using Thy Xame truly, 
 or are trifling with it and taking it in vain. 
 We bless Thee that Thou didst teach them that 
 to trust in Thy Xame is joy, and peace, and 
 freedom. We bless Thee that, when their con- 
 sciences became guilty and foul, because they 
 had forgotten Thy Xame, and broken Thy 
 Commandment, Thou didst bring them back 
 to confidence in Thee, and didst set them free 
 from guilt. We bless Thee that in Thy only- 
 begotten Son Thou hast manifested Thy Name 
 
48 The Tliird Commandment, 
 
 to all nations, for the forgiveness of tlieir sins ; 
 that Thou hast claimed all alike in Him as 
 Thy children ; that Thou hast invited all to 
 draw nigh to Thee, in Him, with pure and 
 clean hearts ; that Thou leadest , sinners hy 
 Thy Holy Spirit to seek Thee, and find 
 Thy Name their everlasting refuge. We 
 bless Thee that Thy Son has taught to ask 
 of Thee, as the first and highest blessing 
 Thou canst give us, that Thy Name may be 
 hallowed. "We bless Thee that His perfect 
 life on earth was a perpetual hallowing of 
 Thy Name. We bless Thee that He has 
 promised us His divine Spirit to write it in 
 our hearts, and to hallow it there. But 
 we have not hallowed Thy Name. We have 
 not believed that Thou art in very deed our 
 Pather, and the Pather of all the families of 
 the earth. We have taken Thy Name in vain. 
 We have taught the people of our land to 
 distrust it, to think of Thee as their enemy, 
 to desire that Thou shouldest not know the 
 secrets of their hearts, to dread Thy discovery 
 and Thy punishment, not the guilt which 
 keeps them apart from Thee. O God, we are 
 feeling the misery of our unbelief, and trans- 
 
The Third Commandment, 49 
 
 gression of Thy Commandinent. Lying and 
 Perjury are in our land; and all our contro- 
 versies will not drive them out. Have mercy 
 upon us, and bring us back to the true fear 
 of Thy Name. Let us not learn it by the 
 precepts of men, but from Thy Law and Thy 
 Gospel. O teach our people, and teach Thy 
 people of all lands, that Thy Xame is now, as 
 ever, the only ground of their confidence in 
 each other, of their fellowship with each other. 
 Teach them that that will abide when all 
 other things to which they have looked for 
 protection fade away and perish. Teach them 
 that they are sealed with Thy Holy Name, the 
 Name of the Eather, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost, the one God blessed for ever, and that 
 in that Name they may rejoice with free and 
 guileless hearts, now, and through all ages. 
 Amen. 
 
 E 
 
THE EOUETH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Etmemher the sahhath day, to keep it holy. Six days slialt thou 
 labour, and do all thy work : but the seventh day is the sabbath of 
 the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy 
 son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, 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 
 sabbath day, and halloived it. 
 
 There is another reason given for keeping 
 the Sahhath Day in the fifth chapter of Deu- 
 teronomy, " And rememher that thou wast a 
 hondsman in the land of Egypt, and that the 
 Lord thy God hrought thee out thence through 
 a mighty hand and hy a stretched out arm : 
 therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee 
 to keep the sahhath day." 
 
 If we are seeking for arguments against 
 this Commandment and its application to 
 ourselves, none will be found more plausible 
 and available than this difference. How can 
 both reasons be the divine reasons ? Are they 
 not different explanations or justifications by a 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 51 
 
 human legislator, for an institution wliicli he 
 has devised ? To me one of the greatest proofs 
 that the Sabbath is not the fruit of human 
 legislation is, that deliverance from bond- 
 age is assigned as a ground for remembering 
 and observing it Human legislators, Jewish 
 and Christian, have made this institution into 
 a bondage, instead of accepting it as a sign 
 of redemption from bondage. The words in 
 Deuteronomy necessarily recall the first Com- 
 mandment, that which I have maintained to 
 be the interpreter of all the rest. According 
 to them, the Sabbath is an institution which 
 is especially to make known the character of 
 the Lord God to all generations of Israelites. 
 
 They came out of a land where the tyranny 
 of the ruler was sustained by the tyranny of a 
 multitude of priests and soothsayers, where 
 these priests and soothsayers prescribed various 
 modes of invoking and appeasing the powers 
 in heaven above, in the earth beneath, in the 
 waters under the earth, or that more terrible 
 Being who might be above all whom they 
 could not name. The bodily bondage which 
 Pharaoh imposed might be cast off ; how 
 could this bondage, this spell over the heart 
 
 E 2 
 
52 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 and conscience of the slave as well as the 
 master, ever be broken ? See whether the 
 Book of Exodus, which is supposed to be at 
 variance with the later book, does not tell us. 
 
 A Lord God who works and who rests ; 
 whose work is the work of creating or giving 
 life, whose rest is the rest of delight in be- 
 holding that which is very good ; a Lord God 
 who commands His subjects to work as He 
 works, to rest as He rests; a Lord God who 
 does not lay down a mere decree respecting 
 rest and work, but who binds them into 
 the succession and order of the life of His 
 subjects; a Lord God who appoints rest for 
 those human creatures and for those animals 
 that have been deemed, by the rich and power- 
 ful of the earth, only made for perpetual toil 
 on their behalf : such a Lord God is spoken of 
 here if I read the simple letter of it, if I put 
 no gloss of my own or of any other man 
 upon it. 
 
 Sir Rutherford Alcock observes in his work 
 upon Japan (answering the arguments of some 
 who have attempted to defend the Sabbath 
 from its universality), that he can find no 
 traces of a Sabbath except among the Jews, 
 
The 'Fourth Commandment. 53 
 
 or in those nations which have adopted the 
 institutions of the Jews. The remark is, I 
 conceive, undoubtedly true, and of the greatest 
 worth. I would urge the student to test it by- 
 history, and to bring another remark to the 
 same test. I believe no nation can be found 
 which in its thoughts of the Divinity has 
 been able to reconcile the idea of Work with 
 the idea of E^est ; none in which they have not 
 dwelt together in perpetual collision, each 
 suggesting the other, and each, when predomi- 
 nant, provoking, by its own feebleness or its 
 own weakness, a reaction in favour of the other. 
 This, which is true of all popular conceptions 
 of the Divine nature, such as are embodied in 
 legends and ceremonies, is equally true of all 
 philosophical conceptions founded upon them 
 or produced in opposition to them. It meets 
 us on the very threshold of our studies in 
 Cicero's book on the Nature of the Gods. The 
 Stoic and Epicurean can always retort on his 
 opponent (he does again and again use the 
 advantage), "A fine divinity, indeed, who is 
 always in a bustle about the affairs of the crea- 
 tures below him ! " — "A fine divinity, indeed, 
 who is always reposing in selfish indolence ! " 
 
54 The Fourth Commandment, 
 
 That discussion belongs to the highest time of 
 Gr8eco-B;Oman civilization — its final results 
 contemplated and reported by the man who 
 was best able to appreciate them in their 
 practical as well as in their theoretical 
 aspects. 
 
 "What!" some one will exclaim; "then 
 you imagine that these speculations, the work 
 of ages, after all chiefly the possession of refined 
 intellects, were present to a Jewish shepherd, if 
 there was such a legislator as Moses, or to the 
 general Jewish mind in its most barbarous 
 period, if there was no such legislator ?" No, 
 that is precisely what I do not imagine ; what 
 I have no need to imagine and cannot imagine 
 if I believe the Commandment to be what it 
 professes to be, the Commandment of God. 
 Then I have nothing to do with a particular 
 Jewish legislator or with the general Jewish 
 mind. Then I suppose Him who created men 
 in His image, to know what He created, and 
 to ordain for them what was best, that they 
 might live as if they were formed in His 
 image, and might rise out of their partial and 
 confused notions to an apprehension of their 
 Author. Then I suppose Him to have de- 
 
The 'Fourth Commandment, 55 
 
 clared His laws for the good not of philoso- 
 phers more than of men-servants and maid- 
 servants. Then I suppose the imperfect 
 apprehensions of the philosophers as well as 
 of the men-servants and the maid- servants, to 
 be signs and witnesses of their relation to Him 
 — confessions how little they can enter into 
 that relation — silent petitions that He would 
 reveal Himself to them. And if I discover in 
 a certain portion of the race — that very limited 
 portion of it to which Sir Eutherford Alcock 
 refers — not only the formal acknowledgment 
 of a revelation of God which reconciles rest 
 and work as co-essential elements of His 
 nature, hut an actual institution or order of 
 life which assumes their union in Him, and 
 their union in men, because men are formed 
 after His likeness — I may be tempted to con- 
 sider whether there is not some warrant for 
 the opinion which I find prevailing among 
 this portion of the race, that in them and 
 their seed all the families of the earth are to 
 be blessed. 
 
 But, again, the work of the Lord God is in 
 this Commandment represented as the work of 
 Creation. This, the six days commemorate. 
 
56 The Fourth Commandment, 
 
 The work, if I take as my interpreter the first 
 chapter of the Book of Genesis, is that of 
 enduing creatures with seeds of an ever- 
 renewing life, a recurring day and night; 
 lights that remain from generation to gene- 
 ration, and appear statedly to fix times and 
 seasons. At the head of all is a creature 
 with the same reproductive power as the 
 other animals, made male and female, with 
 dominion over them, in the image of God. 
 The work is this. It may be converted by 
 divines into the manufacture of a dead world. 
 That is what they may understand, or lead 
 others to understand, by Creation. But they 
 set at nought the letter of the book by 
 such an opinion. No doctrine of continuity 
 propounded by philosophers is more distinctly 
 the assertion of the capacities of self-renewal 
 in vegetables, in animals, in man, than this 
 record, which is supposed to be at variance 
 with it. A world of this kind — the actual 
 world which we behold — the operations and 
 relations of which physiologists investigate, is 
 the one which the Book of Genesis sets forth 
 to us, if we read it strictly ; this, according to 
 the express terms of the Commandment, is 
 
The Fourth Commandment, 57 
 
 the Divine work, the pattern of man's work, 
 that which the six days are to keep before 
 him and to assure him has the stamp of 
 the Lord God his Deliverer upon it. The 
 fact of this life, perpetual illustrations and 
 displays of it, will he about him wherever 
 he dwells, wherever he travels. The man- 
 servant and the maid- servant must take notice 
 of them ; the experience of this teeming life, 
 of these permanent yet changing lights, of this 
 regular succession, will be wrought into the 
 tissue of their ordinary existence, of their 
 commonest services. The six days say to 
 the most ordinary men and women, to the 
 profoimdest students, " Behold the work of 
 the Lord God ! See how He is working ; 
 even as you are. The creation is always 
 new, coming forth each day fresh from His 
 hands." 
 
 Eut are the heaven and the earth only a re- 
 petition of endless movements ? Does not that 
 recurrence of movements point to an order, a 
 completion ? " The Lord rested." " The Lord 
 finished the work which He had made. ' ' When 
 the character of the rest is described, it is 
 said, " He beheld His works, and lo ! they 
 
58 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 were very good." The seventh day, according 
 to the Commandment, commemorates this 
 rest. God pronounces the day holy, because 
 it speaks of His rest. He appoints it for man. 
 He desires them, one and all, to enter into His 
 rest. The rest, like the work, is connected 
 with our rest. The notion of God working no 
 more, after the six days, is contradicted by 
 the very observation of the six days, by the 
 renewal of them for each man for each gene- 
 ration of men. If men work still, God works 
 still. The notion of the rest of God being 
 only on the seventh day is contradicted by the 
 observance of the seventh day: by the re- 
 newal of it for each man and each generation 
 of men. The whole institution is, therefore, a 
 protest against the hard material notions 
 which have been grounded upon it ; so far as 
 the Commandment is kept faithfully, a deliver- 
 ance from them. At the same time it asserts 
 the relation between the highest human rest, 
 the rest of the spirit in God, and the animal 
 rest, that which every creature, according to 
 its constitution, has need of. Each is secured; 
 the Divine sanction is upon one as well as the 
 other. 
 
The 'Fourtli Commandment, 59 
 
 Again, I shall be told, "These are notions 
 which you get from a certain kind of philo- 
 sophy, and which then, by a strange ana- 
 chronism, you impute to a particularly ignorant 
 people, or some early legislator." And, again, 
 I answer : I did not get these notions from 
 philosophy; they are just what I have been 
 unable to get from it. I find philosophers 
 perceiving the endless vicissitudes of the uni- 
 verse, and trying to account for them. I find 
 philosophers perceiving the fixed order of the 
 universe, and trying to account for it. What 
 I do not find is, the clear acknowledgment of 
 each truth, and the reconciliation of the 
 truths ; or even the slightest attempt to bring 
 either home to the apprehension of the man- 
 servant and maid-servant, who have as much 
 interest in them as the sage ; the least attempt 
 to associate practically the higher rest, which 
 the man demands as a man, with the lower 
 rest, which he demands in common with the 
 other animals, though all language confesses 
 that they have something in common. And, 
 since later philosophers have not attained this 
 wisdom, I do not impute to Moses or the 
 Hebrews a premature philosophy, because an 
 
60 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 institution of tlieirs embodied it. I accept 
 their own statement, that they could not have 
 devised such an institution, that it originated 
 in the Commandment of a Lord God, who 
 chose them, one of the dullest and feeblest of 
 the nations, to teach the other nations con- 
 cerning His relation to them and to the earth. 
 All that I read in the Gospels, of the way in 
 which they construed this Commandment, not 
 in the days of their ignorance or barbarism, 
 but when they had synagogues in every city, 
 when the law was read, and learned doctors ex- 
 pounded it, confirms me in this opinion. If I 
 accept the Evangelists as faithful witnesses, if 
 I accept any one of them as a faithful witness, 
 the most religious men among the Jews, in 
 the days when our Lord walked in Galilee and 
 Judaea, actually inverted this Commandment, 
 turning it from a blessing into a curse. They 
 made it altogether another Commandment by 
 their reading of it. There were not six days 
 in which men were to work, because God 
 worked and as He worked; there were six 
 days in which they might follow their own in- 
 clinations and interests if they were masters, 
 the inclinations and interests of their masters 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 61 
 
 if they were servants. There was not one day 
 in which they were to rest hecause God rested ; 
 there was one day in which they were to pay a 
 hard reluctant service to the most exacting of all 
 Masters; to One who prohibited the enjoyment 
 of His earth, as well as acts of healing, to His 
 creatures as unholy acts, inconsistent with the 
 homage to Him ; to One who only tolerated 
 such acts in rich men as were needful to the 
 preservation of their property. Suppose Jesus 
 did come on earth, as we say that He did, as 
 He said that He did, to show forth His Father's 
 Image, to do His Father's works, to bring 
 men into His Father's rest, was it not inevi- 
 table that He should regard the Sabbath of 
 the Pharisees with indignation and horror, 
 that He should wage a deadly warfare against 
 their conception of the Fourth Command- 
 ment, that He should restore the sense of 
 it, ''fulfilling," according to the maxim of 
 the Sermon on the Mount, what they were 
 destroying ? 
 
 The thunders of Sinai sounded from Christ's 
 lips against these transgressions of the Fourth 
 Commandment in its letter and its spirit. 
 Before I consider whether they are sounding 
 
62 The Fourth Comynandment. 
 
 against our transgressions of it, I must en- 
 counter the charge that we have entirely 
 departed from it by keeping the first day 
 instead of the seventh; that this alteration 
 makes our boast of submitting to it a mere 
 pretence. This opinion, I need not say, is 
 a very prevalent and a very plausible one. 
 The cry sounds on all sides of us, " Change 
 a law which you profess to consider a divine 
 one, and then talk of being bound by it ! How 
 monstrous !" 
 
 So much turns upon this objection in respect 
 to the nature, as well as the authority of this 
 Commandment, and of all the Commandments, 
 that I must devote a little time to the exami- 
 nation of it. 
 
 A change, it is assumed, was made by some 
 particular Christian legislator, or a council of 
 Christian legislators, in the day of worship. 
 The first day, it was thought, would preserve 
 the memory of our Lord's resurrection. That, 
 it was decreed, should be the Sabbath of 
 Christians. That any persons should have 
 felt themselves competent to make this change 
 in a law which they supposed to proceed from 
 God Himself, must, indeed, make us wonder. 
 
The Fourth Commandment, 63 
 
 The inference is natural. They either did not 
 think that it proceeded from God, or they 
 supposed that it had no longer His sanction ; 
 the old arrangement was a merely local one ; 
 they might deal with it as they thought j&t. 
 
 The first question one has to ask is this — 
 When did this legislator, or this council of 
 legislators, exist ? What traces are there of 
 them in history ? Suppose we have a right 
 to assume their existence without any docu- 
 mentary evidence, how did they establish their 
 decree ? How did they make it effectual over 
 all the different Churches of the East and the 
 West ? We do know, on the clearest evidence, 
 that an attempt was made in the earliest ages 
 of the Church, when it was most alive to the 
 sacredness of unity, when it was under perse- 
 cution from the Roman world, to establish a 
 common day for keeping Easter. We know 
 that the attempt led in that time to a sepa- 
 ration between the East and the West, and 
 that the West rejected the day which there 
 were plausible reasons for supposing that the 
 latest Apostle had observed. Yet it is sup- 
 posed that this far . more important change, 
 affecting all the daily relations and circum- 
 
64 The Fourth Commandment, 
 
 stances of life, took effect by the decree of 
 some Apostle, or some ecclesiastical Synod, of 
 which no record, no legend even, is preserved ! 
 Or, perhaps, a half-heathen, more than half- 
 heathen, statute of Constantine about the 
 Dies Soils accomplished what the legislators 
 of the Church could not accomplish — suc- 
 ceeded not only in securing its adoption by 
 Athanasians, Arians, Semi-Arians, whose con- 
 troversies Constantine could never heal, but in 
 securing the allegiance of all the barbarous 
 tribes which accepted the Gospel under such 
 various conditions in later times. Can any 
 suppositions make greater demands on our 
 credulity than these ? 
 
 But still the facts remain to be accounted 
 for; not one, but two. The first marvel is 
 that the institution of a week of six days and 
 one day should be adopted by the Greek and 
 Latin Churches, not from any Greek or 
 Roman precedent, but from the precedent of 
 a race which they utterly abhorred, and held 
 to be accursed. The second is, that, the 
 Jewish institution continuing, there should 
 be a change in the order of its days ; the 
 first assuming the dignity and sacredness 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 65 
 
 which had been given to the seventh. Explain 
 these facts as you will, or as you can, they are 
 facts, some of the most curious, if one reflects 
 on them, which are to be found in any part of 
 human history. 
 
 But they are often reported with singular 
 carelessness. It is supposed that a certain day 
 of worship was fixed for the Jews, and that 
 Cliristian legislation substituted for it another 
 day of worship. Is it not strange that the 
 Fourth Commandment should say nothing 
 about worship ; that it should speak of rest 
 and work — of God's rest and God's work — of 
 man's rest and man's work — of the holiness of 
 the Sabbath; but should never even hint at 
 the seventh day being more a day of worship 
 than the six days ? Nor was there anything 
 in the contemporary legislation to support the 
 idea. There was morning and evening sacri- 
 fice in the Temple every day. When the 
 synagogues were established, the Scribes may 
 have found the Sabbath-day a convenient day 
 for instructing the people in the Law. But 
 the synagogues did not exist till after the 
 captivity. They were valuable institutions, 
 no doubt ; they have no direct relation to 
 
 E 
 
66 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 tlie Commandment : it does not provide for 
 them. 
 
 Supposing, then, there were ever so many 
 decrees, civil or ecclesiastical, fixing the Sun- 
 day for a day of worship, or assigning the kind 
 of services to it which had heen once performed 
 in the Jewish synagogues ; that would not in 
 the least explain the history of the Christian 
 week, or its relation to the Jewish week. These 
 decrees about worship presume the change to 
 have taken place — presume that, for some rea- 
 son or other, by some influence or other, the 
 first day has become the Sabbath, or resting- 
 day ; they do not make it such a day ; how 
 it became such a day we still have need to 
 inquire. 
 
 If we start with a denial that God was the 
 Author of these Commandments, or that He 
 did give them to one nation, with the purpose 
 of making it a blessing to all nations ; if we 
 assume that the meaning of these Command- 
 ments was not to be fulfilled — that no one 
 was to come, in whom they should become a 
 blessing to all nations — no one who should 
 exhibit the perfect image of the God who rests 
 and who works — no one who should make it 
 
The Fourth Commandment 67 
 
 possible for man to rest as God rests, for man to 
 work as God works ; that is to say, if we assume 
 Law and Gospel to be both, equally a dream, 
 the Jew and the Christian to be equally dupes 
 of a cunningly-devised fable; I ovm. myself 
 unable to account either for the existence of 
 the week at first, or for the change which has 
 been effected in it among the nations which 
 have confessed Jesus to be their Lord. I do not 
 mean, even if I adopt this denial, to resort to 
 shifts which seem to me utterly uncritical and 
 unreasonable for the explanation of facts. I 
 shall, in that case, hold my tongue. I shall 
 say there is a mystery which baffles me; I 
 must be content to let it alone. But if I do 
 believe that God, and not man, is the Author of 
 the week, and that the Tourth Commandment 
 expresses exactly the meaning of it; if I do 
 believe that Jesus Christ came to fulfil this 
 Law, as well as the whole Law of God, to 
 reveal God in His own Person, to unite God 
 and man, to conquer the enemies of man ; if 
 I do adopt this amazing belief — which is, 
 however, the belief that Christendom professes, 
 apart from which it ceases to be Christendom ; 
 — then it seems to me that many parts of our 
 
 f2 
 
68 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 economy, which are ordinarily obscured, stand 
 forth in remarkable clearness, and that the 
 perplexities and anomalies of our practice 
 become also very glaring, our abuses of the 
 Sabbath being shown to be precisely of the 
 same kind with those of the Jews, — more 
 scandalous than theirs, because they are sins 
 against the same institution in its most perfect 
 and developed form. 
 
 If the six days spoke as the Commandment 
 says they do, of the work of Creation, or the 
 calling forth of Life in all things and in man ; 
 if the seventh day spoke of the Rest of God 
 in the contemplation of this completed work ; 
 must not the question have occurred to those 
 who kept the Sabbath, " What then of Death? 
 Can God contemplate that, and say, It is 
 good ? Yet it has entered into His Creation. 
 It has set its mark upon all these things. It 
 claims man for its victim. What has become 
 of the work, what has become of the rest?" 
 We do not imagine this question. We know 
 that the most enlightened Jews were tor- 
 mented by it. We find it in their devotions. 
 They could not find the answer to it. They 
 waited for God to give the answer. If He did 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 69 
 
 rejoice in His works, if He wished His crea- 
 tures to rejoice in them, He would give it. 
 The Gospel of the Resurrection (I use Mr. 
 Westcott's admirable substitute for the bald 
 phrase, "Doctrine of the Resurrection") was 
 this : "God has given the answer. He has 
 declared death not to be the lord of man, or 
 of the universe. He has declared One who has 
 conquered death to be the Lord of it. In 
 Him He rests. In Him you may rest." That 
 Gospel means this, or means nothing. If it 
 means less than this, let Renan, let Strauss, 
 let all Prance, Germany, England, proclaim 
 it to be a lie ; let us confess that for eighteen 
 centuries all the most civilized nations of the 
 earth have been living upon a lie. But if it 
 does mean this, the Sabbath could not be 
 what the Commandment declares it to be, if 
 it did not unfold itself — that is to say, if God 
 did not unfold it — at the crisis of its fulfilment, 
 to express that fulfilment. 
 
 Where else has it been expressed? Have 
 the priests or doctors of any part of Chris- 
 tendom really taught the nations that the 
 law of life is stronger than the law of 
 death ; that mankind has been brought by its 
 
70 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 Head under that law of life ? Is not our 
 preaching altogether ahout the power of death; 
 the feehleness of life ? Who could gather 
 from our language that the Resurrection of 
 Christ is the foundation of our faith ; that to 
 bear witness of Christ's triumph to the world 
 is our main function ? Have we not led men 
 to think that this Resurrection is to he 
 accepted as the great anomaly of all, not as 
 the fact which clears away anomalies, which 
 restores order to the universe ? The Christian 
 Sabbath, penetrating into our common exist- 
 ence, laying the foundation of work in rest, 
 bears that witness of the Hesurrection as con- 
 cerning all men, all creatures, which we have 
 refused to bear. The priests and doctors of 
 every nation have, indeed, tried to drag the 
 Sunday down to their own level. Abroad, the 
 day has been claimed merely as a Church 
 festival, which the Church might treat ac- 
 cording to its pleasure. At home, it has ceased 
 to be regarded as a festival at all. It has 
 become emphatically a day of unrest; a day 
 which God is supposed to demand from men 
 for His use, and from which they gladly escape 
 to those six days which they may claim for 
 
•The Fourth Commandment. 71 
 
 their own use. So has this institution suffered 
 from the treatment of God's ministers. And 
 yet our modern Reformers think they are 
 maintaining a great principle, when they deny 
 that it has any higher origin than the wisdom 
 of these ministers. The okl Reformation as- 
 serted for us a right to appeal from human 
 traditions to God's Commandments. Their 
 successors throw us hack upon Romish or 
 Preshyterian traditions, and the interpreta- 
 tions those traditions may receiye from any 
 given age. They complain of a Pharisaical 
 Sahhath. They can only complain. They 
 excite the fears of the hest men, that in losing 
 the perversions they shall lose that which has 
 been perverted. 
 
 But when we go back to the terms of the 
 Pourth Commandment, and accept our own 
 Sabbath as the fulfilment of it, we have a pro- 
 tection against all Pharisaical interpretations 
 of its meaning, against all attempts to enforce 
 them upon the conscience of nations or of 
 men. Not interfering with the habits of any 
 land, or striving to fashion them according 
 to our own, we can say to every land : " God, 
 not man, has given you this day. God, not 
 
72 The Fourth Commandment, 
 
 man, is testifying to your people, liigh and 
 low, that He has redeemed you in His Son 
 from death, the grave, from all the enemies 
 that would separate you from Him. He in- 
 vites you, all of you, to rest in Him, your 
 Creator and Deliverer. There is the rest for 
 the spirit of man. And the body is to have 
 its own rest ; that it may labour more freely, 
 more effectually, more nobly. To all sons of 
 toil, to all who work with the hands, or with 
 the brain, God holds out the same gift, 
 grounded on the same Redemption. It is 
 part of His charter of freedom to the nations ; 
 let the nation which aspires to be free, receive 
 it at His hands." And what we would vindi- 
 cate for other men, we must desire for our- 
 selves. In the name of God's Commandment, 
 in the power of Christ's Resurrection, we defy 
 all attempts to turn that into an instrument 
 of bondage which derives its sanction from 
 the God who delivers out of bondage. We 
 will worship on the Sabbath-day ; but worship 
 must mean entering into God's rest, or it is 
 not true worship. We may listen to Christian 
 teachings on the Sabbath-day ; but if the 
 preacher does not testify that Christ has risen 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 73 
 
 to justify mankind from sin, and death, and 
 hell, his doctrine is not Christian, not Sabha- 
 tieal. Against all restrictions which shall lead 
 men to think that God intended the Sabbath as 
 not a blessing but a torment to His creatures, 
 we invoke the judgment of the Son of God, 
 who, we believe, condemns us, as He con- 
 demned the Scribes of Jerusalem, for all out- 
 rages upon His Law; who, we believe, will 
 prove that His Resurrection was no fable, and 
 will bring rest and restoration to the earth 
 which He has redeemed. 
 
 PEAYEE. 
 
 O Lord God, the Deliverer out of the house 
 of bondage, we bless Thee that Thou didst 
 ordain the six days of work and the one day 
 of rest as a perpetual token to Thy ancient 
 people of the freedom which Thou hadst 
 bestowed upon them; a perpetual sign be- 
 tween Thee and them of what Thou art, and 
 of what Thou hadst created them to be. We 
 bless Thee, Lord, that Thou didst testify to 
 them by the six days that Thy work is the 
 
74 The Fourth Commandment. 
 
 work of giving life, of forming creatures, 
 whose life is perpetually renovating itself, and 
 tliat Thy rest is the rest of rejoicing in that 
 which is orderly and perfectly good. We 
 bless Thee that Thou didst call Thy nation of 
 Israel to enter into Thy rest and Thy work. 
 And we bless Thee, O Lord, that in the fulness 
 of the time Thou didst send Thy Son to take 
 our nature, and to perfect Thy work. We bless 
 Thee that Thou didst raise Him from the dead, 
 testifying that Thou hadst not made all things 
 in vain, that life is stronger than death, that 
 mankind is justified in Him its righteous and 
 living Head, that Thou dost still rejoice in 
 Thy work, that men may enter fully into Thy 
 rest. We bless Thee for our Resurrection 
 Sabbath, which bears silent witness to rich 
 and poor, to the learned and unlearned, of this 
 redemption, of our right to draw nigh to Thee 
 as our Eather in Jesus, to rest in Thy love, 
 and in Thy strength do the good works which 
 Thy Spirit inspires. But, O God, we have not 
 entered into Thy rest, or done Thy work. We 
 have abused Thy Sabbaths. We have turned 
 them into a bondage. We have not accepted 
 them as the witnesses of the liberty wherewith 
 
The Fourth Commandment. 75 
 
 Tliou hast made us free, of the glory of Thy 
 creation, of the conquest over death which 
 Thou hast obtained for it. Have mercy 
 upon our nation, and upon all the nations 
 which confess the Name of Thy Son, and 
 profess to keep His day. Bring them, we 
 beseech Thee, out of the dominion of men's 
 traditions which enslave. Bring them under 
 the power of Thy law of liberty. O break the 
 yoke of the idleness which we have mistaken 
 for rest ; of the weary, fretting toil which we 
 have mistaken for work. Eill us with longings 
 for the eternal rest which is in Thee, for the 
 perpetual work of doing Thy commandments, 
 hearkening to the voice of Thy word. Pill 
 us with the hope of the great day of redemp- 
 tion, when the heaven and earth which Thou 
 hast created shall rejoice and sing together, as 
 Thou hast promised. Amen. 
 
THE FIPTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon 
 the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. 
 
 St. Paul, writing to a Gentile Church, the 
 most Gentile probably of all the Churches 
 which he founded, speaks of this as the first 
 Commandment with promise. That is to say, 
 he not only accepts the commandment to 
 honour parents as applicable to Gentiles, but 
 he accepts the clause respecting the land which 
 God gives as applicable to them. In our days 
 the question is asked which was first asked by 
 Heylin, the biographer of Laud, ''How can 
 the honour which we pay to parents have any- 
 thing to do with this command, seeing that a 
 promise is appended to it which points to 
 Palestine, and only to Palestine ? " 
 
 That question has taught me more respect- 
 ing the meaning and truth of these Command- 
 ments, and respecting the cause of our grow- 
 ing contempt for them, than the most elaborate 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 77 
 
 discussions could have done. It shows me 
 what is the suppressed premiss in the minds 
 of those who suppose the Decalogue to be a 
 Jewish code unfit for our country and our 
 time. It is this : " JSTo land of the modern 
 world is a gift from the Lord God to those who 
 occupy it in the same sense in which Palestine 
 was a gift to the Jews." I do not say that 
 this premiss is at all confined to those who 
 speak slightingly of the Commandments. 
 Many of those who contend most vehemently 
 for their paramount authority would be scan- 
 dalized if any one said broadly, "I maintain 
 that Great Britain is given to us just as 
 Palestine was given to the Israelites ; that we 
 hold it of the same Lord on the same condi- 
 tions." They would feel as if the exceptional 
 miraculous character of the Old Testament 
 narrative was invaded by such an opinion, as 
 if it was in danger of being reduced to the 
 level of common history. And yet, if this 
 opinion is false, the Pifth Commandment has 
 clearly no binding force upon us; the objection 
 to it is conclusive. 
 
 I adhere to the maxims respecting this Com- 
 mandment which I have maintained respecting 
 
78 The Fifth Commandment. 
 
 those wliich precede it. I hold that it was 
 addressed by the living God to a particular 
 nation, which He chose out of all nations, to 
 be a witness of Him, a specimen of His ways 
 and doings, and of His relation to every people 
 under heaven. I cannot, therefore, shrink 
 from the position which orthodox men seem to 
 agree with liberal reformers in rejecting. I 
 cannot allow any belief which I may entertain 
 respecting the miraculous incidents of the 
 Jewish history to interfere with my convic- 
 tion that the principles of that history are 
 unchangeable principles, that the code which 
 embodies these principles is a code for all 
 kindreds and peoples. In the light of those 
 principles, as they are set forth here, I re- 
 gard the honour of parents. The Bible says 
 that the land of Palestine had been given by 
 the Lord God to other races before it was given 
 to the Jewish race, and that these races did 
 not continue in it ; they committed evils which 
 made them a curse to the land and a curse to 
 themselves. The Israelites were told that if 
 they committed the like evils they should perish 
 from off the good land to which they were 
 going. Eoremost among these evils, this com- 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 79 
 
 mandment places the loss of honour for the 
 father and mother. "If you lose that," it 
 says, "your case shall he like that of the 
 people who will he driven out from before 
 you. If you keep the honour of the father 
 and mother, your days will he long upon that 
 land." I think, as the prophet assures us, 
 that the sentence was fulfilled strictly to the 
 people of Israel. I think, also, that it has heen 
 fulfilled to every nation of the old and of 
 the modern world ; that God gave Persians, 
 Greeks, and Homans their land, as He gave the 
 Jews their land ; that He has given Britons, 
 Romans, Saxons, Normans, the land on which 
 we dwell ; that every race has holden it of 
 Him under the tenure of honouring fathers 
 and mothers ; that the days of no race have 
 been long on the land when the honour of 
 fathers and mothers has ceased in that race ; 
 that the days of no race will he long in any 
 land when the honour of fathers and mothers 
 shall cease in that race. 
 
 I scarcely know whether these doctrines 
 will he received as commonplaces too obvious 
 to require any defence or illustration, or as 
 paradoxes which no sane man would dream 
 
80 The Fifth Commandment. 
 
 of putting forward. Be they what they may, 
 I not only adopt them hut also this corol- 
 lary from them, which to me at least sounds 
 very terrible. Our domestic transgressions 
 involve a coldness and indiflPerence to our 
 duties as citizens ; our home life is con- 
 fused and darkened by our want of zeal for 
 the well-being of the nation. No one can 
 really appreciate the fellowship of those evils 
 in his age or country, however he may talk of 
 them, till it has been brought home in some 
 measure to himself; till he has learnt to 
 abhor a number of religious subterfuges and 
 equivocations, as well as worldly self-indul- 
 gences, which at diflPerent times have weakened 
 for him the force and awfulness of the Pifth 
 Commandment in its twofold aspect. 
 
 And then he wUl care that it should come 
 forth to his countrymen and his generation, 
 not as a pretty and useful maxim of ethics, 
 not as a generalization from a long experience, 
 but as a sentence proceeding from the mouth 
 of the Most High ; as a declaration from the 
 Judge of the whole earth of His will con- 
 cerning families and nations — how they sus- 
 tain each other, how they must perish together. 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 81 
 
 Then he will feel that the enforcement of this 
 declaration can be entrusted to no religious 
 men or women, to no doctors of the law, to no 
 priests. If he believes Jesus Christ to be his 
 Lord and the Son of God — if he thinks that 
 the Evangelists have not misrepresented the 
 words which Jesus spoke upon earth — he must 
 suppose that priests and doctors are specially 
 disposed to substitute for this Commandment 
 of God their traditions. Talk of the mild 
 voice of Jesus being exchanged for the 
 threatening of Sinai ! Did not that mild 
 voice echo all the thunders of Sinai ? did it 
 not direct them against the Holy City of David, 
 not only when it spoke of the hypocrites who 
 would pull the ox and the ass out of the pit 
 on the Sabbath-day, and would leave the man 
 in it, but even more when it laid bare the 
 abominations of the Corban ? '' You pay money 
 into the divine treasury, and so are excused 
 from the obligation of obeying the divine 
 command to honour fathers and mothers." 
 Was not the sentence, " Your days shall not 
 be long in the land which the Lord your God 
 has given you" (rendered by Him into these, 
 "Your house shall be left unto you desolate "), 
 
 G 
 
82 The Fifth Commandment. 
 
 contained in that exposure ? And has there 
 been a country or a period in the history of 
 the Church wherein doctors, casuists, priests, 
 and preachers have not repeated the offence of 
 the Corban — have not in Christ's name taught 
 their disciples that the duty of giving money 
 to some ecclesiastical treasury was greater than 
 the duty of honouring fathers and mothers ? 
 This they have called loving Christ more than 
 the father and the mother, — -Christ, from whose 
 lips those withering words in exaltation of the 
 Eifth Commandment, in deprecation of the 
 gifts, proceeded 1 
 
 And how remarkably have these rebellions 
 against the law by ecclesiastics borne witness 
 to that connexion between the national and 
 the domestic obligation which it enforces ! In 
 despising one, the sacerdotal temper has been 
 forced to despise both. " What is there sacred 
 in the land ? You are to seek the kingdom of 
 Heaven, a world beyond the grave. These home 
 relations, this country which you talk so much 
 of — do you not know that they are all to be 
 taken from you ? There is nothing lasting in 
 them." No, I answer. The land will not last 
 if you are the masters of it. Then it will soon 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 83 
 
 perish away from us. But it has something 
 that is lasting, something that is the witness 
 of the Everlasting God, of Him who was, and 
 is, and is to come, if it contains the tombs of 
 the fathers and mothers who dwelt on the land 
 before us. If we honour them, if we worship 
 their God as our God, if we teach our children 
 that He was their God and will be the God 
 for all generations, — then the whole earth, and 
 especially that portion of it which the Lord God 
 has given us to keep, will be most dear in our 
 eyes, as we believe it is in His eyes ; then any 
 attempt to disparage or degrade it will appear 
 to us a flagrant sin and blasphemy against 
 Him ; then all efforts to piu^ify and cultivate 
 it, and make it a fit habitation for the ages 
 to come, will be deemed a service acceptable 
 to Him. 
 
 And so the message of our Lord concerning 
 a Kingdom of Heaven may begin to be taken, 
 not in twenty different senses but, in one 
 simple honest sense. It will not be thrown 
 into a vague imaginary future. It will make 
 the future real by linking it to the present 
 and the past. The honour of parents on earth 
 will be sustained by the faith in a Eather in 
 
 g2 
 
84 The Fifth Commandment. 
 
 heaven. A house not made with hands, eternal 
 in the heavens, instead of being a shadowy 
 dream, will become continually dearer and 
 more substantial from its association with the 
 father's house in the land which God has given 
 us. And every cotter and every town me- 
 chanic may learn that he, as much as the 
 noble, has an ancestry ; that the honour which 
 he pays them gives him a place and right in 
 the land. Then the rich will understand that 
 the land has been given to the nation by God ; 
 that if they have purchased any portion of it 
 with money, they still hold it of Him ; hold 
 it for the honour of their ancestors, for the 
 benefit of their children's children, — there- 
 fore, for the good of the whole people. The 
 more one studies the history of sacerdotal as- 
 sumptions, the more one sees that, while they 
 put scorn upon the earth and human relations, 
 they bestow immense honour upon money. 
 That becomes the great prize for the Church, 
 that becomes an instrument for the remission 
 of sins. Whereas God's law honours the earth, 
 honours human relations, and by these breaks 
 the yoke of Mammon, withdrawing men from 
 that worship which is slavery and degradation. 
 
The Fifth Commandment. 85 
 
 PEAYER. 
 
 O God of our fathers, Lord God of Israel and 
 of England, have mercy upon us. Thou hast 
 given us the ' land on which we dwell, and 
 we have called it our own, not confessed it to 
 be Thine. We have not confessed that we 
 are all citizens of the same land, bound to 
 our forefathers, whose tombs are amongst us, 
 bound to the children whom Thou wilt watch 
 over as Thou hast watched over us. We have 
 not reverenced our fathers and mothers as 
 Thou hast bidden us reverence them. We 
 have often fancied that we were honouring 
 Thee in neglecting them. O God, for the 
 sake of Thy dear Son, who hast taught us to 
 call Thee Eather, and has bound us together in 
 one family, turn us from our evil ways. May 
 Thy Spirit write this Commandment, that we 
 should honour our fathers and mothers in our 
 hearts. May He make this land very dear to 
 us. May He make us ready to live and die 
 that it may be a great and free land, worship- 
 ping Thee the true God, and not worshipping 
 Mammon, the spirit of baseness and selfish- 
 
86 The Fifth Commandment. 
 
 ness. We know that if we serve him, we shall 
 be indifferent to our fathers and mothers, and 
 perish off the land. But O, reform us, and 
 restore us, and fill us with fear of Thee and 
 trust in Thee, that we may honour those who 
 have testified, and do testify, to us of Thee, 
 of Thy enduring law, of Thy everlasting love. 
 Amen. 
 
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Thou shalt not kill. 
 
 In speaking of tlie Third and Pourth Com- 
 mandments I have rested much on the words 
 of Christ, in the Sermon on the Mount, "I 
 come not to destroy the law, but to fulfil." 
 Those words introduce the passage in the Ser- 
 mon which concerns the Sixth Commandment. 
 How, then, do our Lord's words respecting 
 that Commandment fulfil it ? There are two 
 answers often given to this question. One is, 
 that whereas the Commandment is merely a 
 prohibition of a direct crime, addressed to 
 wrong-doers, the Sermon on the Mount con- 
 tains counsels of perfection for those who 
 aim at a more elevated standard of morality. 
 The other is, that our Lord adds to the 
 terrors of the Commandment more tremendous 
 warning respecting punishments in the future 
 world. How plausible each of these state- 
 
88 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 ments is, we perceive at once, when we read 
 the passage : 
 
 " Ye have heard that it was said hy them of 
 old time, Thou shalt not hill; and whosoever 
 shall kill shall he in danger of the judgment : 
 hut I say unto you, That whosoever is angry 
 with his hrother without a cause shall he in 
 danger of the judgment : and lohosoever shall 
 say to his hrother, Raca, shall he in danger 
 of the council : hut whosoever shall say, Thou 
 fool, shall he in danger of hell fire. ^^ 
 
 There can be no doubt that the man who 
 abstains from anger against his brother is 
 more "perfect" than one who abstains from 
 murder ; that may be called a counsel of per- 
 fection, which suggests the higher instead of the 
 lower virtue. There can be no doubt, again, 
 that the ''council" and "hell fire" point to 
 consequences more fearful than the mere "judg- 
 ment " which is associated with a breach of the 
 Commandment. But how does it happen that 
 these terrible warnings refer not to the crime 
 w^hich the Commandment denounces, but to 
 those evils of which the man who is aiming at 
 the high standard is conscious ; those evils to 
 which every one of us is prone ? I omit other 
 
The Sixth Commandment, 89 
 
 reasons whicli have often been urged against 
 tlie notion that the Sermon on the Mount is 
 laying down the maxims of a special and re- 
 fined morality. I omit the obvious remark, 
 that it is throughout a denunciation of the re- 
 ligious sect which was standing apart from the 
 crowd and cultivating an exclusive righteous- 
 ness, that it is throughout an announcement 
 of the Kingdom of Heaven as meant for those 
 who refuse to be above their fellows, — for the 
 poor in spirit, for those who hunger after a 
 righteousness which they do not find in them- 
 selves. I rest only on the evidence which this 
 particular passage affords. It is surely a 
 levelling one. " Wliosoever is angry with his 
 brother, is in danger of the judgment : toho- 
 soever says. Thou fool, is in danger of hell 
 fire." There is no encouragement here to 
 any who fancy that they are unlike the 
 offenders of whom the Commandment speaks. 
 There is everything to suggest the thought : 
 "In thee, O man, who seemest most safe 
 from the temptation to commit murder, are 
 the roots of murder. Oh, bethink thee well 
 of these roots ! Consider how they may be 
 extirpated ! Por the judgment upon that 
 
90 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 wliich thou mayst do, will not be so dreadful 
 as the judgment upon that which thou art^ 
 upon thy own very self," 
 
 Here I find the fulfilment of the Command- 
 ment. It comes forth, as every Command- 
 ment comes, in the name of the Lord God 
 of Israel, the Deliverer out of the house of 
 bondage. It is addressed, as every Com- 
 mandment is, to the conscience of the whole 
 nation, to the conscience of each individual 
 member of the nation. There lies its power 
 — there is its thunder. It is backed by no 
 threats of punishment. There will be a judg- 
 ment appointed by the land for the trial of 
 all offences against the Law. Whether that 
 judgment is a righteous one will depend upon 
 the righteousness of those who conduct it; 
 their righteousness or unrighteousness may 
 affect mightily the conscience and well-being 
 of the nation, its faith in a higher and more 
 perfect Judge. But the Law itself does not 
 speak of any contrivances for the discovery or 
 the punishment of the criminal. It stands 
 forth in its stern simplicity. It carries home 
 to the man a witness of a Highteousness which 
 he cannot set aside, though he may defy it, — 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 91 
 
 which will assert itself against him, and against 
 all men. 
 
 Those who set up their judgment-seats for 
 the trial of murder — those who devise punish- 
 ments, capital or other, for the murderer — 
 think that in these arrangements of theirs 
 lies the eiiicacy of the Commandment. They 
 suppose that the threats which are addressed 
 to the brute in the man — to that which 
 answers only to threats — are the real, nay, 
 the only deterrents from crime. They do 
 not perceive that such threats presume the 
 existence of an imagination, of a foresight, 
 in the person to whom they appeal; which 
 qualities are not brutal, but human. They 
 beg help from that which they refuse to 
 acknowledge. The man wants their threats, 
 wants that protection against his lower nature. 
 But he wants much more ; he wants that mes- 
 sage to him, that acknowledgment of him, as 
 the subject of an unseen Lawgiver and Judge, 
 which is contained in the Commandment. 
 Eob him of that, and all the most ingenious 
 devices which a Theorie des Feines et des Re- 
 compenses can suggest are fruitless. They 
 seem to be complete in themselves ; in fact, 
 
92 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 their influence comes from that older legis- 
 lation which they suppose that theirs has 
 superseded. 
 
 The Jews, in the days when our Lord dwelt 
 on earth, though without a Theorie des Feines 
 et des Recomjjenses, had no faith in anything 
 but punishments and rewards. Their judg- 
 ments, they supposed, were the only securities 
 against the murderer. Very ineffectual secu- 
 rities thej' were, if we may trust the Jewish 
 historian of that age ; very ineffectual to pre- 
 vent the murders which arose from the plots 
 of the religious sects against each other. And 
 now He speaks, who speaks with authority, of a 
 judgment, a sure and clear judgment, not only 
 against the murderer, hut against him who is 
 angry with his brother without a cause. To 
 him the Judge, who says, " Thou shalt do no 
 murder," is speaking. Alone, in the deep 
 caverns of his heart, he may hear the Voice of 
 the All-E;ighteous saying to him, " Thou art 
 wrong ; thou art separating thyself from Me. 
 I discern that rising fury, though none other 
 can." Will he heed that Voice ? will he turn 
 to the E;eprover ? or will he utter the " Kaca " 
 against the brother which the E^eprover would 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 93 
 
 restrain him from uttering ? Then the Voice 
 will sound louder : " The council of the holy 
 and righteous is passing sentence upon thee. 
 Thou art cutting thyself from their company." 
 Will he despise that Voice, too ? Shall anger 
 turn to contempt ? Will he treat his brother 
 with " Thou fool ? " fool thyself ! How little 
 thou knowest the depth of thy madness ! A 
 fire is burning within thee which thou canst 
 not quench ! It will consume thee, body and 
 soul, if another fire — God's fire, the fire which 
 comes with His Spirit — does not enter it; if 
 that does not burn up the offal which is in thee, 
 that thou mayest be made a true vessel, fit for 
 the Master's use, fit to be the 'dwelling-place 
 of His charity. 
 
 Yes ! thus, even thus, does He who is the 
 Eegenerator of humanity, He who comes to 
 baptize with the Spirit, fulfil the old Com- 
 mandment, depriving it of none of its old 
 significance, putting nothing in the place of 
 it, but affirming that the tree must be made 
 good if the fruit is to be good ; that the man 
 must encounter the murderous spirit in the 
 depth of his own being, if he would not be his 
 tool and victim in acts of crime. 
 
94 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 Such service I believe tlie Commandment 
 may do for tlie nations now, if they will not 
 substitute for it the casuistry of priests, the 
 schemes of jurists, the motives of sentimental 
 moralists. When a people like the Italians are 
 awakened to feel that they are a people, how 
 fearful must seem to them all those webs of 
 sophistry which have been woven by a priestly 
 government about this crime of murder ; the 
 induls^encies, the endless confusion between 
 civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction which have 
 made the trade of the assassin so successful a 
 one; the more than justifications which has 
 been offered for such acts when they have been 
 done for a holy cause. How eager they must 
 be to sweep all these webs aside, and to accept 
 any suggestions of modern experience (their 
 own country has supplied some of the most 
 remarkable) for making judgment-seats fair 
 and punishments equitable. A nation cannot 
 live or breathe till it has got something of 
 evenness and simplicity into these, till it has 
 judges who are not respecters of persons, who 
 care nothing for rich or poor, for priest or lay- 
 man, who care only to assert right and put 
 down wrong. But that it may have such 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 95 
 
 judges, that it may condemn the guilty and 
 clear the innocent, there must he that helief 
 in a perfectly just Judge, a Judge who sees into 
 the heart of things as of men, which the priests 
 have ohscured and practically set at nought. 
 The people must hear that Judge speaking to 
 them one and all directly, in their own con- 
 sciences, not through the muttered hewildering 
 tones of those who profess to be the inter- 
 preters of His will. Once again let the old 
 Commandment sound in their ears, let them 
 feel that it is fresh and young for them, awful 
 and mysterious just because there are in it no 
 mystifications. 
 
 Here, in England, we have been blessed, and 
 are blessed, with honest judges ; we have, to 
 a great extent, cleared away the duplicity 
 which arises from the attempts of ecclesias- 
 tics to intrude upon the functions of the civil 
 tribunal Por these gifts we cannot be too 
 thankful. But the dangers are great which 
 accompany them. We suppose that we have 
 a set of punishments tolerably well contrived, 
 but still imperfect, for hindering murders; 
 their weakness must be eked out by the threat 
 of punishments greater and more enduring 
 
96 The Sixth Commandment, 
 
 hereafter. These are used as a machinery for 
 producing obedience to the law; they evidently 
 do not produce obedience to it. But that hell, 
 which the judge, as much as the council, has 
 need to remember ; the hell of anger and con- 
 tempt within ; the moral death of the man : 
 that is lost sight of; the real hell has been 
 changed for a hell of the fancy. Then moralists 
 cry out, with just indignation, that there can 
 be no actual virtue and vice, whilst we are 
 merely occupied with the advantages of one 
 and the disadvantages of the other. They assert 
 that there is a sense of right and wrong in all 
 men ; they erect an ethical system upon that 
 sense. If there is such a sense — and I think 
 the universe must go to pieces at once if there 
 is not — who imparted it ? Who speaks to it ? 
 Bid the system create it? Does the system 
 speak to it ? Or did the Lord God create it ? 
 Does He speak to it ? That is what I mean 
 when I say, " The Commandment is above all 
 the contrivances, threats, dogmas of Priests, 
 Jurists, Moralists. The Priest, the Jurist, the 
 Moralist came not to destroy, but to fulfil it." 
 
The Sixth Commandment. 97 
 
 PEAYEE. 
 
 O Lord God, we bless Thee that Thou caresi 
 for the life of every one of Thy creatures 
 whom Thou hast made in Thine image. We 
 bless Thee that Thou hast bound together 
 nations in awe of Thy Commandment, " Thou 
 shalt do no murder." We bless Thee that 
 Thine Eye pursues him who has shed his 
 brother's blood, that Thou bringest him to 
 judgment, if no man knows what he has done. 
 We bless Thee for all righteous judges whom 
 Thou hast established in our land or in any 
 land, to bear witness for Thy everlasting Law. 
 We bless Thee that Thou dost not only pro- 
 nounce Thy sentence upon acts of murder, but 
 that Thou hast declared war by the voice of Thy 
 Son against all the tempers and habits of mind 
 which lead to murder. We bless Thee that 
 He has told us that anger with our brother 
 exposes us to Thy Judgment, and that if anger 
 and contempt possess us, there is a Hell within 
 us, from which we cannot be delivered unless 
 we turn to Thee, and yield ourselves to Thy 
 
 H 
 
98 The Sixth Commandment. 
 
 Holy Spirit. We bless Thee, O God, that in 
 Thy New Covenant Thou promisest the con- 
 tinued presence of Thy Holy Spirit, that we 
 may be made right and loving men, and so 
 may be kept from cruel and murderous deeds. 
 But we have not honoured Thy holy Com- 
 mandment. We have thought that by our 
 punishments and our threats we could drive 
 murder out of our land. Thou knowest how, 
 in spite of our punishments and our threats, 
 dark murders, the murders of children by their 
 parents, of wives by their husbands, are com- 
 mitted among us. The land is defiled by this 
 blood, and yet we do not count it the curse 
 and misery of our nation ; we do not confess it 
 to Thee as the fruit of the evil passions which 
 we have allowed to grow up in our hearts. 
 And in many lands, where men are sealed with 
 the seal of Thy Covenant, and profess to wor- 
 ship Thee, Thy priests have led murderers to 
 think that they may escape Thy Justice, and 
 that they may have indulgence for their crimes 
 through the intercession of earthly mediators, 
 instead of that deliverance from the sin of their 
 hearts, which Thou hast promised in Thy Son. 
 O Lord God, let the nations once more hear 
 
The Sixth Commandment, 99 
 
 Thy voice, which is speaking to them now as 
 in the days of old. Let them submit to Thy 
 unchangeable Law, that they may know the 
 blessing of Thy everlasting Gospel, and may 
 feel that they are bound to each other as the 
 brothers of Christ, and as Thy children in 
 Him. So shall they w^orship Thee the God 
 of Life, through Him who gave His Life for 
 all. Amen. 
 
 h2 
 
THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Thou shalt not commit adultery. 
 
 Those who think that the command to honour 
 fathers and mothers has lost all direct appli- 
 cation to us, hecause it is connected with 
 continuance on the land which the Lord God 
 had given the Israelites, may also suppose 
 that the Seventh Commandment had a chiefly 
 local meaning, because the prophets lament 
 the adulteries of the Israelites as a main cause 
 of their approaching captivity; and hecause 
 continual allusions occur to adultery as the sin 
 of the nation itself, as well as of its individual 
 members. Such passages undoubtedly sound 
 very unreal to the majority of Englishmen, 
 when they are said to concern England; divines 
 who see in them only '' types " of what has 
 happened or is happening or will happen in 
 the Church, or who only "improve" them to 
 our use, increase the sense of their unreality. 
 " The Israelites," we are often told, " lived 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 101 
 
 under a peculiar dispensation. Crimes wliicli 
 we denounce as leading to future misery 
 brought on them temporal punishments ; they 
 were subjects of a Theocracy. So departure 
 from the service of the unseen God, and the 
 adoption of idol worship, might for them be 
 aptly compared to the revolt of a wife from 
 her husband." AYith phrases such as these, 
 repeated by one person after another, ncA^er 
 sifted or winnowed to see how much there is 
 in them of Avheat, how much of mere chaflF, we 
 cheat ourselves and our flocks, and keep up in 
 them and in our own minds the opinion that 
 the Bible is a very divine and wonderful book, 
 nnd that its words may signify anything or 
 nothing. 
 
 If it is meant that the prophets told men 
 who had given up their hearts to their corn 
 and their wine — who had become sottish and 
 brutal through self-indulgence — that the corn 
 would fail to grow, that the vines would lan- 
 guish, that the earth would be dried up, the 
 assertion is no doubt true. How such sen- 
 tences point to any peculiarity in their dis- 
 pensation I am at a loss to perceive. When 
 such habits become the habits of a nation, 
 
102 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 there will be that indifference to the care of 
 the land, that slavish expectation of supplies 
 to come without energy and effort, that depen- 
 dence upon chance, from which these calamities 
 proceed; the truth is not less applicable to 
 modern Egypt or modern England than to the 
 Holy Land. The only question is, whether 
 these things happen because there is an ever- 
 lasting and unchangeable Ruler of the nations 
 and of the earth, because His laws are violated 
 and revenge themselves ; or whether they 
 happen through the interference of some ca- 
 pricious gods — call them by what names you 
 please — who disturb the order of things to 
 avenge some offence to their priests or them- 
 selves. The latter is the heathen solution of 
 this difB.culty; the former is that of the 
 Jewish law and prophets. 
 
 But when we turn to such a crime as 
 adultery, the phrase " temporal punishment," 
 even in this sense, becomes not merely in- 
 adequate to express the warnings of the 
 Hebrew books, but it is, in some respects, 
 the most unsuitable that could be found. 
 Do you call it a temporal punishment that 
 a people loses all sense of its relation to the 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 10 
 
 o 
 
 permanent and tlie eternal ? Eut it is exactly 
 this which the prophets foretell, when they 
 use that language which seems to you so 
 strange and mystical about the land of Israel 
 breaking loose from Jehovah, its true Lord 
 and Husband, and going after visible lovers. 
 And this they treat as both cause and efPect 
 of a habit of indifference to the marriage 
 bond. '^ Tlie neighing after the neighbour's 
 wife," appeared to Jeremiah the inevitable 
 accompaniment of the nation's pursuit of 
 idols "upon every high hill, and under every 
 green tree." When the habit of forgetting the 
 unseen Lord prevailed, the habit of forgetting 
 the unseen ties which bind the wife to her 
 husband would prevail ; fleshly instincts would 
 become supreme. This doctrine was not 
 Semitic in tihs sense, that there was any liking 
 for it in the Jewish mind. The prophets 
 were as much scorned for their mystical notion 
 that domestic life had anything to do with 
 national life — or that God cared for either — 
 in the East as they would have been in the 
 West. " Doth he not speak parables ? " was 
 the habitual taunt there as here. The only 
 question in this case as in every other is, 
 
104 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 Were the prophets or the scorners right, right 
 for that country and time, and for all countries 
 and times ? Was the parable true, or a lie for 
 that country and time, and for all countries 
 and times ? Or, to put the question a little 
 differently, Will there ever be a free nation 
 where the sanctity of the marriage-bed is not 
 honoured ? Will the sanctity of the marriage- 
 bed be ever honoured in a nation which is 
 subject to an arbitrary government, which 
 does not confess a God of E;ighteousness, which 
 does not trust in Him as a Deliverer ? Can the 
 nation shake off the yoke of arbitrary power, 
 in whatever form it may be afflicting them, if 
 they do not believe that the God of Eighteous- 
 ness, the Deliverer out of bondage, is sending 
 forth His everlasting decree against adultery ? 
 It is easy to evade these inquiries by grand 
 phrases about Semitic or Judaical habits of 
 thought, but such phrases do not help us to 
 interpret the actual records of mankind. They 
 do not show why the consciences of men have, 
 in legends of no Semitic origin, traced a con- 
 nexion between the tyranny over states and the 
 pollution of household sanctity, have hailed 
 the husbands and wives who have been true to 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 105 
 
 each other as the restorers of freedom. They 
 do not show why the annalists of Home and 
 the satirists of Rome associated the decay of 
 all sense of national dignity with the decay of 
 domestic purity. They do not show how it 
 came to pass that the Gothic tribes, subverting 
 that old civilization, were able to establish a 
 new order in Europe founded on reverence for 
 the original law : " God made them male and 
 female." They do not show why the Popes, 
 while they upheld the sanctity of the marriage 
 vow against monarchs who were setting it 
 at nought, could appeal to the conscience 
 of the nations, and obtain reverence as the 
 ministers of God ; why there was a sense in 
 men's minds of a truth in the assertion that 
 marriage was a divine sacrament ; why the 
 Popes lost all reverence, and roused the con- 
 science of the nations against them, when 
 they taught that marriage was not holy for 
 priests ; why it was felt that by this doctrine 
 they established priests into a tyrannical caste, 
 separated from the nation, presenting no ex- 
 ample of morality to it, interfering with its 
 civil order. These phrases about Semitic 
 modes of thought do not show why our an- 
 
106 The Seve^ith Commandment. 
 
 cestors turned to the Jewish Connnandments 
 and the Jewish history as witnesses for the 
 domestic law, and for the national law, against 
 those who were nndermining both. These 
 phrases do not explain why, when Italy was 
 sinking into moral corruption and political 
 slavery, under the joint influence of the 
 patrons of Art and the priests of Religion, 
 Savonarola found in the words of the Law 
 and the Prophets the protests against both. 
 They do not explain why a Dominican monk, 
 who had so earnest a hatred of corruption 
 and oppression in priests as well as kings, 
 could not effectually deliver his people from 
 oppression or corruption, because he could bear 
 no witness for the honour of marriage. These 
 phrases do not show why, in the German and 
 English E^eformations, the old Jewish idea of 
 the sacrament between God and the nation 
 brought with it the acknowledgment of mar- 
 riao-e as a divine ordinance of God which it 
 was the great function and honour of the priest 
 to ratify, but which derived its sanctity from 
 another than him. These phrases do not make 
 it less true, that men in the sixteenth century 
 spoke of England in the very language which 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 107 
 
 the prophets applied to Judaea, as having re- 
 volted from her true Hushand through lust for 
 visible things and earthly gods, as being sought 
 by Him in all her wanderings, as being led 
 back by punishment and suffering to her alle- 
 giance. These phrases do not explain why 
 the great Bourbon, whom Erance reveres as 
 her liberal and gallant monarch, did by his 
 gallantries undermine the effect of his many 
 genial qualities, lost his own sense of truth 
 and weakened the sense of truth in his people, 
 prepared the way for the still grander monarch 
 who said, ^'L'etat ! — c'est jnoi!'^ who filled the 
 land with the fruits of his profligacy, at the 
 same time that he was destroying all the traces 
 of its liberty. These phrases do not explain 
 how perfectly compatible this profligacy and 
 this invasion of old order were with the religion 
 which Louis learnt from his confessors ; that 
 they were only incompatible with the belief in 
 an everlasting God, who from age to age says, 
 *' I bring nations out of bondage. Thou shalt 
 not commit adultery." These phrases do not 
 explain the history of the Voltairian liberalism 
 of the next century, how mighty it was to 
 expose rottenness, to pull down houses built 
 
108 TJie Seventh Commandment. 
 
 upon the sand, liow impotent it was to restore 
 law or freedom to any people. These phrases 
 do not make ns understand the powerlessness 
 of the ablest and most far-seeing man in the 
 National Assembly to raise up any edifice in 
 place of that which he was helping to throw 
 down, or to preserve anything which he desired 
 to preserve. These phrases do not help us 
 to explain the fact that the cleverest dis- 
 courses of the cleverest doctrinaires of Prance 
 have not been able to deliver it in former days 
 or now from an imperial regime, or from the 
 domination of priests, even when that regime 
 and they have seemed most hostile to each 
 other. Nor do these phrases give us much 
 help in weighing the hopes and fears of the 
 newly risen Italy, in judging whether her 
 freedom will be such as her best patriots would 
 wish for her, or such as some may wish for 
 her who accept Julius Caesar as the model of a 
 popular leader, and who afiirm (I trust falsely) 
 that he was not only the libertine we know 
 him to have been, but that he made deliberate 
 use of his libertinism for his political purposes.* 
 
 * I need not remind any reader that this charge is brought 
 .igainst the great Roman by the patron of Italy, who is also the 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 109 
 
 Once more, I must say it very solemnly, such 
 phrases do not make the revelations of our 
 Divorce Courts more tolerable, do not give us 
 the least assurance that the abysses of family 
 corruption which they open to us are not also 
 abysses of national debasement, from which 
 no boasts of commercial prosperity or of high 
 civilization will avail to raise us. 
 
 To me it -seems that no better message can 
 reach us, or any nation, than that the Lord 
 God is the enemy of our adulteries, national 
 and domestic, and is willing to deliver us 
 from both. I cannot help the message being 
 Semitic, or Judaical. I believe we shall all 
 perish if we do not hear it, and heed it. I 
 cannot find that the i3riests or the philoso- 
 phers of any nation have provided a substitute 
 for it. All they can either of them do is to 
 warn us of certain consequences which will 
 
 eldest son of the Church, not at all as a charge ; rather as a lively 
 illustration of the character and designs of the hero, who is ex- 
 hibited to us as the prototype of the first Napoleon, and of other 
 democratic leaders that have been slandered as foes of liberty. The 
 apology that Csesar was a heathen must appear ridiculous to every 
 schoolboy. Are there no heathen protests against invasions of 
 female pimty of a much less aggravated kind than this ? What 
 are the best legends of the Eepublic but protests agamst them ? 
 
110 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 follow from the transgression to the individuals 
 who commit it. There are consequences un- 
 doubtedly following from it which are most 
 grave and terrible to them But the sense of 
 them is most alive when it is least wanted ; 
 in moments of fierce passion it vanishes — often 
 vanishes soonest from those who are least de- 
 based. 
 
 And if it is said that they may, by degrees, 
 bv a long course of discipline, be trained to 
 a foresight of these consequences, let it be 
 remembered how many ingenious men and 
 women have been at work in all days — are 
 specially industrious in ours — to dispute a 
 number of these consequences, to draw the 
 most delicate distinctions, which prove certain 
 adulteries to be, on the whole, rather innocent 
 than guilty, rather commendable than blame- 
 able. Let it be remembered how little mere 
 dry ethical disquisitions, be they ever so sound, 
 can prevail against arguments of this kind, 
 presented in the form of some popular story, 
 exhibiting very often real acquaintance with 
 subtle processes of the heart, striking at many 
 conventional reasonings on behalf of virtue, 
 which the conscience acknowledges to be 
 
The Seventh Commandment. Ill 
 
 worthless, mixing many plausilDle, and some 
 honest, religious sentiments with apologies 
 for departure from virtue. Here is a disci- 
 pline to prepare a man or a woman for the 
 actual hour of temptation ! lYhat armour 
 of foresight have you in store to counter- 
 act it ? 
 
 " The fear of hell." Let me apply to this 
 subject the remark which I made under the 
 last head. It is not in the Commandment 
 against adultery that we meet with any allu- 
 sion to punishment, present or future. But 
 when we turn to the Sermon on the Mount, 
 we find it written — 
 
 " Ye have heard that it was said by them of 
 old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery : 
 but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh 
 upon a woman to lust after her hath com- 
 mitted adultery with her already in his heart. 
 And if thy right eye oflPend thee, pluck it out, 
 and cast it from thee : for it is profitable for 
 thee that one of thy members should 23erish, 
 and not that thy whole body should be cast 
 into hell. And if thy rio^ht hand oflPend thee, 
 cut it off, and cast it from thee : for it is 
 profitable for thee that one of thy members 
 
112 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 should perish, and not that thy whole body 
 should be cast into hell." 
 
 Here we have the casting into hell. Hei^e 
 we have warnings that anything should be 
 given Tip, rather than that we should incur 
 that horror. And, again, we are not left to 
 guess about the horror. The impure act 
 springs from a state of impurity. To be in 
 that state — shut up in it — is the hell which 
 we have to dread, to avoid which we are will- 
 ingly to part with the right eye or the right 
 hand. 
 
 Is there anything new in this way of con- 
 sidering these words ? Is it not the old doc- 
 trine, that to be in hell is to be in the company 
 of unclean spirits, to be their subjects ? That 
 old doctrine — it seems to me the true one 
 — we have exchanged, to our infinite loss, 
 for the notion of a hell which God of His 
 arbitrary pleasure designs for those who com- 
 mit certain acts, a hell which we fashion out 
 of our own imagination, in hopes that the 
 imagination of other men will recognise it, 
 and that it will keep them at least from 
 flagrant enormities. The more we heap up 
 the possible penalties of body and soul, the 
 
The Seventh Commandment. 113 
 
 more incredible they become; the man says, 
 '* These cannot be for me." He calls to his 
 recollection what he has been told of God's 
 mercy, to assure him that they cannot. 
 Whereas, if he were directed to Christ's own 
 words — to His teaching about hell — he would 
 say, " Yes, that hell is real, is true. I have 
 suffered from it. I am suffering from it. O 
 Lord God of mercy and goodness, wilt not Thou 
 raise me out of it ? Wilt not Thou save me 
 from the presence and despotism of these un- 
 clean spirits ? Wilt not Thou teach me to cut 
 off the right hand, to put out the right eye, 
 which gives them a power over me ? Wilt not 
 Thou claim me as Thine ? " Then he will under- 
 stand that Christ's Gospel of the Kingdom of 
 Heaven was the answer to this cry. Then he 
 will perceive that to be possessed by His holy 
 and loving Spirit is indeed to be in the heavenly 
 state, as to be possessed by a foul spirit is to 
 be in the hellish state. 
 
 This, like the other, may be Judaical lan- 
 guage. I find it sound and true ; therefore I 
 use it. I believe that England will cease to 
 be a nation if it loses its old faith in a Pather 
 in heaven who is a Deliverer, if it confounds 
 
 I 
 
114 The Seventh Commandment. 
 
 Him with the destroyer. I believe no nation 
 can recover its rights as a nation till it utterly 
 abjures and abhors the notion of God as a 
 destroyer ; till it turns to God as the Deliverer 
 from all the sins which have brought and are 
 bringing desolation upon it. Priests, Philo- 
 sophers, Conservatives, Liberals, call yourselves 
 what you will, if you do not teach us that 
 lesson, you will not help the nations to rise ; 
 they will fall, and you will fall with them. 
 
 PEAYEE. 
 
 O holy and everlasting God, we bless Thee 
 that Thou hast established the holy bond of 
 marriage among the nations of men. We 
 bless Thee that Thou hast sent forth Thy 
 Commandment against all who break that 
 bond. We bless Thee that Thou makest na- 
 tions to live by the keeping of this Command- 
 ment, and that they wither and perish when 
 they fall into contempt of it. Have mercy 
 upon us, for we have made light of it in this 
 land. It is defiled by its adulteries, and we 
 have not felt that they are bringing a curse 
 
The Seventh Commandment, 115 
 
 upon us all. We grieve when Thou takest 
 from us our outward prosperity, but we do 
 not grieve for the loss of our heart and man- 
 liness, and of our trust in Thee. Renew these 
 in us, whatever becomes of Thy gifts of corn 
 and wine. Teach us to fear Thy Holy Name, 
 that we being true to Thee, the Lord and 
 Husband of the whole land, the husbands 
 and wives in it may be true to each other. 
 Almighty Pather, Thy Son has taught that it 
 is damnation to be impure in beart and spirit, 
 and that to be made pure and to be filled with 
 Thy holiness and love is the great salvation. 
 Help us, we beseech Thee, to hate evil more 
 than all punishments. Help us to cleave to 
 Thee as the God of all goodness, who sendest 
 punishments that Thou mayest bring us out 
 of evil. O God, give us repentance, and Thy 
 gracious Spirit, that we may be true witnesses 
 of Thee. We ask all things in Thy Son's 
 Name. Amen, 
 
 12 
 
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Thou shalt not steal. 
 
 La Tropriete cest le vol, is that dogma of 
 M. Prondhon wliich terrified all sober and 
 quiet people in the E evolution of 1848. "Why 
 were they terrified ? I think because they 
 were conscious that they had been claiming 
 for property a position which it can never 
 maintain, from which it may be shaken by 
 any convulsion. They had assumed individual 
 property to be the basis of a nation ; again, 
 they had afiirmed that the chief use of a nation 
 is to uphold property. Which is the tortoise, 
 which is the elephant ? Conservatives and 
 Liberals were equally puzzled to determine; 
 the former seemed to think that there was a 
 something called Eeligion which clothed 
 Property with a mysterious, unapproachable 
 sanctity. 
 
 In any great crisis this divinity will be 
 rudely examined ; the question will be asked, 
 
The Eighth Commandment, 117 
 
 Is this the Lord God, who has created the 
 universe, and whom you worship ? Proudhon 
 may have been an Atheist ; he may have be- 
 lieved that there is no Lord Grod of nations. 
 Eut his wild maxim may have forced some to 
 consider what was the jDlank which separated 
 them from Atheism ; whether a belief in pro- 
 perty was the plank ; whether, in that case, 
 they were not distinctly renouncing the Lord 
 God of the New as well as of the Old Testa- 
 ment. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we believe in that 
 Lord God, if we confess that the nation 
 rests on His righteous and eternal IsTame — 
 that it has no standing-ground but that : 
 property will be regarded as one of the in- 
 stitutes of the nation, subordinate to manv 
 others — to the order of the week, to the honour 
 of parents, to the sacredness of life, to the 
 sanctity of marriage ; but still as holy, estab- 
 lished by the Most High, sustained by a 
 Commandment. If the owners of property 
 will recognise that tenure of it, and what that 
 tenure involves, they come under the protec- 
 tion of this Law. Then the nation, so long 
 as it is a nation, instead of treating property 
 
118 The MgJith Commandment. 
 
 as robbery, will treat every invasion of pro- 
 perty as robbery — will guarantee to each man 
 that which he has inherited or purchased : be- 
 cause it is jealous of common rights, and will 
 not suffer them to be touched, it will be jealous 
 of individual rights, and will not suffer them 
 to be touched. If those who have property 
 choose another god, let them invoke his pro- 
 tection in their tin^e of need ; let them cry to 
 their companies to deliver them. That cry 
 we may hear ascending loudly enough in our 
 day; whether there is any that regardeth or 
 answereth, is another question. 
 
 The command, Thou shall not steal, taken 
 in its simplest sense, without the least para- 
 phrase or attempt to give it an unnatural 
 extension, presumes the existence of a nation 
 — presumes a Divine King watching over 
 the nation, and over that which is in the 
 hands of each of its members. The prophets 
 never deemed that the Commandment was only 
 to keep the poor man's hands from meddling 
 with the treasures of his richer neighbours, 
 though they counted it a blessing to him and 
 to all others that he should be kept from 
 meddling with those treasures. But Ahab the 
 
The Eighth Commandment, 119 
 
 king robbing Naboth of his vineyard, even 
 insisting that he should part with it for a 
 price or for a fair equivalent, was, in their 
 judgment, trampling upon the Commandment. 
 The eye of the Lord God was upon him ; he 
 would be forced to make restitution in land 
 or in life. That is an instance how little 
 they tied the Commandment to the regula- 
 tions which might be desirable for making it 
 effectual at any given time against the thief of 
 some movable article. Statutes against thefts 
 were framed for the land of Israel. Obedience 
 to such statutes was a national obligation; 
 the name of the Lord God of Israel was the 
 sanction of them as much as of any grander 
 and more universal principle. But particu- 
 lar statutes of this or any kind were not 
 necessarily, as the prophet Ezekiel intimated, 
 good in themselves ; they might be good only 
 in adaptation to a peculiar state of circum- 
 stances — good on account of " the hardness of 
 heart," which called them forth. They had 
 the stamp of time, and place, and accident 
 upon them; it belonged to their very nature. 
 The meaning of the enactment was not recog- 
 nised, if that stamp was obliterated, and a 
 
120 The Eighth Commandment. 
 
 more permanent one substituted for it. Here 
 was a Commandment which no punishment 
 devised by any man or body of men for the 
 infraction of it, could enhance or exhaust. It 
 was in the Divine keeping. It applied to the 
 ruler as well as his subjects ; it would be 
 enforced against both. 
 
 And surely it has been so in the latest, as 
 in the earliest times. The thunders have 
 sounded against robbery as against murder; 
 have sounded in the consciences of men, in 
 the conscience of nations, because the com- 
 mand which they ratified has been felt to be 
 God's command not by reason of the outward 
 terrors which have sustained it. These terrors 
 to the flesh or evil nature have been neces- 
 sary; no sage man or nation would dispense 
 with them ; the sagest men and nations have 
 considered how they might be shaped so as 
 least to interfere with the effect of the higher 
 law on the man himself. For it has been 
 found that in various ways the local laws 
 which define what crimes shall fall under the 
 definition of stealing, or what punishments 
 shall be awarded to those crimes, may inter- 
 fere perilously with that Commandment which 
 
The Mglitli Commandment. 121 
 
 lies beneatli them, and from which they de- 
 rive their efficiency. So long as forest laws 
 or game laws exist, the Name of the Lord 
 will be a sanction for them to him who rever- 
 ences the Commandment, if he dislikes them 
 ever so much. But he loill dislike them for 
 this reason especially — that they bewilder the 
 conscience respecting the weight and authority 
 of the Eighth Commandment ; that they pro- 
 voke all kinds of casuistry respecting the limits 
 within which it may be observed or disobeyed ; 
 that they do very often touch that point where 
 the claims of property become robbery ; where 
 the individual privilege invades the common 
 justice of the nation. All Robin Hood legends 
 and the sympathy which they have awakened 
 in a people suggest this moral. It does not 
 become obsolete in post-feudal times ; it can 
 never be pondered too earnestly by holders of 
 property and by legislators in all times. 
 
 In connexion with this subject we ought to 
 consider the so-called Communism of the early 
 Christian Church. Does it interfere with the 
 respect for property which the national com- 
 mandment inculcates ? Here, as elsewhere, 
 I believe, we have the fulfilment of the Com- 
 
122 The MgJith Commmidment. 
 
 mandment, not the destruction of it. The 
 members of the early Church, filled with the 
 spirit of fellowship and unity, manifested that 
 spirit in not saying that anything which they 
 had was their own, in selling their lands, in 
 distributing to those who had need. They 
 entered into the very meaning of the Sermon 
 on the Mount. Prom him that would borrow 
 of them they turned not away ; just as in 
 their persecutions, " from him who took away 
 their goods they asked them not again." They 
 were at that time all Israelites, and they vin- 
 dicated the true brotherhood of Israelites; 
 they bore witness against the exclusiveness, 
 spiritual and material, of the Pharisees. But 
 that exclusiveness made property odious; 
 provoked the wish to invade it. Those who 
 showed that there was a principle deeper than 
 the regard for property, that men who pos- 
 sessed it could part with it for a higher end, 
 raised the poor man to a level which enabled 
 him to regard the possessions of the rich 
 without grudging, suggested to the rich the 
 purpose for which he was entrusted with more 
 goods than his neighbours and why the law 
 secured them to him. 
 
TJie Eighth Commandment. 123 
 
 The cammunity of goods was never ordained 
 by the Apostles ; the impulse seems to have 
 been discouraged by them after the abuse of it 
 by Ananias and Sapphira. There is no allu- 
 sion to it in the Epistles to the Gentile 
 Churches ; nay, there is positive evidence that 
 it did not exist in those Churches. The story 
 of the first days after the Pentecost remains 
 as a record — a quite invaluable record — of the 
 principles which must inspire a Church, so 
 far as it is a Church ; a record showing that 
 a Church has no power to originate a law, or 
 to dispense with a national law ; that it mis- 
 takes its calling, and denies its proper glory, 
 when it aspires to any, the least, competition 
 with a nation. 
 
 What has been the effect of the attempts 
 in the Church to interfere with the ordinary 
 arrangements respecting property, to estab- 
 lish orders in which property shall be un- 
 known ? The story of the Eranciscan disputes 
 in the fourteenth century is a complete answer 
 — one which, if it needed repetition, has been 
 repeated to satiety. The renunciation of pro- 
 perty leads to bitter quarrels about the possible 
 limits within which it may be lawfullv held. 
 
124 The Mglith Commandment. 
 
 to endless equivocations about the property of 
 the individual and the property of the body. 
 And these are not the worst scandals of Church 
 history in respect to this Commandment. The 
 robbery for burnt- offerings which the old pro- 
 phets denounced, has in every age awakened 
 the indignation of the laity ; has stirred up a 
 selfishness and cunning in the holders of land 
 or goods, which they can always justify by 
 the rival selfishness and cunning of the eccle- 
 siastics ; who plead the honour of God for 
 their exactions and subterfuges. A Church 
 which acknowledges that the honour of God 
 is involved in the keeping of His Command- 
 ments, and that, before these Commandments 
 all traditions of men must fall, will uphold the 
 institution of property by the zeal with which 
 it bears witness that property exists for the 
 sake of great common interests, and must 
 perish if it is exalted above them. 
 
 PEAYER. 
 
 Lord our God, we have reverenced our 
 property more than we have reverenced Thee. 
 We have believed that our nation rests upon 
 
The Eighth Commandment, 125 
 
 the security of property, and not upon Thee. 
 We have sacrificed the common interest to our 
 private interests. And so the poor have been 
 tempted to break thy Commandment against 
 robbery. And the rich have robbed the poor 
 of that which was the inheritance of their 
 fathers. And our lives are passed in strug- 
 gling how much we can win from one another, 
 and defend against one another. We have by 
 our selfishness weakened the belief in Thy 
 law. We have punished our people for crimes 
 which Ave have made, and so have led them to 
 doubt what are or are not crimes in Thy sight. 
 Have mercy upon us all. Have mercy upon 
 Thy priests, who in a multitude of ways have 
 confused the consciences of men respecting this 
 Commandment, who have not shown them how 
 Thy Divine Spirit blesses all property by teach- 
 ing the owners of it that they hold it as in 
 trust from Thee, for Thy children. Oh, give 
 us all a new heart. Mould us after the image 
 of Thy Son, that we may count it more blessed 
 to give than to receive. So will our nation 
 hear Thy Commandment and keep it, and 
 Thou wilt bless us, and the land will give her 
 increase, and our barns will be full of stores, 
 
126 The Eighth Commandment. 
 
 our oxen will be strong to labour, and there 
 will be no complaining in our streets. O 
 teach poor and rich, that a man is not happy 
 for the multitude of the things which he pos- 
 sesses, but that a people is happy which has 
 God for its Lord. We ask all blessings in the 
 name of Jesus Christ Thy Son. Amen. 
 
THE NINTH COMMANDMENT, 
 
 Thou shalt not bear false luitiuss against thy neig 
 
 Though we are wont to speak of the second 
 Table of the Law as setting forth our duty to 
 our neighbour, it is only into the last two Com- 
 mandments that the word neighbour enters. 
 
 "When our Lord said that the first Com- 
 mandment was. Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God, and the second. Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbour as thyself. He did not introduce 
 an artificial division into the Decalogue. He 
 adopted the terms in Deuteronomy to explain 
 the whole of it. 
 
 Since the Commandments are addressed to 
 Israel as a nation, and to each Israelite, the 
 idea of neighbourhood is involved in them all. 
 Since the Commandments come forth from 
 God to the nation, and to each Israelite, alle- 
 giance to Him — that allegiance which is not 
 slavish, but the loving allegiance to a deliverer 
 
128 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 — must be implied in every act of obedience 
 to them. 
 
 I believe this observation is necessary, be- 
 cause we are very apt to suppose that murder, 
 adultery, theft, are crimes chiefly against the 
 man who is murdered, the man whose bed is 
 polluted, the man from whom any goods are 
 stolen. Whereas the Jews believed, and we 
 Englishmen till of late always believed, that 
 they are crimes against the nation ; that the 
 nation suffers an injury which no satisfaction 
 to the individual sufferer, or to those who 
 represent him, can repair. Nor is the case 
 changed when the word is introduced which 
 occurs in the Ninth Commandment. The false 
 witness must be against some person, some 
 fellow-citizen. But here, as everywhere, the 
 wrong done to him is done to the community. 
 Israel is injured, if a particular Israelite is 
 slandered. 
 
 That kind of false witness which takes the 
 form of perjury, which breaks the sanctity of 
 the oath, has already come before us in the 
 Third Commandment. It is included, no doubt, 
 in this. But false witness is no more limited 
 by it than murder, adultery, theft is limited 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 129 
 
 to the cases in which it becomes open and 
 notorious. The prohibition goes forth in the 
 name of tlie Lord, the King of the nation, 
 against that which destroys the order and 
 existence of the nation. The covert crime — 
 that which shrinks from the light, that which 
 is transacted in whispers — is more deadly than 
 any which the earthly legislator or judge can 
 take account of. The Legislator and Judge 
 knows it. His thunders say to the man, 
 '' Thou shalt not do it." " But yet," some 
 one will say, "it is done." Certainly, the 
 Commandment against bearing false witness 
 is disobeyed, as every other Commandment is 
 disobeyed. It speaks to the conscience of a 
 voluntary creature. As a Commandment, it 
 exercises no force, except over the conscience ; 
 whatever other influence deters a man from a 
 crime is external to the Commandment. 
 
 I make this remark again, though it has no 
 more application to the Ninth Commandment 
 than to any other, because experience suggests 
 this thought to us all. 
 
 " It is possible to define murder, adultery, 
 robbery ; you can assign to them such penal- 
 ties as you think desirable. But is it pos- 
 
 K 
 
130 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 sible to define false witness ? The laws in 
 every country must take cognizance of slander 
 and defamation. They mean, of course, to 
 check falsehood. But they do often punish 
 truth. The paradox, ' The greater the truth 
 the greater the libel,' may be now banished 
 from our Courts ; but there was an excuse for 
 it in the inability of the Court to judge of the 
 offence, except by the amount of injury which 
 it did to the person who suffered from it." 
 This remark being undoubtedly true, I draw 
 attention to the fact that this Commandment 
 makes the essence of the crime consist, not in 
 the injury that it does to any one, but simply 
 in its falseness. That is the wrong to the 
 nation : that wrong is discovered by the God of 
 Truth ; to that the conscience of the man is 
 privy. 
 
 But the Commandment is obsolete ! It 
 applied only to the Jews ! The ethics of 
 civilized society have discovered a provision 
 against this crime, which the old vulgar legis- 
 lation of Sinai could not dream of ! Do we in 
 England dare to say this ? Was the " School 
 for Scandal" produced in an age of barbarism ? 
 Does it represent the habits of an unrefined 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 131 
 
 class? Is not the modern press a creation of 
 modern civilization? Has it discovered the 
 secret of stopping false witness against the 
 neighbour? Outward persecutions are im- 
 possible to a great extent for Protestant 
 theologians. Have they learnt that it is a 
 sin, — do they not often count it a duty, — to 
 bear false witness against each other ? Where 
 are the ethics of fashion, of public opinion, 
 of the religious world, which have devised 
 securities against this evil, which have pre- 
 vented it from becoming a cancer in the body 
 politic? Woe to us if we are left to the 
 decrees of civilization to extirpate it ; let that 
 civilization call itself Christian or anti- Chris- 
 tian, let it express itself in saloons or lecture- 
 rooms or pulpits. Till the voice of God is 
 heard once again speaking without respect of 
 persons against every kind of false witness, — 
 till we feel that He who uttered that voice is 
 the Judge of the whole earth, and will cut 
 through every web of sophistry and casuistry, 
 which we have woven to hide ourselves from His 
 sight, — we shall go on each in his own way, 
 under his own pretext, adding something to 
 the lies which are circulating through tlie land, 
 
 K 2 
 
132 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 and whicli are working, as surely as murder or 
 adultery, for the dissolution of it. 
 
 Oh, is it the time to tell us that the nations 
 do not want this Commandment ? Ought we 
 not rather to say to every nation that is strug- 
 gling into birth : '' This prohibition is just 
 what you do want, just what the tyrants who 
 have kept you down have not suffered you to 
 hear. Believe it, there is no sin like lying; 
 all sins are included in that. Priests have 
 taught that, for certain high and holy ends, 
 lying is lawful, is excusable. You cannot 
 answer them; I cannot. But the Lord God 
 can. If He is not the God of truth, there is 
 no God ; we have been worshipping a phantom. 
 If He is the God of truth, then He maintains 
 an eternal warfare against falsehood in every 
 nation, in every man. Leave the sophists 
 to argue out cases, through volumes upon 
 volumes if they like. What signify their 
 volumes to you and me ? God speaks. God 
 will search out your lies and mine. God will 
 destroy them. Oh let us long that He should ! 
 He can give us no greater blessing than that." 
 
 '' But yet holy men do feel that their duty 
 to God involves what seems rather like in- 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 133 
 
 justice to their neighbour." . Certainly they 
 do. St. James told us so long ago. " There- 
 with," he says — with the same tongue — "bless 
 we God, even the Pather ; and therewith curse 
 we men, which are made in the similitude of 
 God." That was the practice of religious 
 men in his days. It seemed to the Apostle a 
 huge contradiction. Is it so or not ? And is 
 he right, when he goes on to use that lan- 
 guage which sounds at first so hopeless ? "The 
 tongue is an unruly evil ; the tongue can no 
 man tame." Yes ! it seems to me that my 
 own conscience, and the experience of our 
 times, fully bear out his assertion. 
 
 If it were not so, what means this tendency 
 to slander in myself, what means this atmo- 
 sphere of slander in which we grow up ? The 
 child's tongue begins to lisp slanders; the 
 tongue of the clever schoolboy utters them more 
 skilfully; the delicate young lady practises 
 them as an art ; literature adopts them into 
 itself as a principal part of its attraction, as one 
 of its great instruments for refining manners. 
 Surely the tongue can no man, no society of 
 men, tame, although it be such a deadly poison, 
 although it is working such desperate mischief. 
 
134 The Ninth Commandment. 
 
 What, then, am I to do ? The old Com- 
 mandment throws me upon the promise of the 
 New Covenant. God forbids us to bear false 
 witness against our neighbour. He says that 
 He will bestow on us His Spirit of Truth and 
 Charity. It is a promise to a society. It is a 
 promise to each member of a society. Is it a 
 delusion ? If we may not believe that God is 
 saying to each of us, " Thou shalt not bear 
 false witness against thy neighbour ; " if we 
 may not believe that He will give us the 
 strength we need to obey His Commandments 
 — we shall find that there is another spirit 
 at work among us — a spirit of lies — a spirit 
 which no arts of civilization, no arguments or 
 threats of religion can exorcise — a spirit of 
 which they may become the agents and minis- 
 ters, — a spirit the purpose and function of 
 which is to rend families, commonwealths, and 
 Churches asunder. 
 
 PRAYER. 
 
 O Lord God, we bless Thee that Thou hast 
 bestowed on us the wonderful gift of speech, 
 that we may hold fellowship with each other, 
 
The Ninth Commandment. 135 
 
 and may show forth that divine Word in whose 
 image Thou hast created ns. "We hless Thee 
 that Thou hast endued us in this land with a 
 nohle and beautiful language, which binds us 
 .to our fathers, and in which wise men have 
 spoken and sung to us of justice, and mercy, 
 and truth. O God, we have abused this 
 precious treasure to the vilest purposes. We 
 have made it an instrument for uttering false- 
 hoods against each other. We have come 
 before Thee with words of praise and adora- 
 tion, and we have applied those same words 
 to the slander of those whom Thou hast 
 redeemed by the blood which has redeemed 
 us. We are all guilty before Thee ; the richest 
 and the poorest, the most enlightened and the 
 most ignorant, young and old, women and men. 
 But specially those who preach the faith of 
 Thy Son to us have borne false witness 
 against each other, and have excused their lies 
 as being lies for Thee. O Lord God, suffer not 
 the nation which Thou hast loved and watched 
 over to perish through the cruelty and malice 
 of us who dwell in it ; give us that hearty 
 and inward repentance which Thou only canst 
 give, that when Thy Son shall sift us and all 
 
136 The Ninth Commandment, 
 
 nations, and separate the wheat from the 
 chaff, we may be a holy and acceptable people 
 in Thy sight. As Thou didst send Thy Spirit 
 at first to prepare Thy disciples, and that 
 they might prepare their countrymen, for the 
 great and terrible day of the Lord, which was 
 coming upon them, and to form a Church 
 of loving men, true to each other, bearing 
 witness of Thy truth ; so now, O Lord, purify 
 and renew the Church of this land with Thy 
 Spirit, that it may hate all lies, and may pre- 
 pare us for that day when every secret slander 
 and lie will be exposed by Thy light. Oh, let 
 us not tremble at the thought of that day, but 
 long for it, and wait for it as indeed the rising 
 of the Sun of E^ighteousness upon the earth. 
 May He arise now in our hearts, and scatter 
 all the darkness which is in them, that they 
 may be filled with Thy brightness and glory. 
 Amen. 
 
THE TENTH COMMANDMENT. 
 
 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbow^s house, thou shalt not covet thy 
 neighbour's wife, nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor 
 his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour's. 
 
 It was this Commandment, St. Paul tells us, 
 which utterly crushed him. He might have 
 thought, as the young ruler thought, that he 
 had kept the others from his youth up. It 
 was shown to him, very clearly, that he had 
 not kept this. Nay, he was shown something 
 else, which was utterly bewildering. The 
 Commandment produced the very state of 
 mind which it denounced. " It wrought in 
 me," he says, "all manner of concupiscence.'* 
 There is no experience more important than 
 this for the understanding of St. Paul's history, 
 or the history of the Christian Church. Out 
 of it came the discovery to him of the meaning 
 of the Gospel which he accepted for himself, 
 and which he preached to the nations. All 
 that he says about the impotence of the law, 
 
138 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 about the curse of the law, is interpreted by 
 it. An experience in its essentials similar to 
 this was passed through by Luther. Out of 
 it came his discovery of the Gospel which was 
 accepted by him and which he preached to 
 his nation. Out of it came the protest of the 
 sixteenth century, and all its mighty effects 
 upon national as w^ell as personal life. It 
 must concern us greatly, therefore, to consider 
 what this experience meant, and what was the 
 deliverance from it. Does it bind us, if we 
 maintain the liberty of the Gospel, to cast 
 aside the Commandments as obsolete and 
 dead ? Are those who treat them as obsolete 
 and dead of the same mind with St. Paul and 
 with Luther ? Are the effects of their teach- 
 ing likely to be such an emancipation of the 
 nations as proceeded from the teaching of the 
 Apostle and the Reformer ? 
 
 Saul of Tarsus felt that it was his calling 
 and work to defend the law of the Lord God 
 of Israel against the Nazarenes, who were, as 
 he thought, subverting it, who were breaking 
 down secretly, if not openly and formally, the 
 distinction between Jew and Gentile. He en- 
 tered upon this task manfully. In the course 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 139 
 
 of it that strange discovery was made to him, 
 " Thou, too, O child of Ahraham, Hebrew of 
 the Hebrews, art condemned by the very law 
 of which thou art the champion. The law 
 says, ' Thou shatt not covet' Does it say that 
 to the Gentile or to thee ? Is the law for the 
 Gentile, or for thee, a member of the race to 
 whom it was given ? And thou dost covet. 
 Thou art continually coveting. Thou dost not 
 covet less since thou hast heard the law. The 
 law has brought thy covetousness to light." 
 
 '' Is it possible ? Does the Lord God of Israel 
 then utter His tremendous sentence against 
 me ? How can I avoid this sentence ? If I 
 exhibit this zeal against the Nazarenes — if I 
 practise all the services which the straitest 
 of our sects prescribes — will that set me free 
 from it ? No ; it dogs me everywhere. Not 
 some other law, but this law, this which I 
 esteem so divine. There it is. I cannot erase 
 this Commandment against coveting from the 
 tables of stone. And, while it remains there, 
 it bears witness, not only against certain acts 
 of mine, but against a state of mind into 
 which I am habitually falling. Yes ; and a 
 state of mind which the very effort to avert 
 
140 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 the pimisliment of the Commandment — that 
 death which is implied in the violation of 
 it — strengthens and deepens. The more I 
 struggle, the more covetous I hecome. That 
 hahit which comes forth to some men in a 
 simple desire for the ox or the ass seems, in 
 me, concentrated. It fills my Avhole heing. 
 It is my religion. In all my thoughts ahout 
 the fufeiire or the present, I am covetous. I 
 am never so covetous, so wrapped in self, as 
 when I am plotting how I can he saved from 
 the judgment of God against me." 
 
 And yet how strange ! The conscience 
 which torments him for this hreach of the law 
 approves it, admires it. He confesses that it 
 is holy, just, and true. He is powerless to 
 ohev it, hut there is a consent in his mind to 
 its perfect rectitude. He might wish at times 
 to hlot it out of the Bible. Eut he does not 
 really wish it. He knows it is impossible. 
 And suppose it was possible — supposing covet- 
 ousness were to be permitted, sanctioned in him 
 and in all Israelites — would that be a blessed 
 state of things ? Would it not be precisely 
 the most accursed state of things possible ? 
 Could there be a nation of Israel if it existed ? 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 141 
 
 Would not each man be plotting to destroy the 
 nation, to get everything from his neighbour 
 which the law of the nation vindicated for his 
 neigliboar ? 
 
 Clearly this was a contradiction, the most 
 radical of all contradictions. He is not able 
 to get rid of by shutting his eyes to it, or 
 by determining that it is a problem past 
 his solution. The problem is in himself; he 
 must have a solution of it, he cannot live 
 as an Israelite unless he finds one. And yet 
 what can it be ? Is not covetousness his 
 nature, his own self ? How can it die, unless 
 he dies ? 
 
 How could there be this war in the very 
 heart of man with himself ? How could there 
 be this war with the Lord God of his fathers ? 
 There was the same answer to both questions. 
 One was revealed to him, the Lord of him, 
 the Lord of those whom he was persecuting. 
 Against Him he was fighting. Saul was sell- 
 ing himself to the covetousness with which 
 this Lord was engaged in eternal war. Eor 
 He was without covetousness. He had come 
 to give Himself up for men as His brethren. 
 That mind in Saul which confessed the law to 
 
142 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 be holy, and just, and good, turned to this 
 Lord, trusted in Him ; by that trust rose out 
 of the covetous nature which had kept it in 
 bondage, coukl treat this nature as a cursed 
 thing, an enemy. But not till the same mind 
 had confessed his Lord to be the Lord of all 
 men, of Gentiles as well as Jews, not till he 
 had felt that he liad a right to say to every 
 man, " Thou mayst count thyself dead indeed 
 unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus 
 Christ thy Lord." 
 
 Another discovery could not be separated 
 from this. The Lord of men was the Son of 
 God. He who offered Himself as the Sacrifice 
 for men was the perfect Image of His Pather. 
 He had come to do the will of His Eather in 
 that sacrifice. He had come to give men the 
 Spirit, in which He had made this sacrifice 
 that they might not be the slaves of their 
 covetous nature, that they might obey the 
 true law which they were created in Christ 
 Jesus to obey. 
 
 Thus, then, it had come to pass, that Saul, 
 being at war with himself, was also at war 
 with the God who gave the Commandment. 
 HE was the uncovetous Being ; the Being 
 
The Tenth Commandment, 143 
 
 who had sworn to put down covetousness 
 as the foe of His own Nature; as the foe 
 of the creatures whom He had made in His 
 image. Saul, like the heathens, had been 
 clothing this Being with his own attributes, 
 had been imputing to Him his own selfishness. 
 Now he could proclaim His true Name. He 
 could baptize all nations, in the name of the 
 Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. 
 He could say to all, " God in Christ has recon- 
 ciled you to Himself. The sacrifice of Christ 
 shows you what He is. The sacrifice tells you 
 what is the true law of your being, what you 
 are made to be." 
 
 At every step in the proclamation of this 
 Gospel, he had to encounter the opposition of 
 those who thought that they were defending 
 the law. What he was really encountering 
 was the spirit of covetousness, which was 
 making them rebels against the law. They 
 could not believe in a Christ who sacrificed 
 Himself; they would not believe in a God 
 who had created the universe in His infinite 
 charity, who had redeemed the universe from 
 its death and curse out of the same infinite 
 charity. 
 
144 The Tenth Commandment, 
 
 The Baptism of the nations set forth this 
 God to the nations. The Baptism of the 
 nations adopted them into this Name. The 
 Eather of Him in whom all things were 
 created, by whom all things consisted, was 
 their Eat her. The Son was the Head of the 
 society, the Lord of each man. In Him they 
 were members of a nniversal family. The 
 Spirit, in whom the Eather and the Son were 
 eternally one, drew them into the confession 
 of this fellowship. The Christian name, the 
 name which denoted the adoption into this 
 divine Name, v/as the familiar name, that 
 which each parent used in speaking to his 
 child, — the distinctive name, yet, in the widest 
 sense of all, the family name. "With Baptism 
 was joined the Eucharist. That went into all 
 landsj'^estifying of a Sacrifice once made for 
 all, for which all were to give thanks, testify- 
 ing that all were bound together under the 
 law of Sacrifice — the law of His being, who is 
 the Head of every man — and that each man 
 might overcome that covetousness which severs 
 man from man, which is the destroyer of 
 nations. 
 
 Eor centuries that Baptism and that Eucha- 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 145 
 
 rist had been established among the nations of 
 Europe. They marked out the nations for a 
 Christendom. In the city of Eome dwelt a 
 man, who was called the Pather of this Chris- 
 tendom, the Yicar of Christ, the Uniter of the 
 nations. Prom this man went forth the ofPer 
 to the people of Europe of remission of sins 
 to be sold for a price, the money to be used 
 for the building of a church — the church of 
 the sacred city — in which the free Sacrifice of 
 Christ for the world should be daily celebrated. 
 To Leo, the patron of the Arts, the member of 
 a family which had destroyed the liberty of his 
 native city, the liveliest of jokers, the most 
 subtle of intriguers, this seemed as reasonable 
 a way of raising funds for a chm^ch as any 
 other. The clever scholars of the time smiled 
 at a practice with which they were already 
 familiar ; practical people thought it might 
 do the boors good to be told that they must 
 pay something for escape from hell and admis- 
 sion into heaven ; religious people said that 
 religion would be endangered if any decree of 
 the supreme father were set at nought. To 
 one man it w^as not a jest, but an abomination 
 and a blasphemy. He had been born among 
 
 li 
 
146 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 boors ; he had become a scholar ; especially he 
 had studied in the school where Saul of Tarsus 
 had studied. The covetousness of his own 
 heart had been revealed to him by the God 
 who condemns covetousness. He had found 
 that for boors and scholars there is a deliver- 
 ance from covetousness, a union with God in 
 Him who gave Himself up for the world. The 
 covetousness of a Church which was the wit- 
 ness for this Sacrifice utterly appalled him. 
 Could it mean anything but this, that the 
 Church was denying Christ, was selling itself 
 to His enemy ? He appealed to the old testi- 
 monies. He conjured men to believe that 
 Baptism and the Eucharist were not lying 
 speeches, not inventions of men, but authentic 
 declarations concerning God and their relation 
 to Him ; His messages from generation to 
 generation. It was a time of great kings, of 
 wonderful politicians. And this voice, coming 
 from a monk knowing only the cloister and 
 the college, produced such a national move- 
 ment as all the kings, and all the politicians, 
 and all the priests could not quell. Por men 
 knew in their inmost hearts that covetous- 
 ness was eating up Christendom, that the kings 
 
The Tenth Commandment, 147 
 
 were enslaved to it, that the priests were 
 cherishing it under divine titles; that no 
 maxims of ethics, no ridicule of wits, no in- 
 surrection of peasants could put it down. 
 Only in the Name of the Lord God could it 
 be encountered ; only He could raise His 
 Church out of the pit which His ministers 
 had dug for it. 
 
 And now we who live three centuries after 
 the Reformation, in a country which accepted 
 it,— we who still conjure with the names 
 of St. Paul and Luther — are utterly unable to 
 cast out this spirit of covetousness from our 
 land or from our hearts ; it leaps on us, and 
 overcomes us. Eor we, using the watchwords 
 of St. Paul and Luther, have inverted their 
 sense. We recognise covetousness as the law 
 of the universe ; we try to persuade men that 
 sacrifice is not the law of it, — only a special 
 law for some few who have confessed Christ's 
 name ; nay, not even for those, but for those 
 who have accepted a " scheme of salvation 
 which is laid down in books of divinity. The 
 Sacrifice of the Son of God has dwindled into 
 that ! It is made dependent upon our con- 
 ception of it or belief in it ! And what belief 
 
 
148 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 in it can there be, when we are no more 
 encouraged to believe in Him as the Head of 
 every man, when we are taught to think of 
 Him as a Redeemer out of His ^Father's 
 hands, not as One who has come from the 
 Pather to redeem us out of the power of the 
 spirit of covetousness, to make us sons of God 
 and heirs of the eternal life of righteousness 
 and charity ? So all the dark thoughts about 
 sacrifice which the Reformation sought to 
 cure appear again in their old malignity. As 
 much in Protestant as in Romish countries, 
 men and women devise self-willed sacrifices, 
 which may commend them to God, and deliver 
 their consciences from a burden. The secret 
 that the self-will is itself the burden, that 
 that is separating us from each other and from 
 God, that it must be taken away before we can 
 offer ourselves, and all our energies of mind and 
 body, as sacrifices to God, dawns upon us at 
 times ; but how the burden can be thrown off, 
 how the free heart can be won — this we are 
 not told, or told in language the most perplex- 
 ing and contradictory. Nay, English divines 
 are inviting us to put on the old fetters, to 
 accept spiritual directors in place of the divine 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 149 
 
 Teacher, to deny that there is any divine 
 Teacher, except He comes to lis through them ; 
 to regard the priest as making that Sacrifice, 
 for which he is permitted, in the name of the 
 congregation, to give thanks. Not a few- 
 would persuade us that, if we will put on 
 these fetters thankfully, and wear them grace- 
 fully, we shall recover our unity with the 
 nations from which we have been separated. 
 
 We do, indeed, want that unity. All hearts 
 ought to cry for it. But it must come by 
 no renunciation of any truths which our 
 fathers asserted for us — by no effort that any 
 mere customs which we have inherited from 
 our fathers should be adopted by foreign 
 lands. It must come from the acknowledg- 
 ment that the old Commandments which we 
 had from the beginning are still for old and 
 young, for every country, and every age ; that 
 none speaks so clearly and so loudly against 
 us, and against the corrupt tendencies of every 
 nation and every Church, as this concerning 
 covetousness. It must come from the belief 
 that all the nations of Christendom have been 
 claimed as inheritors of God's New Covenant; 
 that they are all sealed as His children, and 
 
150 The Tenth Commandment, 
 
 baptized into His Spirit; that they are wit- 
 nesses of this adoption to the nations which 
 are still ignorant of the Name of Christ, espe- 
 cially the witnesses of Him, by showing that 
 they are not tied to the law of covetousness, 
 that they can obey the law of charity. 
 
 This unity of the nations must come from 
 the belief that the Holy Communion, the cele- 
 bration of the Sacrifice, which binds heaven 
 and earth together, is not a delusion ; that it 
 does reveal to us the true character and pur- 
 pose of OLir Pather in heaven ; that it is esta- 
 blished in Christ for all mankind; that the 
 Holy Spirit is able to write the law of Christ 
 on the hearts of human beings. 
 
 I rejoice, therefore, that the Commandments 
 are linked in our English Service to the Service 
 of Communion. I rejoice that we are all put 
 on the same level by that treatment. There 
 is no fine morality for fine and spiritual people. 
 There is no coarse and vulgar morality for 
 coarse and vulgar and irreligious people. All 
 are regarded as being liable to commit the 
 crimes which the law prohibits. Each of us 
 is regarded as suffering from these crimes 
 whether he commits them or no, seeing that 
 
The Tenth Commandment. 151 
 
 lie is a member of the body in which they are 
 committed. All are assured that they are under 
 the goyernment of the God of nations ; in- 
 cluded in the same redemption; educated by 
 the same Spirit of truth and unity. In losing 
 the Commandments to the nations, I believe 
 we lose the Gospel to mankind. If the one is 
 changeable, the other will become more change- 
 able. If we do not believe the Lord God pro- 
 claimed Himself to the Israelites as a Deliverer 
 out of the house of bondage, the New Testa- 
 ment will become to Christians a house of 
 bondage. If we no longer hear the voice of 
 the Lord, saying, " Thou shalt not covet," we 
 shall turn the news of Christ's Sacrifice into 
 an excuse for the most profound and hopeless 
 covetousness. 
 
 PUAYER. 
 
 O God, who art the infinite Charity, who 
 hast constituted us under Thy Law of Charity ; 
 who hast sent Thy Son to fulfil Thy Law, by 
 giving Himself for the world; who hast sent 
 Thy Spirit of Love to mould us in Thy Like- 
 
152 The Tenth Commandment. 
 
 ness, and to deliver us from our enemies ; 
 have mercy upon us. Break the yoke of our 
 covetousness, which sets us at war with Thee. 
 Show the nations that the spirit of selfishness 
 is not supreme. E^aise them up to worship 
 Thee, the only true God. Then we believe and 
 know that Thou wilt fulfil Thy blessed Cove- 
 nant, and write Thy Law of Love in our hearts, 
 and deliver us from all the curses into which our 
 disobedience has brought us. Then, O Eather, 
 who dwellest with the Son in the Unity of 
 the Holy Spirit, the one God of Charity, shall 
 Thy Church give glory to Thy Name. As it 
 was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall 
 be, world without end. Amen. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 LONDON : K. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR PRINTERS. 
 
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