The Book of
Exodus
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Chapter 20
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THE LAW.
Exo 20:1-17.
We have now reached that great event, one of the most momentous
in all history, the giving of the Ten Commandments. And it is
necessary to consider what was the meaning of this event, what part
were they designed to play in the religious development of mankind.
1. St. Paul tells us plainly what they did not effect. By
the works of the law could no flesh be justified: to the father of
the Hebrew race faith was reckoned instead of righteousness; the
first of their royal line coveted the blessedness not of the
obedient but of the pardoned; and Habakkuk declared that the just
should live by his faith, while the law is not of faith, and offers
life only to the man that doeth these things (Rom 4:3, Rom 4:6; Gal
3:12). In the doctrinal scheme of St. Paul there was no room for a
compromise between salvation by faith and reliance upon our own
performance of any works, even those simple and obvious duties which
are of world-wide obligation.
2. But he never meant to teach that a Christian is free from the
obligation of the moral law. If it is not true that we can keep it
and so earn heaven, it is equally false that we may break it without
penalty or remorse. What he insisted upon was this: that obligation
is one thing, and energy is another; the law is good, but it has not
the gift of pardon or of inspiration; by itself it will only reveal
the feebleness of him who endeavours to perform it, only force into
direst contrast the spiritual beauty of the pure ideal and the
wretchedness of the sinner, carnal, sold under sin. In this respect,
indeed, the law was its own witness. For if, among all the millions
of its children, one had lived by obedience, how could he have
shared in its elaborate sacrificial apparatus, in the hallowing of
the altar from pollution by the national uncleanness, in the
sprinkling of the blood of the offering for sin? Take the case of
the highest official. A sinless high priest under the law would have
been paralysed by his virtue, for his duty on the greatest day of
all the year was to make atonement first for his own sins.
3. The law being an authorised statement of what innocence means,
and therefore of the only terms upon which a man might hope to live
by works, is an organic whole, and we either keep it as a whole or
break it. Such is the meaning of the words, he that offendeth in one
point is guilty of all; because He who gave the seventh commandment
gave also the sixth--so that if one commit no adultery, yet kill, he
has become a transgressor of the law in its integrity (Jam 2:11).
The challenge of God to human self-righteousness is not one which
can be half met. If we have not thoroughly kept it, we have
thoroughly failed.
4. But this failure of man does not involve any failure, in the
law, to accomplish its intended work. It is, as has been said, a
challenge. The sense of our inability to meet it is the best
introduction to Him Who came not to call the righteous but sinners
to repentance, and thus the law became a tutor to bring men to
Christ. It awoke the conscience, brought home the sense of guilt,
and entered, that sin might abound in us, whose ignorance had not
known sin without it. It was strictly that which Moses most
frequently calls it--the Testimony.
5. Finally, however, the teaching of Scripture is not that
Christians are condemned to live always in a condition of baffled
striving, hopeless longing, conscious transgression of a code which
testifies against them. The old and carnal nature gravitates
downward, to selfishness and sin, as surely as by a law of the
physical universe. But the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus
emancipates us from that law of sin and death--the higher nature
doing, by the very quality of its life, what the lower nature cannot
be driven to do, by dread of hell or by desire of heaven. The
creature of earth becomes a creature of air, and is at home in a new
sphere, poised on its wings upon the breeze. Love is the fulfilling
of the law. And the Christian is free from its dictation, as
affectionate men are free from any control of the laws which command
the maintenance of wife and child, not because they may defy the
statutes, but because their volition and the statutes coincide.
Liberty is not lawlessness--it is the reciprocal harmony of law and
the will.
And thus the grand paradox of Luther is entirely true: "Unless
faith be without any, even the smallest works, it does not justify,
nay, it is not faith. And yet it is impossible for faith to be
without works--earnest, many and great." We are justified by faith
without the works of the law, and yet we do not make void the law by
faith--nay, we establish the law.
All this agrees exactly with the contrast, so often urged,
between the giving of the Law and the utterance of the Sermon on the
Mount. The former echoes across wild heights, and through savage
ravines; the latter is heard on the grassy slopes of the hillside
which overlooks the smiling Lake of Galilee. The one is spoken in
thunder and graven upon stone: the other comes from the lips, into
which grace is poured, of Him Who was fairer than the children of
men. The former repeats again and again the stern warning, "Thou
shalt not!" The latter crowns a sevenfold description of a
blessedness, which is deeper than joy, though pensive and even
weeping, by adding to these abstract descriptions an eighth, which
applies them, and assumes them to be realised in His
hearers--"Blessed are ye." If so much as a beast touched the
mountain it should be stoned. But Simeon took the Divine Infant in
his arms.
And this is not because God has become gentler, or man worthier:
it is because God the Lawgiver upon His throne has come down to be
God the Helper. But the beatitudes could never have been spoken, if
the law had not been imposed: the blessedness of a hunger and thirst
for righteousness was created by the majestic and spiritual beauty
of the unattained commandment.
Yes, it had a spiritual beauty. For, however formal, external,
and even shallow, the commandments may appear to flippant modern
babblers, St. Paul bewailed the contrast between the law, which was
spiritual, and his own carnal heart. And he, who had kept all the
letter from his youth, was only the more vexed and haunted by the
fleeting consciousness of a higher "good thing" unattained. Did not
one table say "Thou shalt not covet," and the other promise mercy to
thousands of those that love?
This leads us to consider the structure and arrangement of the
Decalogue. Scripture itself tells us that there were "ten words" or
precepts, written upon both sides of two tables. But various answers
have been given at different times, to the question, How shall we
divide the ten?
The Jews of a later period made a first commandment of the words,
"I am the Lord thy God," which is not a commandment at all. And they
restored the proper number, thus exceeded, by uniting in one the
prohibition of other gods and of idolatry; although the worship of
the golden calf, almost immediately after the law was given,
suffices to establish the distinction. For then, as well as under
Gideon, Micah and Jeroboam, the sin of idolatry fell short of
apostasy to a wholly different god (Jdg 8:23, Jdg 8:27, Jdg 17:3,
Jdg 17:5; 1Ki 12:28). The worship of images dishonours God, even if
it be His semblance that they claim. In this arrangement, the tables
were allotted five commandments each.
Another curious arrangement was devised, apparently by St.
Augustine; and the weight of his authority imposed it upon Western
Christianity until the Reformation, and upon the Latin and Lutheran
churches unto this day. Like the former, it adds the second
commandment to the first, but it divides the tenth. And it gives to
the first table three commandments, "since the number of
commandments which concern God seem to hint at the Trinity to
careful students," while the seven commandments of the second table
suggest the Sabbath. Such mystical references are no longer weighty
arguments. And the proposed division of the tenth commandment seems
quite precluded by the fact that in Exodus we read, "Thou shalt not
covet thy neighbour's house nor his wife," while in Deuteronomy the
order is reversed; so that its advocates are divided among
themselves as to whether the coveting of a house or a wife is to
attain the dignity of separate mention.
The ordinary English arrangement assigns to the tables four
commandments and six respectively. And the noble catechism of the
Church of England appears to sanction this arrangement by including
among "my duties to my neighbour" that of loving, honouring and
succouring my father and mother. There are several objections to
this arrangement. It is unsymmetrical. There seems to be something
more sacred and divine about my relationship with my father and
mother than those which connect me with my neighbour. The first
table begins with the gravest offence, and steadily declines to the
lowest; sin against the unique personality of God being followed by
sin against His spirituality of nature, His name, and His holy day.
If now the sin against His earthly representative, the very fountain
and sanction of all law to childhood, be added to the first table,
the same order will pervade those of the second--namely, sin against
my neighbour's life, his family, his property, his reputation, and
lastly, his interest in my inner self, in the wishes that are
unspoken, the thoughts and feelings which
"I wad nae tell to nae man."
We thus obtain both the simplest division and the clearest
arrangement. In Rom 13:9 the fifth commandment is not enumerated
when rehearsing the actions which transgress the second table. In
the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy all the later commandments are joined
with the sixth by the copulative (represented along with the
negative fairly enough in our English by "Neither"), which seems to
indicate that these five were united together in the author's mind.
But the fifth stands alone, like all those of the first table. Now,
it is clear that such an arrangement gives great sanction and weight
to the sacred institution of the family.
Finally, the comprehensiveness and spirituality of the law may be
observed in this; that the first table forbids sin against God in
thought, word and deed; and the second table forbids sin against man
in deed, word and thought.
THE PROLOGUE.
Exo 20:2.
The Decalogue is introduced by the words "I am the Lord thy God,
which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
bondage."
Here, and in the previous chapter, is already a great advance
upon the time when it was said to them "The God of thy fathers, the
God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, hath appeared." Now they are
expected to remember what He has done for themselves. For, although
religion must begin with testimony, it ought always to grow up into
an experience. Thus it was that many of the Samaritans believed on
Jesus because of the word of the woman; but presently they said,
"Now we believe, not because of thy speaking, for we have heard Him
ourselves, and know." And thus the disciples who heard John the
Baptist speak, and so followed Jesus, having come and seen where He
abode, could say, "We have found the Messiah."
This prologue is vitally connected with both tables of the law.
In relation to the first, it recognises the instinct of worship in
the human heart. In vain shall we say Do not worship idols, until
the true object of adoration is supplied, for the heart must and
will prostrate itself at some shrine. A leader of modern science
confesses "the immovable basis of the religious sentiment in the
nature of man," adding that "to yield this sentiment reasonable
satisfaction is the problem of problems at the present hour."[35]
It is indeed a problem for the unbelief which, because it professes
to be scientific, cannot shut its eyes to the fact that men whose
faith in Christ has suffered shipwreck are everywhere seen to be
clinging to strange planks--spiritualism, esoteric Buddhism, and
other superstitions,--which prove that man must and will reverence
something more than streams of tendencies, or beneficial results to
the greatest numbers. The Law of Moses abolishes superstition by no
mere negation, but by the proclamation of a true God.
Moreover, it declares that this God is knowable, which flatly
contradicts the brave assertion of modern agnostics that the notion
of a God is not even "thinkable." That assertion is a bald and
barren platitude in the only sense in which it is not contrary to
the experience of all mankind. As we cannot form a complete and
perfect, nor even an adequate notion of God, so no man ever yet
conceived a complete and adequate notion of his neighbour, nor
indeed of himself. But as we can form a notion of one another, dim
and fragmentary indeed, yet more or less accurate and fit to guide
our actions, so has every nation and every man formed some notion of
deity. Nor could even the agnostic declare that God is unthinkable,
unless the word God, of which he makes this assertion, conveyed to
him some idea, some thought, more or less worthy of the
thinking. The ancient Jew never dreamed that he could search out the
Almighty to perfection, yet God was known to him by His actions (the
only means by which we know our fellow-men); and the combined terror
and loving-kindness of these at once warned him against revolt, and
appealed to his loyalty for obedience.
In relation to the second table, the prologue was both an
argument and an appeal. Why should a man hope to prosper by
estranging his best Friend, his Emancipator and Guide? And even if
disobedience could obtain some paltry advantage, how base would he
be who snatched at it, when forbidden by the God Who broke his
chains, and brought him out of the house of bondage--a Benefactor
not ungenial and remote, but One Who enters into closest relations
with him, calling Himself "Thy God"!
Now, a greater emancipation and a closer personal relationship
belong to the Church of Christ. When a Christian hears that God is
unthinkable, he ought to be able to answer, 'God is my God, and He
has brought my soul out of its house of bondage.'
Moreover, his emancipation by Christ from many sins and inner
slaveries ought to be a fact plain enough to constitute the sorest
of problems to the observing world.
It must be observed, besides, that the Law, which was the centre
of Judaism, does not appeal chiefly to the meaner side of human
nature. Hell is not yet known, for the depths of eternity could not
be uncovered before the clouds had rolled away from its heights of
love and condescension; or else the sanity and balance of human
nature would have been overthrown. But even temporal judgments are
not set in the foremost place. As St. Paul, who knew the terrors of
the Lord, more commonly and urgently besought men by the mercies of
God, so were the ancient Jews, under the burning mountain, reminded
rather of what God had bestowed upon them, than of what He might
inflict if they provoked Him. And our gratitude, like theirs, should
be excited by His temporal as well as His spiritual gifts to us.
THE FIRST COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt have none other gods before Me."-- Exo
20:3.
When these words fell upon the ears of Israel, they conveyed, as
their primary thought, a prohibition of the formal worship of rival
deities, Egyptian or Sidonian gods. Following immediately upon the
proclamation of Jehovah, their own God, they declared His
intolerance of rivalry, and enjoined a strict and jealous
monotheism. For God was a reality. Races who worshipped
idealisations or personifications might easily make room for other
poetic embodiments of human thought and feeling; but Jehovah would
vindicate His rights. He had proved himself very real in Egypt.
Other gods would not displace Him: He would observe them: they would
be "before Me."[36] God
does not quit the scene when man forgets Him.
Now, it is hard for us to realise the charm which the worship of
false gods possessed for ancient Israel. To comprehend it we must
reflect upon the universal ignorance which made every phenomenon of
nature a portentous manifestation of mysterious and varied power,
which they could by no means trace back to a common origin, while
the crash and discord of the results appeared to indicate opposing
wills behind. We must reflect how closely akin is awe to worship,
and how blind and unintelligent was the awe which storm and
earthquake and pestilence then excited. We must remember the
pressure upon them of surrounding superstitions armed with all the
civilisation and art of their world. Above all, we must consider
that the gods which seduced them were not of necessity supreme:
homage to them was very fairly consistent with a reservation of the
highest place for another; so that false worship in its early stages
need not have been much more startling than belief in witchcraft, or
in the paltry and unimaginative "spirits" which, in our own day, are
reputed to play the banjo in a dark room, and to untie knots in a
cabinet. Is it for us to deride them?
To oppose all such tendencies, the Lord appealed not to
philosophy and sound reason. These are not the parents of
monotheism: they are the fruit of it. And so is our modern science.
Its fundamental principle is faith in the unity of nature, and in
the extent to which the same laws which govern our little world
reach through the vast universe. And that faith is directly
traceable to the conviction that all the universe is the work of the
same Hand.
"One God, one law, one element;"--the preaching of the first was
sure to suggest the other two. Nor could any race which believed in
a multitude of gods labour earnestly to reduce various phenomena to
one cause. Monotheism is therefore the parent of correct thinking,
and could not draw its sanctions thence. No: the law appeals to the
historical experience of Israel; it is content to stand and fall by
that; if they acknowledged the claim of God upon their loyalty, all
the rest followed. Their own story made good this claim. And so does
the whole story of the Church, and the whole inner life of every man
who knows anything of himself, bear witness to the religion of
Jesus.
Never let us weary of repeating that while we have ample
controversial resource, while no missile can pierce the chain-armour
of the Christian evidences, connected and interwoven into a great
whole, and while the infidelity which is called scientific is really
infidel only so far as it begs its case (which is an unscientific
thing to do), nevertheless the strength of our position is
experimental. If the experience which testifies to Jesus were
historical alone, I might refuse to give it credit: if it were only
personal, I might ascribe it to enthusiasm. But as long as a great
cloud of living witnesses, and all the history of the Church,
declare the reality of His salvation, while I myself feel the
sufficiency of what He offers (or else the bitter need of it), so
long the question is not between conflicting theories, but between
theories and facts. To have another god is to place him beside One
Whom we already have, and Who has wrought for us the great
emancipation. It is not an error in theological science: it is
ingratitude and treason.
But it very soon became evident that men could apostatise from
God otherwise than in formal worship, chant and sacrifice and
prostration: "This people honoureth me with their mouths, but their
hearts are far from Me." God asks for love and trust, and our
litanies should express and cultivate these. Whatever steals away
these from the Lord is really His rival, and another god. "What is
it to have a God? or what is God?" Luther asks. And he answers, "He
is God, and is so called, from Whose goodness and power thou dost
confidently promise all good things to thyself, and to Whom thou
dost fly from all adverse affairs and pressing perils. So that to
have a God is nothing else than to trust Him and believe in Him with
all the heart, even as I have often alleged that the reliance of the
heart constitutes alike one's God and one's idol.... In what thing
soever thou hast thy mind's reliance and thine heart fixed, that is
beyond doubt thy God" (Larger Catechism).
And again: "What sort of religion is this, to bow not the knees
to riches and honour, but to offer them the noblest part of you, the
heart and mind? It is to worship the true God outwardly and in the
flesh, but the creature inwardly and in spirit" (X. Pr Êcepta
Witt. PrÊdicata).
It was on this ground that he included charms and spells among
the sins against this commandment, because, though "they seem
foolish rather than wicked, yet do they lead to this too grave
result, that men learn to rely upon the creature in trifles, and so
fail in great things to rely upon God" (Ibid.)
This view of false worship is frequent in Scripture itself. The
Chaldeans were idolaters of an elaborate and imposing ritual, but
their true deities were not to be found in temples. They adored what
they really trusted upon, and that was their military prowess--the
god of the modern commander, who said that Providence sided with the
big battalions. The Chaldean is "he whose might is his god," whereas
the sacred warrior has the Lord for his strength and shield and very
present help in battle. Nay, regarding men "as the fishes of the
sea," and his own vast armaments as the fisher's apparatus to sweep
them away, the Chaldean, it is said, "sacrificeth unto his net, and
burneth incense unto his drag; because by them his portion is fat
and his meat plenteous" (Hab 1:11, Hab 1:14-16). Multitudes of
humbler people practise a similar idolatry. They say to God "Give us
this day our daily bread"; but they really ascribe their maintenance
to their profession or their trade; and so this is the true object
of their homage. They, too, burn incense to their drag.
Others had no thought of a higher blessedness than animal
enjoyment. Their god was their belly. They set the excitement of
wine in the place of the fulness of the Spirit, or preferred some
depraved union upon earth to the honour of being one spirit with the
Lord (Php 3:19; Eph 5:18; 1Co 6:16-17). And some tried to combine
the world and righteousness; not to lose heaven while grasping
wealth, and receiving here not only good things, but the only good
things they acknowledged--their good things (Luk 16:25). As
the Samaritans feared the Lord and served graven images, so these
were fain to serve God and mammon (2Ki 17:41; Mat 6:24).
Now, these departures from the true Centre of all love and Source
of all light were really a homage to His great rival, "the god of
this world." Whenever men seek to obtain any prize by departing from
God, they do reverence to him who falsely said of all the kingdoms
of the earth, and their glory, "These things are delivered unto me,
and to whomsoever I will I give them." They deny Him to Whom indeed
all power is committed in heaven and earth.
What is the remedy, then, for all such formal or virtual
apostasies? It is to "have" the true God--which means, not only to
know and confess, but to be in real relationship with Him.
Despite His so-called self-sufficiency, man is not very
self-sufficing, after all. The vast endowments of Julius C Êsar
did not prevent him from chafing because, at the age when he was
still obscure, Alexander had conquered the world. To be Julius CÊsar
was not enough for him. Nor is any man able to stand alone. In the
Old Testament Joshua said, "If it seem evil unto you to serve the
Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve,"--implying that they
must obey some one and will do better to choose a service than to
drift into one (Jos 24:15). And in the New Testament Jesus declared
that no man can serve two masters; but added that he would not break
with both and go free, he was sure to love and cleave to one of
them. Now, he only is proof against apostasy, who has realised the
wants of the soul within him, and the powerlessness of all creatures
to satisfy or save, and then, turning to the cross of Christ, has
found his sufficiency in Him. "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast
the words of everlasting life." Marvellous it is to think that
underneath the stern words "Thou shalt have none other," lies all
the condescension of the privilege "Thou shalt have ... Me."
THE SECOND COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, ...
thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them."-- Exo
20:4-6.
How far does the second of these clauses modify the first? Men
there are who maintain the severe independence of the former, so
that it forbids the presence of any image or likeness in the house
of God, even for innocent purposes of adornment. But the Decalogue
is not a liturgical directory: what it forbids in church it forbids
anywhere; and on this theory the statues in Parliament Square would
be idolatrous, as well as those in Westminster Abbey. And such
Christians are more Judaical than the Jews, who were taught to place
in the very Holy of Holies golden cherubim overshadowing the
mercy-seat, and to represent them again upon its curtains.
It is therefore plain that the precept never forbade imagery, but
idolatry, which is the making of images to satisfy the craving of
men's hearts for a sensuous worship--the making of them "unto thee."
The second clause qualifies and elucidates the first. And what the
commandment prohibits is any attempt to help our worship by
representing the object of adoration to the senses.
The higher and more subtle idolatries do not conceive that wood
or gold is actually transformed into their deities; but only that
the deities are locally present in the images, which express their
attributes--power in a hundred hands, beneficence in a hundred
breasts. But in thus expressing, they degrade and cramp the
conception.
They may perhaps evade the reproach of Isaiah that they warm
themselves with a portion of timber, and roast meat with another
portion, and make the remainder a god (Isa 44:15-17), by urging that
the timber is not the god, but an abode which he chooses because it
expresses his specific qualities. But they cannot evade the reproach
of St. Paul, that being ourselves the offspring of God, we ought not
to compare Him to the workmanship of our hands, graven with art and
man's device (Act 17:29).
A truly spiritual worship is intellectually as well as morally
the most elevating exercise of the soul, which it leads onward and
upward, making of all that it knows and thinks a vestibule, beyond
which lie higher knowledge and deeper feeling as yet unattained.
Why is Gothic architecture better adapted for religious buildings
than any Grecian or Oriental style? Because its long aisles, vaulted
roofs and pointed arches, leading the vision up to the unseen, tell
of mystery, and draw the mind away beyond the visible and concrete
to something greater which it hints; while rounded arches and
definite proportions shut in at once the vision and the mind. The
difference is the same as between poetry and logic.
And so it is with worship. We fetter and cramp our thoughts of
deity when we bind them to even the loftiest conceptions which have
ever been shut up in marble or upon canvas. The best image that ever
took shape is inferior to the poorest spiritual conception of God,
in this respect if in no other--that it has no expansiveness, it
cannot grow. And in connecting our prayers with it, we virtually
say, 'This satisfies my conception of God.'
It is not to be condemned merely as inadequate, for so are all
our highest thoughts of deity; nor only because average humanity
(which is supposed to stand most in need of the help and suggestion
of art) will never learn the fine distinctions by which subtle
intellects withhold from the image itself the worship which it
evokes, and which goes out in its direction. It is still more
mischievous because, even for the trained theologian, it is the
petrifaction of what is meant to develop and expand, the
solidification of the inadequate, the accepting of what is human as
our idea of the divine.
Nor will it long continue to be merely inadequate. Experience
proves that ideas, like air and water, cannot be confined without
stagnating. Idolatries not only fail to develop, they degenerate;
and systems, however orthodox they may appear at starting, which
connect worship with palpable imagery, are doomed to sink into
superstition.
To this precept there is added a startling and painful
caution--"For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God." That a man
should be jealous is no passport to our friendship: we think of
unreasonable estrangements, exaggerated demands, implacable and
cruel resentments. It would not enter the average mind to doubt that
one is highly praised when another says of him, 'I never traced in
his words or actions the slightest stain of jealousy.' And yet we
are to think of God Himself as the jealous God.
Upon reflection, however, we must admit that a man is not
condemned as jealous-minded because he is capable of jealousy, but
because he has an unjust and unreasonable tendency towards it. It is
a narrowing and suspicious quality when it operates without due
cause, a vindictive and cruel one when it operates in excessive
measure. But what should we think of a parent who felt no jealousy
if the heart of his child were stolen from him by intriguing
servants or by frivolous comrades? Now, God has called Israel His
son, even His firstborn. The truth is that with us jealousy is
dangerous and frequently perverted, because we are bad judges of the
measure of our own rights, especially when our affections are
involved. But some measure of jealousy is the necessary pain of love
neglected, love wronged or slighted by those upon whom it has a
claim. Jealousy is the shadow thrown where the sunshine of love is
intercepted, and it is strong in proportion to the strength of the
light. It operates in the heart exactly like the sense of justice in
the reason. Justice expects a recompense where it has given service,
and jealousy asks for love where it has given affection.
And therefore, when God tells us that He is jealous, He implies
that He condescends to love us, to look for a return, to desire more
from us than outward service. We cannot be jealous concerning things
which are indifferent to us. Even the jealousy of rival competitors
for business or for place may be measured by the desire of each for
that which the other would engross. The politician is not jealous of
the millionaire, nor the capitalist of the prime minister.
Now, if God is jealous when the enemies of our soul would steal
away our loyalty, it surely follows that we shall not be left to
contend with those enemies alone: He values us; He is upon our side;
He will help us to overcome them.
And now we begin to see why this attribute is connected with the
second commandment and not the first. The apostate who betakes
himself to another god is almost beyond the reach of this tender and
intimate emotion: he is still loved, for God loves all men; but yet
perhaps the chord is unstrung which trembles responsive to this
plaintive note.
When a man who confesses God begins to weary of spiritual
intercourse with the Lord of spirits, when he can no longer worship
One whose actual presence is realised because His voice is heard
within, when the likeness of man or brute, or brightness of morning,
or marvel of life or its reproductiveness, contents him as a
representation of God the invisible, then his heart is beginning to
go after the creature, to content itself with artistic loveliness or
majesty, to let go the grasp as upon a living hand, by which alone
the soul may be sustained when it stumbles, or guided when it would
err.
To those who are within His covenant--to us, therefore, as to His
ancient Israel--He says, "I the Lord thy God am a jealous God."
Because I am "thy God."
The assertion of a Divine jealousy is but one difficulty of this
remarkable verse. The Lord goes on to describe Himself as "visiting
the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and
fourth generation of them that hate Me, and showing mercy unto
thousands of them that love Me and keep My commandments." And is
this reasonable? To punish the child, to be avenged upon the
children's children, for sins which are not their own? We know how
often the sceptic has made gain out of this representation--which is
but his own unauthorised gloss, since in reality God has said
nothing about punishing the righteous with the wicked. It is not
true that all sad and disastrous consequences are penal; many are
disciplinary, and even to the people of God some are surgical,
cutting away what would lead to disease and death. Are no evil
consequences probable, if men brought up amid scenes dishonouring to
God were treated exactly like those who have since childhood felt as
it were the hand of a Father upon their head? For themselves it is
best and kindest that so deep a loss could come home to their
consciousness in pain.
At all events, the assertion so early made in Scripture is
confirmed in all the experience of the race. Insanity, idiocy,
scrofula, consumption, are too often, though not always, the
hereditary results of guilt. Sins of the flesh are visited upon the
bodily system. Sins of the temper, such as pride, cynicism and
frivolity, are felt in the mental structure of the race. And the
sins which offend directly against God, do they bring no results
with them? Ask of the investigators of the new science of heredity
and transmitted peculiarities, whether it stops short of the highest
and holiest parts of human nature. Or consider the ravages which
victory and consequent wealth have made, again and again, in the
character of whole nations.
There is no doctrine impugned in Scripture, which men have less
prospect of shaking off, even if they close their Bibles for ever,
than this. If it were not there, we should be perplexed at a want of
conformity between the ways of God in nature and what is asserted of
Him in His Book.
But it is either slander or blindness to represent this law,
viewed in its entirety, as other than benevolent. The transmission
of the result of evil is only a part of the vast law which has bound
men together in nations and families, as partners and members with
each other. It is clear that distinctive advantages cannot be
bestowed upon the children of the good, as such, unless the same
advantages be withheld from the evil race beside them. If the prizes
of a university are won by knowledge, the result is that ignorance
is "visited," in the withholding of them. And if, in the vaster
university of life, health, affluence, good repute and a clear
intellect are the transmitted results of virtue, then disease,
poverty, neglect and incompetence become the dire bequest of the
unrighteous.
There is no choice, therefore, except either to carry out this
law, or else to bid every man in the world begin life, not as "the
heir of all the ages," but absolutely destitute of all that has been
acquired by his fellow-men.
Sometimes a hint is given us of what this would be. There is
brought occasionally into civilised communities, from the depths of
forests, a creature without language or decency or intellect, with
low forehead and brutal appetites, who in his early childhood had
wandered away and been lost,--brought up, men say, by the strange
compassion of some lower creature, and now sunken well-nigh to its
level. To this degradation we should all come, if it were not for
the transmitted inheritance of our fathers. And so vast is the
upward force of this grand law, that it is steadily though slowly
upheaving the whole mass; and the lowest of today, visited for
ancestral failings by sinking to the bottom, is higher than if he
had been left absolutely alone.
This over-weight of good is clearly seen by comparing the
clauses, for the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children
to the third and fourth generation, but mercy is shown in them that
love God upon a wholly different scale. Even "unto thousands" would
enormously counterbalance three generations. But the Revised Version
rightly suggests "a thousand generations" in the margin, and
supports it by one of its very rare references. It is plainly stated
in Deu 7:9, that He "keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love
Him and keep His commandments unto a thousand generations."
Lastly, it is to be observed that in all this passage the gospel
is shining through the law. It is not a question of just dealing,
but of emotion. God is not a master exacting taskwork, but a Father,
jealous if we refuse our hearts. He visits sin upon the posterity
"of them that hate," not only of them that disobey Him. And when our
hearts sink, we who are responsible for generations yet to be, as we
reflect upon our frailty, our ignorance and our sins, upon the awful
consequences which may result from one heedless act--nay, from a
gesture or a look--He reminds us that He does not requite those who
serve Him only with a measured wage, but shows "mercy" upon those
who love Him unto a thousand generations.
THE THIRD COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God
in vain."-- Exo 20:7.
What is the precise force of this prohibition? The word used is
ambiguous: sometimes it must be rendered as here, as in the verses "Vain
is the help of man," and "Except the Lord build the house, their
labour is but vain that build it" (Psa 108:12, Psa 127:1).
But sometimes it clearly means false, as in the texts "Thou shalt
not raise a false report," and "swearing falsely in
making a covenant" (Exo 23:1; Hos 10:4). Yet again, it hangs midway
between the two ideas, as when we read of "lying vanities,"
and again, "trusting in vanity and speaking lies" (Psa 31:6;
Isa 59:4).
In favour of the rendering "falsely" it is urged that our Lord
quotes it as "said to them of old time 'Thou shalt not forswear
thyself'" (Mat 5:33). But it is by no means clear that He quotes
this text: the citation is closer to the phraseology of Lev 19:12,
and it is found in a section of the Sermon which does not confine
its citations to the Decalogue (cf. Mat 5:38).
The Authorised rendering seems the more natural when we remember
that civic duty had not yet come upon the stage. When we have
learned to honour only one God, and not to degrade nor materialise
our conception of Him, the next step is to inculcate, not yet
veracity toward men when God has been invoked, but reverence, in
treating the sacred name.
We have already seen the miserable superstitions by which the
Jews endeavoured to satisfy the letter while outraging the spirit of
this precept. In modern times some have conceived that all
invocation of the Divine Name is unlawful, although St. Paul called
God for a witness upon his soul, and the strong angel shall yet
swear "by Him Who liveth for ever and ever" (2Co 1:23; Rev 10:6).
As it is not a temple but a desert which no foot ever treads, so
the sacred name is not honoured by being unspoken, but by being
spoken aright.
Swearing is indeed forbidden, where it has actually disappeared,
namely, in the mutual intercourse of Christian people, whose
affirmation should suffice their brethren, while the need of
stronger sanctions "cometh of evil," even of the consciousness of a
tendency to untruthfulness, which requires the stronger barrier of
an oath. But our Lord Himself, when adjured by the living God,
responded to the solemn authority of that adjuration, although His
death was the result.
The name of God is not taken in vain when men who are conscious
of His nearness, and act with habitual reference to His will,
mention Him more frequently and familiarly than formalists approve.
It is abused when the insincere and hollow professor joins in the
most solemn act of worship, honours Him with the lips while the
heart is far from Him--nay, when one strives to curb Satan, and
reclaim his fellow-sinner, by the use of good and holy phrases, in
which his own belief is merely theoretical; and fares like the sons
of Sceva, who repeated an orthodox adjuration, but fled away
overpowered and wounded. Or if the truth unworthily spoken assert
its inherent power, that will not justify the hollowness of his
profession, and in vain will he plead at last, "Lord, Lord, have we
not in Thy name cast out devils, and in Thy name done many
marvellous acts?"
The only safe rule is to be sure that our conception of God is
high and real and intimate; to be habitually humble and trustful in
our attitude toward Him; and then to speak sincerely and frankly, as
then we shall not fail to do. The words which rise naturally to the
lips of men who think thus cannot fail to do Him honour, for out of
the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.
And the prevalent notion that God should be mentioned seldom and
with bated breath is rather an evidence of men's failure habitually
to think of Him aright, than of filial and loving reverence. There
is a large and powerful school of religion in our own day, whose
disciples talk much more of their own emotions and their own souls
than St. Paul did, and much less about God and Christ. Some day the
proportions will be restored. In the great Church of the future men
will not morbidly shrink from confessing their inner life, but
neither will it be the centre of their contemplation and their
discourse: they will be filled with the fulness of God; out of the
abundance of their hearts their mouths will speak; His name shall be
continually in their mouth, and yet they shall not take the name of
the Lord their God in vain.
THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT.
Exo 20:8-11.
It cannot be denied that the commandment to honour the Sabbath
day occupies a unique place among the ten. It is, at least
apparently, a formal precept embedded in the heart of a moral code,
and good men have thought very differently indeed about its
obligation upon the Christian Church.
The great Continental reformers, Lutheran and Calvinistic alike,
who subscribed the Confession of Augsburg, there affirmed that
"Scripture hath abolished the Sabbath by teaching that all Mosaic
ceremonies may be omitted since the gospel has been revealed" (II.
vii. 28). The Scotch reformers, on the other hand, declared that God
"in His Word, by a positive moral and perpetual commandment, binding
all men in all ages, hath particularly appointed one day in seven
for a Sabbath, to be kept holy unto Him" (Westminster Confess.,
XXI. vii.). They are even so bold as to declare that this day "from
the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ was the
last day of the week, and from the resurrection of Christ was
changed into the first day of the week"; but this proposition would
be as hard to prove as the contrary assertion, still maintained by
some obscure religionists, that the change of day, for however
sufficient and sublime a reason, was beyond the capacity of the
Church of Christ to enact.
Amid these conflicting opinions the doctrinal formularies of the
Church of England are characteristically guarded and prudent; but
her worshippers are bidden to seek mercy from the Lord for past
violations of this law, and an inclination of heart to keep it in
the future; and when the Ten have been recited, they pray that "all
these Thy laws" may be written upon their hearts. There is no doubt,
therefore, about the opinion of our own Reformers concerning the
divine obligation of the commandment.
In examining the problem thus presented to us, our chief light
must be that of Scripture itself. Is the Sabbath what the Lutheran
confession called it, a mere "Mosaic ceremony," or does it rest upon
sanctions which began earlier and lasted longer than the precept to
abstain from shell-fish, or to sanctify the firstborn of cattle?
Does its presence in the Decalogue disfigure that great code, as
the intrusion of these other precepts would do? When we find a
Gentile church reminded that the next precept to this "is the first
commandment with promise" (Eph 6:2), can we suppose that the tables
to which St. Paul appealed, and the promise which he cited at full
length, were both cancelled; that in so far as a moral element
existed in them, that portion of course survived their repeal, but
the code itself was gone? If so, the temporal promise went with it,
and its quotation by St. Paul is strange. Strange also, upon this
supposition, was the stress which he habitually laid upon the law as
a convicting power, and as being only repealed in the letter so far
as it was fulfilled by the spontaneous instinct of love, which was
the fulfilling of the law.
The position of the commandment among a number of moral and
universal duties cannot but weigh heavily in its favour. It prompts
us to ask whether our duty to God is purely negative, to be
fulfilled by a policy of non-intervention, not worshipping idols,
nor blaspheming. Something more was already intimated in the promise
of mercy to them "that love Me." For love is chiefly the source of
active obedience: while fear is satisfied by the absence of
provocation, love wants not only to abstain from evil but to do
good. And how may it satisfy this instinct when its object is the
eternal God, Who, if He were hungry, would not tell us? It finds the
necessary outlet in worship, in adoring communion, in the exclusion
for awhile of worldly cares, in the devotion of time and thought to
Him. Now, the foundation upon which all the institutions of religion
may be securely built, is the day of rest. Call it external, formal,
unspiritual if you will; say that it is a carnal ordinance, and that
he who keeps it in spirit is free from the obligation of the letter.
But then, what about the eighth commandment? Are we absolved also
from the precept "Thou shalt not steal," because it too is concerned
with external actions, because "this ... thou shalt not steal ...
and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in
this one saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"? Do we
say, the spirit has abolished the letter: love is the rescinding of
the law? St. Paul said the very opposite: love is the fulfilling of
the law, not its destruction; and thus he re-echoed the words of
Jesus, "I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil."
All men know that the formal regulations which defend property
are relaxed as the ties of love and mutual understanding are made
strong; that to enter unannounced is not a trespass, that the same
action which will be prosecuted as a theft by a stranger, and
resented as a liberty by an acquaintance, is welcomed as a graceful
freedom, almost as an endearment, by a friend. And yet the
commandment and the rights of property hold good: they are not
compromised, but glorified, by being spiritualised. As it is between
man and his brother, so should it be between us and our Divine
Father. We have learned to know Him very differently from those who
shuddered under Sinai: the whole law is not now written upon tables
of stone, but upon fleshly tables of the heart. But among the
precepts which are thus etherialised and yet established, why should
not the fourth commandment retain its place? Why should it be
supposed that it must vanish from the Decalogue, unless the
gathering of sticks deserves stoning? The institution, and the
ceremonial application of it to Jewish life, are entirely different
things; just as respect for property is a fixed obligation, while
the laws of succession vary.
Bearing this distinction in mind, we come to the question, Was
the Sabbath an ordinance born of Mosaism, or not? Grant that the
word "Remember," if it stood alone, might conceivably express the
emphasis of a new precept, and not the recapitulation of an existing
one. Grant also that the mention in Genesis of the Divine rest might
be made by anticipation, to be read with an eye to the institution
which would be mentioned later. But what is to be made of the fact
that on the seventh day manna was withheld from the camp, before
they had arrived at Horeb, and therefore before the commandment had
been written by the finger of God upon the stone? Was this also done
by anticipation? Upon any supposition, it aimed at teaching the
nation that the obligation of the day was not based upon the
positive precept, but the precept embodied an older and more
fundamental obligation.
How is the Sabbath spoken of in those prophecies which set least
value upon the merely ceremonial law?
Isaiah speaks of mere ritual as slightly as St. Paul. To fast and
afflict one's soul is nothing, if in the day of fasting one smites
with the fist and oppresses his labourers. To loose the bonds of
wickedness, to free the oppressed, to share one's bread with the
hungry, this is the fast which God has chosen, and for him who fasts
after this fashion the light shall break forth like sunrise, and his
bones shall be strong, and he himself like an unfailing
water-spring. Now, it is the same chapter which thus waives aside
mere ceremonial in contempt, which lavishes the most ample promises
on him who turns away his foot from the Sabbath, and calls the
Sabbath a delight, and the holy of the Lord, honourable, and honours
it (Isa 58:5-11, Isa 58:13-14).
There is no such promise in Jeremiah, for the observance of any
merely ceremonial law, as that which bids the people to honour the
Sabbath day, that there may enter into their gates kings and princes
riding in chariots and upon horses, and that the city may remain for
ever (Jer 17:24-25).
And Ezekiel declares that in the day when God made Himself known
to His people in the land of Egypt, He gave them statutes and
judgments and His sabbaths (Eze 20:11-12). Now, this phrase is a
clear allusion to the word of God in Jeremiah, that "I spake not
unto their fathers in the day when I brought them out of Egypt,
concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices, but this thing I commanded
them, saying, Hearken unto My voice," etc. (Jer 7:23). And it
sharply contrasts the sacredness of God's abiding ordinances with
the temporary institutions of the sanctuary. But it reckons the
Sabbath among the former.
It is objected that our Lord Himself treated the Sabbath lightly,
as a worn-out ordinance. But He was "a minister of the
circumcision," and always discussed the lawfulness of His Sabbath
miracles as a Jew with Jews. Thus He argued that men, admittedly
under the law, baked the shewbread, circumcised children, and even
rescued cattle from jeopardy upon the seventh day. He appealed to
the example of David, who met a sufficiently urgent necessity by
eating the consecrated bread, "which was not lawful for him to eat"
(Mat 12:4).
He did not hint that the law of the sabbath had disappeared, but
insisted that it was meant to serve man and not to oppress him: that
"the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath" (Mar
2:27).
Now, there is not in the life of Christ an assertion, so broad
and strong as that the Sabbath was made for the human race, which
can be narrowed down to a discussion of any merely local and
temporary institution. He Who stood highest, and saw the widest
horizons, declared that the Sabbath was intended for humanity, and
not for a section or a sect of it. Not because He was the King of
the Jews, but because He was the Son of Man, the ripe fruit and the
leader of the world-wide race which it was given to bless, therefore
He was also its Lord.
And in Him, so are we. Like all things present and things to
come, it is our help, we are not its slaves.
There is something abject in the notion of a Christian freeman,
who has been for a long week imprisoned in some gloomy and
ill-ventilated workshop, whose lungs would be purified, and
therefore his spirits uplifted, and therefore his reason and his
affections invigorated, and therefore his worship rendered more
fresh, warm and reasonable, by the breathing of a purer air, yet
whose conception of a day of rest is so slavish that he dares not
"rest" from the pollution of an infected atmosphere, and from the
closeness of a London court, because he conceives it imperative to
"rest" only from that bodily exercise, to enjoy which would be to
him the most real and the most delightful repose of all.
But there are other things more abject still; and one of them is
the miserable insincerity of the affluent and luxurious, using the
exceptional case of him whose week-days are thus oppressed, to
excuse their own wanton neglect of religious ordinances, accepting
at the hands of Christianity the sacred holiday, but ignoring
utterly the fact that the Lord sanctified and hallowed it, that it
is to be called the holy of the Lord, and to be honoured, and that
we are free from the letter of the precept only in so far as we rise
to the spirit of it, in loving and true communion with the Father of
spirits.
Another utterance of Jesus throws a strong light upon the nature
and the limits of our obligation. "My Father worketh even until now,
and I work" (Joh 5:17) is an appeal to the fact that in the long
sabbath of God His world is not deserted; creation may be suspended,
but the bounties of Providence go on; and therefore Christ also felt
that His day of rest was not one of torpor, that in healing the
impotent man upon the Sabbath He was but following the example of
Him by whose rest the day was sanctified. All works of beneficent
love, all that ministers to human recovery from anguish, and carries
out the Divine purposes of grace for body or soul, rescue from
danger, healing of disease, reformation of guilt, are sanctioned by
this defence of Christ.
They need not plead that the commandment is abrogated, but that
Jesus of Nazareth, of the seed of David, found nothing in such
liberties inconsistent with the duties of a devout Hebrew.
THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT.
"Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days
may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee."-- Exo
20:12.
This commandment forms a kind of bridge between the first table
and the second. Obedience to parents is not merely a neighbourly
virtue; we do not honour them simply as our fellow-men: they are the
vicegerents of God to our childhood; through them He supplies our
necessities, defends our feebleness, and pours in light and wisdom
upon our ignorance; by them our earliest knowledge of right and
wrong is imparted, and upon the sanction of their voice it long
depends.
It is clear that parental authority cannot be undermined, nor
filial disobedience and irreverence gain ground, without shaking the
foundations of our religious life, even more perhaps than of our
social conduct.
Accordingly this commandment stands before the sixth, not because
murder is a less offence against society, but because it is more
emphatically against our neighbour, and less directly against God.
The human infant is dependent and helpless for a longer period,
and more utterly, than the young of any other animal. Its growth,
which is to reach so much higher, is slower, and it is feebler
during the process. And the reason of this is plain to every
thoughtful observer. God has willed that the race of man should be
bound together in the closest relationships, both spiritual and
secular; and family affection prepares the heart for membership
alike of the nation and the Church. With this inner circle the wider
ones are concentric. The pathetic dependence of the child nourishes
equally the strong love which protects, and the grateful love which
clings. And from our early knowledge of human generosity, human care
and goodness, there is born the capacity for belief in the heart of
the great Father, from Whom every family in heaven and earth derived
its Greek name of Fatherhood (Eph 3:15).
Woe to the father whose cruelty, selfishness, or evil passions
make it hard for his child to understand the Archetype, because the
type is spoiled! or whose tyranny and self-will suggest rather the
stern God of reprobation, or of servile, slavish subjection, than
the tender Father of freeborn sons, who are no more under tutors and
governors, but are called unto freedom.
But how much sorer woe to the son who dishonours his earthly
parent, and in so doing slays within himself the very principle of
obedience to the Father of spirits!
No earthly tie is perfect, and therefore no earthly obedience can
be absolute. Some crisis comes in every life when the most innocent
and praiseworthy affection becomes a snare--when the counsel we most
relied upon would fain mislead our conscience--when a man, to be
Christ's disciple, must "hate father and mother," as Christ Himself
heard the temptation of the evil one speaking through chosen and
beloved lips, and said "Get thee behind Me, Satan." Even then we
shall respect them, and pray as Christ prayed for His failing
apostle, and when the storm has spent itself they shall resume their
due place in the loving heart of their Christian offspring.
So Jesus, when Mary would interrupt His teaching, said "Who is My
mother?" But imminent death could not prevent Him from pitying her
sorrow, and committing her to His beloved disciple as to a son.
From the letter of this commandment streams out a loving
influence to sanctify all the rest of our relationships. As the love
of God implies that of our brother also, so does the honour of
parents involve the recognition of all our domestic ties.
And even unassisted nature will tend to make long the days of the
loving and obedient child; for life and health depend far less upon
affluence and luxury than upon a well-regulated disposition, a
loving heart, a temper which can obey without chafing, and a
conscience which respects law. All these are being learned in
disciplined and dutiful households, which are therefore the
nurseries of happy and righteous children, and so of long-lived
families in the next generation also. Exceptions there must be. But
the rule is clear, that violent and curbless lives will spend
themselves faster than the lives of the gentle, the loving, the
law-abiding and the innocent.
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt do no murder."-- Exo 20:13.
We have now clearly passed to the consideration of man's duty to
his fellow-man, as a part of his duty to his Maker. It is no longer
as holding a divinely appointed relation to us, but simply as he is
a man, that we are bidden to respect his person, his family, his
property, and his fair fame.
And the influence of the teaching of our Lord is felt in the very
name which we all give to the second table of the law. We call it
"our duty to our neighbour." But we do not mean to imply that there
lives on the surface of the globe one whom we are free to assault or
to pillage. The obligation is universal, and the name we give it
echoes the teaching of Him who said that no man can enter the sphere
of our possible influence, even as a wounded creature in a swoon
whom we may help, but he should thereupon become our neighbour. Or
rather, we should become his; for while the question asked of Him
was "Who is my neighbour?" (whom should I love?) Jesus reversed the
problem when He asked in turn not To whom was the wounded man a
neighbour? but Who was a neighbour unto him? (who loved him?)
Social ethics, then, have a religious sanction. It is the
constant duty and effort of the Church of God to saturate the whole
life of man, all his conduct and his thought, with a sense of
sacredness; and as the world is for ever desecrating what is holy,
so is religion for ever consecrating what is secular.
In these latter days men have thought it a proof of grace to
separate religion from daily life. The Antinomian, who maintains
that his orthodox beliefs or feelings absolve him from the
obligations of morality, joins hands with the Italian brigand who
hopes to be forgiven for cutting throats because he subsidises a
priest. The enthusiast who insists that all sins, past and future,
were forgiven him when he believed, approaches far nearer than he
supposes to the fanatic of another creed, who thinks a formal
confession and an external absolution sufficient to wash away sin.
All of them hold the grand heresy that one may escape the penalties
without being freed from the power of evil; that a life may be saved
by grace without being penetrated by religion, and that it is not
exactly accurate to say that Jesus saves His people from their sins.
It is scarcely wonderful, when some men thus refuse to morality
the sanctions of religion, that others propose to teach morality how
she may go without them. In spite of the experience of ages, which
proves that human passions are only too ready to defy at once the
penalties of both worlds, it is imagined that the microscope and the
scalpel may supersede the Gospel as teachers of virtue; that the
self-interest of a creature doomed to perish in a few years may
prove more effectual to restrain than eternal hopes and fears; and
that a scientific prudence may supply the place of holiness. It has
never been so in the past. Not only Jud ea,
but Egypt, Greece, and Rome, were strong as long as they were
righteous, and righteous as long as their morality was bound up in
their religion. When they ceased to worship they ceased to be
self-controlled, nor could the most urgent and manifest
self-interest, nor all the resources of lofty philosophy, withhold
them from the ruin which always accompanies or follows vice.
Is it certain that modern science will fare any better? So far
from deepening our respect for human nature and for law, she is
discovering vile origins for our most sacred institutions and our
deepest instincts, and whispering strange means by which crime may
work without detection and vice without penalty. Never was there a
time when educated thought was more suggestive of contempt for one's
self and for one's fellow-man, and of a prudent, sturdy, remorseless
pursuit of self-interest, which may be very far indeed from
virtuous. The next generation will eat the fruit of this teaching,
as we reap what our fathers sowed. The theorist may be as pure as
Epicurus. But the disciples will be as the Epicureans.
Is there anything in the modern conception of a man which bids me
spare him, if his existence dooms me to poverty and I can quietly
push him over a precipice? It is quite conceivable that I can prove,
and very likely indeed that I can persuade myself, that the
shortening of the life of one hard and grasping man may brighten the
lives of hundreds. And my passions will simply laugh at the attempt
to restrain me by arguing that great advantages result from the
respect for human life upon the whole. Appetites, greeds,
resentments do not regard their objects in this broad and colourless
way; they grant the general proposition, but add that every rule has
its exceptions. Something more is needed: something which can never
be obtained except from a universal law, from the sanctity of all
human lives as bearing eternal issues in their bosom, and from the
certainty that He who gave the mandate will enforce it.
It is when we see in our fellow-man a divine creature of the
Divine, made by God in His own image, marred and defaced by sin, but
not beyond recovery, when his actions are regarded as wrought in the
sight of a Judge Whose presence supersedes utterly the slightness,
heat and inadequacy of our judgment and our vengeance, when his pure
affections tell us of the love of God which passeth knowledge, when
his errors affright us as dire and melancholy apostacies from a
mighty calling, and when his death is solemn as the unveiling of
unknown and unending destinies, then it is that we discern the
sacredness of life, and the awful presumption of the deed which
quenches it. It is when we realise that he is our brother, holding
his place in the universe by the same tenure by which we hold our
own, and dear to the same Father, that we understand how stern is
the duty of repressing the first resentful movements within our
breast which would even wish to crush him, because they are a
rebellion against the Divine ordinance and against the Divine
benevolence.
Is it asked, how can all this be reconciled with the lawfulness
of capital punishment? The death penalty is frequent in the Mosaic
code. But Scripture regards the judge as the minister and agent of
God. The stern monotheism of the Old Testament "said, Ye are Gods,"
to those who thus pronounced the behest of Heaven; and private
vengeance becomes only more culpable when we reflect upon the high
sanction and authority by which alone public justice presumes to
act.
Now, all these considerations vanish together, when religion
ceases to consecrate morality. The judgment of law differs from my
own merely as I like it better, and as I am a party (perhaps
unwillingly) to the general consent which creates it; he whom I
would assail is doomed in any case to speedy and complete
extinction; his longer life is possibly burdensome to himself and to
society; and there exists no higher Being to resent my interference,
or to measure out the existence which I think too protracted. It is
clear that such a view of human life must prove fatal to its
sacredness; and that its results would make themselves increasingly
felt, as the awe wore away which old associations now inspire.
THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt not commit adultery."-- Exo 20:14.
This commandment follows very obviously from even the rudest
principle of justice to our neighbour. It is among those that St.
Paul enumerates as "briefly comprehended in this saying, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself."
And therefore nothing need here be said about the open sin by
which one man wrongs another. Wild and evil theories may be abroad,
new schemes of social order may be recklessly invented and
discussed; yet, when the institution of the permanent family is
assailed, every thoughtful man knows full well that all our
interests are at stake in its defence, and the nation could no more
survive its overthrow than the Church.
But when our Lord declared that to excite desire through the eyes
is actually this sin, already ripe, He appealed to some deeper and
more spiritual consideration than that of social order. What He
pointed to is the sacredness of the human body--so holy a thing that
impurity, and even the silent excitement of passion, is a wrong done
to our nature, and a dishonour to the temple of the Holy Ghost.
Now, this is a subject upon which it is all the more necessary to
write, because it is hard to speak about.
What is the human body, in the view of the Christian? It is the
one bond, as far as we know in all the universe, between the
material and the spiritual worlds, one of which slopes thence down
to inert molecules, and the other upward to the throne of God.
Our brain is the engine-room and laboratory whereby thought,
aspiration, worship express themselves and become potent, and even
communicate themselves to others.
But it is a solemn truth that the body not only interprets
passively, but also influences and modifies the higher nature. The
mind is helped by proper diet and exercise, and hindered by impure
air and by excess or lack of food. The influence of music upon the
soul has been observed at least since the time of Saul. And
hereafter the Christian body, redeemed from the contagion of the
fall, and promoted to a spiritual impressibility and receptiveness
which it has never yet known, is meant to share in the heavenly joys
of the immortal spirit before God. This is the meaning of the
assertion that it is sown a natural (soulish) body, but shall
be raised a spiritual body. In the meantime it must learn its true
function. Whatever stimulates and excites the animal at the cost of
the immortal within, will in the same degree cloud and obscure the
perception that a man's life consisteth not in his pleasures, and
will keep up the illusion that the senses are the true ministers of
bliss. The soul is attacked through the appetites at a point far
short of their physical indulgence. And when lawless wishes are
deliberately toyed with, it is clear that lawless acts are not
hated, but only avoided through fear of consequences. The reins
which govern the life are no longer in the hands of the spirit, nor
is it the will which now refuses to sin. How, then, can the soul be
alert and pure? It is drugged and stupified: the offices of religion
are a dull form, and its truths are hollow unrealities, assented to
but unfelt, because unholy impulses have set on fire the course of
nature, in what should have been the temple of the Holy Ghost.
Moreover, the Christian life is not one of mere submission to
authority; its true law is that of ceaseless upward aspiration. And
since the union of husband and wife is consecrated to be the truest
and deepest and most far-reaching of all types of the mystical union
between Christ and His Church, it demands an ever closer approach to
that perfect ideal of mutual love and service.
And whatever impairs the sacred, mysterious, all-pervading unity
of a perfect wedlock is either the greatest of misfortunes or of
crimes.
If it be frailty of temper, failure of common sympathies, an
irretrievable error recognised too late, it is a calamity which may
yet strengthen the character by evoking such pity and helpfulness as
Christ the Bridegroom showed for the Church when lost. But if
estrangement, even of heart, come through the secret indulgence of
lawless reverie and desire, it is treason, and criminal although the
traitor has not struck a blow, but only whispered sedition under his
breath in a darkened room.
THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt not steal."-- Exo 20:15.
There is no commandment against which human ingenuity has brought
more evasions to bear than this. Property itself is theft, says the
communist. "It is no grave sin," says the Roman text-book, "to steal
in moderation"; and this is defined to be, "from a pauper less than
a franc, from a daily labourer less than two or three, from a person
in comfortable circumstances anything under four or five francs, or
from a very rich man ten or twelve francs. And a servant whom force
or necessity compels to accept an unjust payment, may secretly
compensate himself, because the workman is worthy of his hire."[37]
A moment's reflection discovers this to be the most naked
rationalism, choosing some of the commandments of God for honour,
and some for contempt as "not very grave" and wholly ignoring the
principle that whoever attacks the code at any one point "is guilty
of all," because he has despised it as a code, as an organic system.
Nothing is easier than to confuse one's conscience about the
ethics of property. For the arrangements of various nations differ:
it is a geographical line which defines the right of the elder son
against his brothers, of sons against daughters, and of children
against a wife; and the demand is still more capricious which the
state asserts against them all, under the name of succession duty,
and which it makes upon other property in the form of a multitude of
imposts and taxes. Can all these different arrangements be alike
binding? Add to this variability the immense national revenues,
which are apparently so little affected by individual contributions,
and it is no wonder if men fail to see that honesty to the public is
a duty as immutable and stern as any other duty to their neighbour.
Unfortunately the evil spreads. The same considerations which make
it seem pardonable to rob the nation apply also to the millionaire;
and they tempt many a poor man to ask whether he need respect the
wealth of a usurer, or may not adjust the scales of Mine and Thine,
which law causes to hang unfairly.
It is forgotten that a nation has at least the same authority as
a club to regulate its own affairs, to fix the relative position and
the subscription of its members. Common honesty teaches me that I
must conform to these rules or leave the club; and this duty is not
at all affected by the fact that other associations have different
rules. In three such societies God Himself has placed us all--the
family, the Church, and the nation; and therefore I am directly
responsible to God for due respect to their laws. It is not true
that the statute-book is inspired, any more than that the
regulations of a household are divinely given. Yet a Divine
sanction, such as rests upon the parental rule of fallible human
creatures, hallows also national law. I may advocate a change in
laws of which I disapprove, but I am bound in the meantime to obey
the conditions upon which I receive protection from foreign foes and
domestic fraud, and which cannot be subjected to the judgment of
every individual, except at the cost of a dissolution of society,
and a state of anarchy compared with which the worst of laws would
be desirable.
This revolt of the individual is especially tempting when
selfishness deems itself wronged, as by the laws of property. And
the eighth commandment is necessary to protect society not merely
against the violence of the burglar and the craft of the impostor,
but also against the deceitfulness of our own hearts, asking What
harm is in the evasion of an impost? What right has a successful
speculator to his millions? Why should I not do justice to myself
when law refuses it?
There is always the simple answer, Who made me a judge in my own
case?
But when we regard the matter thus, it becomes clear that honesty
is not mere abstinence from pillage. The community has larger claims
than this upon us, and is wronged if we fail to discharge them.
The rich man robs the poor if he does not play his part in the
great organisation by which he is served so well: every one robs the
community who takes its benefits and returns none; and in this sense
the bold saying is true, that every man lives by one of two
methods--by labour or by theft.
St. Paul does not exhort men to refrain from theft merely in
order to be harmless, but to do good. That is the alternative
contemplated when he says, "Let the thief steal no more, but rather
let him labour, working with his hands the thing that is good, that
he may have whereof to give to him that hath need" (Eph 4:28).
THE NINTH COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbour."-- Exo 20:16.
St. James called the tongue a world of iniquity. And against its
lawlessness, which inflames the whole course of nature, each table
of the law contains a warning. For it is equally ready to profane
the name of God, and to rob our neighbour of his fair fame.
Jesus Christ regarded verbal professions as a very poor thing,
and asked, "Why call ye Me Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I
command you?" He aimed a parable at the hollowness of merely saying,
"I go, sir." But, worthless though such phrases be, the act which
substitutes professions for actual service is no trifle; and our
Lord felt the importance of words, empty or sincere, so profoundly
as to stake upon this one test the eternal destinies of His people:
"By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt
be condemned." Now, the tongue is thus important because it is so
prompt and willing a servant of the mind within. We scarcely think
of it as a servant at all: our words do not seem to be more than
"expressions," manifestations of what is within us.
But a thought, once expressed, is transformed and energetic as a
bullet when the charge is fired; it modifies other minds, and the
word which we took to be far less potent than a deed becomes the
mover of the fateful deeds of many men. And thus, being at once
powerful and unsuspected, it is the most treacherous and subtle of
all the forces which we wield.
And the ninth commandment does not undertake to bridle it by
merely forbidding us in a court of justice to wrong our fellow-man
by perjury.
We transgress it whenever we conceive a strong suspicion and
repeat it as a thing we know; when we allow the temptation of a
biting epigram to betray us into an unkind expression not quite
warranted by the facts; when we vindicate ourselves against a charge
by throwing blame where it probably but not certainly ought to lie;
or when we are not content to vindicate ourselves without bringing a
countercharge which it would perplex us to be asked to prove; when
we give way to that most shallow and meanest of all attempts at
cleverness which claims credit for penetration because it can
discover base motives for innocent actions, so that high-mindedness
becomes pride, and charity withers up into love of patronising, and
forbearance shrivels into lack of spirit. The pattern and ideal of
such cleverness is the east wind, which makes all that is fair and
sensitive to shut itself up, forbids the bud to expand into a
blossom, and puts back the coming of the springtime and of the
singing bird.
There are very gifted persons who have never found out that a
kindly and winning phrase may have as much literary merit as a
stinging one, and it is quite as fine a thing to be like the dew on
Hermon on as to shoot out arrows, even bitter words.
It is a pity that our harsh judgments always speak more loudly
and confidently than our kindly ones, but the reason is plain: angry
passion prompts the former, and its voice is loud; while the calm
reflection which tones down and sweetens the judgment softens also
the expression of it.
It has to be remembered, also, that false witness can reach to
nations, organisations, political movements as well as individuals.
The habit of putting the worst construction upon the intentions of
foreign powers is what feeds the mutual jealousies that ultimately
blaze out in war. The habit of thinking of rival politicians as
deliberately false and treasonable is what lowers the standard of
the noblest of secular pursuits, until each party, not to be undone,
protests too much, raises its voice to a falsetto to scream its
rival down, and relaxes its standard of righteousness lest it should
be outdone by the unscrupulousness of its rival.
And there is yet another neighbour, against whom false witness is
woefully rife, both in the Church and in society. That neighbour is
mankind at large. There is a prevalent theory of human sinfulness
which unconsciously scoffs at the appeals of the gospel, striving
indeed to influence me by love, gratitude, admiration for the
Perfect One, and desire to be like Him, by the hope of holiness and
the shame of vileness, but telling me at the same time that I have
no sympathies whatever except with evil. The observation of every
day shows that man's nature is corrupt, but it also shows that he is
not a fiend--that he has fallen indeed, but remembers yet in what
image he was made. But the world cannot upbraid the Church for these
exaggerations, since they are but the echo of its own.
"I do believe, Though I have
found them not, that there may be
Words which are things, hopes
which will not deceive,
And virtues which are merciful,
nor weave
Snares for the failing; I would
also deem
O'er others' griefs that some
sincerely grieve;
That two, or one, are almost
what they seem,
That goodness is no name, and
happiness no dream."
Childe Harold,
III., cxiv.
Cynicism is false witness; and if it does not greatly wrong any
one of our fellow-men, it injures both society and the cynic. If he
is of a coarse fibre, it excuses him to himself in becoming the hard
and unloving creature which he fancies that all men are. If he is
too proud or too self-respecting to yield to this temptation, it
isolates him, it chills and withers his sympathies for people quite
as good as himself, whom he thinks of as the herd.
As for the more flagrant sins, so for this, the remedy is love.
Love sympathises, makes allowance for frailty, discovers the germs
of good, hopeth all things, taketh not account of evil.
THE TENTH COMMANDMENT.
"Thou shalt not covet ... anything that is his."--
Exo 20:17.
It will be remembered that the order of the catalogue of objects
of desire is different in Exodus and in Deuteronomy. In the latter
"thy neighbour's wife" is first, as of supreme importance; and
therefore it has been thought possible to convert it into a separate
commandment.
But this the order in Exodus forbids, by placing the house first,
and then the various living possessions which the householder
gathers around him. What is thought of is the gradual process of
acquisition, and the right of him who wins first a house, then a
wife, servants, and cattle, to be secure in the possession of them
all. Now, between foes, we saw that the evil temper is what leads to
the evil deed, and the man who nurses hatred is a murderer at heart.
Just so the householder is not rendered safe, and certainly not
happy in the enjoyment of his rights, by the seventh commandment and
the eighth, unless care be taken to prevent the accumulation of
those forces which will some day break through them both. To secure
cities against explosion, we forbid the storage of gunpowder and
dynamite, and not only the firing of magazines.
But the moral law is not given to any man for his neighbour's
sake chiefly. It is for me: statutes whereby I myself may live. And
as the Psalmist pondered on them, they expanded strangely for his
perception. "I have kept Thy testimonies," he says; but presently
asks to be quickened,--"So shall I observe the testimony of
Thy mouth,"--and prays, "Give me understanding, that I may know
Thy testimonies." And at the last, he confesses that he has "gone
astray like a lost sheep" (Psa 119:22, Psa 119:88, Psa 119:125, Psa
119:176). Starting with a literal innocence, he comes to feel a deep
inward need, need of vitality to obey, and even of power to
understand aright. If the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, it
follows that they are a spirit, and inward loyalty is the necessary
condition upon which external obedience can be accepted. The cheers
of a traitor, the flattery of one who scorns, the ritual of a
hypocrite, these are quite as valuable, as indications of what is
within, as a reluctant relinquishment to my neighbour of what is
his. I must not covet. Plainly this is the sharpest and most
searching precept of all; and accordingly St. Paul asserts that
without this he would not have suffered the deep internal
discontent, the consciousness of something wrong, which tortured
him, even although no mortal could reproach him, even though,
touching the righteousness of the law, he was blameless. He had not
known coveting, except the law had said "Thou shalt not covet."
Here, then, we perceive with the utmost clearness what St. Paul
so clearly discerned--the true meaning of the Law, its convicting
power, its design to work not righteousness, but self-despair as the
prelude of self-surrender. For who can, by resolving, govern his
desires? Who can abstain not only from the usurping deed, but from
the aggressive emotion? Who will not despair when he learns that God
desireth truth in the inward parts? But this despair is the way to
that better hope which adds, "In the hidden part Thou shalt make me
to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean."
And as a strong interest or affection has power to destroy in the
soul many weaker ones, so the love of God and our neighbour is the
appointed way to overcome the desire of taking from our neighbour
what God has given to him, refusing it to us.
THE LESSER LAW.
Exo 20:18 - Exo 23:33.
With the close of the Decalogue and its universal obligations, we
approach a brief code of laws, purely Hebrew, but of the deepest
moral interest, confessed by hostile criticism to bear every mark of
a remote antiquity, and distinctly severed from what precedes and
follows by a marked difference in the circumstances.
This is evidently the book of the Covenant to which the nation
gave its formal assent (Exo 24:7), and is therefore the germ and the
centre of the system afterwards so much expanded.
And since the adhesion of the people was required, and the final
covenant was ratified as soon as it was given, before any of the
more formal details were elaborated, and before the tabernacle and
the priesthood were established, it may fairly claim the highest and
most unique position among the component parts of the Pentateuch,
excepting only the Ten Commandments.
Before examining it in detail, the impressive circumstances of
its utterance have to be observed.
It is written that when the law was given, the voice of the
trumpet waxed louder and louder still. And as the multitude became
aware that in this tempestuous and growing crash there was a living
centre, and a voice of intelligible words, their awe became
insufferable: and instead of needing the barriers which excluded
them from the mountain, they recoiled from their appointed place,
trembling and standing afar off. "And they said unto Moses, Speak
thou with us and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we
die." It is the same instinct that we have already so often
recognised, the dread of holiness in the hearts of the impure, the
sense of unworthiness, which makes a prophet cry, "Woe is me, for I
am undone!" and an apostle, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man."
Now, the New Testament quotes a confession of Moses himself,
well-nigh overwhelmed, "I do exceedingly fear and quake" (Heb
12:21). And yet we read that he "said unto the people, Fear not, for
God is come to prove you, and that His fear may be before your
faces, that ye sin not" (Exo 20:20). Thus we have the double
paradox,--that he exceedingly feared, yet bade them fear not, and
yet again declared that the very object of God was that they might
fear Him.
Like every paradox, which is not a mere contradiction, this is
instructive.
There is an abject fear, the dread of cowards and of the guilty,
which masters and destroys the will--the fear which shrank away from
the mount and cried out to Moses for relief. Such fear has torment,
and none ought to admit it who understands that God wishes him well
and is merciful.
There is also a natural agitation, at times inevitable though not
unconquerable, and often strongest in the highest natures because
they are the most finely strung. We are sometimes taught that there
is sin in that instinctive recoil from death, and from whatever
brings it close, which indeed is implanted by God to prevent
foolhardiness, and to preserve the race. Our duty, however, does not
require the absence of sensitive nerves, but only their subjugation
and control. Marshal Saxe was truly brave when he looked at his own
trembling frame, as the cannon opened fire, and said, "Aha!
tremblest thou? thou wouldest tremble much more if thou knewest
whither I mean to carry thee today." Despite his fever-shaken
nerves, he was perfectly entitled to say to any waverer, "Fear not."
And so Moses, while he himself quaked, was entitled to encourage
his people, because he could encourage them, because he saw and
announced the kindly meaning of that tremendous scene, because he
dared presently to draw near unto the thick darkness where God was.
And therefore the day would come when, with his noble heart
aflame for a yet more splendid vision, he would cry, "O Lord, I
beseech Thee show me Thy glory"--some purer and clearer irradiation,
which would neither baffle the moral sense, nor conceal itself in
cloud.
Meanwhile, there was a fear which should endure, and which God
desires: not panic, but awe; not the terror which stood afar off,
but the reverence which dares not to transgress. "Fear not, for God
is come to prove you" (to see whether the nobler emotion or the
baser will survive), "and that His fear may be before your faces"
(so as to guide you, instead of pressing upon you to crush), "that
ye sin not."
How needful was the lesson, may be seen by what followed when
they were taken at their word, and the pressure of physical dread
was lifted off them. "They soon forgat God their Saviour ... they
made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the work of their own hands."
Perhaps other pressures which we feel and lament today, the
uncertainties and fears of modern life, are equally required to
prevent us from forgetting God.
Of the nobler fear, which is a safeguard of the soul and not a
danger, it is a serious question whether enough is alive among us.
Much sensational teaching, many popular books and hymns, suggest
rather an irreverent use of the Holy Name, which is profanation,
than a filial approach to a Father equally revered and loved. It is
true that we are bidden to come with boldness to the throne of
Grace. Yet the same Epistle teaches us again that our approach is
even more solemn and awful than to the Mount which might be touched,
and the profaning of which was death; and it exhorts us to have
grace whereby we may offer service well-pleasing to God with
reverence and awe, "for our God is a consuming fire" (Heb 4:16, Heb
12:28). That is the very last grace which some Christians ever seem
to seek.
When the people recoiled, and Moses, trusting in God, was brave
and entered the cloud, they ceased to have direct communion, and he
was brought nearer to Jehovah than before.
What is now conveyed to Israel through him is an expansion and
application of the Decalogue, and in turn it becomes the nucleus of
the developed law. Its great antiquity is admitted by the severest
critics; and it is a wonderful example of spirituality and searching
depth, and also of such germinal and fruitful principles as cannot
rest in themselves, literally applied, but must lead the obedient
student on to still better things.
It is not the function of law to inspire men to obey it; this is
precisely what the law could not do, being weak through the flesh.
But it could arrest the attention and educate the conscience. Simple
though it was in the letter, David could meditate upon it day and
night. In the New Testament we know of two persons who had
scrupulously respected its precepts, but they both, far from being
satisfied, were filled with a divine discontent. One had kept all
these things from his youth, yet felt the need of doing some good
thing, and anxiously demanded what it was that he lacked yet. The
other, as touching the righteousness of the law, was blameless, yet
when the law entered, sin revived and slew him. For the law was
spiritual, and reached beyond itself, while he was carnal, and
thwarted by the flesh, sold under sin, even while externally beyond
reproach.
This subtle characteristic of all noble law will be very apparent
in studying the kernel of the law, the code within the code, which
now lies before us.
Men sometimes judge the Hebrew legislation harshly, thinking that
they are testing it, as a Divine institution, by the light of this
century. They are really doing nothing of the sort. If there are two
principles of legislation dearer than all others to modern
Englishmen, they are the two which these flippant judgments most
ignore, and by which they are most perfectly refuted.
One is that institutions educate communities. It is not too much
to say that we have staked the future of our nation, and therefore
the hopes of humanity, upon our conviction that men can be elevated
by ennobling institutions,--that the franchise, for example, is an
education as well as a trust.
The other, which seems to contradict the first, and does actually
modify it, is that legislation must not move too far in advance of
public opinion. Laws may be highly desirable in the abstract, for
which communities are not yet ripe. A constitution like our own
would be simply ruinous in Hindostan. Many good friends of
temperance are the reluctant opponents of legislation which they
desire in theory but which would only be trampled upon in practice,
because public opinion would rebel against the law. Legislation is
indeed educational, but the danger is that the practical outcome of
such legislation would be disobedience and anarchy.
Now, these principles are the ample justification of all that
startles us in the Pentateuch.
Slavery and polygamy, for instance, are not abolished. To forbid
them utterly would have substituted far worse evils, as the Jews
then were. But laws were introduced which vastly ameliorated the
condition of the slave, and elevated the status of woman--laws which
were far in advance of the best Gentile culture, and which so
educated and softened the Jewish character, that men soon came to
feel the letter of these very laws too harsh.
That is a nobler vindication of the Mosaic legislation than if
this century agreed with every letter of it. To be vital and
progressive is a better thing than to be correct. The law waged a
far more effectual war upon certain evils than by formal
prohibition, sound in theory but premature by centuries. Other good
things besides liberty are not for the nursery or the school. And
"we also, when we were children, were held in bondage" (Gal 4:3).
It is pretty well agreed that this code may be divided into five
parts. To the end of the twentieth chapter it deals directly with
the worship of God. Then follow thirty-two verses treating of the
personal rights of man as distinguished from his rights of property.
From the thirty-third verse of the twenty-first chapter to the
fifteenth verse of the twenty-second, the rights of property are
protected. Thence to the nineteenth verse of the twenty-third
chapter is a miscellaneous group of laws, chiefly moral, but deeply
connected with the civil organisation of the state. And thence to
the end of the chapter is an earnest exhortation from God,
introduced by a clearer statement than before of the manner in which
He means to lead them, even by that mysterious Angel in Whom "is My
Name."
PART I.--THE LAW OF WORSHIP.
Exo 20:22-26.
It is no vain repetition that this code begins by reasserting the
supremacy of the one God. That principle underlies all the law, and
must be carried into every part of it. And it is now enforced by a
new sanction,--"Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you
from heaven: ye shall not make other gods with Me; gods of
silver or gods of gold ye shall not make unto you" (Exo 20:22-23).
The costliest material of this low world should be utterly contemned
in rivalry with that spiritual Presence revealing Himself out of a
wholly different sphere; and in so far as they remembered Him, and
the Voice which had thrilled their nature to its core, in so far
would they be free from the desire for any carnal and materialised
divinity to go before them.
Impressed with such views of God, their service of Him would be
moulded accordingly (Exo 20:24-25). It is true that nothing could be
too splendid for His sanctuary, and Bezaleel was presently to be
inspired, that the work of the tabernacle might be worthy of its
destination. Spirituality is not meanness, nor is art without a
consecration of its own. But it must not intrude too closely upon
the solemn act wherein the soul seeks the pardon of the Creator. The
altar should not be a proud structure, richly sculptured and
adorned, and offering in itself, if not an object of adoration, yet
a satisfying centre of attention for the worshipper. It should be
simply a heap of sods. And if they must needs go further, and erect
a more durable pile, it must still be of materials crude,
inartistic, such as the earth itself affords, of unhewn stone. A
golden casket is fit to convey the freedom of some historic city to
a prince, but the noblest offering of man to God is too humble to
deserve an ostentatious altar.
"If thou lift up a tool upon it thou hast polluted it:" it has
lost its virginal simplicity; it no longer suits a spontaneous
offering of the heart, it has become artificial, sophisticated,
self-conscious, polluted.
It is vehemently urged that these verses sanction a plurality of
altars (so that one might be of earth and another of stone), and
recognise the lawfulness of worship in other places than at a
central appointed shrine. And it is concluded that early Judaism
knew nothing of the exclusive sanctity of the tabernacle and the
temple.
This argument forgets the circumstances. The Jews had been led to
Horeb, the mount of God. They were soon to wander away thence
through the wilderness. Altars had to be set up in many places, and
might be of different materials. It was an important announcement
that in every place where God would record His name He would come
unto them and bless them. But certainly the inference leans rather
toward than against the belief that it was for Him to select every
place which should be sacred.
The last direction given with regard to worship is a homely one.
It commands that the altar must not be approached with steps, lest
the clothes of the priest should be disturbed and his limbs
uncovered. Already we feel that we have to reckon with the temper as
well as the letter of the precept. It is divinely unlike the frantic
indecencies of many pagan rituals. It protests against all
infractions of propriety, even the slightest, such as even now
discredit many a zealous movement, and bear fruit in many a scandal.
It rebukes all misdemeanour, all forgetfulness in look and gesture
of the Sacred Presence, in every worshipper, at every shrine.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] Prof. Tyndall, Belfast
Address, p. 60. What progress has scientific unbelief made since
1874 in solving this "question of questions for the present hour"?
It has perfected the phonograph, but it has not devised a creed.
[36] "Or beside Me" (R.V.) The
preposition is so vague that either of our English words may suggest
quite too definite a meaning, as when "before Me" is made to mean
"in My angry eyes," or "beside Me" is taken to hint at resentment
for intrusion upon the same throne.
[37] Gury, Compend., i., secs. 607,
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