Deut. iv. 6, reference is made to the commandments in these words, "Keep, therefore, and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and shall say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people." Again, there is a most notable and beautiful instance of the same teaching, when the Lord says, "And, now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, and to walk in all his ways, and to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul; to keep the commandments of the Lord and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good," not which I command thee as things which cannot be done, but "which I command thee for thy good."-Deut. x. 12, 13. And again, "O that there were such an heart in them, that they might fear me and keep my commandments always, that it might be well with them, and with their children for ever!"-Deut. v. 29. Precisely thus in the prophetic parts of the Word, and in fact, throughout every portion of divine wisdom we find the same teaching. In Isaiah xlviii. 18, it is written "Oh that thou hadst hearkened to my commandments! then had thy peace been as the river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea." And so, when the Lord came into the world He said, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Whosoever shall break the least of these my commandments and teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven; but, whosoever shall do and teach them, shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven." And summing up the whole in the last chapter of the Revelations, it is written, "Blessed are they who do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city." Such, then, is the divine testimony respecting these sacred laws -that they are not either matters that are hard to do, or impossible to do, or terrible to do. In fact, it is the merest illusion for a person to suppose that it is hard to keep the divine commandments. Whenever a person is really earnest in loving God and his neighbour, he will find it ten times easier to keep the commandments than to break them. Take any one you please. How easy is it for a man who is upright and earnest to be honest! If a person seeks to deal with another in order to obtain useful articles, and both parties intend to do each other good, how simple and easy the transaction is. The one desires to take no advantage of the other, but to give as good as he wishes to the one, receive. How simple it is! But let a thief intend to break a commandment, and he at once feels that he has got a very difficult matter to perform. He has to begin to scheme, and to plan how he shall accomplish his end, and not be discovered. He must get some cunning tools for his knavery; he must keep away from the sight of every honest man or woman. He must sneak about so that nobody can detect him; and if he succeed he must go away to deposit the things stolen, so that he shall run as little risk of discovery as may be. Why, look at the comparison between these two modes of life. How easy and how difficult the other! Yes, and each crime will be an eternal difficulty to the man who succeeds in it. If he succeed in his villany, he has stolen a little property from some one and injured him slightly, but he has robbed himself of his salvation, and injured himself eternally. There is the everlasting difference between right and wrong. If ever that man shall reach salvation, he will have to undo, as far as possible, all he has done. He will have to hate himself, to fight against himself, to detest himself— to repent in dust and ashes. He has gone down the hill instead of going upwards. He has to retrace his steps and get up back again, and then when he begins to lead a life of goodness, he will only be where he started from. Why, there could not possibly be a greater delusion than to imagine that hell's yoke is easy. The Israelites did not find the Egyptian yoke easy. The way to heaven is pleasantness itself compared with the yoke of sin which hell imposes upon the soul when it turns away from God, from purity and heaven. The Lord Jesus Christ says, "My yoke is easy and my burden is light? Let a person earnestly seek to love the Lord, and to keep His commands, and he will find those words are true; the very way of peace purity, serenity and sufficiency, as well as of order and happiness. God will speak from the mountain again, and his speech will have this gracious lesson for us, Do what I command you; for heaven is formed on the blessed laws that are contained in those ten commandments. If you have difficulty, it is not in the laws themselves, but in your degenerate state. Come to me and I will heal you. Are you imprisoned in guilt, in falsehood? I will break the bars of your prison houseI will bring you out of Egypt. SERMON XXI. SLAVERY AMONGST THE ISRAELITES. "And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife and my children: I will not go out free: then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him unto the door, or the door-post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an awl; and he shall serve him for ever.-Exodus xxi. 5, 6. "A "Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still slavery thou art a bitter draught!" Such will ever be the sentiment of the upright lover of his kind and of his God. Freedom and rationality, says a great writer, are two faculties from the Lord in man. man by these faculties is reformed and regenerated by the Lord and without them he could not be reformed and regenerated.' The Lord preserves these two faculties in a man inviolable, and sacred in every proceeding of His Divine Providence. ; Freedom and reason, then, lie at the basis of all real progress, and, indeed, of all that is truly human. Those who oppose these in their fellow creatures, are assaulting the very essence of manhood in them. Hence, to make slaves of men, women, and children, to incite murderous ruffians to steal them, by buying them to sell them, thus violating their marriage ties, and their parental affections, these are all abominations so essentially contrary to the Lord, to true humanity, and to all the purposes of Divine Providence, that the existence of these practices among so-called Christian nations for three hundred years, prosecuted by their people, sanctioned by their rulers, ecclesiastical as well as temporal, by popes, by bishops, by priests, by monarchs, by nobles, and by merchants alike, forms the crowning evidence that the church as the Lord's kingdom among men had come to its end. Future historians when recording the decline of the church from the time of the Council of Nice, will describe the follies, the cruelties, the darkness through which the church V passed for long dreary centuries, and then will say at last, THEY STOLE MEN. These so-called Christians crossed the ocean in hundreds of ships per annum, and stole human beings. They brought them in horrid ships so packed that cleanliness for weeks was impossible. And thousands died annually from stenches, that other thousands might be landed to toil and live in compelled debasement, ignorance and profligacy, to enable these Christians to pass their time in idleness and wealth. Through awful periods of degeneracy, these professed disciples of Him who is love itself, and who taught that they only were His disciples who loved one-another, revelled in hate and revenge against their fellow-countrymen of different opinions, persecuted, maligned, made war upon each other, desolated nations from the lust of domineering over others, and at last they emulated each other in the barbarous work of stealing men. False as the winds that round his vessel blow A Christian broker in the trade of blood; Boisterous in speech, in action prompt and bold, Happily, since the dawn of the New Age, we are rising out of the horrid atmosphere of false thought in which these so-called Christian nations have lived and breathed for so long a time. We have witnessed the terrible consequences of this crime upon all who became entangled in it, as exhibited in the terrible desolations of the recent American war, where awful wrong has been awfully expiated, and the judgments of the Lord have been seen in the earth. The spirit of the Bible is love to God and love to man, and all that wisdom which illustrates these.-Matt. xxii. 36-40. Whatever is inconsistent with this spirit cannot be true, and when any turn is given to a portion of the literal sense of the Holy Word, so as to make it sanction conduct which is essentially contrary to doing justly, loving mercy and walking humbly with our God, we should look very carefully to the context and the whole connection. We should look also at the views of those who have associated it with injustice, and compare them with the grand universal elements of the Word of God, and we shall generally detect the fallacy, and bring out the truth. Men there are who have so skilfully woven the commandments of God with their traditions, that it requires great faithfulness to truth, and great skill, to detect the false combination. So has it been in the scriptural defence of slavery. There was slavery in 66 patriarchal times, and there are laws respecting slavery in the Israelitish code, and so say these advocates, slavery is sanctioned' at least not condemned in the Scriptures. Abraham was a slaveholder, he had men bought with his money."-Gen. xvii. 13. Hagar was a bondwoman, and therefore Abraham was an example and a sanction for the slaveholders of modern times. What he, the friend of God did, cannot be wrong in us to do. In reply to these, we waive altogether the unsoundness of Christians borrowing arguments and sanctions from the typical arrangements and shadows of the Old Testament, when the glorious principles of the New have been brought in, arguments by which polygamy, capricious divorce, animal sacrifices might equally be justified, and we remark that the slavery of the Jewish Law and that of the late slave states of America were totally different things. The two systems were different in their origin, different in their character, and different in their results. The Jewish slave code, though a part of those laws which God gave them because of the hardness of their hearts, and which were not purely good, (Ezek. xx. 25) was yet far better than what it superseded. Jewish slavery, as we shall see, was remedial, restorative, and tended to freedom. It was a discipline for reforming the criminal, and strengthening the weak, issuing in the year of Jubilee. American slavery would not have been tolerated by the Jewish law and usage for a moment. Modern slavery, as practised by Christian nations, was founded and sustained by man-stealing, and man-stealing was forbidden among the Jews on pain of death. "HE THAT STEALETH A MAN, AND SELLETH HIM, OR IF HE BE FOUND IN HIS HAND, HE SHALL SURELY BE PUT TO DEATH."-Ex. xxi. 16. To steal property was punished by compelling the thief to restore fourfold, but to steal a man, to deprive him of his liberty for no crime of his own, and sell him, or use him as a mere tool, a chattel, was a felony, punishable by death. This one law in its spirit and in its letter, destroys the whole foundation for a scriptural vindication of black-slavery. If they who steal a man, and they in whose hands the stolen man was found had been punished by death, how could black-slavery have existed among white men? But let us further examine the causes and character of Jewish slavery, and we shall see how far both are from lending any sanction to slavery as commonly understood. |