much the better for you, because you have none." If it come to that, may it not go hard with the strictest Jew? Another scene awaits us more awful than even that morning at Sinai, and as, before God's nearing sanctity, dust and ashes feel like to die, the least sinful might be thankful to say to some Moses,

Speak thou for us," and might give the world for some passport to heaven other than his personal purity.

Such a passport we who are Christians believe that we have found, and for it we own ourselves indebted to One who was not the less a member of your nation, because we believe Him to have been a great deal more. According to our view, Messiah has not only offered a sacrifice for sins, but He has magnified the law and made it honourable. As the representative of His people, and on their behalf, He has fulfilled all righteousness, and with that righteousness His Divine Father is well pleased. We owe much to Moses, but we owe more to Messiah. Moses handed down from God to your fathers a law right but rigid, and said, Do this and live; but Messiah handed up to God, on behalf of His people, a perfect obedience, and from God He hands down to His people in return a pardon all complete, and says, Take this and live. Moses led your fathers to the fenced and flaming skirts of Sinai, but Messiah leads us to the feet of His Father and our Father, and teaches us "Our Father who art in heaven." Such

to say,

happiness as we have we owe it all to One whom, according to the flesh, we owe to you. By a singular combination of circumstances, the most of you have been led to repudiate His claims, although to our minds He is the glory of Israel, and that all-important Personage, for the sake of whom your nation has received and still maintains its mysterious and unprecedented existence. But, forgive me for saying it, you are wrong; your position is a false one; for the facts of history and the facts of consciousness are both against you. We respectfully urge you to examine for yourselves, and as the result of candid inquiry we can only anticipate one conclusion. From that conclusion your minds at this moment revolt; but if it should prove, as we predict, you will eventually wonder at your own repugnance. And amongst other results, besides making the Bible a book true, beautiful, and significant beyond all that it has ever been before, one happy effect will be to give the Decalogue a look no longer threatening and penal, but friendly and propitious. Finding in the Lawgiver the Law-fulfiller, the commandment will acquire a new character, and you will find accomplished that promise of the Lord by Ezekiel, “ A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them."

66

XVI.

The Law and its Fulfiller.

"And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, O Israel, the statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn them, and keep and do them. The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb. The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day. The LORD talked with you face to face in the mount, out of the midst of the fire, (I stood between the LORD and you at that time, to shew you the word of the LORD: for ye were afraid by reason of the fire, and went not up into the mount,) saying," etc.-DEUT. v. 1-21.

Such is that

SUCH are the Ten Commandments. great code of religion and morals on which the legislation of Great Britain is founded, and which pervades the jurisprudence of Christendom. In many sanctuaries it is read over every week, and to each precept the worshipper responds with the prayer, "Lord, incline our hearts to keep this law;" and even where it is not written on the wall or recited from the altar, few are the memories to which it is not familiar. Indeed, so omnipresent is it now in the life, the ideas, and the language of our country, that the difficulty is great to throw ourselves away from it even in thought, so as to mark its features

and admire its symmetry. We cannot imagine a world without it, and so we can hardly estimate the service which has been rendered by its promulgation, not that its details were new even at Mount Sinai, but that then and there the rules of eternal righteousness, which had been lying about the world— tossed along from age to age, vague, amorphous, and unauthoritative-were handed forth from heaven anew, and, clear beyond cavil, sufficiently compact for the smallest memory, and comprehensible by the feeblest understanding, became to mankind a statutebook for ever a statute-book direct from the presence of Infinite Majesty, and in the solemnities by which it was sanctioned, suggestive of that awful tribunal when it will reappear as the law by which the righteous Judge shall render to every man according to his deeds.

1. The Decalogue is the first statute-book which has abolished idolatry and polytheism. "No God but me," says the first commandment; "No likeness or image," says the second; and in thus learning the unity and spirituality of the Divine nature, Israel was at once put in advance of the rest of the world by at least fifteen hundred years. In the most important of all knowledge, the little Samuel who could repeat these two commands was wiser than Socrates or Cicero adoring a statue. He was wiser than Homer, or Hesiod with his lords many and

gods many; he was wiser than Confucius, or Lucretius without a god at all.

2. Another peculiarity of this statute-book is its consecration of one day in seven to the service of Jehovah. The temple was a sacred place, and in the middle ages it was usual to claim for churches the right of sanctuary, so that whosoever took refuge within the hallowed precincts was safe from the avenger. But it is not to a holy place but to a holy day that God has given this protecting privilege. Addressing a world to which He had said, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread," and addressing a community in which there was a great deal of forced labour, many bondmen and many bondmaids, the purport of it was-"Yes, labour. You require labour from your servants, and I require labour from you. Toil is the taskmaster, entitled to seize you and to take it out of you wherever he finds you; but there is a sanctuary. There is one asylum into which I invite you, and forbid my taskmaster to follow you. day shall be an absolute cessation. It is the Sabbath of the Lord your God, when you are to do no work yourself, nor are you to ask your man-servant or maid-servant to do any." The blessing which this weekly respite brought to Israel was unspeakable, and of all the boons which from Palestine have overflowed the surrounding world, there is not one which

into which I Every seventh