6 In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus Christ took two or three of these Commandments, and explained them Himself to the people. He took the Sixth Commandment, and showed that for us it is not enough to remember, Thou shalt not kill,' but that the Commandment went much deeper, and forbade all angry thoughts and words. This was intended to apply to all the other Commandments. It is not in their letter, but in their spirit, that they concern us; and this, no doubt, is what is meant by the prayer which in the Church of England follows after each of them, and at the end of all of them, 'Incline our hearts to keep this law,' "Write all these Thy laws in our hearts, we beseech Thee.' 1. Let us take them one by one in this way. The First Commandment is no longer ours in the letter, for it begins The First Commandment. by saying, I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt.' He did not bring us up out of the land of Egypt, and so completely has this ceased to apply to us, that in the Commandments as publicly read, the Church of England has boldly struck out these words altogether. But the spirit of the Commandment still remains; for we all need to be reminded that there is but one Supreme Mind, whose praise and blame are, above all, worth having, seeking, or deserving. The Second Commandment. 2. The Second Commandment is no longer ours in the letter, for the sculptures and paintings which we see at every turn are what its letter forbade, and what the Jews, therefore, never made. Every statue, every picture, not only in every church, but in every street or room, is a breach of the letter of the Second Commandment. No Jew would have ventured under the Mosaic dispensation to have them. When Solomon made the golden lions and oxen in the Temple, it was regarded by his countrymen as unlawful. The Mahomedan world still observes the Second Commandment literally. The ungainly figures of the lions in the court of the Alhambra, contrasted with the exquisite carving of arabesques and texts on the walls, is an exception that amply proves the rule. The Christian world has entirely set it aside. But in spirit it is still important. It teaches us that we must not make God after our likeness, or after any likeness short of absolute moral perfection. Any fancies, any doctrines, any practices which lead us to think that God is capricious or unjust or untruthful, or that He cares for any outward thing compared with holiness, mercy, and goodness-that is the breach of the Second Commandment in spirit. It was said truly of an attempt to introduce ceremonial forms of the Christian religion, It is so many ways of breaking the Second Commandment.' Every attempt to purify and exalt our ideas of God is the keeping of the Second Commandment in spirit, even although we live amidst pictures and statues and sculptures of things in heaven and things in earth and things under the earth. 6 Command 3. The Third Commandment. Here the original meaning of the Commandment is more elevated and more spiritual than that which is commonly given to it. Many see The Third in it only a prohibition of profane swearing or false ment. swearing. It means this-but it means much more. It means that we are not to appeal to God's name for any unworthy purpose. It is a protest against all those sins which have claimed the sanction of God or of religion. The words are literally Thou shalt not bring the Holy Name to anything that is vain, that is, to anything that is unholy, hollow, empty.' The plea and pretext of God's name will not avail as an excuse for cruelty or hypocrisy or untruthfulness or undutifulness. The Eternal will not hold him guiltless who taketh His name in vain-that is, who brings it to an unjust or unrighteous cause. All the wicked persecutions carried on, all the wicked wars waged, all the pious frauds perpetrated in the name of the Holy God, are breaches of the Third Commandment, both in its letter and in its spirit. 4. The Fourth Commandment. Here, as in the Second Command ment. Commandment, there is a wide divergence between the letter The Fourth and the spirit. In its letter it is obeyed by no Christian society whatever, except the Abyssinian Church in Africa, and the small sect of the Seventh-Day Baptists in England. They still keep a day of rest on the Saturday, the seventh day of the week. But in every other country the seventh day is observed only by the Jews, and not by the Christians. And again, only by the Jews, and not by Christians anywhere, are the Mosaic laws kept which forbade the lighting of a single fire, which forbade the walking beyond a single mile, which forbade the employment of a single animal, which visited as a capital offence the slightest employment on the seventh day. And again, the reasons given in the two versions of the Fourth Commandment are passed away. We cannot be called, as in Deuteronomy, to remember that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, for many of us were never in Egypt at all. We cannot be called, as in Exodus, to remember that the earth was made in six days, for we most of us know that it took, not six days, but millions of ages, to bring the earth from its void and formless state to its present condition. The letter of the Fourth Commandment has long ceased. The very name of the Lord's Day' and of the first day of the week' is a protest against it. The very name of Sabbath is condemned by St. Paul.3 The Catechism of the Church of England speaks of the duty of serving God all the days of our life, and not of serving Him on one day alone. But the principle which lay at the bottom of the Fourth Commandment has not passed away. Just as the prohibition of statues in the Second Commandment is now best carried out by the avoidance of superstitious, unworthy, degrading ideas of the nature of God, so the principle of the observance of the Sabbath in the Fourth Commandment is aimed against worldly, hard, exacting ideas of the work of man. The principle of the Fourth Commandment enjoins the sacred duty of rest-for there is an element of rest in the Divine Nature itself. It enjoins also the sacred duty of kindness to our 3 Col. ii, 16. servants and to the inferior animals- for remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt.' How this rest is to be carried out, within what limits it is to be confined, what amount of innocent recreation is to be allowed, how far the Continental nations have erred on the one side or the Scottish nation on the other side, in their mode of observance, whether the observance of the English Sunday is exactly what it ought to be, or in what respects it might be improved —these are questions which this is not the place to discuss. It is enough to say that amidst all the variations in the mode of observing the Sunday, it is still possible, and it is still our duty to bear in mind the principle of the ancient Law. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day': that is what we should all strive to attain to be raised at least for one day in the week above the grinding toil of our daily work—above the debasing influence of frivolous amusements -above the jangling of business and controversy-raised into the high and holy atmosphere breathed by pure and peaceful lives, bright and beautiful thoughts, elevating and invigorating worship. Although the day has been changed from the seventh day to the first day everywhere-nay, even had it been further changed, as Calvin intended, from Sunday to Thursday even had it yet been further changed, as Tyndale, the foremost of the English Reformers, proposed, from the seventh day to the tenth day-yet still there would survive the solemn obligation founded, not on the Law of Moses, but on the Law of God in Nature, the obligation of rest and of worship as long as human nature remains what it is, as long as the things which are temporal are seen, and the things which are eternal are unseen.4 Command 5. The Fifth Commandment. Here, again, the letter has ceased to have any meaning for us. That thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth The Fifth thee.' We have no claim on the inheritance of the ment. land of Canaan. No amount of filial reverence will secure for us the possession of the goodly heights of Lebanon, or the See Prof. Tyndall's admirable Address on the Sabbath at Glasgow. forests of Gilead or the rushing waters of Jordan. But the ordinance of affection and honour to parents has not diminished, but grown with the years which have passed since the command was first issued. The love of son to mother, the honour of children to parents, is far stronger now than in the days of Moses. It is often discussed in these days whether this or that principle of religion is natural or supernatural. How often is this distinction entirely without meaning! The Fifth Commandment-sacred to the dearest, deepest, purest, noblest aspirations of the heart-is natural because it is supernatural, is supernatural because it is natural. It is truly regarded as the symbol, as the sanction of the whole framework of civil and religious society. Our obedience to law, our love of country, is not a bond of mere expediency or accident. It is not a worldly, unspiritual ordinance, to be rejected because it crosses some religious fancies or interferes with some theological allegory. It is binding on the Christian conscience, because it is part of the natural religion of the human race and of the best instincts of Christendom. The Sixth 6. The Sixth Commandment. The crime of murder is what it chiefly condemns, and no sentimental feelings of modern times have ever been able to bring the murment. derer down from that bad pre-eminence as the worst and most appalling of human offenders. It is the consummation of selfishness. It is the disregard of the most precious of God's earthly gifts-the gift of life. But the scope of the Commandment extends much further. In the Christian sense he is a breaker of the Sixth Commandment who promotes quarrels and jealousies in families, who indulges in fierce, contemptuous words, who fans the passions of class against class, of church against church, of nation against nation. In the horrors of war it is not the innocent soldier killing his adversary in battle, but the partisans on whatever side, the ambitious in whatever nation, the reckless journalists. and declaimers of whatever opinions, by which angry passions are fostered, that are the true responsible authors of the |