of "the first day of the week" is a protest against it. The very name of Sabbath is condemned by St. Paul.* 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 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 every where-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 * Col. ii. 16. 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. * The Fifth 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 thee." W. have no claim on the inheritance of the Commandland of Canaan. No amount of filial reverence will ment. secure for us the possession of the goodly heights of Lebanon, or the forests of Gilead, or the rushing waters of Jordan. But the ordinance of affection and honor 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 honor of children to parents, is far stronger now than in the days of oses. 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. 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 murderer down The Sixth from that bad preeminence as the worst and most Commandappalling of human offenders. It is the consummation ment. of selfishness. It is the disregard of the most precious of God's earthly gifts the gift of life. But the scope of the com *See Prof. Tyndall's admirable Address on the Sabbath at Glasgow. mandment 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 horrors which follow in the train of armies and in the fields of carnage. In the violence of civil and intestine discord, it is not only human life that is at stake, but that which makes human life precious. "As well kill a good man as a good book," was the saying of Milton, and so we may add, in thinking of those who care neither to preserve nor to improve the inheritance which God has given us, "As well kill a good man as a good institution." The Seventh Commandment. 7. The Seventh Commandment. Of this it is enough to say that here also we know well in our consciences that it is not only the shameless villain who invades the sanctity of another's home and happiness that falls under the condemnation of that dreadful word which the Seventh Commandment uses. It is the reader and writer of filthy books; it is the young man or the young woman who allows his or her purity and dignity to be soiled and stained by loose talk and loose company. If the sacredness of the marriage bond be the glory of our English homes, no eccentricities of genius, no exceptional misfortunes-however much we may excuse or pity those who have gone astray-can justify us in making light of that which, disregarded in one case, is endangered in all, which, if lost in a few cases, is the ruin of hundreds. It is not the loss of Christianity, but of civilization; not the advance to freedom, but the relapse into barbarism. The Eighth 8. The Eighth Commandment. "Thou shalt not steal." That lowest, meanest crime of the thief and the robber is not all that the Eighth Commandment condemns. It is Command- the taking of money which is not our due, and which ment. we are forbidden to receive: it is the squandering of money which is not our own, on the race-course or at the gam bling table; it is the taking advantage of a flaw or an accident in a will which gives us property which was not intended for us, and to which others have a better claim than we. He is the true observer of the Eighth Commandment not only who keeps his hands from picking and stealing, but he who renders just restitution, he who, like the great Indian soldier, Outram, the Bayard of modern times, would not claim any advantage from a war which he had victoriously conducted, because he thought the war itself was wrong; he who is scrupulously honest, even to the last farthing of his accounts, with master or servant, with employer or employed; he who respects the rights of others, not only of the rich against the poor, not only of the poor against the rich, but of all classes against each other. These, and these only, are the Christian keepers of the Eighth Commandment. The Ninth 9. The Ninth Commandment. "Thou shalt not bear false witness." False witness, deliberate perjury, is the crown and consummation of the liar's progress. But what a world of iniquity is covered by that one word, Lie. CommandCareless, damaging statements, thrown hither and ment. thither in conversation; reckless exaggeration and romancing, only to make stories more pungent; hasty records of character, left to be published after we are dead; heedless disregard of the supreme auty and value of truth in all things,—these are what we should bear in mind when we are told that we are not to bear false witness against our neighbor. A lady who had been in the habit of spreading slanderous reports once confessed her fault to St. Philip Neri, and asked how she should cure it. He said, "Go to the nearest marketplace, buy a chicken just killed, pluck its feathers all the way as you return, and come back to me." She was much surprised, and when she saw her adviser again, he said, "Now go back, and bring me back all the feathers you have scattered." "But that is impossible," she said; "I cast away the feathers carelessly; the wind carried them away. How can I recover them?" That," he said, "is exactly like your words of slander. They have been carried about in every direction; you cannot recall them. Go, and slander no more. 66 10. The Tenth Commandment. The form of the Com mandment speaks only of the possessions of a rude and pastoral people, the wife of a neighboring chief, the male and female slaves, the Syrian ox, the Egyptian ass. But the The Tenth principle strikes at the very highest heights of Command- civilization and at the very innermost secrets of ment. the heart. Greed, selfishness, ambition, egotism, self-importance, money-getting, rash speculation, desire of the poor to pull down the rich, desire of the rich to cxact more than their due from the poor, eagerness to destroy the most useful and sacred institutions in order to gratify a social revenge, or to gain a lost place, or to make a figure in the world, these are amongst the wide-reaching evils which are included in that ancient but most expressive word "covetousness." "I had not known sin," says the Apostle Paul, "but for the law which says, Thou shalt not covet." So we may all say. No one can know the exceeding sinfulness of sin who does not know the guilt of selfishness; no one can know the exceeding beauty of holiness who has not seen or felt the glory of unselfishness. The Two IV. These are t Ten Commandments-the summary of the morality of Judaism, the basis of the morality of Christian Churches. We have heard it said of such and such great Com- an one with open, genuine countenance, that he mandments. looked as if he had the Ten Commandments written on his face. It was remarked by an honest, pious Roman Catholic of the last generation, on whom a devout but feeble enthusiast was pressing the use of this and that small practice of devotion, "My devotions are much better than those. They are the devotions of the Ten Commandments of God." In the Reformed American Church and in the Reformed Churches of France, and intended by the last Reformers of the English Liturgy in 1689, though they failed to carry the point, after the Ten Commandments are read in church comes this memorable addition, which we ought all to supply in memory, even although it is not publicly used: "Hear also what our Lord Jesus Christ saith." This is what is taken as the ground of the explanation of the Commandments in all Christian Catechisms of our duty to God. Everything in what we call the first table is an enlargement of that one single command, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Everything in the sec |