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. 8. The Eighth Commandment. steal." The Eighth Commandment. "Thou shalt not That lowest, meanest crime of the thief and the robber is not all that the Eighth Commandment condemns. It is the taking of money which is not our due, and which we are forbidden to receive; it is the squandering of money which is not our own, on the race-course or at the gambling 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. ment. 9. The Ninth Commandment. "Thou shalt not bear false witness." False witness, deliberate perjury, is the crown and consummation of the liar's progress. The Ninth But what a world of iniquity is covered by that Commandone word, Lie. Careless, damaging statements, thrown hither and thither in conversation; reckless exag geration and romancing, only to make stories more pun... gent; hasty records of character, left to be published after we are dead; heedless disregard of the supreme duty 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." The Tenth Commandment. 10. The Tenth Commandment. The form of the Commandment 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 principle strikes at the very highest heights of civilization and at the very innermost secrets of 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 exact 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 great Commandments. IV. These are the 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 an one with open, genuine countenance, that he 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 devo tion, "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 simple command, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Everything in the second table of our duty to our neighbor is an enlargement of the command, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." The two together are the whole of religion. Each of itself calls our attention to what is the first and chief duty of each of the two tables. God, the Supreme Goodness, and the Supreme Truth, is to be served with no half service; it must be a service that goes through our whole lives. We must place Him above everything else. He is all in all to us. Truth, justice, purity are in Him made the supreme object of our devotion and affection. "Let no man," says Lord Bacon, “out of weak conceit of authority or ill-applied moderation, think or imagine that a man can search too far or be too well supplied in the Book of God's Word or the Book of God's Works." Man is to be served also with a love like that which we give to ourselves. Selfishness is here made the root of all evil; unselfishness the root of all goodness. Toleration of every difference of race or creed is summed up in the expression "thy neighbor." It was a saying of Abraham Lincoln, "When any church will inscribe over its altar as its sole qualification for membership the Saviour's condensed statement of the substance of both Law and Gospel in those two great Commandments, that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul." There may be an exaggeration in the expression, but the thing intended is true. If any church existed which in reality and in spirit put forth those two Commandments as the sum and substance of its belief, as that to which all else tended, and for the sake of which all was done, it would indeed take the first place amongst the churches of the world, because it would be the Church that most fully had expressed the mind and intention of the Founder of Christendom.1 The Eight V. There was an addition which the English divines of the time of William III. wished to make to the recital of the Ten Commandments in church. It was baffled by the obstinate prejudice of the inferior clergy. But its intention was singularly fine. It was that, on the three great festivals, instead of the Ten Commandments of Mount Sinai should be read the Eight Beatitudes of the Mountain of Galilee, in order to remind us that beyond and above the Law of Duty, there is the happiness of that inward spirit which is at once the spring and the result of all duty- the happiness, the blessedness which belongs to the humble, the sincere, the unselfish, the eager aspirant after goodness, the generous, the pure, the courageous. That happiness is the highest end and aim of all religion. VI. There is one addition yet to be made, which has never been suggested by authority. We sometimes hear in conversation of an Eleventh Commandment invented by the world, in cyn The Elev enth Commandment ical contempt of the old commandments, or in 1 The subject is treated at length in "The Two Great Commandments," in Addresses at St. Andrews, pp. 155–187. |