sumptuous disturbance of such sacred and Divine order, including as it does both the right of separate possession and the duty of charitable donation of property, is opposed by the seventh commandment, which condemns with the same categorical conciseness as the preceding all sins taking place within the province of the command. The sovereignty of these Divine commandments just consists in the fact of their embracing in short but cogent imperatives great provinces of life, and as the ruling principles of these declaring all infringements of their holy order to be criminal, without distinction of their coarser or more refined appearance. Thus the eighth commandment extends over the great province of speech, or the intercourse of men by means of words, upon the faithfulness of and belief in which depend all the ties of society, especially the state with its law and jurisdiction, as well as the power of public opinion, of honour and of a good name. It enjoins in this department truthfulness of testimony, faithful keeping of promises, justice and fairness of judgment, and condemns lying, treachery and slander. The ninth and tenth commandments forbidding covetousness, the root of all evil, envy and all evil desire, close the Decalogue, showing by their reference to what is spiritual and inward that only in holy purity of heart is the law fulfilled. Such purity from every evil desire is, however, found only in a heart filled with divine and self-denying love. The fulfilment of the first commandment is the cause of the fulfilment of all, for all the moral relations are God's ordinances, and these are only esteemed sacred in His fear and love. Hence Luther well begins his explanations of each commandment with the words: We must fear and love God, so that we, etc. It is because the first commandment, comprising all the law, runs through all the commandments, that it is transgressed in the transgression of each, and thus the whole law broken (Jas. ii. 10), just as he who steps over one paling gets over the whole fence.

Thus the Divine law embraces the whole life of man in his

heavenly and earthly relations. It is nothing else than the idea of the Divine image arranged according to its various aspects, and placed in contrast with sin or ungodliness, on which account everything in man which willingly or unwillingly deviates from the norm of the revealed law is sin, and is imputed as sin through the knowledge of that law. It does not extend through the life in only individual items of action and conversation, nor does it as a complete and general ideal conceive of life in complete generality, but as its vital notion embraces its entire successive development, enjoining at every stage, in every particular, its adequate normal condition sanctified by the vital principle of love. It is just because a living man is never without the law of his life, but is always conforming to, or deviating from it, that, whether acting or resting, doing or suffering, he is never in a morally indifferent state. Acting and resting, doing and suffering, are the changing appearances of life; righteousness or unrighteousness is no such changing appearance, but the abiding being of the man in relation to the Divine archetype and law of his nature, which he is at all times either conforming to or violating. The moral character of a man is the same even under the most varying manifestations; indwelling sin is continuously in the mind, is present both before and after the actual outbreak, and remains, though latent, in the soul, even when he rests, even when he sleeps, so that the saying: He who sleeps is not sinning, is correct only with respect to actual sin, for habitual sin does not depart at night and return in the morning, any more than the soul itself, in which it is always inherent. Sin, as selfishness, cleaves to the subject, to the person of man, and being the perennial centre in the variable circumference of his existence, the man affected with sin is at all times a sinner

1

1 Lex est doctrina divina, in qua justissima et immutabilis Dei voluntas revelatur, qualem oporteat esse hominem in sua natura, cogitationibus verbis, factis, ut Deo probari et acceptus esse possit.-Concord. Form. p. 713.

before God's law, to which he is never indifferent.1

Hence the subject is in a moral aspect never indifferent; and since, as he is, so he acts, his action also is never indifferent, but like the actor, affected with sin, i.e. unrighteous or righteous. A strong man is strong in all his actions, a weak man weak, and a lame man limps on every path, not only on a bad, but also on a good one. Very different is the case with the objects of life; for the different classes and vocations, the circumstances and surroundings of men, though all are so designed and arranged that the will of Divine love may be realized in them, are still morally indifferent, i.e. of equal value, inasmuch as the same degree of moral perfection may exist through faith and love in those which vary the most widely; so that in this respect there is no difference between a king and a slave. There is only one righteousness before God, and in this all men, however great the difference between them, can be equal; and just this is its liberty, that it is bound to no external distinction, to no natural difference of men. It is true that this righteousness directs and hallows all given circumstances from the central-point of life, and so by no means leaves them in moral indifferentism, but, on the contrary, pervades them all with Divine love, and gives them thereby their moral importance and perfection; but no natural relation of man is too high or too low, too great or too small, to be equally penetrated and sanctified thereby. Hence there is with it no respect of either persons or things, but rather to its purity all things are pure, and every creature of God good,2 and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving; for it is sanctified by the word of God and by prayer (1 Tim. iv. 4, 5). The law, though ever requiring this righteousness of heart from all, by no means prescribes the objects towards which, and the circumstances in which, it is to be practised. 1 Hence Melanchthon calls it, Loci, a. 1521, p. 59 (August. ed.), sententiam evangelicissimam, non esse opus indifferens.

2 In quantum creatura est, bona est; sed distinguatur res condita et depravatio non condita.

These, on the contrary, often depend on other Divine dispensations, on opportunities and on the choice of man as conditioned thereby. While, therefore, man must be ruled in his inmost heart by the command of love and the prohibition of selfishness, all is on the other hand allowed him in the outer world which is not contrary to the love of God and of his neighbour. As St. Paul says, all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any (1 Cor. vi. 12), i.e. be made to depart from God by any. Love, and then do what thou wilt, says Augustine, thus aptly defining both the one ever enduring necessity and the manifold freedom of man, according to which he is never indeed free from the law, but free in it. The law is nothing else than that one demand for faithful love in all heavenly and earthly relations, which, incessantly issued to the spirit of man from the unity of the interior and Divine life, would freely fashion the manifold actions of his external life to morality.

The law, then, is the Divine archetype of man perfect in love during his whole development, so that it is as much that of the child as of the grown man and woman. This archetype is, according to its notion, neither an unattainable nor unattained ideal; not unattainable, for love is nothing supernatural, but the most natural, the most normal sentiment in the heart of the pure man; not unattained, for the original man was just the realization of this ideal; and as the first Adam existed in original righteousness, though he did not continue therein, so is the second Adam, who came to fulfil the law, its concrete fulfilment in Divine love. Christ is no mere teacher or giver of law, He is the fulfilled law itself, the archetypical and typical man, who from childhood up to manhood so fulfilled in the perfect obedience of love all righteousness, that he who does not resemble Him is unrighteous before Him and before God; and for the same reason He is, as the personal law, the Judge of the world. It is an advantage of the ancient philosophical systems of morals

over those of the moderns, that they concentrate the wide circumference of their doctrines of duties, virtues and the good in the idea of the wise man, and thus lay down in ethics not merely a collection of abstract precepts and descriptions, but the concrete image of a life by which the living may measure themselves. But this image of the perfectly wise man, who is just to duties, unites in himself the cardinal virtues and possesses the supreme good, is only a subjective image fashioned after the subjectivity of the philosopher, with which even he himself does not correspond. It is only an imaginary self-invented ideal, devoid of objective truth and reality, and for that very reason also of power truly to direct and form the subject; it has its life only from the subject, and hence can give him none. In Christ the objective ideal of the Divine law is real, the Divine archetype of human nature is personal, the Word is made flesh. He is righteousness, He is our righteousness, for He is the concrete principle of both the knowledge and fulfilment of the law. The law was given, but not fulfilled, by Moses; grace and truth came by Jesus Christ (John i. 17). All philosophical morality, so far as it is without Him, is but misty and fragmentary.

CHAPTER IV.

OF THE INABILITY OF THE NATURAL FREE WILL TO FULFIL THE LAW; OF SUSCEPTIBILITY OF REDEMPTION, AND HOW THE LAW IS THE PREPARATION OF THIS SUSCEPTIBILITY.

Can the will by an act of its own fill the loveless heart of man with the love which fulfils the law? This is the question on which all depends. It is a confusion of ideas to mingle with this anthropological and ethical question the theological and metaphysical question of the omnipotence and foreknowledge of God, or that of the relation of Divine predestination