gainst the law. Legislation is indeed educational, but the danger
is that the practical outcome of such legislation would be disobedience
and anarchy.

Now, these principles are the ample justification of all that startles
us in the Pentateuch.

Slavery and polygamy, for instance, are not abolished. To forbid them
utterly would have substituted far worse evils, as the Jews then were.
But laws were introduced which vastly ameliorated the condition of the
slave, and elevated the status of woman--laws which were far in advance
of the best Gentile culture, and which so educated and softened the
Jewish character, that men soon came to feel the letter of these very
laws too harsh.

That is a nobler vindication of the Mosaic legislation than if this
century agreed with every letter of it. To be vital and progressive is a
better thing than to be correct. The law waged a far more effectual war
upon certain evils than by formal prohibition, sound in theory but
premature by centuries. Other good things besides liberty are not for
the nursery or the school. And "we also, when we were children, were
held in bondage" (Gal. iv. 3).

It is pretty well agreed that this code may be divided into five parts.
To the end of the twentieth chapter it deals directly with the worship
of God. Then follow thirty-two verses treating of the personal rights
of man as distinguished from his rights of property. From the
thirty-third verse of the twenty-first chapter to the fifteenth verse of
the twenty-second, the rights of property are protected. Thence to the
nineteenth verse of the twenty-third chapter is a miscellaneous group of
laws, chiefly moral, but deeply connected with the civil organisation of
the state. And thence to the end of the chapter is an earnest
exhortation from God, introduced by a clearer statement than before of
the manner in which He means to lead them, even by that mysterious Angel
in Whom "is My Name."

PART I.--THE LAW OF WORSHIP.

xx. 22-26.

It is no vain repetition that this code begins by reasserting the
supremacy of the one God. That principle underlies all the law, and must
be carried into every part of it. And it is now enforced by a new
sanction,--"Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from
heaven: ye shall not make _other gods_ with Me; gods of silver or gods
of gold ye shall not make unto you" (vers. 22, 23). The costliest
material of this low world should be utterly contemned in rivalry wit