on that has received them, and forming the
cardinal principles of all theological belief! Yet it was by Moses that
these Commandments came. He is the first, the favored man, commissioned
by God to declare to the world, clearly and authoritatively, His supreme
power and majesty, whom alone all nations and tribes and people are to
worship to remotest generations. In it he fearfully exposes the sin of
idolatry, to which all nations are prone,--the one sin which the
Almighty visits with such dreadful penalties, since this involves, and
implies logically, rebellion against Him, the supreme ruler of the
universe, and disloyalty to Him as a personal sovereign, in whatever
form this idolatry may appear, whether in graven images of tutelary
deities, or in the worship of Nature (ever blind and indefinite), or in
the exaltation of self, in the varied search for pleasure, ambition, or
wealth, to which the debased soul bows down with grovelling instincts,
and in the pursuit of which the soul forgets its higher destiny and its
paramount obligations. Moses is the first to expose with terrific force
and solemn earnestness this universal tendency to the oblivion of the
One God amid the temptations, the pleasures, and the glories of the
world, and the certain displeasure of the universal sovereign which must
follow, as seen in the fall of empires and the misery of individuals
from his time to ours, the uniform doom of people and nations, whatever
the special form of idolatry, whenever it reaches a peculiar fulness and
development,--the ultimate law of all decline and ruin, from which there
is no escape, "for the Lord God is a jealous God, visiting the
iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation." So sacred and awful is this controlling Deity, that it is
made a cardinal sin even to utter His name in vain, in levity or
blasphemy. In order also to keep Him before the minds of men, a day is
especially appointed--one in seven--which it is the bounden duty as well
as privilege of all generations to keep with peculiar sanctity,--a day
of rest from labor as well as of adoration; an entirely new institution,
which no Pagan nation, and no other ancient nation, ever recognized.
After thus laying solemn injunctions upon all men to render supreme
allegiance to this personal God,--for we can find no better word,
although Matthew Arnold calls it "the Power which maketh for
righteousness,"--Moses presents the duties of