rote the commandments on tables of stone.

BINDING TO-DAY.

Some people seem to think we have got beyond the commandments. What
did Christ say? "Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the
prophets; I am not come to destroy but to fulfil. For verily I say
unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall
in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The commandments
of God given to Moses in the Mount at Horeb are as binding to-day as
ever they have been since the time when they were proclaimed in the
hearing of the people. The Jews said the law was not given in
Palestine, (which belonged to Israel), but in the wilderness, because
the law was for all nations.

Jesus never condemned the law and the prophets, but He did condemn
those who did not obey them. Because He gave new commandments it does
not follow that He abolished the old. Christ's explanation of them
made them all the more searching. In His Sermon on the Mount He
carried the principles of the commandments beyond the mere letter. He
unfolded them and showed that they embraced more, that they are
positive as well as prohibitive. The Old Testament closes with these
words: "Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded
unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments.
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the
great and dreadful day of the Lord: and he shall turn the heart of the
fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their
fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse."

Does that look as if the law of Moses was becoming obsolete?

The conviction deepens in me with the years that the old truths of the
Bible must be stated and restated in the plainest possible language. I
do not remember ever to have heard a sermon preached on the
commandments. I have an index of two thousand five hundred sermons
preached by Spurgeon, and not one of them selects its text from the
first seventeen verses of Exodus xx. The people must be made to
understand that the Ten Commandments are still binding, and that there
is a penalty attached to their violation. We do not want a gospel of
mere sentiment. The Sermon on the Mount did not blot out the Ten
Commandments.

When Christ came He condensed the statement of the law into this form:
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy
soul and with all thy strength and with all thy mind; and thy