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05.25. Chapter Second.

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Chapter Second.—The Direct Instruction Given To The Israelites Before The Erection Of The Tabernacle, And The Institution Of Its Symbolical Services The Law.

Section I.—What Properly, And In The Strictest Sense, Termed The Law, Viz., The Decalogue—Its Perfection And Completeness Both As To The Order And Substance Of Its Precepts. THE historical transactions connected with the redemption of Israel from the land of Egypt, were not immediately succeeded by the introduction of that complicated form of symbolical worship which peculiarly distinguishes the dispensation of Moses. There was an intermediate space occupied by revelations which were in themselves of the greatest moment, and which also stood in a relation of closest intimacy with the symbolical religion that followed. The period we refer to is that to which belongs the giving of the law. And it is impossible to understand aright the nature of the tabernacle and its worship, or the purposes they were designed to accomplish, without first obtaining a clear insight into the prior revelation of law, and the place it was intended to hold in the dispensation brought in by Moses.

What precisely formed this revelation of law, and what was the nature of its requirements? This must be our first subject of inquiry; and by a careful investigation of the points connected with it, we hope to avoid some prolific sources of confusion and error, and prepare the way for a correct understanding of the dispensation as a whole, and the proper adjustment of its several parts.

I. There can be no doubt that the word law is used both in the Old and the New Testament Scriptures with some latitude, and that what is meant by “the law” in one place, is sometimes considerably different from what is meant by it in another. It is used to designate indifferently precepts and appointed observances of any kind, as well as the books in which they are enjoined. This only implies, however, that the things commanded by Moses had so much in common, that they might be all comprehended in one general term. It does not prevent that the law of the ten commandments may have been properly and distinctively the law to Israel, and on that account might have a peculiar and pre-eminent place assigned it in the dispensation. We are convinced that such in reality was the case, and present the following considerations in support of it.

1. The very manner in which these commandments were delivered is sufficient to vindicate for them a place peculiarly their own. For these alone, of all the precepts which form the Mosaic code, were spoken immediately by the voice of God; while the rest were privately communicated to Moses, and by him delivered to the people. Nor was the mode of revelation merely peculiar, but it was attended also by demonstrations of Divine majesty such as were never witnessed on any other occasion. So awfully grand and magnificent was the scene, and so overwhelming the impression produced by it, that the people, we are told, could not endure the sight, and Moses himself exceedingly feared and quaked. That this unparalleled display of the infinite majesty and greatness of Jehovah should have been made to accompany the deliverance of only these ten commandments, seems to have been intended to invest them with a very peculiar character and bearing.

2. The same also may be inferred from their number—ten, the symbol of completeness. It indicates that they formed by themselves an entire whole, made up of the necessary, and no more than the necessary, complement of parts. A good deal of what, if not altogether fanciful, is at least incapable of any solid proof, has recently been propounded, especially by Bähr and Hengstenberg, regarding the symbolical import of numbers. But there are certain points which may be considered to have been thoroughly established respecting them; and none more so than the symbolical import of ten, as indicating completeness. The ascribing of such an import to this number appears to have been of very ancient origin; for traces are to be found of it in the earliest and most distant nations; and even Spencer, who never admits a symbol where he can possibly avoid it, is constrained to allow a symbolical import here.^[223] “The ten,” to use the words of Bähr,^[224] “by virtue of the general laws of thought, shuts up the series of primary numbers, and comprehends all in itself. Now, since the whole numeral system consists of so many decades (tens), and the first decade is the type of this endlessly repeating series, the nature of number in general is in this last fully developed, and the entire course comprised in its idea. Hence the first decade, and of course also the number ten, is the representative of the whole numeral system. And as number is employed to symbolize being in general, ten must denote the complete perfect being,—that is, a number of particulars necessarily connected together, and combined into one whole. So that ten is the natural symbol of perfection and completeness itself a definite whole, to which nothing is wanting.” It is on account of this symbolical import of the number ten that, the plagues of Egypt were precisely of that number—forming as such a complete round of judgments; and it was for the same reason that the transgressions of the people in the wilderness were allowed to proceed till the same number had been reached when they had “sinned ten times,” they had filled up the measure of their iniquities.—(Numbers 14:22) Hence also the consecration of the tenths or tithes, which had grown into an established usage so early as the days of Abraham. (Genesis 14:20) The whole increase was represented by ten, and one of these was set apart to the Lord, in token of all being derived from Him and held of Him. So this revelation of law from Sinai, which was to serve for all coming ages as the grand expression of God’s holiness, and the summation of man’s duty, was comprised in the number ten, to indicate its perfection as one complete and comprehensive whole—“the all that a divinely called people, as well as a single individual, should and should not do in reference to God and their neighbour.”^[225]

^[223]De Leg. Hebrews 3, Lightfoot, Hor. Heb. in Matthew 25:1 : Numero denario gavisa plurimum est gens Judaica et in sacris et in civilibus. But see the proof fully given in Bähr, Symb. i., p. 175 ss. Among other ancient authorities he produces the following: Etymol. Mgn., s.v. δεκὰς· ἡ ἔχουσα ἐν αὐτῇ πάντα ἀριθμὸν. Cyrill. In Hos. iii.: σύμβολον δὲ τελειότητος :ὁ δὲκα ἐστὶν ἀριθμος, παντέλειος ὤν. Herm. Trismeg. Poemand. 13: ἡ ἐνὰς οὖν κατα λόγον τὴν δεκάδα ἔχει καὶ ἡ δέκας τὴν ἑνάδα.

[224] Symabolik, i.. p. 175.

[225] Sack’s Apologetik, p. 180. As further examples of the scriptural import of ten, we might have mentioned the ten men in Zechariali laying hold of the skirt of a Jew, ch. 8:23, the parable of the ten virgins, and the ten horns or kingdoms in Revelation.

3. It perfectly accords with this view of the ten commandments, and is a farther confirmation of it, that they were written by the finger of God on two tables of stone—written on both sides, so as to cover the entire surface, and not leave room for future additions, as if what was already given might admit of improvements; and written on durable tables of stone, while the rest of the law was written only on parchment or paper. It was for no lack of writing materials, as Hengstenberg has fully shown,^[226] that in this and other cases the engraving of letters upon stones was used in that remote period; for materials in great abundance existed in Egypt and its neighbourhood, and are known to have been used from the earliest times, in the papyrus, the byssus-manufacture, and the skins of beasts. “The stone,” he justly remarks, “points to the perpetuity which belongs to the law, as an expression of the Divine will, originating in the Divine nature. It was an image of the truth uttered by our Lord, ‘Verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled.’”

[226] Authentie, i., p. 481 ss. So Buddeus, Hist. Eccl., i., p. 606: Argumento vero id etiam erat, perennem istam legem esse atque perpetuam, etc., and Calvinistic divines generally.

4. Then these ten words, as they are called, had the singular honour conferred on them of being properly the terms of the covenant formed at Sinai. Thus Moses, when rehearsing what had taken place, says, Deuteronomy 4:13, “And He declared to you His covenant, which He commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and He wrote them upon two tables of stone.” Again, in Deuteronomy 9:9, Deuteronomy 9:11, he calls these tables of stone “the tables of the covenant.” So also in Exodus 34:28, “the words written upon the tables, the ten commandments,” are expressly called “the words of the covenant.” To mark more distinctly the covenant nature of these words, it is to be observed (as remarked by Deyling, Obs. Sac., L. ii., obs. 47), that the Scripture never once uses the expression, “the tables of the law,” but always simply the tables, or the testimony, or, conjoining the two, the tables of the testimony, or tables of the covenant. It is true, some other commands are coupled with the ten, when, in Exodus 34:27, the Lord said to Moses, that “after the tenor of (at the month of, according to) these words he had made a covenant with Israel.” It is true, also, that at the formal ratification of the covenant, Exodus 24, we read of the book of the covenant, which comprehended not only the ten commandments, but also the precepts contained in Exodus 21 -Exodus 23; for it is clear that this book comprised all that the Lord had then said, either directly or by the instrumentality of Moses, and to which the people answered, “We will do it.” But it is carefully to be observed, that a marked distinction is still put between the ten commandments and the other precepts; for the former are called emphatically “the words of the Lord,” while the additional words given through Moses are called “the judgments” (Exodus 24:3). They are, indeed, peculiarly rights or judgments, having respect, for the most part, to what should be done from one man to another, and what, in the event of violations of the law being committed, ought to be enforced judicially, with the view of rectifying or checking the evil. Their chief object was to secure, through the instrumentality of the magistrate, that if the proper lore should fail to influence the hearts and lives of the people, still the right should be maintained. Yet while these form the great body of the additional words communicated to Moses and written in the book of the covenant, the symbolical institutions had also a certain place assigned them; for both in Exodus 23:1-33, and again in Exodus 24:1-18, the three yearly feasts, and one or two other points of this description, are noticed. But still these directions and judgments formed no proper addition to the matter of the ten commandments, considered as God’s revelation of law to His people. The terms of the covenant still properly stood, as we are expressly and repeatedly told, in the ten commandments; and what, besides, was added before the ratification of the covenant, cannot justly be regarded as having had any other object in view, in so far as they partook of the nature of laws, than as subsidiary directions and restraints to aid in protecting the covenant, and securing its better observance. The feast-laws, in particular, so far from forming any proper addition to the terms of the covenant, had respect primarily to the people’s profession of adherence to it, and contained directions concerning the sacramental observances of the Jewish Church.

5. What has been said in regard to the ten commandments, as alone properly constituting the terms of the covenant, is fully established, and the singular importance of these commandments further manifested, by the place afterwards assigned them in the tabernacle. The most sacred portion of this, that which formed the very heart and centre of all the services connected with it, was the ark of the covenant. It was the peculiar symbol of the Lord’s covenant presence and faithfulness, and immediately above it was the throne on which He sat as King in Jeshurun. But that ark was made on purpose to contain the two tables of the law, and was called “the ark of the covenant,” simply because it contained “the tables of the covenant.” The book of the law was afterwards placed by Moses at the side of the ark (Deuteronomy 31:26), that it might serve as a check upon the Levites, who were the proper guardians and keepers of the book; it was a wise precaution lest they should prove unfaithful to their charge. But the tables on which the ten commandments were written alone kept possession of the ark, and were thus plainly recognised as containing in themselves the sum and substance of what in righteousness was held to be strictly required by the covenant.

6. Finally, our Lord and His apostles always point to the revelation of law engraven upon these stones as holding a preeminent place, and, indeed, as comprising all that in the strict and proper sense was to be esteemed as law. The Scribes and Pharisees of that age had completely inverted the order of things. Their carnality and self-righteousness had led them to exalt the precepts respecting ceremonial observances to the highest place, and to throw the duties inculcated in the ten commandment! comparatively into the background, thus treating the mere appendages of the covenant as of more account than its very ground and basis. Hence, when seeking to expose the insufficient and hollow nature of “the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees,” our Lord made His appeal to the testimony engraved on the two tables, and most commonly, indeed, though not exclusively, to the precepts of the second table, because He had to do more especially with hypocrites, whose defects and shortcomings might most readily be exposed by a reference to the duties of the second table.—(Matthew 19:16; Luke 10:25; Luke 18:18, etc.) The object of our Lord naturally led Him to give prominence to those things by which a man approves himself to be just, or the reverse. Those parts of duty which more immediately relate to God in their proper observance, have to do so peculiarly with the heart, that it is comparatively easy, on the one hand, for hypocrites to feign compliance with them, and difficult, on the other, to make a direct exposure of their pretensions. For the same reason, Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which was chiefly intended to be an exposition of the real nature and far-reaching import of the ten commandments, bears most respect to those commandments which belonged to the second table, and which had suffered most from the corruption of the times. But the prophets of the Old Testament had done precisely the same thing in reproving the ungodliness prevalent in their day. They were continually striving to recall men from the mere outward observances which the most worth less hypocrites could perform, to the sincere piety toward God, and deeds of substantial kindness toward man, required by the law of the two tables; so that the prophets, as well as the law, were truly said to hang upon one and the same commandment of love.^[227] In like manner, the Apostle Paul, after Christ, as the prophets before, when discoursing in regard to the law, what it was or was not, what it could or could not do, always has in view pre-eminently the law of the two tables. Without an exception, his examples are taken from the very words of these, or what they clearly prohibited and required.—(Romans 2:17-23; Romans 3:10-18; Romans 7:7; Romans 13:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:7-10) This could not, of course, be expected in the argument maintained in the Epistles to the Galatians and Colossians, where the error met and opposed consisted in an undue exaltation of the ceremonial institutions by themselves, as if the observance of these by the Christian Church were essential to salvation. In this case he could not possibly avoid referring chiefly to precepts of a ceremonial nature, and discussing them with respect to the light in which they were improperly viewed by certain parties in the apostolic Church. But when the question was, what the law in its strict and proper sense really required, and what were the ends it was fitted to serve, he never fails to manifest his concurrence with the other inspired writers, in taking the ten words as the law and the testimony, by which everything was to be judged and determined.

[227] See especially Psalms 15, 24, which describe the righteousness required under the covenant, by obedience to the ten commandments, and more particularly to those of the second table; specially indited, no doubt, to meet the tendency which the more attractive and orderly celebration then introduced into the ritual service was fitted to awaken. See also Psalms 40, 50, 51; Isaiah 1, 42., etc.; Micah 6.

We should despair of proving anything respecting the Old Testament dispensation, if these considerations do not prove that the law of the ten commandments stood out from all the other precepts enjoined under the ministration of Moses, and were intended to form a full and comprehensive exhibition of the righteousness of the law, in its strict and proper sense. No doubt, many of the other precepts teach substantially what these commandments did, or contain statements and regulations bearing some way upon their violation or observance. But this was not done with the view of supplying any new or additional matter of obligation; it was merely intended to explain their real import, or to give instructions how to adapt to them what might be called the jurisprudence of the state. We cannot but regard it as an unhappy circumstance, tending to perpetuate much misunderstanding and confusion regarding the legislation of Moses, that the distinction has been practically overlooked, which it so manifestly assigns to the ten commandments, and that they have so frequently been regarded by the more learned theologians as the kind of quintessence of the whole Mosaic code, as the few general or representative heads under which all the rest are to be ranged. Thus Calvin, while he held the ten commandments to be a perfect rule of righteousness, and gave for the most part a correct as well as admirable exposition of their tenor and design, yet failed to bring out distinctly their singular and prominent place in the Mosaic economy, and in his commentary reduces all the ceremonial institutions to one or other of these ten commandments. They were therefore regarded by him as standing to the entire legislation of Moses in the relation of general summaries or compends. And in that case there must have been, as he partially admits there was, something shadowy in the one as well as in the other. But what was chiefly a defect of arrangement in Calvin and many subsequent writers, has in Bähr assumed the form of a guiding principle, and is laid as the foundation of his view of the whole Mosaic system. Agreeing substantially with Spencer, whom he here quotes with approbation, and who considered the decalogue as a brief compend or tabular exhibition of the several classes of precepts in the law, he says: “The decalogue is representative of the whole law; it contains religious and political, not less than moral, precepts. The first command is a purely religious one; as is also the fourth, which belongs to the ceremonial law; and indeed, generally, by reason of the theocratic constitution, all civil commands were at the same time religious and moral ones, and inversely; so that the old division into moral, ceremonial, and political, or judicial, appears quite untenable.”^[228] There is an element of truth in this. The theocracy, doubtless, stamped all with a religious impress, and brought the ceremonial and political into close connection with the moral. But it by no means follows that these were all indiscriminately fused together; otherwise, they must also have been retained, or have fallen together. The view overlooks distinctions which are both real and important, as will appear in the course of our remarks upon some parts of the decalogue itself, and also afterwards, when unfolding the relation of the decalogue to the ceremonial institutions. It is such an error as confounds the means of salvation with the great principles of religious and moral obligation, and leaves, if followed out, no solid basis for the doctrine of a vicarious atonement to rest on. With perfect consistence, Bahr constructs his system without the help of such an atonement; sacrifice in all its forms was but an expression of pious feeling on the part of the worshipper, and consequently fell under one or other of the duties man owed to his Maker.

[228] Symbolik, i., p. 384. He elsewhere, p. 181, seeks to justify this view from the number ten, in which the law was contained; and which number he considers to have been employed in the promulgation of this law, because “it was the fundamental law of Israel, in a religious and political respect—the representative of the whole Israelitish constitution.” It certainly might be called the fundamental law of Israel, but that is a different thing from its being also the representative of the whole Israelitish constitution. In this case the ten must have been individually and conjunctly comprehensive of the whole, and that in their distinctive character as component elements of the Israelitish constitution. But what has any of them in that sense to do, for example, with sacrifice for sin? or with thankofferings for mercies? or with distinctions in meat and drink? If the whole law had been comprised in ten groups, and the decalogue had consisted of one from each group, we could then, but only then, have seen the force and justice of the interpretation.

II. We proceed now to consider the excellence of this law of the ten commandments, and to show, by an examination of its method and substance, how justly it was regarded as a complete and perfect summary of religious and moral duty.

It is scarcely possible, even at this stage of the world’s history, to consider with any care the precepts of the decalogue, without in some measure apprehending its high character as a standard of rectitude. And could we throw ourselves back to the time when it was first promulgated—instead of looking at it, as we now do, from the eminence of a fuller and more perfect revelation—could we distinctly contemplate it, as given seventeen centuries before the Christian era, and received as the summary of all that is morally right and dutiful by a people who had just left the polluted atmosphere of Egypt, we could not fail to discern, in the very existence of such a law, one of the most striking proofs of the Divine character of the Mosaic legislation. We should be much more disposed to exclaim here, than in regard to the outward prodigy which first called forth the declaration, “This is the finger of God.” A remarkable testimony was given to the general excellence of the decalogue, and its vast superiority, as a code of morality, to anything found among the native superstitions of the East, in the language of those Indians referred to by Dr Claudius Buchanan: “If you send us a missionary, send us one who has learned your ten commandments.”^[229] modern idolaters were thus taken with the Divine beauty and singular preciousness of these commandments, we know those could have no less reason to be so to whom they were first delivered; for the land of Egypt, out of which they had recently escaped, was as remarkable for the grossness of its superstition as for the superiority of its learning and civilisation. As far back as our information respecting it carries us,—at a period certainly more remote than that in which Israel sojourned within its borders,—the Egyptians appear to have been immersed in the deepest mire of idolatry and its kindred abominations; and on them, in an especial sense, was chargeable the guilt and folly of “having changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” “The innermost sanctuary of their temples,” says Clement of Alexandria, “is overhung with gilded tapestry; but let the priest remove the covering, and there appears a cat or a crocodile, or a domesticated serpent, wrapt in purple.” Worshipping the Deity thus under the image of even the lower creature-forms, the religion of Egypt must have been of an essentially grovelling tendency, and could scarcely fail to have carried along with it many foul excesses and pollutions. There are not wanting indications of this in Herodotus, and several allusions are also made to it in the Books of Moses. But some of the most profound inquirers into the religion of the ancients have recently shown, on evidence the most complete, that the worship of ancient Egypt was essentially of a bacchanalian character, full of lust and revelry; that its most frequented rites were accompanied with scenes of wantonness and impure indulgence; and that it sometimes gave rise to enormities not fit to be mentioned.^[230] ^[229]Essay on the Estab. of an Episcopal Church in India, p. 61. If

[230] Creuzer, Symbolik, i., p. 448, ss.; comp. also, Hengstenberg, Authentie, i., p. 118, ss.; Egypt and Books of Moses, p. 203, ss.

Such was the atmosphere in which the Israelites had lived during their abode in Egypt; and it was when fresh from such a region that the law of the ten commandments was proclaimed in their hearing, and given to be enshrined in the innermost recess of their sacred structure,—a law which unfolds the clearest views of God’s character and service—which denounces every form and species of idolatry as inconsistent with the spirituality of the Divine nature which enjoins the purest worship and the highest morality, and in its very form is a model of perfection and completeness. Wisdom of this kind Moses could least of all have learned from the Egyptians; nor could it have been his, unless it had descended to him from above.^[231]

^[231]See the subject again referred to at B. iii., c. 5. It is one of the few correct things which Tacitus states concerning the religion of the Jews, that they counted it profanity to make images in the likeness of man, and that they worshipped only one supreme, eternal, unchangeable, and everlasting God.—(Hist., v. 5) It would be difficult, however, to throw together a larger amount of ignorance and error in the same space, than is expressed in this and the preceding chapter, by Tacitus, respecting the religious customs and rites of the Jews.

1. This revelation of law is equally remarkable for the order and arrangement of its several parts, and for the roundness and completeness of its summary of moral obligation; in both respects a certain perfection belongs to it. As regards the former, there are general features which strike one at the first glance, and about which there can be no difference of opinion. This is the case especially with the relative place assigned in it to those things which have more immediate respect to God, and those which concern the rights and interests of one’s fellow-men. However the line of demarcation may be drawn between the two, there can be no doubt—for it stands upon the surface of the code—that the forms and manifestations of love to God occupy the first and most prominent place, while those which are expressive of love to man take a secondary and, in a sense, dependent rank. Religion was made the basis of morality—piety toward God the living root of good-will and integrity toward men; and on this great principle, that unless there were maintained a dutiful and proper regard to the great Head of the human family, it could not reasonably be expected that men would feel and act aright to the different members of the family. We have here, therefore, the true knowledge and love of God virtually proclaimed to be, what was so happily expressed by Augustine, the parent, in a sense, and guardian of all the virtues (mater quodammodo omnium custosque virtutum); or, as it is put by Josephus, “religion was not made a part of virtue, but other virtues were ordained to be parts of religion.”—(Apion., ii:17)

There may, no doubt, be a measure of love and fair dealing between man and man, where there is no spiritual acquaintance with God, and no principle of dutiful allegiance to Him. Were it not so, indeed, society in countries where the true religion is unknown would fall to pieces. But in such cases, the love is destitute of what might give it either the requisite stability or the proper spirit; it is not sustained by adequate views of men’s relationship to God, nor animated by the motives which are supplied by a consideration of their higher calling and destiny: hence it is necessarily defective, partial, irregular, in its manifestations. It was, therefore, in accordance with the truest wisdom, that the things which belong to God were, in this condensed summary of Divine requirement, exalted to the first place; and in farther attestation of their pre-eminent rank and importance, it is to the commands connected with this branch of duty chiefly, if not exclusively, that special reasons have been attached enforcing the obedience required. In all the later precepts there is a simple enunciation of the command. So far all are agreed; but in regard to the manner of making out the division between what is called the first and the second tables of the law, there is not the same general unanimity among theologians. Scripture itself gives no explicit deliverance on the subject. It frequently enough affirms the law to have been written on two tables; but it never intimates how many of the ten words were inscribed on the one, how many on the other; and while it more than once comprises the ten in two still more fundamental and comprehensive precepts—to love the Lord with all the heart, and one’s neighbour as one’s self (Deuteronomy 6:5; Leviticus 19:18; Matt. 19:37)—it leaves altogether undecided the question, how much of the decalogue is embraced in the one, and how much in the other. We cannot but think that there is a profound design in this reserve of Scripture, which it had been good for Christian divines to have inquired into, rather than to have insisted on sharply distinguishing, some in one way, some in another, what perhaps is incapable of a complete and formal separation. For in this revelation of law, while there is a diversity of parts, there is a pervading unity of principle; and, branching out, as it does, the whole sphere of obligation into two great lines of duty, it would yet have us to regard these as cognate and affiliated, rather than absolutely diverse the one merging into the other, and both to a certain extent mutually overlapping each other. Thus, the command enjoining the sacred observance of the weekly Sabbath, in its most obvious and direct aspect, bears on the duty one owes to God, and is in consequence, by all classes of theologians, associated with the first table of the law; while yet the rest to which it calls is inseparably bound up with the best interests of mankind; and the violation of it by the rich was sternly denounced by the prophets among other acts of hardship and oppression.—(Deuteronomy 5:15; Isaiah 58:13; Jeremiah 17:20-22) In His exposition of the sixth commandment, our Lord has given a striking illustration of the manner in which the love it demands toward a fellow-creature intertwines itself with the love which is due to God, and the service He requires of man.—(Matthew 5:23-24) So also the command to honour father and mother has points of affinity with both departments of duty, according as parents are contemplated in the light of Heaven’s representatives, clothed with a measure of supernal authority, or as standing merely in the highest rank of earthly relations. Philo, in his treatise on the decalogue, draws attention to this peculiarity, and represents the command as having its place on the confines of the two tables, because of the parental relationship appearing to partake partly of the Divine and partly of the human element. Formally, however, he assigns it to the first table; and makes the division of the ten to consist of two fives—the first terminating with the command to honour father and mother. Josephus follows exactly the same method, throwing the whole into two equal halves, and making the command to honour parents the closing member of the first five.—(Ant., iii., c. 6, § 6)

There can be no reasonable doubt that these ancient Jewish writers expressed in this matter the common belief of their countrymen; and the division of the decalogue into two fives, with an acknowledgment that the boundary line was not very broadly marked, or altogether free from dubiety, is the one which has the highest claim to antiquity. It has also the advantage of being the most natural and simple; for as the whole law is comprehended in ten, the number of completeness, and from its very nature falls into two grand divisions, we naturally think of two fives—each by itself the symbol of incompleteness, but, as related to each other, the component parts of a perfect whole—for the proper distribution of the commands. Other considerations come in aid of this conclusion: in particular, the circumstance that the fifth command is, like those preceding it, enforced by a reason which places it in immediate connection with the great ends of the covenant; and the sacredness attached by the Apostle Paul to the discharge of the duties enjoined in it, as being, on the part of the young, the showing of piety at home (1 Timothy 5:4),—a spirit characteristically different from that of brotherly love. And, indeed, the relation of a child to a parent is not strictly that of neighbour to neighbour. “It is through the parents that the creative power of God, on which all life depends, is communicated to the children; so that God, as the Creator of life, appears to the children primarily in the parents—the earthly divinities (diis terrestribus), as Grotius calls them. But since the relation between parents and children is the basis of all the divinely-constituted relations of human society, which involve stations of superiority and inferiority, since the names also of father and mother have been made to stretch over the whole natural circle (Genesis 45:8; Judges 5:7)—[and even the name of God, it might have been added, is sometimes given to the judges, who represented Him, Exodus 22:8; Exodus 22:28; Psalms 82:6]—it is certainly in the spirit of the law to explain this command, with Luther, in reference to the sphere of the civil life” (Baumgarten). Hence, also, we may most easily explain why this should be called the first commandment with promise (Ephesians 6:2), because it is the one in respect to which we have first to do with the authority of God, as appearing in those earthly representatives; and on which the greater stress is justly laid, since in them that authority is associated with so much of a winning and attractive nature, that if it fails to elicit from those placed under it a reverential and obedient spirit, much more may the same failure be expected when account has to be made only of the mysterious and dread majesty of Heaven.

These considerations, it seems to us, are sufficient to establish the propriety of this ancient division of the ten commandments into two halves; one which was acquiesced in by the two most learned of the fathers,—Origen (in his 8th Homily on Genesis), and Jerome (on Ephesians 6:2),—and became also the received opinion in the Greek Church. It is preferable to that which has so generally prevailed in the Reformed Church, and which so far concurs with the earlier view as to hold the command respecting parents to be the fifth in order, but differs in laying the chief stress upon the human element in the parental relation, and consequently assigning the fifth command to the second table of the law. The division then falls into four and six, and thereby loses sight of the significance of number in the two divisions, though making account of it in the totality, and, at the same time, overlooks the more distinctive peculiarities of the precept respecting the honouring of parents. But if, in comparison of this view, the other seems deserving of preference (though the difference between them, it must be owned, is not very material), much more is it so when compared with another view which received the sanction of Augustine, and from him has descended to the Romish, and in great part also to the Lutheran Church. According to it, the division falls into three and seven—the three, however, terminating with the fourth command, while the first and second are thrown into one; and the seven is made out by splitting the tenth into two, and placing the coveting of a man’s wife in a different category from the coveting of his house and other possessions. Augustine expressed his preference for this distribution primarily on the ground, that in the three directly pertaining to God he saw an indication of the mystery of the Trinity.—(Quaest. in Ex., § 71) This was evidently the consideration that chiefly weighed with him, although he also thought there was ground for coupling the prohibition against idol-worship with that against the acknowledgment of another God than Jehovah, and for distinguishing between concupiscence toward a neighbour’s wife, and concupiscence in respect to material possessions. Kurtz, along with not a few Lutherans of the present day, still adheres to this view, and very much also from regard to the sacred three and seven, which is thereby obtained.—(Hist, of Old Cov., ii., sec. 47, § 3) But in a grand objective revelation, any to numbers, except such as is quite natural and simple, would be entirely out of place; and the recondite considerations which are required here to discover and elevate into significance a three and a seven, betray the character of their origin: they might do for the speculations of the closet, but were greatly too far to seek for what was required in the fundamental document of a popular religion. Besides, the acknowledgment of one God is not by any means inconsistent with the worship of that God by idols—as, indeed, the history of the Old Testament renders manifest by the marked distinction it draws between the sin of Jeroboam, who corrupted the worship of Jehovah by idols, and the much greater sin of Ahab, who introduced the worship of strange gods: therefore, what are usually called the first and second commandments, are not to be identified; the one has respect to the object, the other to the mode, of worship. On the other hand, the concupiscence condemned in the tenth commandment is substantially one, whatever possession or property of a neighbour’s may be its more immediate object: to regard it when directed towards his wife as specifically different from what it is when directed to other objects, were virtually to identify it with what is forbidden in the seventh commandment. And then there is this fatal objection to the rending of the tenth into two, that it obliges us to discard the form of the precept as given in Exodus, and substitute that in Deuteronomy 5:21 as the more correct: for in this last alone does the wife, as an object of prohibition, stand first; while in Exodus 20:17, first the house is forbidden to be coveted, then the wife, afterwards man-servant, and whatever may belong to one’s neighbour. A theory which requires for its support either a corruption in the text of Exodus, of which there is no evidence, or the assertion of a higher claim in respect to originality for the form of the decalogue given in Deuteronomy as compared with that in Exodus, has manifestly but a poor foundation to stand upon.^[232]

^[232]It seems strange that any one should view the passage in Deuteronomy 5:6-21 in any other light than as a free rehearsal of the commands given as originally uttered in Exodus 20. The account itself professes to be nothing else than such a rehearsal; and, in connection with one of the commands, gives explicit intimation of this: “Honour thy father and thy mother, as the Lord thy God commanded thee.” The addition, also, at ver. 15, in connection with the fourth commandment, where the people are, as by a separate word of exhortation, called upon to remember that they had been bondmen in Egypt, and had been redeemed by the Lord, has all the appearance of an after-thought, thrown in at a later period, when Israel was farther removed from the era of redemption.

Holding then by the generally received view in the Reformed Church, that, in making out the ten commands of the law, the prohibition against idol-worship ranks independently of the first, and that the prohibition against concupiscence is not diverse, but one; holding, farther, that the simplest and most natural, as it is also the oldest, division of the whole, is into two fives,—though the division is not to be understood as very sharply drawn, or as involving anything like an abrupt and formal separation of the one portion from the other,—there is found in this summary of moral and religious obligation a beautiful order and progression in the precepts which compose it. In that part which has more immediate reference to God, it demands for Him the supreme love and homage of mankind—(1) in respect to His being, as the one living God; (2) to His worship, as, like Himself, spiritual, and abhorrent to the rites of idolatry; (3) to His name; (4) to His day of holy rest; (5) to His earthly representatives. Then, as the two last commands have already brought the duties of God’s service into contact with the interests of one’s fellow-men and the relations of social life, the Divine revelation now passes formally over to the things which directly concern the well-being of our neighbour, claiming for him what is due successively in regard to his life, his domestic happiness, his property, his good name in the world, his place in the feelings and affections of our heart. Nothing could be more orderly, and at the same time more compact.

2. But it is of more importance to note the character of the decalogue in regard to the revelation of duty contained in it, or the substance of its precepts. Does it prove itself here, on examination, to be indeed a comprehensive summary of all moral and religious duty; and that with reference to the heart as well as the outward behaviour? An extremely low estimate, in this respect, is formed of the ten commandments by Spencer and his school, as well as of the other portions of the law of Moses. Spencer himself smiles at the idea of all religious and moral obligation being contained here in its fundamental principles, and affirms that such an extent of meaning can be brought out of it only by forcing on its worth an import quite foreign to their proper sense. He can find nothing more in it than a few plain and disconnected precepts, aimed at the prohibition of idolatry and its natural effects.^[233] “In the Mosaic covenant,” says one, who here trod in the footsteps of Spencer, “God appeared chiefly as a temporal prince, and therefore gave laws intended rather to direct the outward conduct than to regulate the actings of the heart. A temporal monarch claims from his subjects only outward honour and obedience. God, therefore, acting in the Sinai covenant as King of the Jews, demanded from them no more.”^[234] What! the holy and righteous God stoop to form a mock covenant like this, and resort to such a wretched expedient to uphold His honour and authority! Could it possibly become Him to descend from heaven amid the awful manifestations of Divine power and glory, in order to proclaim and settle the terms of a covenant, the only aim of which was to draw around Him a set of formal attendants and crouching hypocrites—men of show and parade—the mere ghosts and shadows of obedient children! It is the worst part of an earthly monarch’s lot to be so often surrounded with creatures of this description; but to suppose that the living God, who from the spirituality of His nature must ever look mainly on the heart, and so far from seeking, must indignantly reject, any profession of obedience which does not flow from the wellspring of a loving spirit—to suppose that He should have been at pains to establish a covenant of blood for the purpose of securing such a worthless display,—betrays an astonishing misapprehension of the character of God, or the most shallow and unsatisfactory view of the whole transactions connected with the revelation of Moses.^[235] ^[233]De Legibus Heb., L,, i., c. 2.

[234] Theol. Dissertations by Dr John Erskine, p. 5, 37.

[235] It is strange that this notion, so unworthy of God, and so obviously inconsistent with the nature of the law itself, and the recorded facts of Israelitish history, still holds its ground among us. The shades of Spencer and Warburton still rest even upon many minds of vigorous thought. The covenant of law is with the utmost confidence, and with the tone of one who had made a sort of discovery in the matter, represented by Mr Johnstone, in his Israel after the Flesh, as a simply national covenant, having no other object than to maintain the national recognition of God, and no respect whatever to individuals.—(Ch. i) Mr Litton, in his Bampton Lecture, has, however, taken a more correct view, and brought out distinctly the spiritual element in the law. See especially Lect. III. The ten commandments express the spirit and essence of the whole economy, and only the first of them refers to the national acknowledgment of God. If that had been all they required, how could the Israelites in the wilderness have been treated as guilty of a breach of the covenant for simply failing to exercise faith in a particular word of God? Or how could our Lord charge the Scribes and Pharisees of His time with being condemned by their law, while they rigidly adhered to the acknowledgment of God? Besides, the law is not now, and never was intended, to be viewed as standing by itself. It was a mere appendage to the covenant of Abraham, and the revelations therewith connected. And if these were express on any point, it was, as we have shown in vol. 1st, on the necessity of personal faith and heart-holiness, to fulfil the calling of a son of Abraham. If the law did not require spiritual service, it must have been a retrogression, not an advance, in the revelation of God’s character.

Indeed, if no more had been required by God in His law than what these divines imagine, the commendations bestowed on it, and the injunctions given to study and weigh its precepts, as a masterpiece of Divine wisdom, could only be regarded as extravagant and bombastical. What, on such a supposition, could we make of the command laid upon Joshua to meditate in it day and night (Joshua 1:8); or of the celebration of its matchless excellence and worth by the Psalmist, as better than thousands of gold and silver (Psalms 119:72); or of his prayer, that his eyes might be opened to behold the wondrous things contained in it?—(Psalms 119:18) Such things clearly imply a latent depth of meaning, and a large compass of requirement in the law of Moses, more especially in that part of it which formed the very heart and centre of the whole—the decalogue. Nor would the low and shallow views respecting it, on which we have animadverted, ever have been propounded, if, as Calvin suggests,^[236] men properly considered the Lawgiver, by whose character that of the law must also be determined. An earthly monarch who is capable of taking cognisance only of the outward actions, must prescribe laws which have respect simply tothese. But, for a like reason, the King of heaven, who is Himself a Spirit, and a Spirit of infinite and unchanging holiness, can never prescribe a law but such as is in accordance with His own Divine nature; one, therefore, which pre-eminently aims at the regulation of the heart, and takes cognisance of the outward behaviour only in so far as this may be expressive of what is felt within. And it is justly inferred by Bähr from this view of God’s character even in regard to the ceremonial part of the law of Moses, that the outward observances of worship it imposed could not possibly be in themselves an end; that they must have been intended to be only an image and representation of internal and spiritual relations; and that the command not to make any likeness or graven image, is of itself an incontestable proof of the symbolical character of the Mosaic religion.^[237] ^[236]Institutes, B. ii., c. 8, § 6.

[237] Symbolik, i., p. 14.

Perhaps nothing has tended more to prevent the right perception of the spirituality and extent of the law of the ten commandments, than a mistaken view of the generally negative aspect they assume, as if their aim were more to impose restraints on the doing of what is evil, than to enforce the practice of what is pure and good. If this, however, were the right view of the matter, there manifestly would have been no exception to the negative form of the precepts; they would one and all have possessed the character simply of prohibitions. But the fourth and fifth have been made to run in the positive form; and one of these—the fourth—combines both together, as if on purpose to show, that along with the prohibition of the specified sins, each precept was to be understood as requiring the corresponding duties. In truth, this predominantly negative character is rather a testimony to their deep spiritual import, as confronting at every point the depravity and sinfulness of the human heart. The Israelites then, as professing believers now, admitted by divine grace into a covenant relation to God, and made heirs of His blessed inheritance, should have been disposed of themselves to love and serve God; they should not even have needed the stringent precepts and binding obligations of law to do so. But as a solemn proof and testimony how much the reverse was the case, the law was thrown chiefly into the prohibitory form: “Thou shalt not do this or that;” as much as to say, Thou art of thyself ready to do it this is the native bent of thy inclination but it must be restrained, and things of a contrary nature sought after and performed.

It is perhaps too much to say, with Hengstenberg, that the law was called the testimony (Exodus 25:16; Exodus 30:6, etc.), and the tables on which it was written, the tables of the testimony (Exodus 31:18; Exodus 34:29), simply on account of the revelation therein made of God’s judgment against man’s sin (Pent., ii., p. 600); for this was rather an incidental result, than the direct object of the law: yet it was a result which so inevitably took place, that the name could scarcely have been imposed without some reference to it. In one passage we even find the idea distinctly exhibited, though with reference to the book generally of the law, when Moses was commanded to have a copy of it placed beside the ark of the covenant, that it might be for a witness against Israel.—(Deuteronomy 31:26) The same, undoubtedly, was done in a pre-eminent degree by the two tables, which, as containing the essence of the whole legislation, were put within the ark. And their position there directly under the mercy-seat, where the blood of atonement was perpetually sprinkled, could signify nothing else than that the accusation which was virtually borne against Israel by the law of the covenant, required to be covered from the eye of Heaven by the propitiatory above it. In itself, however, the law was simply the revelation of God’s holiness, with its circle of demands upon the faith, love, and obedience of His people: it testified of what was in His heart as the invisible Head of the kingdom, in respect to the character and conduct of those who should be its members. But the testimony it thus delivered for Him necessarily involved a testimony against them, because of the innate tendency to corruption which existed in their bosoms. And this incidental testimony against the sinfulness of the people,—which is, at the same time, an evidence of the law’s inherent spirituality and goodness,—has its reflection in the very form of the precepts in which it is contained. The more closely we examine these precepts themselves, the more clearly do we perceive their spiritual and comprehensive character. That they recognise love as the root of all obedience, and hatred as inseparable from transgression, is plainly intimated in the description given of the doers and transgressors of the law in the second commandment; the latter being characterized as “those that hate God,” and the former as “those that love Him and keep His commandments.” And that the love required was no slight and superficial feeling, such as might readily give manifestation of itself in a few external acts of homage,—that, on the contrary, it embraced the entire field of man’s spiritual agency, and bore respect alike to his thoughts, words, and deeds,—is manifest from the following analysis and explanation of the second table, given by Hengstenberg:^[238] “Thou shalt not injure thy neighbor—1. In deed, and that (1) not in regard to his life, (2) not in regard to his dearest property, his wife, (3) not in regard to his property generally [in other words, in regard to his person, his family, or his property]. 2. In word (‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour’). 3. In thought (‘Thou shalt not covet’). While it may be admitted, however, that the prohibition of lust or covetousness has an internal character, it may still with some plausibility be maintained, that on this very account the preceding commands are to be taken externally—that we are not in them to go beyond the word and deed—that the mere outward acts, for example, of murder and adultery, are prohibited, so that the four first precepts of the second table may be satisfied without any in ward feeling of holiness, this being required only in the last. There is certainly some degree of truth in this remark. That a special prohibition of sinful lust should follow the rest, shows that what had been said in reference to word and deed primarily has respect to these. Still it must not be overlooked, on the other hand, that precisely through the succession of deed, word, and thought, the deed and word are stript of their merely outward character, and referred back to their root in the mind, are marked simply as the end of a process, the commencement of which is to be sought in the heart. If this is duly considered, it will appear, that what primarily refers only to word and deed, carried at the same time an indirect reference to the emotions of the heart. Thus, the only way to fulfil the command, Thou shalt not kill, is to have the root extirpated from the heart, out of which murder springs. Where that is not done, the command is not fully complied with, even though no outward murder is committed. For this must then be dependent upon circumstances which lie beyond the circle of man’s proper agency.”

[238] Authentie, ii., p. 600. Substantially the same analysis was made by Thomas Aquinas, in a short but very clear quotation given by Hengstenberg from the Summa i 2, q. 100, § 5.

There is no less depth and comprehensiveness in the first table, as the same learned writer has remarked; and a similar regard is had in it to thought, word, and deed, only in the reverse order, and lying somewhat less upon the surface. The fourth and fifth precepts demand the due honouring of God in deed; the third in word; and the two first, pointing to His sole God head and absolute spirituality, require for Himself personally, and for His worship, that place in the heart to which they are entitled. Very striking in this respect is the announcement in the second commandment, of a visitation of evil upon those that hate God, and an extension of mercy to thousands that love Him. As much as to say, It is the heart of love I require; and if ever My worship is corrupted by the introduction of images, it is only to be accounted for by the working of hatred instead of love in the heart. So that the heart may truly be called the alpha and the omega of this wonderful revelation of law: it stands prominently forth at both ends; and had no inspired commentary been given on the full import of the ten words, looking merely to these words themselves, we cannot but perceive that they stretch their demands over the whole range of man’s active operations, and can only be fulfilled by the constant and uninterrupted exercise of love to God and man, in the various regions of the heart, the conversation, and the conduct.

We have commentaries, however, both in the Old and the New Testament Scriptures, upon the law of the ten commandments, and such as plainly confirm what has been said of its perfection and completeness as a rule of duty. With manifest reference to the second table, and with the view of expressing in one brief sentence the essence of its meaning, Moses had said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18); and in like manner regarding the first table, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”—(Deuteronomy 6:5) It is against all reason to suppose, that these precepts should require more than what was required in those which formed the very groundwork and heart of the whole Mosaic legislation; and we have the express authority of our Lord for holding, that the whole law, as well as the prophets, hung upon them.—(Matthew 22:40) Nor only so, but, as already noticed, in the Sermon on the Mount, He has Himself given us an insight into the wide reach and deep spiritual meaning of the ten commandments, clearing them from the false and superficial glosses of the carnal Pharisees. That this is the true character and design of that portion of our Lord’s discourse, that it was intended to bring distinctly out the full import of the old, and not to introduce any new and higher legislation, is now generally admitted by at least the sounder portion of exegetical writers.^[239] And, to mention no more, the Apostle Paul, referring to the law of the ten commandments, calls it “spiritual,” “holy, just, and good,”—represents it as the grand instrument in the hands of the Spirit for convincing of sin, and declares the only fulfilment of it to be perfect love.—(Romans 7:7-14; Romans 13:10)

[239] Tholuck, indeed, as usual on such points, holds a sort of middle opinion here in his Comm. on the Sermon on the Mount, although he is substantially of the opinion expressed above, and opposed to the view of Catholic, Socinian, and Arninian writers. See, however, Baumgarten, Doc. Christi de Lege Mosaica in Oratione Mon., with whom also Hengstenberg concurs, loc. cit.

We trust enough has been said to establish the claim of the law of the ten commandments to be regarded in the light in which it has commonly been viewed by evangelical divines of this country, as a brief but comprehensive summary of all religious and moral duty. And, as a necessary consequence, the two grand rules with which they have been wont to enter on the exposition of the decalogue are fully justified. These rules are—1. That the same precept which forbids the external acts of sin, forbids likewise the inward desires and motions of sin in the heart; as also, that the precept which commands the external acts of duty, requires at the same time the inward feelings and principles of holiness, of which the external acts could only be the fitting expression. 2. That the negative commands include in them the injunction of the contrary duties, and the positive commands the prohibition of the contrary sins, so that in each there is something required as well as forbidden. Nor is the language too strong, if rightly understood, which has often been applied to this law, that it is a kind of transcript of God’s own pure and righteous character,—i.e., a faithful and exact representation of that spiritual excellence which eternally belongs to Himself, and which He must eternally require of His accountable creatures. The idea which such language conveys is undoubtedly correct, if understood in reference to the great principles of truth and holiness embodied in the precepts, though it can be but partially true if regard is had to the formal acts in which those principles were to find their prescribed manifestation; for the actual operation of the principles had of necessity to be ordered in suitable adaptation to men’s condition upon earth, to which, as there belong relations, so also there are relative duties, not only different from anything with which God Himself has properly to do, but different even from what His people shall have to discharge in a coming eternity. There, such precepts as the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, or the eighth, as to the formal acts they prohibit or require, shall manifestly have lost their adaptation. And of the whole law we may affirm, that the precise form it has assumed, or the mould into which it has been cast, is such as fitly suits it only to the circumstances of the present life. But the love to God and man, which constitutes its all-pervading element, and for which the several precepts only indicate the particular ways and channels wherein it should flow—this love man is indispensably bound in all times and circumstances to cherish in his heart, and manifest in his conduct. For the God in whom he lives, and moves, and has his being, is love; and as the duty and perfection of the creature is to bear the image of the Creator, so to love as He loves—Himself first and supremely, and His offspring in Him and for Him must ever be the bounden obligation and highest end of those whom He calls His children.

Section 2.—The Law Continued—Apparent Exceptions To Its Perfection And Completeness As The Permanent And Universal Standard Of Religious And Moral Obligation—Its References To The Special Circumstances Of The Israelites, And Representation Of God As Jealous.

IT is necessary to pause here for a little, and enter into some examination of the objections which have been raised out of the ten commandments themselves, against the character of perfection and completeness which we have sought to establish for them. For if any doubt should remain on this point, it will most materially interfere with and mar the line of argument we mean afterwards to pursue, and the views we have to propound in connection with this revelation of law to Israel. By a certain class of writers, we are met at the very threshold with a species of objection which they seem to regard as perfectly conclusive against its general completeness and universal obligation. For it contains special and distinct references to the Israelites as a people. The whole is prefaced with the declaration, “I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt,” while the fifth commandment embodies in it the promise of the land of Canaan as their peculiar inheritance. And this, we are told, makes it clear as noon-day, that the decalogue was not given as a revelation of God’s will to mankind at large, but was simply and exclusively intended for the Israelites binding, indeed, on them so long as the peculiar polity lasted under which they were placed, but also ceasing as an obligatory rule of conduct when that was abolished.^[240] But, on this ground, the Gospel itself will be found scarcely less imperfect, and we might almost at every step question the fitness or obligation of its precepts in respect to men in general. For it carries throughout a reference to existing circumstances; and by much the fullest development of its principles and duties,—that, namely, contained in the epistles, was given directly and avowedly to particular persons and churches, with the primary design of instructing them as to the things they were respectively to believe or do. So that, if the specialties found in the law of the two tables were sufficient to exempt men now from its obligation, or to deprive it at any time of an ecumenical value, most of the revelations of the Gospel might, for the same reason, be shorn of their virtue; and in both alike, men would be entitled to pick and choose for themselves, what they were to regard as of temporary moment, and what of perpetual obligation.

[240] Bialloblotzky, de Legis Mos. abrogatione, p. 131. Archb. Whately also repeats the same objection, in his Essay on the Abolition of the Law, p. 186—(Second Series of Essays) The view of both these authors, which is radically the same, regarding the abolition of the law under the Christian economy, we shall have occasion to notice afterwards. The affirmation of the Archbishop, at p. 191, that “the Gospel requires a morality in many respects higher and more perfect in itself than the law, and places morality on higher grounds,” has already been met in the preceding section. We admit, of course, that the Gospel contains far higher exemplifications of the morality enjoined in the law than are to be found in the Old Testament, and presents far higher motives for exercising it; but that is a different thing from maintaining that this morality itself is higher, or essentially more perfect. But were not this egregious trifling? The objection overlooks one of the most distinctive features—and, indeed, one of the greatest excellences—of God’s revelation, which at no period was given in the form of abstract delineations of truth and duty, but has ever developed itself in immediate connection with the circumstances of individuals and the leadings of Providence. From first to last it comes forth entwined with the characters and events of history. Not a little of it is written in the transactions themselves of past time, which are expressly declared to have been “written for our learning.” And it is equally true of the law and the Gospel, that the historical lines with which they are interwoven, while serving to increase their interest and enhance their didactic value, by no means detract from their general bearing, or interfere with their binding obligation. The ground of this lies in the unchangeableness of God’s character, which may be said to generalize all that is particular in His revelation, and impart a lasting efficacy to what was but occasional in its origin. Without variableness or shadow of turning in Himself, He cannot have a word for one, and a different word for another. And unless the things spoken and required were so manifestly peculiar as to be applicable only to the individuals to whom they were first addressed, or from their very nature possessed a merely temporary significance, we must hold them to be the revelation of God’s mind and will for all persons and all times. That the Lord uttered this law to Israel in the character of their Redeemer, and imposed it on them as the heirs of His inheritance, made no alteration in its own inherent nature; neither contracted nor enlarged the range of its obligation; only established its claim on their observance by considerations peculiarly fitted to move and influence their minds. Christ’s enforcing upon His disciples the lesson of humility, by His own condescension in stooping to wash their feet, or St Paul’s entreating his Gentile converts to walk worthy of their vocation, by the thought of his being, for their sakes, the prisoner of the Lord, are not materially different. The special considerations, coupled in either case alike with the precept enjoined, leave perfectly untouched the ground of the obligation or the rule of duty. Their proper and legitimate effect was only to win obedience, or, failing that, to aggravate transgression. And when the things required are such as those enjoined in the ten commandments,—things growing out of the settled relations in which men stand to God and to each other,—the obligation to obey is universal and permanent, whether or not there be any considerations of the kind in question tending to render obedience more imperative, or transgression more heinous. But what if some of the considerations employed to enforce the observance of the duties enjoined, involve views of the Divine character and government partial and defective, at variance with the principles of the Gospel, and repulsive even to enlightened reason? Can that really have been meant to be of standing force and efficacy as a revelation of duty, which embodies in it such elements of imperfection? Such is the form the objection takes in the hands of another large class of objectors, who think they find matter of the kind referred to in the declarations attached to the second commandment. The view there given of God as a jealous being, and of the manner in which His jealousy was to appear, has by some been represented as so peculiarly Jewish, by others as so flagrantly obnoxious to right principle, that they cannot tolerate the idea of the decalogue being considered as a perfect revelation of the mind and will of God. The subject has long afforded a favourite ground of railing accusation to avowed infidels and rationalist divines; and Spinosa could not think of anything in Scripture more clearly and manifestly repugnant to reason, than that the attribute of jealousy was ascribed to God in the decalogue itself. The treatment which this article in the decalogue has met with, is quite a specimen of the shallow and superficial character of infidelity. It proceeds on the supposition that jealousy, when ascribed to God, must carry precisely the same meaning, and be understood to indicate the same affections, as when spoken of men. Considered as a disposition in man, it is commonly indicative of something sickly and distempered. But as every affection of the human mind must, when referred to God, be understood with such limitations as the infinite disparity between the Divine and human natures renders necessary, it might be no difficult matter to modify the common notion of jealousy, so far as to render it perfectly compatible with the other representations given of God as absolutely pure and good. But even this is scarcely necessary; for every scholar knows that the word in the original is by no means restricted to what is distinctively meant by jealousy, and that the radical and proper idea, unless otherwise determined by the context, has respect merely to the zeal or ardour with which any one is disposed to vindicate his own rights. Applied to God, it simply presents Him to our view as the one Supreme Jehovah, who as such claims—cannot indeed but claim—He were not the One, Eternal God, but an idol, if He did not claim—the undivided love and homage of His creatures, and who, consequently, must resist with holy zeal and indignation every attempt to deprive Him of what is so peculiarly His own. It is only to give vividness to this idea, by investing it with the properties of an earthly relation, that the Divine affection is so often presented under the special form of jealousy. It arises, as Calvin has remarked, from God’s condescending to assume toward His people the character of a husband, in which respect He cannot bear a partner. “As He performs to us all the offices of a true and faithful husband, so He stipulates for love and conjugal chastity from us. Hence, when He rebukes the Jews for their apostasy, He complains that they have cast off chastity, and polluted themselves with adultery. Therefore, as the purer and chaster the husband is, the more grievously is he offended when he sees his wife inclining to a rival; so the Lord, who has betrothed us to Himself in truth, declares that He burns with the hottest jealousy, whenever, neglecting the purity of His holy marriage, we defile ourselves with abominable lusts; and especially when the worship of His Deity, which ought to have been most carefully kept unimpaired, is transferred to another, or adulterated with some superstition; since, in this way, we not only violate our plighted troth, but defile the nuptial couch, by giving access to adulterers.”^[241] ^[241]Inst., B. 2., c. 8, § 18.

Allowing, however, that the notion of jealousy, when thus explained, is a righteous and necessary attribute of Jehovah, does not the objection hold, at least in regard to the particular form of its manifestation mentioned in the second commandment? If it becomes God to be jealous, yet is it not to make His jealousy interfere with His justice, when He declares His purpose to visit the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation? So one might judge, if looking not merely to the attacks of infidels, but to the feeble and unsatisfactory attempts which have too often been made to explain the declaration by Christian divines. Grotius, for example, resolves it simply into the absolute sovereignty of God, who has a right to do what He will with His own.^[242] Warburton represents it as a temporary expedient to supply the lack of a future state of reward and punishment under the law; and in his usual way, contends that no otherwise could the principle be vindicated, and the several Scriptures referring to it harmonized.^[243] Michaelis,^[244] Paley,^[245] and a host besides, while they also regard it as, to a great extent, a temporary arrangement, rest their defence of it mainly on the ground of its having to do only with temporal evils, and in no respect reaching to men’s spiritual and eternal interests. It is fatal to all these attempts at explanation, that none of them fairly grapples with the visitation of evil threatened as a punishment; for, viewed in this light, which is unquestionably the scriptural one, such attempts are manifestly nothing more than mere shifts and evasions of the point at issue. When resolved into the sovereignty of God, it still remains to be asked, whether such an exercise of His sovereignty is consistent with those ideas of immutable justice which are implanted in the human breast. When viewed as a temporary expedient to supply a want which, to say the least, might, if real, have admitted of a very simple remedy, the question still waits for solution, whether the expedient itself was in proper accordance with the righteous principles which should regulate every government, whether human or divine. And when it is affirmed, that the penalties denounced in the threatening were only temporal, the reply surely is competent, Why might not God do in eternity what He does in time? Or, if the principle on which the punishment proceeds be not in all respects justifiable, how could it be acted on by God temporarily, any more than eternally? Is it consistent with the notion of a God of infinite rectitude, that He should do on a small scale what it would be impious to conceive Him doing on a large one?

[242] De Jure Belli et Pacis, 2., p. 593.

[243] Divine Legation, B. v., sec. 5.

[244] Laws of Moses.

[245] Sermons. The fundamental error in the false explanations referred to, lies in the supposition of the children, who are to suffer, being in a different state morally from that of their parents—innocent children bearing the chastisement due to the transgressions of their wicked parents. But the words of the threatening purposely guard against such an idea, by describing the third and fourth generation, on whom the visitation of evil was to fall, as of those that hate God; just as, on the other hand, the mercy which was pledged to thousands was promised as the dowry of those that love Him. Such children alone are here concerned, who, in the language of Calvin, “imitate the impiety of their progenitors!” Indeed, Augustine has substantially expressed the right principle of interpretation on the subject, though he has sometimes failed in making the proper application of it, as when he says: “But the carnal generation also of the people of God belonging to the Old Testament, binds the sons to the sins oftheir parents; but the spiritual generation, as it has changed the inheritance, so also the threatenings of punishment, and the promises of reward.”^[246] And still more distinctly in his commentary on Ps. 114:14, where he explains the visiting of the “iniquities of the fathers upon them that hate Me,” by saying, “that is, as their parents hated Me; so that, just as the imitation of the good secures that even one’s own sins are blotted out, so the imitation of the bad renders one obnoxious to the deserved punishment, not only of one’s own sins, but also of the sins of those whose ways have been followed.” In short, the Lord contemplates the existence among His professing worshippers of two entirely different kinds of generations: the one haters of God, and manifesting their hatred by depraving His worship, and pursuing courses of transgression; the other lovers of God, and manifesting their love by stedfastly adhering in all dutiful obedience to the way of His holy commandments. To these last, though they should extend to thousands of generations, He would show His mercy, causing it to flow on from age to age in a perennial stream of blessing. But as He is the righteous God, to whom vengeance as well as mercy belongs, the free outpouring of His beneficence upon these, could not prevent or prejudice the execution of His justice upon that other class, who were entirely of a different spirit, and merited quite opposite treatment. It is an unwelcome subject, indeed; the merciful and gracious God has no delight in anticipating the day of evil, even for His must erring and wayward children. He shrinks, as it were, from contemplating the possibility of thousands being in this condition, and will not suffer Himself to make mention of more than a third or a fourth generation rendering themselves the objects of His just displeasure. But still the wholesome truth must be declared, and the seasonable warning uttered. If men were determined to rebel against His authority, He could not leave Himself without a witness, not even in regard to the first race of transgressors, that He hated their iniquities, and must take vengeance of their inventions. But if, notwithstanding, the children embraced the sinfulness of their parents, with the manifest seal of Heaven’s displeasure on it, as their iniquity would be more aggravated, so its punishment should become more severe; the descending and entailed curse would deepen as it flowed on, increasing with every increase of depravity and corruption, till, the measure of iniquity being filled up, the wrath should fall on them to the uttermost.

[246] Contra Julianum Polagianutu, Lib. vi., § 82. That this is the aspect of the Divine character and government which the declaration in the second commandment was meant to exhibit, is evident alone from the glowing delineations of mercy and goodness with which the visitation of evil upon the children of disobedient parents is here and in other places coupled.^[247] But it is confirmed beyond all doubt by two distinct lines of reflection, and, first, by the facts of Israelitish history. These fully confirm the principle of God’s government as now expounded, but give no countenance to the idea of a punishment being inflicted on the innocent for the guilty. However sinful one individual or one generation might be, yet if the next in descent heartily turned to the Lord, they were sure of being received to pardon and blessing. We are furnished with a striking instance of this in the 14th chapter of Numbers, where we find Moses pleading for the pardon of Israel’s transgressions on the very ground of that revelation of the Divine name or character in Exodus 34:6-7, which precisely, as in the second commandment, combines the most touching representation of the Divine mercy with the threat to visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children. It never occurred to Moses that this threat stood at all in the way of their obtaining a complete forgiveness. He found, indeed, that the Lord had determined to visit upon that generation their iniquities, so far as to exclude them from the land of Canaan, but without in the least marring the better prospects of their children, who had learned to hate the deeds of their fathers. And when, indeed, was it otherwise? Is it not one of the most striking features in the whole history of ancient Israel, that, so far from suffering for the sins of former generations, they did not suffer even for their own when they truly repented, but were immediately visited with favour and blessing? And, on the other hand, how constantly do we find the Divine judgments increasing in severity when successive generations hardened themselves in their evil courses? Nor did it rarely happen that the series of retributions reached their last issues by the third or fourth generation. It was so in particular with those who were put upon a course of special dealing—such as the house of Jeroboam, of Jehu, of Eli, etc.

[247] Compare besides Exodus 34:5-6; Numbers 14:18; Psalms 103:8-9.

Another source of confirmation to the view now presented we find in the explanations given concerning it in the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. These prophets lived at the time when the descending curse had utterly failed, so far as it had gone, to turn the children from the sinful courses of their fathers, and was fast running to a fatal termination. But the infatuated people being not less distinguished for self-righteous pride than for their obstinate perseverance in wickedness, they were constantly complaining, as stroke after stroke fell upon them, that they were made unjustly to bear the sins of their fathers. Anticipating our modern infidels, they charged God with injustice and inequality in His ways of dealing, instead of turning their eye inward, as they should have done, upon their own unrighteousness, and forsaking it for the way of peace. The Ezekiel 18:1-32 chapter of Ezekiel contains a lengthened expostulation with these stout-hearted offenders, in the course of which he utterly disclaims the interpretation they put upon the word and providence of God, and assures them, that if they would only turn from their evil doings, they should not have to suffer either for their own or their fathers guilt. And Jeremiah, in his Jeremiah 31:1-40 chapter, speaking of the new covenant, and of the blessed renovation it would accomplish on those who should be partakers of its grace, foretells that there would be an end of such foolish and wicked charges upon God for the inequity of His ways of dealing; for such an increased measure of the Spirit would be given, such an inward conformity to His laws would be produced, that His dealing with transgressors would in a manner cease—His ways would be all acquiesced in as holy, just, and good.

Section 3.—The Law Continued—Further Exceptions—The Weekly Sabbath.

OBJECTIONS have been raised against the decalogue as a complete and permanent summary of duty, from the nature of its requirements, as well as from the incidental considerations by which it is enforced. It is only, however, in reference to the fourth commandment, the law of the Sabbath, that any objection in this respect is made. The character of universal and permanent obligation, it is argued, which we would ascribe to the decalogue, cannot properly belong to it, since one of its precepts enjoins the observance of a merely ceremonial institution—an institution strictly and rigorously binding on the Jews, but, like other ceremonial and shadowy institutions, done away in Christ. It would be impossible to enumerate the authors, ancient and modern, who in one form or another have adopted this view. There can be no question that they embrace a very large proportion of the more learned and eminent divines of the Christian Church, from the fathers to the present time. Much diversity of opinion, however, prevails among those who agree in the same general view, as to the extent to which the law of the Sabbath was ceremonial, and in what sense the obligation to observe it lies upon the followers of Jesus. In the judgment of some, the distinction of days is entirely abolished as a Divine arrangement, and is no further obligatory upon the conscience, than as it may be sanctioned by competent ecclesiastical authority for the purposes of social order and religious improvement. By others, the obligation is held to involve the duty of setting apart an adequate portion of time for the due celebration of Divine worship,—the greater part leaving that portion of time quite indefinite, while some would insist upon its being at least equal to what was appointed under the law, or possibly even more. Finally, there are still others, who consider the ceremonial and shadowy part of the institution to have more peculiarly stood in the observance of precisely the seventh day of the week as a day of sacred rest, and who conceive the obligation still in force, as requiring another whole day to be consecrated to religious exercises.

It would require a separate treatise, rather than a single chapter, to take up separately such manifold subdivisions of opinion, and investigate the grounds of each. We must for the present view the subject in its general bearings, and endeavour to have some leading principles ascertained and fixed. In doing this, we might press at the outset the consideration of this law being one of those engraved upon tables of stone, as a proof that it, equally with the rest, possessed a peculiarly important and durable character. For the argument is by no means disposed of, as we formerly remarked, by the supposition of Bähr and others, that the ceremonial as well as the other precepts of the law were represented in the ten commandments; and still less by the assertion of Paley, that little regard was practically paid in the books of Moses to the distinction between matters of a ceremonial and moral, of a temporary and perpetual kind. It is easy to multiply assertions and suppositions of such a nature; but the fact is still to be accounted for, why the law of the Sabbath should have been deemed of such paramount importance, as to have found a place among those which were “written as with a pen in the rock for ever?” Or why, if in reality nothing more than a ceremonial and shadowy institute, this, in particular, should have been chosen to represent all of a like kind? Why not rather, as the whole genius of the economy might have led us in such a case to expect, should the precept have been one respecting the observance of the great annual feasts, or a faithful compliance with the sacrificial services?^[248] It is impossible to answer these questions satisfactorily, or to show any valid reason for the introduction of the Sabbath into the law of the two tables, on the supposition of its possessing only a ceremonial character. But we shall not press this argument more fully, or endeavour to explain the futility of the reasons by which it is met, as in itself it is rather a strong presumption than a conclusive evidence of the permanent obligation of the fourth command.

[248] The Catholics have felt the force of this in reference to their own Church, which, like the Jewish, deals so much in ceremonies, and therefore have sometimes in their catechism presented the fourth commandment thus: Remember the festivals, to keep them holy.

It deserves more notice, however, than it usually receives in this point of view, and should alone be almost held conclusive, that the ground on which the obligation to keep the Sabbath is based in the command, is the most universal in its bearing that could possibly be conceived. “Thou shalt remember the Sabbath-day, to keep it holy; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.” There is manifestly nothing Jewish here; nothing connected with individual interests or even national history. The grand fact out of which the precept is made to grow, is of equal significance to the whole world; and why should not the precept be the same, of which it forms the basis? God’s method of procedure in creating the visible heavens and earth, produced as the formal reason for instituting a distinctive, temporary Jewish ordinance! Could it be possible to conceive a more “lame and impotent conclusion?” And this, too, in the most compact piece of legislation in existence! It seems, indeed, as if God, in the appointment of this law, had taken special precautions against the attempts which He foresaw would be made to get rid of the institution, and that on this account He laid its foundations first in the original framework and constitution of nature. The law as a whole, and certain also of its precepts, He was pleased to enforce by considerations drawn from His dealings toward Israel, and the peculiar relations which He now held to them. But when He comes to impose the obligation of the Sabbath, He rises far beyond any consideration of a special kind, or any passing event of history. He ascends to primeval time, and, standing as on the platform of the newly created world, dates from thence the commencement and the ordination of a perpetually recurring day of rest. Since the Lord has thus honoured the fourth commandment above the others, by laying for it a foundation so singularly broad and deep, is it yet to be held in its obligation and import the narrowest of them all? Shall this, strange to think, be the only one which did nut utter a voice for all times and all generations? How much more reasonable is the conclusion of Calvin, who in this expressed substantially the opinion of all the more eminent reformers: “Unquestionably God assumed to Himself the seventh day, and consecrated it when He finished the creation of the world, that He might keep His worshippers entirely free from all other cares, while they were employed in meditating on the beauty, excellence, and splendour of His works. It is not proper, indeed, to allow any period to elapse, without our attentively considering the wisdom, power, justice, and goodness of God, as displayed in the admirable workmanship and government of the world. But because our minds are unstable, and are thence liable to wander and be distracted, God in His own mercy, consulting our infirmities, sets apart one day from the rest, and commands it to be kept free from all earthly cares and employments, lest anything should interrupt that holy exercise.... In this respect the necessity of a Sabbath is common to us with the people of old, that we may be free on one day (of the week), and so may be better prepared both for learning and for giving testimony to our faith.”^[249]

^[249]Comm. on Exodus 20:11. The same view is taken in his notes on Genesis 2:3 : “God, therefore, first rested, then He blessed that rest, that it might be sacred among men through all coming ages. He consecrated each seventh day to rest, that His own example might continually serve as a rule,” etc. To the same effect, Luther on that passage, who holds, that “if Adam had continued in innocence, he would yet have kept the seventh day sacred;” and concludes, “Therefore the Sabbath was, from the beginning of the world, appointed to the worship of God.” We have already treated of this branch of the subject in vol. i., and need not go farther into it at present. It is proper to state, however, that the leading divines of the Reformation, and the immediately subsequent period, were of one mind regarding the appointment of a primeval Sabbath. The idea, that the Sabbath was first given to the Israelites in the wilderness, and that the words in Genesis 2 only proleptically refer to that future circumstance, is an after-thought, originating in the fond conceit of some Jewish Rabbins, who sought thereby to magnify their nation, and was adopted only by such Christian divines as had already made up their minds on the temporary obligation of the Sabbath. But then it is argued, that whatever may have been the reason for admitting the law of the Sabbath into the ten commandments, and engraving it on the tables of stone, it still is in its own nature different from all the rest. They are moral, and because moral, of universal force and obligation; while this is ceremonial, owing its existence to positive enactment, and therefore binding only so far as the enactment itself might be extended. The duties enjoined in the former are founded in the nature of things, and the essential relations in which men stand to God or to their fellow-men: hence they do not depend on any positive enactment, but are co-extensive in their obligation with reason and conscience. But the law of the Sabbath, prescribing one day in seven to be a day of sacred rest, has its foundation simply in the authoritative appointment of God, and hence, unlike the rest, is not fixed and universal, but special and mutable.

There is unquestionably an element of truth in this, but the application made of it in the present instance is unwarranted and fallacious. It is true that the Sabbath is a positive institution, though intimately connected with God’s work in creation; and apart from His high command, it could not have been ascertained by the light of reason, that one entire day should at regular intervals be consecrated for bodily and spiritual rest, and especially that one in seven was the proper period to be fixed upon. In this respect we can easily recognise a distinction between the law of the Sabbath, and the laws which prohibit such crimes as lying, theft, or murder. But it does not therefore follow, that the Sabbath is in such a sense a positive, as to be a merely partial, temporary, ceremonial institution, and, like others of this description, done away in Christ. For a law may be positive in its origin, and yet neither local nor transitory in its destination; it may be positive in its origin, and yet equally needed and designed for all nations and ages of the world. For of what nature, we ask, is the institution of marriage? The seventh commandment bears respect to that institution, and is thrown as a sacred fence around its sanctity. But is not marriage in its origin a positive institution? Has it any other foundation than the original act of God in making one man and one woman, and positively ordaining that the man should cleave to the woman, and the two be one flesh?^[250] Wherever this is not recognised, as it is not, in part at least, in Mahommedan and heathen lands, and by certain infidels of the baser sort in Christendom, there also the moral and binding obligation of the ordinance is disowned. But can any humble Christian disown it? Would he not indignantly reject the thought of its being only a temporary ordinance, because standing, as to its immediate origin, in God’s method of creation, and the natural obligations growing out of it? Or does he feel himself warranted to assume, that because, after Christ’s appearing, the marriage-union was treated as an emblem of Christ’s union to the Church, the literal ordinance is thereby changed or impaired? Assuredly not. And why should another course be taken with the Sabbath? This too, in its origin, is a positive institution, and was also, it may be, from the first designed to serve as an emblem of spiritual things—an emblem of the blessed rest which man was called to enjoy in God. But in both respects it stands most nearly on a footing with the ordinance of marriage: both alike owed their institution to the original act and appointment of God; both also took their commencement at the birth of time—in a world unfallen, when, as there was no need for the antitypes of redemption, so no ceremonial types or shadows of these could properly have a place; and both are destined to last till the songs of the redeemed shall have ushered in the glories of a world restored.

[250] Genesis 2:23-24. This has a great deal more the look of a proleptical statement than what is written at the beginning of the chapter about the Sabbath, for it speaks of leaving father and mother, while still Adam and Eve alone existed. Yet our Lord regards it as a statement fairly and naturally drawn from the facts of creation, and as applicable to the earlier as to the later periods of the world’s history.—(Matthew 19:4-5) The distinction, we apprehend, is often too broadly drawn, in discussions on this subject, between the positive and the moral; as if the two belonged to entirely different regions, and but incidentally touched upon each other; as if also the strictly moral part of the world’s machinery were in itself so complete and in dependent, that its movements might proceed of themselves, in a course of lofty isolation from all positive enactments and institutions. This was not the case even in paradise, and much less could it be so afterwards. A certain amount of what is positive in appointment, is absolutely necessary to settle the relations in connection with which the moral sentiments are to work and develop themselves. The banks which confine and regulate the current of a river, are not less essential to its existence than the waters that flow within them; for the one mark out and fix the channel which keeps the other in their course. And, in like manner, the moral feelings and affections of our nature must have something outward and positive, determining the kind of landmarks which they are to observe, and the channels through which they are to flow. There may, no doubt, be many things of this nature at different times appointed by God that are variable and temporary, to suit the present condition of His Church and the immediate ends He has in view. But there may also be some coeval with the existence of the world, founded in the very nature and constitution of things, so essential and necessary, that the love which is the fulfilment of all obligation cannot operate stedfastly or beneficially without them. The real question, then, in regard to the Sabbath, is, whether such love can exist in the heart, without disposing it to observe the rest there enjoined? Is not the present constitution of nature such as to render this necessary for securing the purposes which God contemplated in creation? Could mankind, as one great family, properly thrive and prosper even in their lower interests, as we may suppose their beneficent Creator intended, without such a day of rest perpetually coming round to refresh their wearied natures? Could they otherwise command sufficient time, amid the busy cares and occupations of life, to mind the higher interests of themselves and their households? Without such a salutary monitor ever and anon returning, and bringing with it time and opportunity for all to attend to its admonitions, would not the spiritual and eternal be lost sight of amid the seen and temporal? Or, to mount higher still, how, without this ordinance, could any proper and adequate testimony be kept up throughout the world in honour of the God that made it? Must not reason herself own it to be a suitable and becoming homage rendered to His sole and supreme lordship of creation, for men on every returning seventh day to cease from their own works, and take a breathing-time to realize their dependence upon Him, and give a more special application to the things which concern His glory? In short, abolish this wise and blessed institution, and must not love both to God and man be deprived of one of its best safeguards and most appropriate methods of working? Must not God Himself become practically dishonoured and forgotten, and His creature be worn down with deadening and oppressive toil?

Experience has but one answer to give to these questions. Hence, where the true religion has been unknown, it has always been found necessary to appoint, by some constituted authority, a certain number of holidays, which have often, even in heathen countries, exceeded, rarely anywhere have fallen short of, the number of God’s instituted Sabbaths. The animal and mental, the bodily and spiritual nature of man, alike demand them. Even Plato deemed the appointment of such days of so benign and gracious a tendency, that he ascribed them to that pity which “the gods have for mankind, born to painful labour, that they might have an ease and cessation from their toils.”^[251] And what is this but an experimental testimony to the wisdom and goodness of God’s having ordered His work of creation with a view to the appointment of such an institution in providence? It is manifest, besides, that while men may of themselves provide substitutes to a certain extent for the Sabbath, yet these never can secure more than a portion of the ends for which it has been appointed, nor could anything short of the clear sanction and authority of the living God command for it general respect and attention. The inferior benefits which it carries in its train are not sufficient, as experience has also too amply testified, to maintain its observance, if it loses its hold upon men’s minds in a religious point of view. So that there can scarcely be a plainer departure from the duty of love we owe alike to God and man, than to attempt to weaken the foundations of such an ordinance, or to encourage its habitual neglect.

[251] De Leg., ii., p. 787.

If the broad and general view of the subject which has now been given were fairly entertained, the other and minuter objections which are commonly urged in support of the strictly Jewish character of the Sabbatical institution would be easily disposed of. Even taken apart, there is none of them which, if due account is made of special circumstances, may not be satisfactorily removed.

1. No notice is taken of the institution during the antediluvian and earlier patriarchal periods of sacred history; the profanation of it is not mentioned among the crimes for which the flood was sent, or fire and brimstone rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah; it never rises distinctly into view as a Divine institution till the time of Moses; whence it is inferred, it only then took its commencement. But how many duties of undoubtedly perpetual and universal obligation might be cut off on similar grounds? And how few comparatively of the sins which we may infer with the utmost certainty to have been practised, are noticed in those brief records of the world’s history! It is rather, as we might have expected, the general principles that were acted upon; or, in regard to heinous transgressors, the more flagrant misdeeds into which their extreme depravity ran out, that find a place in the earliest portions of sacred history. Besides, even in the later and fuller accounts, it is usual, through very long periods of time, to omit any reference to institutions which were known to have had a settled existence. There is no notice, for example, of circumcision from the time of Joshua to the Babylonish exile; but how fallacious would be the conclusion from such silence, that the rite itself was not observed! Even the Sabbath, notwithstanding the prominent place it holds in the decalogue and the institutions of Moses, is never mentioned again till the days of Elisha (nearly seven hundred years later), when we meet with an incidental and passing allusion to it.—(2 Kings 4:23) Need we wonder then, that in such peculiarly brief compends of history as are given of antediluvian and patriarchal times, there should be a similar silence? And yet it can by no means be affirmed that they are without manifest indications of the existence of a seventh day of sacred rest. The record of its appointment at the close of the creation period, as we have already noticed, is of the most explicit kind, and is afterwards confirmed by the not less explicit reference in the fourth commandment, of its origin and commencement to the same period. Nor can any reason be assigned one-half so natural and probable as this, for the sacredness attached from the earliest times to the number seven, and for the division of time into weeks of seven days, which meets us in the history of Noah and the later patriarchal times, and of which also very early traces occur in profane history.^[252] Then, finally, the manner in which it first presents itself on the field of Israelitish history, as an existing ordinance which God Himself respected, in the giving of the manna, before the law had been promulgated (Exodus 16), is a clear proof of its prior institution. True, indeed, the Israelites themselves seem then to have been in a great measure ignorant of such an institution; not perhaps altogether ignorant, as is too commonly taken for granted, but ignorant of its proper observance, so far as to wonder that God should have bestowed a double provision on the sixth day, to relieve them from any labour in gathering and preparing it on the seventh. Habituated as they had become to the manners, and bowed down by the oppression, of Egypt, it had been strange indeed if any other result should have occurred. Hence it is mentioned by Moses and by Nehemiah, as a distinguishing token of the Lord’s goodness to them, that in consequence of bringing them out of Egypt, He made them to know or gave them His Sabbaths.—(Exodus 16:29; Deuteronomy 5:15; Nehemiah 9:14)

[252] Genesis 8:10; Genesis 8:12; Genesis 29:27. A large portion of the Jewish writers hold that the Sabbath was instituted at the creation, and was observed by the patriarchs, although some thought differently. References to various of their more eminent writers are given in Meyer, De Temporibus Sacris et Festis Diebus Hebraeorum, P. ii., c. 9. Selden (De Jure Nat. et Gent., L. iii. 12) has endeavoured to prove that the elder Jewish writers all held the first institution of the Sabbath to have been in the wilderness, though by special revelation made known previously to Abraham, and that the notice taken of the subject at the creation is by prolepsis. This, however, does not appear to have been the general opinion among them certainly not that of some of their leading writers; and, as Meyer remarks, it by no means follows from their having sometimes held the proleptical reference in Genesis to the institution of the Sabbath in the wilderness, that they therefore denied its prior institution in paradise. See also Owen’s Preliminary Dissertations to his Com. on Heb. Exodus 36; where, further, the notices are gathered which are to be found in ancient heathen sources regarding the primitive division of time into sevens, and the sacredness of the seventh day. As to the ancient nations of the world not observing it, or not being specially charged with neglecting it, the same may be said in reference to the third commandment, the fifth, many of the sins of the seventh, eighth, and ninth. Besides, when they forsook God Himself, of how little importance was it how they spent His Sabbaths?

2. But the institution of the Sabbath was declared to be a sign between God and the Israelites, that they might know that He was the Lord who sanctified them.—(Exodus 31:13) And if a sign or token of God’s covenant with Israel, then it must have been a new and positive institution, and one which they alone were bound to observe, since it must separate between them and others. So Warburton,^[253] and many besides. We say nothing against its having been, as to its formal institution, of a positive nature; for there, we think, many defenders of the Sabbath have lost themselves.^[254] But its being constituted a sign between God and Israel, neither inferred its entire novelty, nor its special and exclusive obligation upon them. Warburton himself has contended, that the bow in the cloud was not rendered less fit for being a sign of the covenant with Noah, that it had existed in the antediluvian period. And still less might the Sabbath’s being a primeval institution have rendered it unfit to stand as a sign of the Israelitish covenant, as this had respect not so much to its appointment on the part of God, as to its observance on the part of the people. He wished them simply to regard it as one of the chosen means by which He intended them to become, not only a comfortable and blessed, but also an holy nation. Nor could its being destined for such an use among them, in the least interfere with its obligation or its observance among others. Circumcision was thus also made the sign of the Abrahamic covenant, although it had been observed from time immemorial by various surrounding tribes and nations, from whom still the members of the covenant were to keep themselves separate. For it was not the merely external rite or custom which God regarded, but its spiritual meaning and design. When connected with His covenant, or embodied in His law, it was stamped as a religious institution; it acquired a strictly religious use; and only in so far as it was observed with a reference to this, could it fitly serve as a sign of God’s covenant.

[253] Divine Leg., B. iv., Note R. R. R. R.

[254] It has been called a moral-positive command, partly moral and partly positive; in itself a positive enactment, but with moral grounds to recommend or enforce it. See, for example, Ridgeley’s Body of Divinity, ii., p. 267, who expressess the view of almost all evangelical divines of the same period in this country. The distinction, however, is not happy, as the same substantially may be said of all the ceremonial institutions. Moral reasons were connected with them all, and yet they are abolished.

Indeed, a conclusion exactly the reverse of the one just referred to, should rather be drawn from the circumstance of the Sabbath having been taken for a sign that God sanctified Israel. There can be no question that holiness in heart and conduct was the grand sign of their being His chosen people. In so far as they fulfilled the exhortation, “Be ye holy, for I am holy,” they possessed the mark of His children. And the proper observance of the Sabbatical rest being so specially designated a sign in this respect, was a proof of its singular importance to the interests of religion and morality. These, it was virtually said, would thrive and flourish if the Sabbath was duly observed, but would languish and die if it fell into desuetude. Hence, at the close of a long expostulation with the people regarding their sins, and such especially as indicated only a hypocritical love to God, and a palpable hatred or indifference to their fellow-men, the prophet Isaiah presses the due observance of the Sabbath as in itself a sufficient remedy for the evil: “If thou turn away thy foot from the Sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on My holy day; and call the Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord, honourable; and shalt honour Him, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own words: then shalt thou delight thyself in the Lord; and I will cause thee to ride upon the high places of the earth, and feed thee with the heritage of Jacob thy father: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”—(Isaiah 58:13-14) This passage may fitly be regarded as an explanation of the sense in which the Lord meant them to regard the Sabbath as a sign between them and Him. And it is clear, on a moment’s reflection, that the prophet could never have attached the importance he did to the Sabbath, nor so peculiarly connected it with the blessing of the covenant, if the mere outward rest had been all that the institution contemplated. This is what the objectors we now argue with seem uniformly to take for granted; as if the people were really sanctified when they simply rested every Sabbath-day from their labours. The command had a far deeper import, and much more was involved in such a compliance with it, as should prove a sign between them and God. It was designed at once to carry the heart up in holy affection to its Creator, and outwards in acts of good-will and kindness to men on earth. Hence its proper observance is so often put, both in the law and the prophets, for the sum of religion. This is frankly admitted by some who urge the objection (for example, Barrow), while they still hold it to have been a ceremonial institution. But we would ask, if any other ceremonial institution can be pointed to as having been thus honoured? Are they not often rather comparatively dishonoured, by being placed in a relation of inferiority to the weightier matters of the law? And we might also ask, if precisely the same practical value is not attached to the strict religious observance of the Lord’s day now, by all writers of piety, and even by those who, with strange perversion or inconsistency, labour to establish the freedom of Christians from the obligation of the Sabbath? It is one of the burdens, says Barrow, which the law of liberty has taken off from us; and yet he has no sooner said it, than he tells us, in regard to the very highest and most spiritual duties of this law, that we are much more obliged to discharge them than the Jews could be.^[255] Paley, too, presently after he has endeavoured to relax the binding obligation of the Sabbath, proceeds to show the necessity of dedicating the Sunday to religious exercises, to the exclusion of all ordinary works and recreations; and still more expressly in his first sermon, written at a more advanced stage of life, when he knew more personally of the power of religion, he speaks of “keeping holy the Lord’s day regularly and most particularly,” as an essential mark of a Christian.^[256] The leading Reformers were unanimous on this point, holding it to be the duty of all sound Christians to use the Lord’s day as one of holy rest to Him, and that by withdrawing themselves not only from sin and vanity, but also from those worldly employments and recreations which belong only to a present life, and by yielding themselves wholly to the public exercises of God’s worship, and to the private duties of devotion, excepting only in cases of necessity or mercy. The learned Rivet, also, who unhappily argued (in his work on the decalogue) against the obligation of keeping the Sabbath as imposed in the fourth commandment, yet deplored the prevailing disregard of the Lord’s day as one of the crying evils of the times; and Vitringa raised the same lamentation in his day (on Isaiah 58:13).

[255] Works, v., p. 565, 568.

[256] Moral and Polit. Philosophy, B. v., c. 7 and 8, comp. with 1st of the Sermons on several subjects.

What, then, should induce such men to contend against the strict and literal obligation of the fourth command? They must be influenced by one of two reasons: either they dislike the spirit of holiness that breathes in it, or, relishing this, they somehow mistake the real nature of the obligation there imposed. There can be no doubt that the former is the cause which prompts those who are mere formalists in religion to decry this obligation; and as little doubt, we think, in regard to the Reformers and pious divines of later times, that the latter consideration was what influenced them. This we shall find occasion to explain under the next form of objection.

3. It is objected that the Sabbath, as imposed on the Jews, had a rigour and severity in it quite incompatible with the genius of the Gospel: the person who violated its sacredness, by doing ordinary work on that day, was to be punished with death; and so far was the cessation from work carried, that even the kind ling of a fire or going out of one’s place was interdicted.—(Exodus 16:29; Exodus 35:3) It looks as if men were determined to get rid of the Sabbath by any means, when the capital punishment inflicted on the violators of it in the Jewish state is held up as a proof of its transitory and merely national character. For there is nothing of this in the fourth commandment itself; and it was afterwards added to this, in common with many other statutes, as a check on the presumptuous violation of what God wished them to regard as the fundamental laws of the kingdom. A similar violation of the first, the second, the third, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh commandments, had the same punishment annexed to it; but who would thence argue, that the obligation to practise the duties they required, was binding only during the Old Testament dispensation? The other part of the objection demands a longer answer; in which we must first distinctly mark what is the exact point to be determined. The real question is, Did the fourth commandment oblige the Jews to anything which the people of God are under no obligation now to perform? Did it simply enjoin a rigid cessation from all ordinary labour, every seventh day, and did such cessation constitute the kind of sanctification it required? Such unquestionably was the opinion entertained by Calvin and most of the Reformers; who consequently held the Sabbath exacted of the Israelites under this precept to be chiefly of a ceremonial nature, foreshadowing through its outward repose the state of peaceful and blessed rest which believers were to enjoy in Christ, and like other shadows, vanishing when He appeared. There is certainly a measure of truth in this idea, as we shall have occasion to notice under the next objection, but not in the sense understood by such persons. Their opinion of what the Jewish Sabbath should have been, almost entirely coincided with what it actually was, after a cold and dead formalism had taken the place of a living piety. But so far from being justified by the law itself, it is the very notion which our Lord sought repeatedly to expose, by showing the practical impossibility of carrying it out under the former dispensation itself. Parents performed on the Sabbath the operation of circumcising their children; priests did the work connected with the temple service; persons of all sorts went through the labours necessary to preserve or sustain life in themselves or their cattle; and yet they were blameless—the command stood unimpaired, notwithstanding the performance of such works on the seventh day, for they were not inconsistent with its real design. In regard to all such cases, Christ announced the maxim, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,”—meaning, of course, the Sabbath in its original purport and existing obligation not under any change or modification now to be introduced; for had there been any intention of that sort, it would manifestly have been out of place then to speak of it but the Sabbath as imposed in the fourth commandment upon the Israelites: this Sabbath was made for man, as a means to promote his real interests and well-being, and not as a remorseless idol, to which these were to be sacrificed. “To work in the way of doing good to a fellow-creature (such was the import of Christ’s declaration), or entering into the employments of God’s worship, is not now, nor ever was, any interference with the proper duties of the Sabbath, but rather a fulfilment of them. Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath, He who is Lord of man must needs also be Lord of that which was made for man’s good—but its Lord, not to turn it to any other purpose than that for which it was originally given—no, merely to use it Myself, and teach you how to use it for the same. You do therefore grievously err in supposing it possible for Me to do anything inconsistent with the design of this institution; for though, as the Father worketh hitherto, I also must work on this day (John 5:17), so far as the ends of the Divine government may require, yet nothing is or can be done by Me, which is not in the strictest sense a Divine work, and as such suitable to the day of God.”^[257]

^[257]No texts have been more perverted from their obvious meaning, by the opponents of the Sabbath, than those referred to in Mark 2:27-28, about the Son of Man being Lord of the Sabbath, and the Sabbath being made for man, as if the Lord had been there bringing in something new, instead of explaining what was old. The latter is also held “as manifestly implying that the observance of the Sabbath was not a duty of an essential and unchangeable nature, such as those for which man is especially constituted and ordained.”—(Bib. Cyclop., Art. Sabbath) But the same may be said of marriage—it was made for man, and not man for it; and seeing, if there be no marriage, there can be no adultery, is therefore the seventh command only of temporary obligation? Or, since where there is no property there can be no theft, and man was not made for property, is the eighth command also out of date? The main point is, Were they not all alike coeval with man’s introduction into his present state, and needful to abide with him till its close?

It is to wrest our Lord’s words quite beside the purpose for which they were spoken, to represent Him in those declarations He made respecting the Sabbath, as intending to relax the existing law, and bring in some new modification of it. His discourse was clearly aimed at convincing the Jews that this law did not, as they erroneously conceived, absolutely prohibit all work, but work only in so far as the higher ends of God’s glory and man’s best interests might render needful. Precisely as in the second commandment, the prohibition regarding the making of any graven image or similitude was not intended simply to denounce all pictures and statues—both, in fact, had a place in the temple itself but to interdict their employment in the worship of God, so that His worshippers might be free to serve Him in spirit and in truth. And as men might have abstained from using these, while still far from yielding the spiritual worship which the second command really required, so they might equally have ceased from ordinary labour on the seventh day, and yet been far from sanctifying it according to the fourth commandment. This was distinctly enough perceived by some of the more thinking portion of the Jews themselves. Hence, not only does Philo speak of “the custom of philosophizing,” as he calls it, on the seventh day, but we find Abenezra expressly stating, that “the Sabbath was given to man, that he might consider the works of God, and meditate in His law.” To the same effect Abarbanel: “The seventh day has been sequestered for learning the Divine law, and for remembering well the explanations and inquiries regarding it. As is taught in Gemara Hierosol.: ‘Sabbaths and holidays were only appointed for meditating on the law of God; and therefore it is said, in Medrash Schamoth Rabba, that the Sabbath is to be prized as the whole law.’” Another of their leading authorities, R. Menasse Ben Isr., even characterizes it as “a notable error to imagine the Sabbath to have been instituted for idleness; for as idleness is the mother of all vice, it would then have been the occasion of more evil than good.”^[258] ^[258]See Meyer de Temp. Sacris et Festis diebus Hub., p. 197-199, where the authorities are given at length.

These comments, wonderfully good to come from such a quarter, are in perfect accordance with the import of the fourth commandment; that is, if this commandment is to be subjected to the same mode of interpretation which is made to rule the meaning of the rest—if it is to be regarded simply as prohibiting one kind of works, that those of an opposite kind may be performed. Yet, in strange oversight of this, perhaps also unwittingly influenced by the mistaken views and absurd practices of the Jews, such men even as Calvin and Vitringa held, that in the Jewish law of the Sabbath there was only inculcated a cessation from bodily labour, and that the observance of this cessation formed the substance of Sabbatical duty.^[259] Their holding this, however, did not, we must remember, lead them to deny the fact of God’s having set apart, and men’s being in all ages bound to observe, one day in every seven to be specially devoted to the worship and service of God. This with one voice they held: but they conceived the primeval and lasting institution of the Sabbath to have been so far accommodated to the ceremonial character of the Jewish religion, as to demand almost nothing from the Jews but a day of bodily rest. And this rest they farther conceived to have been required, not as valuable in itself, but as the legal shadow of better things to come in Christ: so that they might at once affirm the Jewish Sabbath to be abolished, and yet hold the obligation binding upon Christians to keep, by another mode of observance, one day in seven sacred to the Lord. This is simply what they did. And therefore Gualter, in his summary of the views of the divines of the Reformation upon this subject, has brought distinctly out these two features in their opinions—what they parted with, and what they retained: “The Sabbath properly signifies rest and leisure from servile work, and at the same time is used to denote the seventh day, which God at the beginning of the world consecrated to holy rest, and afterwards in the law confirmed by a special precept. And although the primitive Church abrogated the Sabbath, in so far as it was a legal shadow, lest it should savour of Judaism; yet it did not abolish that sacred rest and repose, but transferred the keeping of it to the following day, which was called the Lord’s day, because on it Christ rose from the dead. The use of this day, therefore, is the same with what the Sabbath formerly was among the true worshippers of God.” Only, the particular way, or kind of service, in which it is now to be turned to this sacred use, is different from what it was in Judaism; and he goes on to describe how the Reformers thought the day should be spent, viz., in a total withdrawing from worldly cares and pleasures, as far as practicable, and employing the time in the public and private exercises of worship.^[260] ^[259]Calvin, Inst., ii., c. 8. Vitringa Synagog. vet., ii., c. 2, and Com. in Isa., c. 56.

[260] I have entered so fully into the views of the Reformers, because their sentiments on this subject are almost universally misunderstood, even by theologians, and their names have often been and still are abused, to support views which they would themselves have most strongly reprobated. The ground of the whole error lay in their not rightly understanding—what, indeed, is only now coming to be properly understood—the symbolical character of the Jewish worship. They viewed it too exclusively in a typical aspect, in its reference to Gospel things, and saw but very dimly and imperfectly its design and fitness to give a present expression to the faith and holiness of the worshipper. Hence, positive institutions were considered as altogether the same with ceremonial, and the services connected with them as all of necessity bodily, typical, shadowy—therefore done away in Christ. In this way superficial readers, who glance only at occasional passages in their writings, and do not take these in connection with the whole state of theological opinion then prevalent regarding the Old and New dispensations, find no difficulty in exhibiting the Reformers as against all Sabbatical observances; while, if it suited their purpose to look a little farther, another set of passages might be found which seem to establish the very reverse. Archbishop Whately says (Second Series of Essays, p. 206) that the English Reformers were almost unanimous in disconnecting the obligation regarding the keeping of the Lord’s day among Christians from the fourth commandment, and resting it simply on the practice of the apostles and the early Church—thus making the Christian Lord’s day an essentially different institution from the Jewish Sabbath. We don’t need to investigate the subject separately as it affects them; for their opinions, as the Archbishop indeed asserts, agreed with those of the Continental Reformers. But we affirm that the Reformers, as a body, did hold the Divine authority and binding obligation of the fourth command, as requiring one day in seven to be employed in the worship and service of God, admitting only of works of necessity and of mercy to the-poor and afflicted. The release from legal bondage, of which they speak, included simply the obligation to keep precisely the seventh day of the week, and the external rest, which they conceived to be so rigorously binding on the Jews, that even the doing of charitable works was a breach of it the very mistake of the Pharisees. In its results, however, the doctrinal error regarding the fourth commandment has been very disastrous even in England, but still more so on the Continent. However strict the Reformers were personally, as to the practical observance of the Lord’s day—so strict, especially in Geneva, that they were charged by some with Judaizing the separation they made here between the law and the Gospel soon wrought most injuriously upon the life of religion; and the saying of Owen was lamentably verified: “Take this day off from the basis whereon God hath fixed it, and all human substitutions of anything in the like kind will quickly discover their own vanity.” See Appendix A.

It presents no real contrariety to the interpretation we have given of the fourth commandment, as affecting the Jews, that Moses on one occasion enjoined the people not to go out of their place or tents on the Sabbath-day. For that manifestly had respect to the gathering of manna, and was simply a prohibition against their going out, as on other days, to obtain food. Neither is the order against kindling a fire on the Sabbath any argument for an opposite view; for it was not less evidently a temporary appointment, suitable to their condition in a wilderness of burning sand—necessary there, perhaps, to ensure even a decent conformity to the rest of the Sabbath, but palpably unsuitable to the general condition of the people, when settled in a land which is subject to great vicissitudes, and much diversity as to heat and cold. It was, in fact, plainly impracticable as a national regulation; and was not considered by the people at large binding on them in their settled state, as may be inferred from Josephus noticing it as a peculiarity of the Essenes, that they would not kindle a fire on the Sabbath.—(Wars, ii., c. § 8, 9) Indeed, it is no part of the fourth commandment, fairly interpreted, to prohibit ordinary labour, excepting in so far as it tends to interfere with the proper sanctification of the time to God; and this in most cases would rather be promoted than hindered by the kindling of a fire for purposes of comfort and refreshment. So we judge, for example, in regard to the sixth commandment, which, being intended to guard and protect the sacredness of man’s life, does not absolutely prevent all manner of killing, nay, may sometimes rather be said to require this, that life may be preserved. In like manner, it was not work in the abstract that was forbidden in the fourth commandment, but work only in so far as it interfered with the sanctified use of the day, as was already indicated in the Sabbath of the Passover, which, while prohibiting ordinary work from being done, expressly excepted what was necessary for the preparation of food.—(Exodus 7:16) And the endless restrictions and limitations of the Jews, in our Lord’s time and since, about the Sabbath-day’s journey, and the particular acts that were or were not lawful on that day, are only to be regarded as the wretched puerilities of men in whose hands the spirit of the precept had already evaporated, and for whom nothing more remained than to dispute about the bounds and lineaments of its dead body.

4. But then there is an express abolition of Sabbath-days in the Gospel, as the mere shadows of higher realities; and the Apostle expressly discharges believers from judging one another regarding their observance, and even mourns over the Galatians, as bringing their Christian condition into doubt by observing days and months and years. We shall not waste time by considering the unsatisfactory attempts which have frequently been made to account for such statements, by many who hold the still abiding obligation of the fourth commandment. But supposing this commandment simply to require, as we have endeavoured to show it does, the withdrawal of men’s minds from worldly cares and occupations, that they might be free to give themselves to the spiritual service of God, is it conceivable, from all we know of the Apostle’s feelings, that he would have warned the disciples against such a practice as a dangerous snare to their souls, or raised a note of lamentation over those who had adopted it, as if all were nearly gone with them? Is there a single unbiassed reader of his epistles, who would not rather have expected him to rejoice in the thought of such a practical ascendancy being won for spiritual and eternal things over the temporal and earthly? It is the less possible for any one to doubt this, when it is so manifest from his history, that he did make a distinction of days in this sense, by everywhere establishing the practice of religious meetings on the first day of the week, and exhorting the disciples to observe them aright. When he, therefore, writes against the observing of days, it must plainly be something of a different kind he has in view. And what could that be but the lazy, corporeal, outward observance of them, which the Jews had now come to regard as composing much of the very substance of religion, and by which they largely fed their self-righteous pride? Sabbath-days in this sense it is certainly no part of the Gospel to enforce; but neither was it any part of the law to do so: Moses, had he been alive, would have denounced them, as well as the ambassador of Christ. But this, it may perhaps be thought, scarcely reaches the point at issue; for the Apostle discharges Christians from the observance of Sabbath-days, not in a false and improper sense, but in that very sense in which they were shadows of good things to come, placing them on a footing in this respect with distinctions of meat and drink. It is needless to say here, that certain feast-days of the Jews, being withdrawn from a common to a sacred use, were called Sabbaths, and that the Apostle alludes exclusively to these.^[261] There can be no doubt, indeed, that they were so called, and are also included here; but not to the exclusion of the seventh-day Sabbath, which, from the very nature of the case, was the one most likely to be thought of by the Colossians. Unless it had been expressly excepted, we must in fairness suppose it to have been at least equally intended with the others. But the truth is simply this: what the observance of the seventh-day Sabbath was not necessarily, or in itself, it came to acquire in the general apprehension, from the connection it had so long held with the symbolical services of Judaism. In its original institution there was nothing in it properly shadowy or typical of redemption; for it commenced before sin had entered, and while yet there was no need for a Redeemer. Nor was there anything properly typical in the observance of it imposed in the fourth commandment; for this was a substantial re-enforcement of the primary institution, only with a reference in the letter of the precept to the circumstances of Israel, as the destined possessors of Canaan. But, becoming then associated with a symbolical religion, in which spiritual and divine things were constantly represented and taught by means of outward and bodily transactions, the bodily rest enjoined in it came to partake of the common typical character of all their symbolical services. The same thing happened here as with circumcision, which was the sign and seal of the Abrahamic covenant of grace, and had no immediate connection with the law of Moses; while yet it became so identified with this law, that it required to be supplanted by another ordinance of nearly similar import, when the seed of blessing arrived, which the Abrahamic covenant chiefly respected. So great was the necessity for the abolition of the one ordinance and the introduction of the other, that the Apostle virtually declares it to have been indispensable, when he affirms those who would still be circumcised to be debtors to do the whole law. At the same time, the original design and spiritual import of circumcision he testifies to have been one and the same with baptism—speaks of baptized believers, indeed, as the circumcision of Christ (Colossians 2:11)—and consequently, apart from the peculiar circumstances arising out of the general character of the Jewish religion, the one ordinance might have served the purpose contemplated as well as the other.

[261] This is Haldane’s explanation in his Appendix to his Com. on Romans, as it had also been Ridgeley’s and others in former times. But if that explanation were right—if the Apostle really intended to except what the world at large pre-eminently understood by Sabbath-days—it would be impossible to acquit him of using language almost sure to be misunderstood. So with the Sabbath. Having been engrafted into a religion so peculiarly symbolical as the Mosaic, it was unavoidable that the bodily rest enjoined in it should acquire, like all the other outward things belonging to the religion, a symbolical and typical value. For that rest, though by no means the whole duty required, was yet the substratum and groundwork of the whole; the heart, when properly imbued with the religious spirit, feeling in this very rest a call to go forth and employ itself on God. To aid it in doing so, suitable exercises of various kinds would doubtless be commonly resorted to;^[262] but not as a matter of distinct obligation, rather as a supplementary help to that quiet rest in God, and imitation of His doings, to which the day itself invited. This end is the same also which the Gospel has in view, but which it seeks to accomplish by means of more active services and direct instruction. The end under both dispensations was substantially the same, with a characteristic difference as to the manner of attaining it, corresponding to the genius of the respective dispensations—the one making more of the outward, the other addressing itself directly to the inward man; the one also having more of a natural, the other more of a spiritual, redemptive basis. Hence the mere outward bodily rest of the Sabbath came, by a kind of unavoidable necessity, to acquire of itself a sacred character, although ultimately carried to an improper and unjustifiable excess by the carnality of the Jewish mind. And hence, too, when another state of things was introduced, it became necessary to assign to such Sabbaths the Jewish seventh day of rest a place among the things that were done away, and so far to change the ordinance itself as to transfer it to a different day, and even call it by a new name. But as baptism in the Spirit is Christ’s circumcision, so the Lord’s day is His Sabbath; and to be in the Spirit on that day, worshipping and serving Him in the truth of His Gospel, is to take up the yoke of the fourth commandment.

[262] 2 Kings 4:23, where the Shunammite woman’s husband expressed his wonder that she should go to the prophet when it was neither new moon nor Sabbath, implies that it was customary to meet for social exercises on these days.

5. This touches on, and partly answers, another objection—the only one of any moment that still remains to be adverted to—that derived from the change of day, from the last to the first day of the week. This was necessary, not merely, as Horsely states,^[263] to distinguish Christian from Jew, but also to distinguish Sabbath from Sabbath a Sabbath growing up amid symbolical institutions, which insensibly imparted to it a spirit of outward ritualism, and a Sabbath not less marked, indeed, by a withdrawal from the cares and occupations of worldly business, but much more distinguished by spiritual employment and active energy, both in doing and receiving good. Such a change in its character was clearly indicated by our Lord in those miracles of healing which He purposely performed on the Sabbath, that His followers might now see their calling, to use the opportunities presented to them on the day of bodily rest, to minister to the temporal or the spiritual necessities of those around them. And in fitting correspondence with this, the day chosen for the Christian Sabbath was the first day of the week—the day on which Christ rose from the dead, that He might enter into the rest of God, after having finished the glorious work of redemption. But that rest, how to be employed? Not in vacant repose, but in an incessant, holy activity, in directing the affairs of His mediatorial kingdom, and diffusing the inestimable blessings He had purchased for men. A new era then dawned upon the world, which was to give an impulse hitherto unknown to all the springs of benevolent and holy working; and it was meet that this should communicate its impress to the day through which the Gospel was specially to develop its peculiar genius and proper tendency. But pre-eminent as this Gospel stands above all earlier revelations of God, for the ascendancy it gives to the unseen and eternal over the seen and temporal, it would surely be a palpable contrariety to the whole spirit it breathes, and the ends it has in view, if now, on the Lord’s day, the things of the world were to have more, and the things of God less, of men’s regard than formerly on the Jewish Sabbath. Least of all could any change have been intended in this direction; and the only variation in the manner of its observance, which the Gospel itself warrants us to think of, is the greater amount of spiritual activity to be put forth on it, flowing out in suitable exercises of love to God, and acts of kindness and blessing towards our fellow-men.

[263] Works, vol. i., p. 356. The greater part of his three Sermons is excellent, though he does not altogether avoid, we think, some of the misapprehensions referred to above.

What though the Gospel does not expressly enact this change of day, and in so many words enjoin the disciples to hallow the ordinance after the manner now described? It affords ample materials to all for discovering the mind of God in this respect, who are really anxious to learn it; and what more is done in regard to the ordinances of worship generally, or to anything in God’s service connected with external arrangements? It is the characteristic of the Gospel to unfold great truths and principles, and only briefly to indicate the proper manner of their development and exercise in the world. But can any one in reality have imbibed these, without cordially embracing, and to the utmost of his power improving, the advantages of such a wise and beneficent institution? Or does the Christian world now not need its help, as much as the Jewish did of old? Even Tholuck, though he still does not see how to give the Christian Sabbath the right hold upon the conscience, yet deplores the prevailing neglect of it as destructive to the life of piety, and proclaims the necessity of a stricter observance. “Spirit, spirit! we cry out: but should the prophets of God come again, as they came of old, and should they look upon our works—Flesh, flesh! they would cry out in response. Of a truth, the most spiritual among us cannot dispense with a rule, a prescribed form, in his morality and piety, without allowing the flesh to resume its predominance. The sway of the Spirit of God in your minds is weak; carry, then, holy ordinances into your life.”^[264]

^[264]Sermons, Bib. Cab., vol. xxviii., p. 13. The absolute necessity of a strict observance of the Lord’s day to the life of religion, is well noted in a comparison between Scotland and Germany, by a shrewd and intelligent observer—Mr Laing, in his Notes on the Pilgrimage to Treves, ch. x. He does not profess to state the theological view of the subject, and even admits there may be some truth in what is sometimes pleaded for a looser observance of the day, especially in regard to those situated in large towns; but still holds the necessity of a well-spent Sabbath to produce and maintain a due sense of religion, and attributes the low state of religion in Germany very much to their neglect of the Sabbath. He justly says, the strict observance of Sunday “is the application of principle to practice by a whole people; it is the working of their religious sense and knowledge upon their habits; it is the sacrifice of pleasures, in themselves innocent and these are the most difficult to be sacrificed—to a higher principle than self-indulgence. Such a population stands on a much higher moral and intellectual stop than the population of the Continent,” etc.

It is not unimportant to state farther, in regard to the change of day from the last to the first day of the week, that while strong reasons existed for it in the mighty change that had been introduced by the perfected redemption of Christ, no special stress appears, even in the Old Testament Scripture, to have been laid on the precise day. Manifestly the succession of six days of worldly occupation, and one of sacred rest, is the point chiefly contemplated there. So little depended upon the exact day, that on the occasion of renewing the Sabbatical institution in the wilderness, the Lord seems to have made the weekly series run from the first giving of the manna. His example, therefore, in the work of creation, was intended merely to fix the relative proportion between the days of ordinary labour and those of sacred rest—and with that view is appealed to in the law. Nay, even there the correspondence is closer than is generally considered between the Old and the New; for while the original Sabbath was the seventh day in regard to God’s work of creation, it was man’s first. He began his course of weekly service upon earth by holding Sabbath with his Creator; much as the Church was called to begin her service to Christ on His finishing the work of the new creation. Nor, since redemption is to man a still more important work than creation, can it seem otherwise than befitting to a sanctified mind, that some slight alteration should have taken place in the relative position of the days, as might serve for a perpetual memorial that this work also was now finished. By the resurrection of Christ, as the Apostle shows, in 1 Corinthians 15:20, sq., a far higher dignity has been won for humanity than was given to it by the creation of Adam; and one hence feels, as Sartorius has remarked (Cultus, p. 154), that it would be alike unnatural and untrue, if the Church now should keep the creation-Sabbath of the Old, and not the resurrection-Sabbath of the New—if she should honour, as her holy-day, that day on which Christ was buried, and not rather the one on which He rose again from the dead. It was on the eve of the resurrection-day that He appeared to the company of the disciples, announced to them the completion of His work, gave them His peace, and authorized and commissioned them to preach salvation and dispense forgiveness to all nations in His name.—(Luke 24) So that, if Adam’s Sabbath was great by the Divine blessing and sanctification, Christ’s Sabbath was still greater through the Divine blessing of peace, grace, and salvation, which He sheds forth upon a lost world, in order to reestablish the Divine image in men’s souls, in a higher even than its original form, and bring in a better paradise than that which has been lost. In conclusion, we deem the law of the Sabbath, as interpreted in this section, to have been fully entitled to a place in the standing revelation of God’s will concerning man’s duty, and to have formed no exception to the perfection and completeness of the law:—

(1.) Because, first, there is in such an institution, when properly observed, a sublime act of holiness. The whole rational creation standing still, as it were, on every seventh day as it returns, and looking up to its God—what could more strikingly proclaim in all men’s ears, that they have a common Lord and Master in heaven! It reminds the rich that what they have is not properly their own that they hold all of a Superior—a Superior who demands that on this day the meanest slave shall be as his master—nay, that the very beast of the field shall be released from its yoke of service, and stand free to its Creator. No wonder that proud man, who loves to do what he will with his own, and that the busy world, which is bent on prosecuting with restless activity the concerns of time, would fain break asunder the bands of this holy institution; for it speaks aloud of the overruling dominion and rightful supremacy of God, which they would willingly cast behind their backs. But the heart that is really imbued with the principles of the Gospel, how can it fail to call such a day the holy of the Lord, and honourable? Loving God, it cannot but love what gives it the opportunity of holding undisturbed communion with Him.

(2.) Secondly, because it is an institution of mercy. In perfect harmony with the Gospel, it breathes good-will and kindness to men. It brings, as Coleridge well expressed it, fifty-two spring-days every year to this toilsome world; and may justly be regarded as a sweet remnant of paradise, mitigating the now inevitable burdens of life, and connecting the region of bliss that has been lost with the still brighter glory that is to come. As in the former aspect there is love to God, so here there is love to man.

(3.) Lastly, we uphold its title to a place in the permanent revelation of God’s will to man, because of its eminent use and absolute necessity to promote men’s higher interests. Religion cannot properly exist without it, and is always found to thrive as the spiritual duties of the day of God are attended to and discharged. It is, when duly improved, the parent and the guardian of every virtue. In this practical aspect of it, all men of serious piety substantially concur; and as a specimen of thousands which might be produced, we conclude with simply giving the impressive testimony of Owen: “For my part, I must not only say, but plead, whilst I live in this world, and leave this testimony to the present and future ages, that if ever I have seen anything of the ways and worship of God, wherein the power of religion or godliness hath been expressed—anything that hath represented the holiness of the Gospel and the Author of it—anything that looked like a prelude to the everlasting Sabbath and rest with God, which we aim, through grace, to come unto,—it hath been there, and with them, where, and among whom, the Lord’s day hath been held in highest esteem, and a strict observation of it attended to, as an ordinance of our Lord Jesus Christ. The remembrance of their ministry, their walk and conversation, their faith and love, who in this nation have most zealously pleaded for, and have been in their persons, families, parishes or churches, the most strict observers of this day, will be precious to them that fear the Lord, whilst the sun and moon endure. Let these things be despised by those who are otherwise minded; to me they are of great weight and importance.”—(On Heb., vol. i., 726, Tegg’s ed.)

Section Fourth.—What The Law Could Not Do—The Covenant Standing And Privileges Of Israel Before It Was Given.

HAVING now considered what the law, properly so called, was in itself, we proceed to inquire into the ends and purposes for which it was given, and the precise place which it was designed to hold in the ancient economy. Any misapprehension entertained, or even any obscurity allowed to hang upon these points, would, it is plain, materially affect the result of our future investigations. And there is the more need to be careful and discriminating in our inquiries here, as, from the general and deep-rooted carnality of the Jewish people, the effect which the law actually produced upon the character of their religion was, to a considerable extent, different from what it ought to have been. This error on their part has also mainly contributed to the first rise and still continued existence of some mistaken views regarding the law among many Christian divines.

There can be no doubt that the law held relatively a different place under the Old dispensation from what it does under the New. The most superficial acquaintance with the statements of New Testament Scripture on the subject, is enough to satisfy us of this. “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.” There is, however, one point—the first that properly meets us in this department of our subject in regard to which both dispensations are entirely on a footing. This point has respect to the condition of those to whom the law was given, and which, being already possessed, the law could not possibly have been intended to bring. So that an inquiry into the nature of that condition, of necessity carries along with it the consideration of what the law could not do.

Now, as the historical element is here of importance, when was it, we ask, that this revelation of law was given to Israel? Somewhere, we are told, about the beginning of the third month after their departure from the land of Egypt.^[265] Hence, from the very period of its introduction, the law could not come as a redeemer from evil, or a bestower of life and blessing. Its object could not possibly be to propose anything which should have the effect of shielding from death, rescuing from bondage, or founding a title to the favour and blessing of Heaven—for all that had been already obtained. By God’s outstretched arm, working with sovereign freedom and almighty power in behalf of the Israelites, they had been brought into a state of freedom and enlargement, and under the banner of Divine protection were travelling to the laud settled on them as an inheritance, before one word had been spoken to them of the law in the proper sense of the term. And whatever purposes the law might have been intended to serve, it could not have been for any of those already accomplished or provided for.

[265] Exodus 19:1.

It is of great importance to keep distinctly in view this negative side of the law; what it neither could, nor was ever designed to do. For if we raise it to a position which it was not meant to occupy, and expect from it benefits which it was not fitted to yield, we must be altogether at fault in our reckoning, and can have no clear knowledge of the dispensation to which it belonged. It is in reference to this that the Apostle speaks in Galatians 3:17-18 : “And this I say, that the covenant, which was confirmed before of God in Christ, the law, which was four hundred and thirty years after, cannot disannul, that it should make the promise of none effect. For if the inheritance be of the law, it is no more of promise: but God gave it to Abraham by promise.” The Jews had come in the Apostle’s time, and most of them, indeed, long before, to look to their deeds of law as constituting their title to the inheritance; and the same leaven of self-righteousness was now beginning to work among the Galatian converts. To check this tendency in them, and convince them of the fundamental error on which it proceeded, he presses on their consideration the nature and design of God’s covenant with Abraham, which he represents as having been “confirmed before of God in Chart,” became in making promise of a seed of blessing it had respect pre-eminently to Christ, and might justly be regarded, in its leading objects and provisions, as only an earlier and imperfect exhibition of the Christian covenant of redemption. But that covenant expressly conferred on Abraham’s posterity, as Heaven’s free gift, the inheritance of the land of Canaan; and it must also have secured their redemption from the house of bondage, and their safe conduct through the wilderness, since these were necessary to their entering on the possession of the inheritance. Hence, as the Apostle argues, their title to these things could not possibly need to be acquired over again by deeds of law afterwards performed; for this would manifestly have been to give to the law the power of disannulling the covenant of promise, and would have made one revelation of God overthrow the foundation already laid by another. But that God never meant the law to interfere with the gifts and promises of the covenant, is clear from what He said to the children of the covenant immediately before the law was given: “Ye have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles wings, and brought you unto Myself. Now therefore, if you will obey My voice indeed, and keep My covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine. And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.”—(Exodus 19:5) Here God addresses them as already standing in such a relation of nearness to Him, as secured for them an interest in His faithfulness and love. He appeals to the proofs which He had given of this, as amply sufficient to dispel every doubt from their mind, and to warrant them in expecting whatever might still be needed to complete their felicity. “Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice”—not because ye have obeyed it, have the great things which have just been accomplished in your experience taken place; but these have been done, that you might feel your calling to obey, and by obeying fulfil the high destiny to which you are appointed. In this call to obedience we already have the whole law, so far as concerns the ground of its obligation and the germ of its requirements. And when the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai to proclaim the words of the law, He is simply to be regarded as giving utterance to that voice which they were to obey. Hence, also, in prefacing the words then spoken by the declaration, “I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage,” He rests his claim to their obedience on precisely the same ground as here: He resumes what He had previously said in regard to the peculiar relation in which He stood to them, as proved by the grand deliverance He had achieved in their behalf, and on that founds His special claim to the return of dutiful obedience which He justly expected at their hands. And when it was proclaimed as the result of this obedience, that they should be to God “a peculiar people, a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation,” they were given to understand, that thus alone could they continue to occupy the singular place they now held in the regard of Heaven, enjoy intimate fellowship with God, and be fitting instruments in His hand for carrying out the wise and holy purposes of His Divine government. This, however, belongs to another part of the subject, and has respect to what the law was given to do.

We see, then, from the very time and manner in which the law was introduced, that it could not have been designed to interfere with the covenant of promise; and as all that pertained to redemption, the inheritance, and the means of life and blessing, came by that covenant, the law was manifestly given to provide none of them. Nor could it make any alteration on the law in this respect, that it was made to assume the form of a covenant. Why this was done, we shall inquire in the sequel. But looking at the matter still in a merely negative point of view, it is obvious that the law’s coming to possess the character of a covenant could give it no power to make void the provisions of that earlier covenant, which secured for the seed of Abraham, as Heaven’s free gift, the inheritance, and everything properly belonging to it. And if the Israelites should at any time come to regard the covenant of law as having been made for the purpose of founding a title to what the covenant with Abraham had previously bestowed, they would evidently misinterpret the meaning of God, and confound the proper relations of things. This, however, is what they actually did on a large scale, the grievous error and pernicious consequences of which are pointed out in Galatians 4:21-31 : “Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons; the one by a bond maid, the other by a five woman. But he who was of the bond woman was born after the flesh; but he of the free woman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the Mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Hagar. For this Hagar is (i.e., corresponds to) Mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written (Isaiah 54:1), Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she that hath an husband. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise,” etc.

Here the proper wife of Abraham, Sarah, and his bond maid Hagar, are viewed as the representatives of the two covenants respectively; and the children of the two mothers as, in like manner, representatives of the kind of worshippers whom the covenants were fitted to produce. Sarah, the only proper spouse of Abraham, stands for the heavenly Jerusalem; that is, the true Church of God, in which He perpetually resides, and begets children to Himself. Whoever belong to it are born from above, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” And that Sarah’s son might be the fit representative of all such, his birth was delayed till she had attained an advanced age. Born as Isaac was, it was impossible to overlook the immediate and supernatural operation of God’s hand in his birth; and if ever mother had reason to say, “I have gotten a man from the Lord,” it was Sarah, when she brought forth Isaac. But what was true of Isaac’s natural birth, is equally true of the spiritual birth of God’s people in every age. The Church, as a heavenly society, is their mother. But that Church is so, simply because she is the habitation of God, and the channel through which His grace, flowing into the dead heart of nature, quickens it into newness of life. And the covenant in the hand of this Church, by which she is empowered to bring forth such children to God, must be substantially the same in every age—viz., the covenant of grace, which began to be disclosed in part on the very scene of the fall—which was again more distinctly revealed to Abraham, when he received the promises of a seed of blessing, and an inheritance everlasting, and which has been clearly brought to light and finally confirmed in Christ for the whole elect family of God. This unquestionably is the covenant which answers to Sarah, and belongs to the heavenly Jerusalem: to this covenant all the real children of God owe their birth, their privileges, and their hopes; those who are born of it, in whatever age of the Church, are born in freedom, and heirs of the inheritance.

It is this Church, standing in and growing out of this covenant, that the prophet Isaiah addresses, in the passage quoted by the Apostle, as a “barren woman, a widow, and desolate,” and whom he comforts with the promise of a numerous offspring. He does not expressly name Sarah, but he evidently has her in his eye, and draws his delineation both of the present and the future in language suggested by her history. For, as in her case, so the seed of the true Church was long in coming, and slow of increase, compared with those born after the flesh. It seemed often, especially in such times of backsliding and desolation as those contemplated by the prophet, as if the spouse were absolutely forsaken, or utterly incapable of being a mother; and she appeared all the more in need of consolation, as her carnal rival even then possessed a large and numerous offspring. But the prophet cheers her with the prospect of better days to come; and gives her the assurance, that in the long run her spiritual seed would greatly outnumber the fleshly seed of the other. This prospect began (as the Apostle intimates, Galatians 4:31) to be more especially realized when the kingdom opened the door of salvation to the Gentiles. The other covenant, which answers to Hagar, was the covenant of law, ratified at Sinai; but that by no means corresponding, as is often represented, to the Old Testament dispensation as a whole. For, viewed in the light of mothers, the two covenants are spoken of as directly opposite in their nature, tendency, and effects, while the Old and New Testament dispensations present no such contrast to each other. They are rather to be regarded as in all essential respects the same. They differ, not as Ishmael differed from Isaac, but only as the heir when a child differs from the heir when arrived at maturity. Of all the true members of both Churches, Abraham is the common parent and head; and whether outwardly descended from his loins or not, they constitute properly but one people. They are all the children of faithful Abraham, possessing his covenant relation to God, and his interest in the promises of good things to come.—(Romans 4:11-13; Galatians 3:29) But the seed that came by Hagar, which was born, not properly of God, but of the will of the flesh, was entirely of another kind, and represented no part of the true Church in any age: it represented only the carnal portion of the professing Church—the unregenerate, idolatrous, or self-righteous Israelites of former times, who deemed it quite enough that they were able to trace their descent from Abraham; and the merely nominal believers now, who satisfy themselves with an outward standing among the followers of Jesus, and a formal attendance on some of the ordinances of His appointment. These are they “who say they are Jews, but are not;” they no more belonged to the seed of God under the Old Testament, than they do under the New; they are Ishmaelites, not Israelites—a spurious fleshly offspring, that should never have been born, and when born, without any title to the inheritance and the blessing.

It was the prevailing delusion of the Jews in our Lord’s time, as it had been also of many in former times, not to perceive this—failing to understand, what yet God had taken especial pains to teach them, that the subjects of His love and blessing were always an elect seed. From the time of Abraham, they had chiefly belonged to his stock, but never had they at any period embraced all his offspring: not the sons of Gagar and Keturah, but only the son of Sarah; not both the sons of Isaac, but only Jacob; not all the sons of Jacob, but only such as possessed his faith, and were, like him, princes with God. The principle, “not all Israel who are of Israel,” runs through the entire history; and too often also do the facts of history afford ground for the conclusion, that those who were simply of Israel had greatly the preponderance in numbers and influence over such as truly were Israel. But how did such children come to exist at all? How did they get a being within the bosom of the Church of God? They also had a mother, represented by Hagar, and that mother, as well as the other, a covenant of God—the covenant of Sinai. But why should it have produced such children? In one way alone could it possibly have done so; viz., by being elevated out of its proper place, and turned to an illegitimate use. God never designed it to be a mother; no more than Hagar, respecting whom Abraham sinned when he turned aside to her, and took her for a mother of children: her proper place was that only of an handmaid to Sarah. And it was, in like manner, to pervert the covenant of law from Sinai to an improper purpose, to look to it as a parent of life and blessing; nor could any better result come from the error. “It gendereth unto bond age,” says the Apostle; that is, in so far as it gave birth to any children, these were not true children of God, free, spiritual, with hearts of filial confidence and devoted love; but miserable bondmen, selfish, carnal, full of mistrust and fear. Of these children of the Sinaitic covenant we are furnished with the most perfect exemplar in the Scribes and Pharisees of our Lord’s time—men who were chiefly remarkable for the full and ripened development of a spirit of bondage in religion who were complete in all the garniture of a sanctified demeanour, while they were full within of ravening and wickedness—worshipping a God, whom they eyed only as the taskmaster of a laborious ritual, by the punctual observance of which they counted themselves secure of His favour and blessing—crouching like slaves beneath their yoke of bondage, and loving the very bonds that lay on them, because nothing better than the abject and hireling spirit of slavery breathed in their hearts. Such were the children whom the covenant of law produced, as its natural and proper offspring. But did God ever seek such children? Could He own them as members of His kingdom? Could He bestow on them an interest in its promised blessings? Assuredly not; and therefore it was entirely against His mind, when His professing people looked in that direction for life and blessing. If really His people, they already had these by another and earlier covenant which could give them; and those who still looked for them to the covenant of law, only got a serpent for bread—instead of a blessing, a curse.^[266]

^[266]On this negative side of the law, may be consulted Bell on the Covenants, which, though full of repetition, is clear and satisfactory on this part of the subject; it forms a sort of expanded, though certainly rather tedious, illustration of Vitringa’s Com. on Isaiah 54:1. On the positive side of the law, or what it was designed to do, the work is by no means so successful.

It seems very strange that so many Christian divines, especially of such as hold evangelical principles, should here have fallen into substantially the Jewish error, representing the Israelites as being in such a sense under the covenant of law, that by obedience to it they had to establish their title to the inheritance. Not only does Warburton call the dispensation under which they were placed, roundly “a dispensation of works,”^[267] but we find Dr John Erskine, an evangelical writer, among many similar things, writing thus: “He who yielded an external obedience to the law of Moses, was termed righteous, and had a claim in virtue of his obedience to the land of Canaan, so that doing these things he lived by them. Hence Moses says, Deuteronomy 6:25, ‘It shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the Lord our God;’ i.e., it shall be the cause and matter of our justification—it shall found our title to covenant blessings. But to spiritual and heavenly blessings, we are entitled by the obedience of the Son of God, not by our own.”^[268] It was very necessary, when the learned author made obedience to the covenant of Sinai the ground of a title to the inheritance of Canaan, that he should bring down its terms as low as possible; for had these not been of a superficial and formal nature, it would manifestly have been a mockery to make the people’s obedience the ground of their title. But what, then, becomes of the covenant of Abraham, if the inheritance, which it gave freely in promise to his seed, had to be acquired over again by deeds of law? And what, indeed, becomes of the spiritual and unchangeable character of God, if, in one age of the Church, He should appear to have imposed duties of an external kind, as the ground of a title to His blessing, while in another all is given of grace, and the duties required are pre-eminently inward and spiritual? In such a case, there not only could have been no proper correspondence between the earlier and the later dispensations, but the revealed character of God must have undergone an essential change: He could not be “the Jehovah, that changeth not.” The confusion arises from assigning to the covenant of law a wrong place, and ascribing to it what it was never intended to do or give. “God did never make a new promulgation of the law by revelation to sinful men, in order to keep them under mere law, without set ting before them, at the same time, the promise and grace of the new covenant, by which they might escape from the curse which the law denounced. The legal and evangelical dispensations have been but different dispensations of the same covenant of grace, and of the blessings thereof. Though there is now a greater degree of light, consolation, and liberty, yet if Christians are now under a kingdom of grace, where there is pardon upon repentance, the Lord’s people under the Old Testament were (as to the reality and substance of things) also under a kingdom of grace.”^[269] So that it is quite wrong, as the judicious author states, to represent those “who were under the pedagogy of the law, as if they had been under a proper and strict covenant of works.”

[267] Div. Leg., B. v., Note C.

[268] Theological Dissertations, p. 41.

[269] Fraser on Sanctification; Explic. of Romans 7:8.

Bähr, who rises immeasurably above all who, have imbibed their notions of the legal dispensation in the school of Spencer and Warburton, and who everywhere exhibits a due appreciation of the moral and religious element in Judaism, still so far coincides with them, that he elevates the law to a place not properly its own. After investigating the descriptions given of the decalogue, he draws the conclusion, that “for Israel this formed the foundation of its whole existence as a people, the root of its religious and political life, the highest, best, most precious thing the people had their one and all.”^[270] So also again, when speaking of the covenant and the law being entirely the same, he says to the like effect: “This covenant first properly gave Israel as a people its being; it was the root and basis of the life of Israel as a people.”^[271] No doubt understanding, as he does, by the law or covenant all the precepts and institutions of Moses, which he holds to have been represented in the decalogue, the idea here expressed is not quite so wide of the truth as it might otherwise appear. But still the statement is by no means correct; it is utterly at variance with the facts of Israel’s history, and calculated to give a false impression of the whole nature and design of the Mosaic legislation. It presents this to our view simply as a dispensation of works, having law for the root of life, and consequently the deeds of law for the only ground of blessing. In plain contrariety to the assertion of the Apostle,^[272] it virtually says that a law was given which brought life, and that righteousness was by the law. Finally, it gives such a place to the mere requirements and operations of law, that nothing remained for grace to do, but merely to pardon the shortcomings and transgressions of which men might be guilty, as subject to law: all else was earned by the obedience performed; even forgiveness itself in a manner was thus earned, because obtained as the result of services rendered in compliance with the terms and prescriptions of law.

[270] Symbolik, i., 386, 387.

[271] Symbolik, ii., 389.

[272] Galatians 3:21. This glorification of law, however, has not been confined to the Old Testament Church. There are not a few Christian divines who are so enamoured of law, that the Gospel of the grace of God has become in their hands only a kind of modified covenant of works; and they can only account for faith holding the peculiar place assigned to it in the work of salvation, because in their view it comprises all other graces and virtues in its bosom. Salvation appears not directly and properly as the free gift of Divine grace in Christ, but rather as the acquired result of man’s evangelical righteousness, or, as it is generally termed, his sincere though imperfect obedience. The title to heaven must still be earned, only the satisfaction of Christ has secured its being done on much easier conditions. There is no need for our entering into any exposure of this New Testament legalism, as we have seen that its prototype under the Old Testament, though it had more seemingly to countenance it, was still without any proper foundation. But we may briefly advert to the statements of another class of theologians, who, while they admit that the Old as well as the New Testament Church was under a dispensation of grace, to which it owed all its privileges, blessings, and hopes, at the same time regard the covenant of Sinai as in itself properly the covenant of works, by obedience to which, if faithfully and fully rendered, men would have founded a title to life and blessing. They justly regard it as in substance a republication of the law of holiness originally impressed upon the soul of Adam; but fall into perplexity and confusion by adopting a somewhat erroneous view of the primary design and object of that law. The righteousness there required they are accustomed to represent as that “by the doing of which man was to found his right to promised blessings;”^[273] or, to use the language of another, “in virtue of which he might thereon plead and demand the reward of eternal life.”^[274] Then, viewing such a law or covenant of works in reference to men as sinful, the works required in it are necessarily considered as “the condition of a sinner’s justification and acceptance with God,” “a law to be done that he might be saved.”^[275] ^[273]Bell on Covenants, p. 198.

[274] Boston’s Notes on Marrow of Modern Divinity, p. 1, Introd.

[275] Ib. P. 1, c. 1, and the Marrow itself there; also Fraser on Romans 7:4, and Chalmers’ Works, vol. x., p.207. But was a law ever given, or a covenant ever made with man, with any such professed design? Was it even propounded thus to Adam in paradise? Had he not received as a free gift from the hand of God, before anything was exacted of him in the way of obedience, both the principle of a divine life and an inheritance of blessing? So far from needing to found by deeds of righteousness a title to these, he came forth at the very first fully fraught with them; and the question with him was, not how to obtain what he had not, but how to continue in the enjoyment of what he already possessed. This he could no otherwise do than by fulfilling the righteous ends for which he had been created. To direct him towards these, therefore, must have been, if not the sole, at least the direct and ostensible object of whatever law was outwardly proposed to him, or inwardly impressed upon his conscience. If the word to him might be said to be, “Do this and live,” it could only be in the sense of his thereby continuing in the life, in the possession and blessedness of which he was created. And it was the fond conceit of the Pharisaical Jews, that their law was given for purposes higher even than those for which any law was given to man in innocence; that they might, by obedience to law, work out a righteousness, and acquire a title to life and glory, which did not naturally belong to them. It is simply against this groundless and perverse notion, which had come latterly to diffuse its leaven through the whole Jewish mind, that our Lord and His apostles are to be understood as speaking, when in a manifold variety of ways they endeavour to withdraw men’s regards from the law as a source of life, and point them to the riches of Divine grace.^[276]

^[276]Romans 3, 7; 2 Corinthians 3:6-7; Galatians 3:11; Galatians 3:21; Php 3:8-9; Ephesians 1:3-7; Titus 3:4-7; 1 John 5:11; also of our Lord’s discourses, Luke 15; Luke 19:1-10; John 3:16-18; John 6:51. When He directed the lawyer, who tempted Him with the question, “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” to the commandments of the law, and in reference to the perfect love there required to God and man, said, “This do and thou shalt live,” it is clear He merely met the inquirer on his own ground, and aimed at sending him away with an impression of the impossibility of obtaining life by perfecting himself in the law’s requirements. So, also, such expressions as that in Romans 7:10, of “the commandment being ordained to life” (lit., which was for, or unto life), cannot mean that it was given to confer life, or to show the way of obtaining it, for this is denied of any law that ever could have been given to sinful men (Galatians 3:21). It simply means, that the law was given to subserve or promote the purposes of God in respect to life.

It is, then, carefully to be remembered, in regard to the Old Testament Church, that she had two covenants connected with her constitution—a covenant of grace as well as of law; and that the covenant of law, as it came last, so it took for granted the provisions of the elder covenant of grace. It was grafted upon this, and grew out of it. Hence, in revealing the terms of the legal covenant, the Lord spake to the Israelites as already their God, from whom they had received life and freedom (Exodus 20:2),—proclaimed Himself as the God of mercy as well as of holiness (Exodus 20:5-6),—recognised their title to the inheritance as His own sovereign gift to them (Exodus 20:12),—thus making it clear to all, that the covenant of law raised itself on the ground of the previous covenant of grace, and sought to carry out this to its legitimate consequences and proper fruits.^[277]

^[277]The relation between the two covenants is briefly but correctly stated by Sack in his Apologetik, p. 179: “The matter of the law is altogether grounded upon the covenant of promise made with Abraham. . . . The law neither could nor would withdraw the exercise of faith from the covenant of promise, or render that superfluous, but merely formed an intermediate provision until the fulfilment came.” The relation is seldom correctly made out by writers of the class last referred to. For example, Boston would have the two covenants to have been revealed simultaneously from Sinai, making the Sinaitic covenant as much a covenant of grace as of law (on the Marrow, p. 1, c. 2). Burgess (on Mural Law and Covenants, p. 224) represents it as properly a covenant of grace. That this also is the order of God’s procedure with men under the Gospel, nothing but the most prejudiced mind can fail to perceive. Everywhere does God there present Himself to His people as in the first instance a giver of life and blessing, and only afterwards as an exacter of obedience to His commands. Their obedience, so far from entitling to salvation, can never be acceptably rendered till they have become partakers of the blessings of salvation. These blessings are altogether of grace, and are therefore received through faith. For what is faith, but the acceptance of Heaven’s grant of salvation, or a trusting in the record in which the grant is conveyed? So that, in the order of each man’s experience, there must be, as is fully brought out in the Epistle to the Romans, first a participation in the mercies of God, and then growing out of this a felt and constraining obligation to run the way of God’s commandments. How can it, indeed, be otherwise? How were it possible for men, laden with sin, and underlying the condemnation of Heaven, to earn anything at God’s hands, or do what might seem good in His sight, till they become partakers of grace? Can they work up to a certain point against the stream of His displeasure, and prosecute of themselves the process of recovery, only requiring His supernatural aid to perfect it? To imagine the possibility of this, were to betray an utter ignorance of the character of God in reference to His dealings with the guilty. He can, for His Son’s sake, bestow eternal life and blessing on the most unworthy, but He cannot stoop to treat and bargain with men about their acquiring a title to it through their own imperfect services. They must first receive the gift through the channel of His own providing; and only when they have done this, are they in a condition to please and honour Him. Not more certainly is faith without works dead, than all works are dead which do not spring from the living root of faith already implanted in the heart.

Section Fifth.—The Purposes For Which The Law Was Given, And The Mutual Interconnection Betwixt It And The Symbolical Institutions.

WE proceed now to advance a step farther, and to consider what the law was designed to do for Israel. That it did not come with a hostile intent, we have already seen. Its object was not to disannul the covenant of promise, or to found a new title to gifts and blessings already conferred. It was given rather as an handmaid to the covenant, to minister, in an inferior but still necessary place, to the higher ends and purposes which the covenant itself had in view. And hence, when considered as standing in that its proper place, it is fitly regarded as an additional proof of the goodness of God towards His people: “He made known His ways unto Moses, His statutes and His judgments unto Israel; He hath not dealt so with any people.”

1. The first and immediate purpose for which the law was given to Israel, was that it might serve as a revelation of the righteousness which God expected from them as His covenant people in the land of their inheritance. It was for this inheritance they had been redeemed. They were God’s own peculiar people, His children and heirs, proceeding, under the banner of His covenant, to occupy His land. And that they might know the high ends for which they were to be planted there, and how these ends were to be secured, the Lord took them aside by the way, and gave them this revelation of His righteousness. As the land of their inheritance was emphatically God’s land, so the law which was to reign paramount there must of necessity be His law, and that law itself the manifestation of His righteousness. With no other view could God have stretched out His hand to redeem a people to Himself, and with no other testimony set them as His witnesses before the eye of the world, on a territory peculiarly His own. For His glory, viewed in respect to His moral government, is essentially bound up with the interests of righteousness; and those whom He destined to be the chosen instruments for showing forth that glory in the region prepared for them, must go thither with the revelation of His righteousness in their hand, as the law which they were to carry out into all the relations of public and private life. The same thing might be said in this respect of the land as a whole, which the Psalmist declares in reference to its spiritual centre—the place on which the tabernacle was pitched: “Lord, who shall abide in Thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in Thy holy hill? He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart.”—(Psalms 15) And again in Psalms 24 : “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? and who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul to vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.” There can be no doubt that the character here meant to be delineated is that of the true servants of God as contradistinguished from hypocrites—of the real denizens of His kingdom, whose high distinction it was to be dwellers and sojourners with Him. The going up to the hill of God, standing in His holy place, or abiding in His tabernacle, is merely an image to express this spiritual idea. The land as a whole being God’s land, the people as a whole should also have been found dwelling as guests, or sojourning with Him.—(Leviticus 25:23) But this they could only be in reality, the Psalmist means to say, if they possessed the righteous character he delineates. In both of the delineations he gives, it is impossible to overlook a reference to the precepts of the decalogue. And that such delineations should have been given at a time when the tabernacle service was in the course of being set up anew with increased splendour, was plainly designed to sound a warning in the ears of the people, that whatever regard should be paid to the solemnities of worship, it was still the righteousness in thought, word, and deed, as required in the precepts of the decalogue, which God pre-eminently sought. This was what peculiarly fitted them for the place they occupied, and the destiny they had to fill. Hence, not only the righteousness of the decalogue in general, but that especially of the second table, is made prominent in the description, because hypocrites have so many ways of counterfeiting the works of the first table.^[278] ^[278]See Hengstenberg and Calvin on Psalms 15:2.

It makes no essential alteration on the law in this point of view, that it was made to assume the form of a covenant. For what sort of covenant was it? And with what object ratified? Not as an independent and separate revelation; but only, as already stated, an handmaid to the previously existing covenant of promise. On this last, as the divine root of all life and blessing, it was grafted; and rising from the ground which that former covenant provided, it proceeded to develop the requirements of righteousness, which the members of the covenant ought to have fulfilled. It was merely to impart greater solemnity to this revelation of righteousness—to give to its calls of duty a deeper impression and firmer hold upon the conscience—to render it clear and palpable, that the things required in it were not of loose and uncertain, but of most sure and indispensable obligation it was for such reasons alone that the law, after being proclaimed from Sinai, was solemnly ratified as a covenant. By this most sacred of religious transactions the Israelites were taken bound as a people to aim continually at the fulfilment of its precepts. But its having been turned into a covenant did not confer on it a different character from that which belonged to it as a rule of life and conduct, or materially affect the results that sprung either from obedience or disobedience to its demands; nor was any effect contemplated beyond that of adding to its moral weight and deepening its hold upon the conscience. And the very circumstance of its being ratified as a covenant, having God in the relation of a Redeemer for one of the contracting parties, was fraught with comfort and encouragement; since an assurance was thus virtually given, that what God in the one covenant of law required His people to do, He stood pledged in the other covenant of promise with His Divine help to aid them in performing. The blood of the covenant as much involved a Divine obligation to confer the grace to obey, as it bound them to render the obedience. So that, while there was in this transaction something fitted to lighten rather than to aggravate the burden of the law’s yoke, there was, at the same time, what involved the necessity of compliance with the tenor of its requirements, and took away all excuse from the wilfully disobedient. The sum of the matter, then, was this: The seed of Abraham, as God’s acknowledged children and heirs, were going to receive for their possession the land which He claimed as more peculiarly His own. But they must go and abide there partakers also of His character of holiness, for thus alone could they either glorify His name or enjoy His blessing. And so, bringing them as He did from the region of pollution, He would not suffer them to plant their foot within its sacred precincts, until He had disclosed to them the great lines of religious and moral duty, in which the resemblance most essentially stands to His character of holiness, and taken them bound by the most solemn engagement to have the pattern of excellence set before them, as far as possible, realized in practice, through all the dwellings of Canaan. Had they been but faithful to their engagement—had they as a people striven in earnest through the grace offered them in the one covenant to exemplify the character of the righteous man exhibited in the other, “delighting in the law of the Lord, and meditating therein day and night,” then in their condition they should assuredly have been “like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season, whose leaf doth not wither, and whatsoever he doth prospereth.” Canaan would then, indeed, have verified the description of a land flowing with milk and honey.

We thus see, in the immediate purposes of God respecting Israel, a sufficient reason for the introduction of the law, and for the prominent place assigned to it in the Divine dispensation. But if we connect the immediate with the ultimate design of God in this portion of His dealings, we see the absolute necessity of what was done, in order to make the past a faithful representation of the future. Canaan stood to the eye of faith the type of heaven; and the character and condition of its inhabitants should have presented the image of what theirs shall be, who have entered on the kingdom prepared for them before the foundation of the world. The condition of such, we are well assured, shall be all blessedness and glory. The region of their inheritance shall be Immanuel’s land, where the vicissitudes of evil and the pangs of suffering shall be alike unknown,—where everything shall reflect the effulgent glory of its Divine Author, and streams of purest delight shall be ever flowing to satisfy the souls of the redeemed. But it is never to be forgotten, that their condition shall be thus replenished with all that is attractive and good, because their character shall first have become perfect in holiness. No otherwise than as conformed to Christ’s image can they share with Him in His inheritance; for the kingdom of which they are the destined heirs is one which the unrighteous cannot inherit, nor shall corruption in any form or degree be permitted to dwell in it. “Its people shall be till righteous”—that is their first characteristic; and the second, depending upon this, and growing out of it as its proper result, is, that they shall be all filled with the goodness and glory of the Lord.

Hence, in addition to the moral ends of a direct and immediate kind which required to be accomplished, it was necessary also, in this point of view, to make the experience of God’s ancient people, in connection with the land of promise, turn upon their relation to the law. As He could not permit them to enter the inheritance without first placing them under the discipline of the law, so neither could He permit them after wards to enjoy the good of the land, while they lived in neglect of the righteousness the law required. In both respects, the type became sadly marred in the event; and the image it presented of the coming realities of heaven, was to be seen only in occasional lines and broken fragments. The people were so far from being all righteous, that the greater part were ever hardening their hearts in sin. On their part, a false representation was given of the moral perfection of the future world; and it was in the highest degree impossible that God on His part should countenance their backsliding so as notwithstanding to render their state a full representation of its perfection in outward bliss. He must of necessity trouble the condition and change the lot of His people, in proportion as sin obtained a footing among them. The less there was of heaven’s righteousness in their character, the less always must there be of its blessedness and glory in their condition;—until at last the Lord was constrained to say: “Because they have forsaken My law which I set before them, and have not obeyed My voice, neither walked therein; but have walked after the imagination of their own heart: therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and give them water of gall to drink. I will scatter them also among the heathen, and will send a sword after them, till I have consumed them.”^[279] Such were the imperfections of the type; let us rejoice that in the antitype similar imperfections can have no place. All there stands firm and secure in the unchanging faithfulness of Jehovah; and it will be as impossible for sin as for adversity and trouble to have a place in the heavenly Canaan. The view now presented as to the primary reason for the giving of the law, is in perfect accordance with what is stated by the Apostle in Galatians 3:19 : “Wherefore, then, serveth the law? It was added because of transgressions, till the seed should come to whom the promise was made.” The meaning is, it was added to the provisions and blessings secured in the earlier covenant of promise, because of the disposition in the hearts of the people to transgress the obligations under which they stood, and fall in with the corruptions of the world. To check this disposition—to keep their minds under the discipline of a severe and holy restraint—and circumscribe and limit their way, so that no excuse or liberty should be left them to turn aside from the right path—for this reason the law was added to the covenant. But for that inherent proneness to sin, now sufficiently made manifest, there should have been no need for such an addition. Had the members of the covenant thoroughly imbibed its spirit, and responded as they should have done to the love God had manifested toward them in making good its provisions, they would of themselves have been inclined to do the things which were contained in the law. This, however, they were not; and hence the law came, presupposing and building upon the moral aim of the covenant, and more stringently binding upon their consciences the demands of righteousness, in order to stem the current of their sinful inclinations. It was to these inclinations alone that the law carried a hostile and frowning aspect: in respect to the people themselves, it came as a minister of good, and not of evil; and so far from being opposed to the promises of the covenant, it was rather to be viewed as a friendly monitor and guide, directing the people how to continue in the blessing of the covenant, and fulfil the ends for which it was established.

[279] Jeremiah 9:13-16.

2. There was, however, another great reason for the law being given, which is also perhaps alluded to by the Apostle in the passage just noticed, when he limits the use of the law, in reference to transgressions, to the period before Christ’s appearance. Christ was to be pre-eminently the seed of promise, through whom the blessings of the covenant were to be secured; and when He should come, as a more perfect state of things would then be introduced, the law would no longer be required as it was before. While, therefore, it had an immediate and direct purpose to serve in restraining the innate tendency to transgression, it might be said to have had the further end in view of preparing the minds of men for that coining seed. And this it was fitted to do precisely through the same property which rendered it suitable for accomplishing the primary design, viz., the perfect revelation it gave of the righteousness of Heaven. It brought the people into contact with the moral character of God, and bound them by covenant sanctions and engagements to make that the standard after which they should endeavour to regulate their conduct. But conscience, enlightened and aroused by the lofty ideal of truth and duty thus presented to it, became but the more sensible of transgressions committed against the righteousness required. Instead of being a witness to which men could appeal in proof of their having fulfilled the high ends for which they had been chosen and redeemed by God, the law rather did the part of an accuser, testifying against them of broken vows and violated obligations. And thus keeping perpetually alive upon the conscience a sense of guilt, it served to awaken in the hearts of those who really understood its spiritual meaning, a feeling of the need, and a longing expectation of the coming, of Him who was to bring in the more perfect state of things, and take away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. The certainty of this effect both having been from the first designed, and also to some extent produced, by the law, will always appear the more obvious, the more clearly we perceive the connection between the law and the ritual of worship, and see how inadequately the violations of the one seemed to have been met by the provisions of the other. We shall have occasion to refer to this more fully under the next division. But in some of the confessions of the Old Testament saints, we have undoubted indications of the feeling that the law, which they stood bound to obey, contained a breadth of spiritual requirement which they were far from having reached, and brought against them charges of guilt from which they could obtain no satisfactory deliverance by any means of expiation then provided. The dread which God’s manifested presence inspired, even in such seraphic bosoms as Isaiah’s, “Wo is me, for I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts,” is itself a proof of this; for it betokened a conscience much more alive to impressions of guilt than to the blessings of forgiveness and peace. It showed that the law of righteousness had written its convictions of sin too deeply on the tablet of the heart for the ceremonial institutions thoroughly to supplant them by the full sense of reconciliation. But a still more decided testimony to the same effect was given by the Psalmist, when, in compositions designed for the public service of God, and of course expressing the sentiments of all sincere worshippers, he at once celebrated the law of God as every way excellent and precious, and at the same time spake of it as “exceeding broad,”—felt that it accused him of iniquities “more in number than the hairs of his head;” so that if “the Lord were strict to mark them, none should be able to stand before Him”—nay, sometimes found himself in such a sense a sinner, that no sacrifice or offering could be accepted, and his soul was left without any ostensible means of atonement and cleansing, with nothing indeed to rest upon, but an unconditional forgiveness on God’s part, and renewed surrender on its own.—(Psalms 51)

It was this tendency of the law to beget deep convictions of sin, and to leave upon the mind such a felt want of satisfaction, which truly disposed enlightened consciences to give a favourable hearing to the doctrines of the Gospel, and to rejoice in the consolation brought in by Christ. It was this which gave in their minds such emphasis to the contrast, “The law came by Muses but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ,” and which led St Paul to hold it out as an especial ground of comfort to believers in Christ, that “by Him they might be justified from all things from which they could not be justified by the law of Moses.” It was this feature also of the law which the same Apostle had more particularly in his eye, when he described it as a “schoolmaster to lead men to Christ,” shutting them up, by its stern requirements and wholesome discipline, to the faith which was afterwards to be revealed. And the contrast which he draws in the third chapter of the second Epistle to the Corinthians, between the law and the Gospel, proceeds entirely upon the same ground in reference to the law; that is, it is viewed simply as by itself, in the matter of its precepts, a revelation of the perfect righteousness of God, and, apart from the covenant of promise, with which it was connected, fitted only to inspire fear and trembling, or to bring condemnation and death. He therefore calls it the ministration of condemnation, a letter that killeth, as in Romans 7:10 he testifies of having found it in his own experience to be unto death. The Apostle does not mean to say that this was properly the object for which the law was given, for then it had come directly to oppose and subvert the covenant of promise; but that it was an inseparable effect attending it, arising from the perfection of its character as a rule of righteousness, compared with the manifold imperfections and sins ever discovering themselves among men. And hence it only required spiritual minds, such as would enter thoroughly into the perception of the law’s character, first to make them deeply sensible of their own guilt, and then to awaken in them the desire of something higher and better than was then provided for the true consolation of Israel. An important connection thus arises between the law and the Gospel, and both are seen to hold respectively their proper places in the order of the Divine dispensations. “It is true,” as Tholuck has remarked with sound discrimination, “that the New Testament speaks more of grace than of sin; but did it not on this very account presuppose the existence of the Old Covenant with the law, and a God who is an holy and jealous God, that will not pass by transgression and sin? The Old Covenant was framed for the conviction of sin, the New for the forgiveness of sin. The moral law, which God has written in indelible lines upon the heart of every man, was once also proclaimed with much solemnity from Sinai, that it might be clear that God, who appeared in fire and flame as the revealer of His holy law, is the same who has imprinted the image of holiness deep in the secret chambers of the bosom. Is not Israel, incessantly resisting with his stiff neck the God of love, until he has always again been reduced to subjection by the God of fiery indignation, an image of proud humanity in its constant war fare against God, who seeks to conquer them by anger and love?”^[280] Hence the order of God’s dispensations is substantially also the order of each man’s experience. The sinner must be humbled and bruised by the law—that is, through the manifestation of God’s righteousness, he must have his conscience aroused to a sense of sin—before he can be brought heartily to acquiesce in the Gospel method of salvation. Therefore, not only had the way of Christ to be prepared by one who with a voice of terror preached anew the law’s righteousness and threatenings, but Christ Himself also needed to enter on the blessed work of the world’s evangelization, by unfolding the wide extent and deep spirituality of the law’s requirements. For how large a portion of the Sermon on the Mount is taken up in giving a clear and searching exposition of the law’s righteousness, and rescuing it from the false and extenuating glosses under which it had been buried! Nay, Christ, during His personal ministry, could proceed but a small way in openly revealing the grace of the Gospel, because, after all, the work of the law was so imperfectly done in the hearts even of His own disciples. And so still in the experience of men at large; it is because the sense and condemnation of sin are so seldom felt, that the benefits of salvation are so little known.^[281]

^[280]From a work, Die Lehre von der Sünde und von Versöhner, as quoted by Bialloblotzky, De Abrogatione Legis, p. 82, 83.

[281] The use of the law now described, though properly but its secondary design, is very commonly given by popular writers of this country as its chief, or almost only, use to the Israelites. Thus Bell, on Cov., p. 142, speaking of God’s design in giving the law from Sinai, says, “God gave it in subserviency to the promise, to show unto sinners their transgression and their guilt, and of consequence to drive them unto it.” So another still more strongly: “God made it (viz., the covenant of law, which is regarded by the author as the same with the covenant of works) with the Israelites for no other end than that man, being thereby convinced of his weakness, might flee unto Christ.”—(Marrow of Modern Div., P. i., c. 2) Their put ting this design first, and making it in a manner all, arose from their viewing the religion of the Old Covenant too exclusively in a typical aspect, as if the things belonging to it had not also had another and more direct bearing.

3. The necessary connection that subsisted between the law and the ceremonial institutions of the Old Testament, may be given as a still further reason of its revelation and enactment; although, when properly understood, this was not so much a distinct and separate end, as a combination of the two already specified. This law, perfect in its character and perpetual in its obligation, formed the groundwork of all the symbolical services afterwards imposed; as was distinctly implied in the place chosen for its permanent position. For as the centre of all Judaism was the tabernacle, so the centre of this again was the law—the ark, which stood enshrined in the Most Holy Place, being made for the sole purpose of keeping the two tables of the covenant. So that the reflection could hardly fail to force itself on all considerate and intelligent worshippers, that the observance of this law was the great end of the religion then established. Nor could any other use be imagined, of the strictly religious rites and institutions which so manifestly pointed to this law as their common ground and centre, than either to assist as means in preserving alive the knowledge of its principles, and promoting their observance, or as remedies to provide against the evils naturally arising from its neglect and violation.

These two objects plainly harmonize with the reasons already assigned for the giving of the law, and present the ceremonial services and institutions to our view as partly subservient to the righteousness it enjoined, and partly conducive to its ulterior end of drawing men to Christ. It will be our endeavour in the next Book to bring fully out and illustrate this relation between the law of the two tables and the symbols of Judaism; but at present we must content ourselves with briefly indicating its general nature.

(1.) In so far as those symbols had in view the first of the objects just mentioned, they are to be regarded in the same general light as the means and ordinances of grace under the New Testament. It is through these that the knowledge of the Gospel is diffused, its divine principles implanted in the hearts of men, and a suitable channel also provided for expressing the thoughts and feelings which the reception of the Gospel tends to awaken. Such also was one great design of the law’s symbolical institutions, though with a characteristic difference suited to the time of their appointment. They were formal, precise, imperative, as for persons in comparative childhood, who required to be kept under the bonds of a rigid discipline, and a discipline that should chiefly work from without inwards, so as to form the soul to right thoughts and feelings, while, at the same time, it provided appropriate services for the exercise of such when formed. Appointed for these ends, the institutions could not be of an arbitrary nature, as if the authoritative command of God were the only reason that could be assigned for their appointment, or as if the external service were required simply on its own account. They stood to the law in the stricter sense—the law of the ten commandments—in the relation of expressive signs and faithful monitors, perpetually urging upon men’s consciences, and impressing, as it were, upon their senses, the essential distinctions between right and wrong, which the law plainly revealed and established. The symbolical ordinances did not create these distinctions; they did not of themselves even indicate wherein the distinctions stood; and in this partly appeared their secondary and subservient position as compared with the law of the two tables. The ordinance, for example, respecting clean and unclean in food, pointed to a distinction in the moral sphere—to one class of things to be avoided as evil, and another to be sought after as good; but it gave no intimation as to what the one or the other actually was: for this, it pointed to the two tables of the covenant. Or, to look to another ordinance, why should the touch of the dead have defiled? The touch might come by accident, or even in the discharge of domestic duty; yet defilement was not the less its result; and only after a series of lustrations could the subjects of it return to the freedom and privileges of God’s covenant. The reason was, that as the children of the living God, they should have been conscious only of righteousness and life: neither sin nor death (which is the wages of sin) should have been found within their borders. And so, to constitute the visitation of death, or even the touch of a dead man’s bone, into a ground of defilement, was virtually to admonish them of the accursed nature of sin, and of their still abiding connection with the region where sin was working. In short, it ought to be held as a most certain principle, that in the ceremonialism of the Old Covenant nothing was simply ceremonial: the spirit of the whole was the spirit of the ten commandments.

Such being the connection between the moral law in the legislation of Moses, and the symbolical rites and services annexed to it, it was plainly necessary that the latter required to be wisely arranged, both in kind and number, so as fitly to promote the ends of their appointment. They were not outward rites and services of any sort. The outward came into existence merely for the sake of the religious and moral elements embodied in it, for the spiritual lessons it conveyed, or the sentiments of godly fear and brotherly love it was fitted to awaken. And that such ordinances should not only exist, but also be spread out into a vast multiplicity of forms, was a matter of necessity; as the dispensation then set up admitted so very sparingly of direct instruction, and was comparatively straitened in its supplies of inward grace. Imperfect as those outward ordinances were, so imperfect, that they were at last done away as unprofitable, the members of the Old Covenant were still chiefly dependent upon them for having the character of the Divine law exhibited to their minds, and its demands kept fresh upon the conscience. It was therefore fit that they should not only pervade the strictly religious territory, but should even be carried beyond it, embracing all the more important relations of life, that the Israelite might thus find something in what he ordinarily saw and did,—in the very food he ate, and the garments he wore,—to remind him of the law of his God, and stimulate him to the cultivation of that righteousness which it was his paramount duty to cherish and exemplify. Were these things duly considered, another and worthier reason would easily be discovered for the occasional intermingling of the moral and the ceremonial parts of the Mosaic legislation, than what is very commonly assigned. This did not arise from a confounding of the positive and moral, the shadowy and the abiding, as if they stood upon the same level, and no distinction were recognised betwixt them. The position of the law of the ten commandments in the ark of the covenant, as we have already stated, to say nothing of the other marks of distinction belonging to it, stood as a perpetual sign before the eyes of the people, that the things there enjoined held immeasurably the highest rank. It is, in truth, the most sublime exaltation of the moral above all material symbols of revelation, or ceremonial forms of worship, to be found in the religious annals of antiquity. In heathendom there is nothing to be compared with it, nor in the after-history of the covenant people is there anything that can justly be placed above it. The elevated moral teaching of the prophets is but the reflection, or specific and varied application, of what stood embodied before them in the lofty pattern exhibited in the handwriting of Moses, wherein the ceremonial was appointed only for the sake of the moral, and in a relation of subservience to it. From the views now unfolded, an important conclusion follows of a practical kind: for, since the symbolical institutions of Judaism continually bore respect to the moral law, and in a manner re-echoed its testimony, it is plain that God never could be satisfied with a mere outward conformity to the letter of the Mosaic ritual. Support has often been sought in Scripture itself for such an idea, especially in regard to the sacrifices; and the prophets have not unfrequently been represented as by their teaching serving to correct the tendency of the law in this respect, and going far in advance of it. The prophets, however, only comparatively depreciated the ceremonial institutions of the law (for at fitting times they also zealously enjoined their observance, Psalms 51:19; Psalms 118:27; Isaiah 43:23-24; Isaiah 56:7; Malachi 1:11; Malachi 3:9; Malachi 4:4, etc.), and for the purpose of meeting a corrupt tendency among the people, to lay undue stress on merely outward rites and services. But, in reality, the law itself, when properly understood, did the same. No one who looked into it with a considerate spirit could avoid the impression, that “to obey was better than sacrifice;” and that they who made the outward ceremonies of one part a substitute for the spiritual requirements of another, were taking counsel of their own hearts, rather than sitting at the feet of Moses, Hengstenberg justly remarks, that “there cannot be produced out of the whole Old Testament one single passage, in which the notion that sacrifices of themselves, and apart from the state of mind in the offerers, are well-pleasing to God, is noticed, except for the purpose of vigorously opposing it. When, for example, in Leviticus 26:31, it is said in reference to the ungodly, I will not smell the savour of your sweet odours; and when, in Genesis 4:4-5, we find that, along with an outward similarity, the offerings of Cain and Abel met with such a different reception from God, and that this difference is represented as being based on something personal to the individuals, it is all but expressly asserted, that sacrifices were regarded only as expressive of the inner sentiment.”^[282] And again: “That the law, with all its appearance of outwardness, still possessed throughout a religious-moral, an internal, spiritual character, is manifest from the fact, that the two internal commands of love to God and one’s neighbour are in the law itself represented as those in which all the rest lie enclosed, the fulfilment of which carried along with it the fulfilment of all individual precepts, and without which no obedience was practicable: ‘And now, Israel, what does the Lord thy God require of thee,’ etc.—(Deuteronomy 10:12; Deuteronomy 6:5; Deuteronomy 11:1; Deuteronomy 11:13; Deuteronomy 13:3; Deuteronomy 30:15; Deuteronomy 30:20; Leviticus 19:18) If everything in the law is made to turn upon love, it is self-evident that a dead bodily service could not be what was properly required. Besides, in Leviticus 26:41, the violation of the law is represented as the necessary product of an uncircumcised heart; and in Deuteronomy 10:16 we find the remarkable words: ‘And ye shall circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff-necked,’— which condemn all Pharisaism, that is ever expecting good fruit from bad trees, and would gather grapes from thorns, and figs from thistles.”^[283] What is called the ceremonial law, therefore, was, in its more immediate and primary aspect, an exhibition by means of symbolical rites and institutions of the righteousness enjoined in the decalogue, and a discipline through which the heart might be wrought into some conformity to the righteousness itself.

[282] Introduc. to Psalms 32.

[283] Authentie, ii., p. 611, 612.

(2.) But the more fully the ceremonial parts of the Mosaic legislation were fitted to accomplish this end, they must so much the more have traded to help forward the other end of the law, viz., to produce conviction of sin, and prepare the heart for Christ. “By the law is the knowledge of sin”—the sense of shortcomings and transgressions is in exact proportion to the insight that has been obtained into its true spiritual meaning. And the manifold restrictions and services of a bodily kind which were imposed upon the Israelites, as they all spoke of holiness and sin, so, where their voice was honestly listened to, it must have been with the effect of begetting impressions of guilt. They were perpetually uttering without the sanctuary the cry of transgression, which was rising within, under the throne of God, from the two tables of testimony. They might even be said to do more; for of them more peculiarly does it hold, “They entered that the offence might abound,” since, while calling upon men to abstain from sin, they at the same time multiplied the occasions of offence. The strict limitations and numerous requirements of service, through which they did the one, render it unavoidable that they should also do the other; as they thus necessarily made many things to be sin which were not so before, or in their own nature, and consequently increased both the number of transgressions, and their burden upon the conscience. How comparatively difficult must it have been to apprehend through so many occasions and witnesses of guilt the light of God’s reconciliation and love! How often must the truly spiritual heart have felt as heavy laden with its yoke, and scarcely able to bear it! And how glad should have been to all the members of the covenant the tidings of that “liberty with which Christ makes His people free!”

This, however, was not the whole. Had the ceremonial institutions and services simply co-operated with the decalogue in producing upon men’s minds a conviction of guilt, and shut ting them up to the necessity of salvation, the yoke of bondage would have been altogether intolerable, and despair rather than the hope of salvation must have been the consequence. They so far differed, however, from the precepts of the law, that they provided a present atonement for the sin which the law condemned—met the conscious defect of righteousness which the law produced, with vicarious sacrifices and bodily lustrations. But these, as formerly noticed, were so manifestly inadequate to the end in view, that though they might, from being God’s own appointed remedies, restore the troubled conscience to a state of peace, they could not thoroughly satisfy it. First of all, they betrayed their own insufficiency, by allowing certain fearful gaps in the list of transgressions to stand unprovided for. Be sides, the comparatively small distinction that was made, as regards purification, between mere bodily defilements and moral pollution, and the absolute necessity of resorting anew to the blood of atonement, as often as the sense of guilt again returned, were plain indications that such services “could not make the comers thereunto perfect as pertaining to the conscience.” To the thoughtful mind it must have seemed as if a struggle was continually proceeding between God’s holiness and the sin of His creatures, in which the former found only a most imperfect vindication. For what just comparison could be made between the forfeited life of an accountable being and the blood of an irrational victim? Or between the defilements of a polluted conscience and the external washings of the outward man? Surely considerate and pious minds must have felt the need of something greatly more valuable to compensate for the evil done by sin, and must have seen, in the existing means of purification, only the temporary substitutes of better things to come. Such, at least, was the ultimate design of God; and whatever may have been the extent or clearness of view in those who lived among the shadows of the law, regarding the coming realities of the Gospel, it is impossible that they should have entered into the spirit of the former dispensation without being prepared to hail a suffering Messiah as the only true consolation of Israel; and prepared also to join in the song of the redeemed, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.”^[284]

^[284]It is assumed here, that the sacrifices appointed under the law were intended to meet the sense of guilt produced by the law, and provide for it a present relief—the one, therefore, having to do with moral considerations as well as the other. But see this point formally discussed in connection with the sin-offering, Ch. III., sec. 7. At the same time, there can be no doubt that here peculiarly lay the danger of the members of the Old Covenant—a danger, which the issue too clearly proved, that but a small proportion of them were able properly to surmount. Not seeing to the end of the things amid which they were placed, and wanting the incalculable advantage of the awful revelation of God’s righteousness in Christ, the law failed to teach them effectually of the nature of that righteousness, or to convince them of sin, or to prepare them for the reception of the Saviour. But failing in these grand points, the law became a stumbling-block and a hindrance in their path. For now men’s consciences adjusted themselves to the imperfect appearances of things, and acted much in the spirit of those in present times, who, as a sensible and pious writer expresses it, “try to bring up the power of free-will to holiness, by bringing holiness down to the power of free-will.”^[285] The dead letter, consequently, became everything with them; they saw nothing beneath the outward shell, nor felt any need for other and higher realities than those with which they had immediately to do. Self-righteousness was the inevitable result; and that, rooting itself the more deeply, and raising more proudly aloft its pretensions, that it had to travel the round of so complicated a system of laws and ordinances. For, great as the demand was which the observance of these made upon the obedience, still, as viewed by the carnal eye, it was something that could be measured and done—not so huge but that the mind could grapple with its accomplishment; and hence, instead of undermining the pride of nature, only supplying it with a greater mass of materials for erecting its claims on the favour of Heaven. The spirit of self-righteousness was the prevailing tendency of the carnal mind under the Old Dispensation, as an unconcern about personal righteousness is under the New. How many were snared by it! and how fatally bound! Of all “the spirits in prison” to whom the word of the Gospel came with its offers of deliverance, those proved to be the most hopelessly incarcerated in the strongholds of error, who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and stumbled at the rock of a free salvation.

[285] Fraser on Sanctification, p. 298.

Section Sixth.—The Relation Of Believers Under The New Testament To The Law—In What Sense They Are Free From It—And Why It Is No Longer Proper To Keep The Symbolical Institutions Connected With It THE relation of believers under the New Testament to the law has been a fruitful subject of controversy among divines. This has arisen chiefly from the apparently contradictory statements made respecting it in New Testament Scripture; and this, again, partly from the change introduced by the setting up of the more spiritual machinery of the Gospel dispensation, and partly also in consequence of the mistaken views entertained regarding the law by those to whom the Gospel first came, which required to be corrected by strong representations of an opposite description. Thus, on the one hand, we find our Lord saying, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whoso ever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”^[286] Stronger language could not possibly be employed to assert the abiding force and obligation of the law’s requirements under the New Testament dispensation; for that this is specially meant by “the kingdom of heaven,” is too obvious to require any proof. In perfect conformity with this statement of our Lord, we find the apostles everywhere enforcing the duties enjoined in the law; as when St James describes the genuine Christian by “his looking into the perfect law of liberty, and continuing therein,” and exhorts the disciples “not to speak evil of the law, or to judge it, but to fulfil it;”^[287] or when the Apostle Paul not only speaks of himself as “being under the law to Christ,”^[288] but presses on the disciples at Koine and Galatia the constant exercise of love on the ground of its being “the fulfilling of the law;”^[289] and in answer to the question, “Do we then make void the law through faith?” he replies, “God forbid: yea, we establish the law.”^[290] ^[286]Matthew 5:17-19.

[287] James 1:25; James 2:8-12.

[288] 1 Corinthians 9:21.

[289] Romans 13:10; Galatians 5:14.

[290] Romans 3:31.

But, on the other hand, when we turn to a different class of passages, we meet with statements that seem to run in the precisely opposite direction, especially in the writings of St Paul. There alone, indeed, do we meet with them in the form of dogmatical assertions, although in a practical form the same element of thought occurs in the other epistles. In the first Epistle to Timothy he lays this down as a certain position, that “the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient.”^[291] And in the Epistle to the Romans he indicates a certain contrast between the present state of believers in this respect with what it was under the former dispensation, and asserts that the law no longer occupies the place it once did: “Now we are delivered from the law, being dead to that wherein we were held; that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter.”^[292] And again: “Sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.”^[293] ^[291]1 Timothy 1:9.

[292] Romans 7:6.

[293] Romans 6:14. That in all these passages the law, in the strict and proper sense, is meant,—the law of the ten commandments, the sum of whose precepts is perfect love to God and man,—we may here take for granted, after what has been said regarding it in the first section of this chapter. It seems perfectly unaccountable, on any grounds of criticism at least, that so many English writers should have thought of solving the difficulty arising from the use of such language, by alleging the Apostle to have had in view simply the ceremonial law, as contradistinguished from the moral. This view, we should imagine, is now nearly exploded among the better-informed students of Scripture; for not only does the Apostle, as Archbishop Whately states, speak of the freedom of Christians from the law, “without limiting or qualifying the assertion, without even hinting at any distinction between moral and ceremonial or civil precepts,” but there can be no doubt that it is what is commonly understood by the moral part of the Mosaic legislation the decalogue—that he has specially and properly in view.^[294]

^[294]The work of Fraser on Sanctification, which has been less known in England than it should have been, is perfectly conclusive against Locke, Hammond, Whitby, and others, that the Apostle in Romans had in view the moral rather than the ceremonial law. It is impossible, indeed, that such a notion could ever have been entertained by such men except through strong doctrinal prejudices. In what respect, then, can it be said of Christians, that they are freed from this law, or are not under it? We must first answer the question in a general way; after which only can we be prepared for pointing out distinctly wherein the relation of the members of the New Covenant to the law differs from that of those who lived under the Old.

1. Believers in Christ are not under the law as to the ground of their condemnation or justification before God. It is not the law, but Christ, that they are indebted to for pardon and life; and receiving these from Him as His gift of grace, they cannot be brought by the law into condemnation and death. The reason is, that Christ has, by His own pure and spotless obedience, done what the law, in the hands of fallen humanity, could not do—He has brought in the everlasting righteousness, which, by its infinite worth, has merited eternal life for as many as believe upon Him. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus; “Whosoever believeth upon Him is justified from all things; “or, in the still stronger and more comprehensive language of Christ Himself, “He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but hath passed from death to life.”^[295] ^[295]Romans 8:1; Acts 13:39; John 5:24.

This, it will be perceived, is what is commonly understood by deliverance from the law as a covenant. But it is proper to remark, that though the idea expressed in such language is scriptural, the language itself is not so, and is rather fitted to mislead; for it appears to imply that, as the law certainly formed the basis of a covenant with the Old Testament Church, its being so formed made it something else than a rule of life, and warranted the Israelites to look to it, in the first instance at least, for life and blessing. This, we have already shown, was not the purpose for which the law was either given or established as a covenant among them; and deliverance from it in the sense mentioned above, marks no essential distinction between the case of believers under the Old and that of those under the New Testament dispensation. The standing of the one as well as the other was in grace; and when the law came, it came not for the purpose of subverting or changing that constitution, but only to direct and oblige men to carry out the important ends for which they had been made partakers of grace and blessing. Strictly speaking, therefore, the Church never was under the law as a covenant, in the sense commonly understood by the term; it was only the mistake of the carnal portion of her members to suppose themselves to have been so. But as God Himself is unchangeable in holiness, the demands of His law, as revealed to men in grace, must be substantially the same as those which they are bound in nature to comply with under pain of His everlasting displeasure. In this respect all may be said, by the very constitution of their being, to be naturally under law to God, and, as transgressors of law, liable to punishment. But through the grace of God we have ceased to be so under it, if we have become true believers in Christ. We have pardon and acceptance through faith in His blood; and even though “in many things offending, and in all coming short,” yet, while faith abides in us, we cannot come into condemnation. To this belong all such passages as treat of justification, and declare it to be granted without the law, or the deeds of the law, to the ungodly, and as God’s gift of grace in Christ.

2. But this is not the only respect in which the Apostle affirms believers now to be free from the law, nor the respect at all which he has in view in the sixth and seventh chapters of his Epistle to the Romans; for the subject he is there handling is not justification, but sanctification. The question he is discussing is not how, as condemned and sinful creatures, we may be accepted as righteous before God; but how, being already pardoned and accepted in the Beloved, we ought to live. In this respect, also, he affirms that we are dead to the law, and are not under it, but under grace the grace,—that is, of God’s in dwelling Spirit, whose quickening energy and pulse of life takes the place of the law’s outward prescriptions and magisterial authority. And if it were not already clear, from the order of the Apostle’s thoughts, and the stage at which he has arrived in the discussion, that it is in this point of view he is now considering the law, the purpose for which he asserts our freedom to have been obtained would put it beyond all reasonable doubt, viz., “that sin might not have dominion over us” (Romans 6:14), or, “that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us.”—(Romans 8:4)^[296]

^[296]It seems very strange, considering bow plain and explicit the Apostle’s meaning is, that the late Professor Lee of Cambridge should still say: “The main question, I think, here discussed (viz., in ch. 7) by the Apostle is, How is a man to be justified with God?” (Dissertations, i., sec. 10) Haldane, also, in his Commentary, maintains the same obviously untenable view. Fraser (Sanctification, on Romans 7:4) justly remarks, that though the similitude of marriage used by the Apostle in ch. 7 “might be explained to show that the sinner cannot attain justification or any of its comfortable consequences by the law,” yet that it is another consequence of the marriage covenant and relation that he hath in his eye,” viz., “the bringing forth of fruit unto God; “in other words, the maintaining of such holy lives as constitute our sanctification.

According to the doctrine of the Apostle, then, believers are not under the law as to their walk and conduct; or, as he says elsewhere, “the law is not for the righteous:” believers “have the Spirit of the Lord; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” But is not this dangerous doctrine? For where now is the safeguard against sin? May not each one do as he lists, oblivious of any distinction between holiness and sin, or even denying its existence, as regards the children of God, on the ground that where no law is, there is no transgression? To such questions the Apostle’s reply is, “God forbid,”—so far from it, that the freedom he asserts from the law has for its sole aim a deliverance from sin’s dominion, and a fruitfulness in all well-doing to God. The truth more fully stated is simply this: When the believer receives Christ as the Lord his righteousness, he is not only justified by grace, but he comes into a state of grace, or gets grace into his heart as a living, reigning, governing principle of life. What, however, is this grace but the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus? And this Spirit is emphatically the Holy Spirit; holiness is the very element of His being, and the essential law of His working; every desire He breathes, every feeling He awakens, every action He disposes and enables us to perform, is according to godliness. And if only we are sufficiently possessed of this Spirit, and yield ourselves to His direction and control, we no longer need the restraint and discipline of the law; we are free from it, because we are superior to it. Quickened and led by the Spirit, we of ourselves love and do the things which the law requires. Does not nature itself teach substantially the same lesson in its line of things? The child, so long as he is a child, must be subject to the law of his parents; his safety and well-being depend on his being so; he must on every side be hemmed in, checked, and stimulated by that law of his parents, otherwise mischief and destruction will infallibly overtake him. But as he ripens toward manhood he becomes freed from this law, because he no longer needs such external discipline and restraint. He is a law to himself, putting away childish things, and of his own accord acting as the parental authority, had he still been subject to it, would have required and enforced him to do. In a word, the mind has become his from which the parental law proceeded, and he has consequently become independent of its outward prescriptions. And what is it to be under the grace of God’s Spirit, but to have the mind of God?—the mind of Him who gave the law simply as a revelation of what was in His heart respecting the holiness of His people. So that the more they have of the one, the less obviously they need of the other; and if only they were complete in the grace of the Spirit, they should be wholly independent of the bonds and restrictions of the law. Or let us bring into comparison the relation in which a good man stands to the laws of his country. In one sense, indeed, he is under them; but in another and higher sense he is above them, and moves along his course with conscious freedom, as if he scarcely knew of their existence. For what is the object of such laws but to prevent, under severe penalties, the commission of crime? Crime, however, is already the object of his abhorrence; he needs no penalties to keep him from it. He would never harm the person or property of a neighbour, though there were not a single enactment in the statute-book on the subject. His own love of good and hatred of evil keep him in the path of rectitude, not the fines, imprisonments, or tortures which the law hangs around the path of the criminal. The law was not made for him.

It is not otherwise with one who has become a partaker of grace. The law, considered as an outward discipline placing him under a yoke of manifold commands and prohibitions, has for him ceased to exist. But it has ceased in that respect only by taking possession of him in another. It is now within his heart. It is the law of the Spirit of life in his inner man; emphatically, therefore, “the law of liberty:” his delight is to do it; and it were better for him not to live, than to live otherwise than the tenor of the law requires. We see in Jesus, the holy child of God, the perfect exemplar of this free-will service to Heaven: for while He was made under the law, He was so replenished with the Spirit, that He fulfilled it as if He fulfilled it not; it was His very meat to do the will of Him that sent Him; and not more certainly did the law enjoin, than He in His inmost soul loved righteousness and hated iniquity. Such also, in a measure, will ever be the case with the devout believer in Jesus—in the same measure in which he has received of his Master’s Spirit. Does the law command him to bear no false witness against his neighbour? He is already so renewed in the spirit of his mind, as to speak the truth in his heart, and be ready to swear to his own hurt. Does the law demand, through all its precepts, supreme love to God, and brotherly love to men? Why should this need to be demanded as matter of law from him who has the Eternal Spirit of love bearing sway within, who therefore may be said to live and breathe in an atmosphere of love? Like Paul, he can say with king-like freedom, “I can do all things through Christ strengthening me;” even in chains I am free; I choose what God chooses for me: His will in doing or suffering I embrace as my own; for I have Him working in me both to will and to do of His good pleasure.

Now it is here that the difference properly comes in between the Old and the New Testament dispensations,—a difference. however, it must be carefully marked, of degree only, and not of kind. The saying is here especially applicable, “On the outside of things look for differences, on the inside for likenesses.”^[297] In correspondence with the change that has taken place in the character of the Divine administration, the relative position of believers to the law and the Spirit has changed; but under both covenants alike, an indispensable place belongs to each of them. In the former dispensation the law stood more prominently out, and was the more peculiar means for leading men to holiness—supplying, as by a sort of artificial stimulant and support, the still necessary defect in the inward gift of the Spirit’s grace. We say the necessary defect; for the proper materials of the Spirit’s working, not yet being provided or openly revealed, the Spirit could not be fully given, nor could His work be carried on otherwise than in a mystery. It was so carried on, however; every true member of the covenant was a partaker of the Spirit, because he stood in grace at the same time that he stood under the law. But his relation to the Spirit was of a more hidden and secret, to the law of a more ostensible and manifest, character. In the New Testament dispensation this relation is exactly reversed, although in each respect it still exists. The work of Christ, which furnishes the proper materials of the Spirit’s operations, having been accomplished, and Himself glorified, the Spirit is now fully and unreservedly given. Through the power of His grace, in connection with the word of the Gospel, the Divine kingdom avowedly purposes to effect its spiritual designs, and bring forth its fruits of righteousness to God. This, therefore, it is to which the believer now stands immediately and ostensibly related, as the agency through which he is to fulfil the high ends of his calling; while the law retires into the background, or should be known only as existing within, impressed in all its essential lines of truth and duty upon the tablet of the heart, and manifesting itself in the deeds of a righteous life. But whether the law or the Spirit stand more prominently forward, the end is the same—namely, righteousness. The only difference that exists, is as to the means of securing this end more outward in the one case, more inward in the other; yet in each a measure of both required, and one and the same point aimed at. Hence the words of the Apostle: “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth,” i.e., both alike are for righteousness—this is the one great end which Christ and the law have equally in view. But in Christ it is secured in a far higher way than it could possibly be through the law, since He has not only perfected Himself as the Divine Head and Surety of His people in the righteousness which the law requires, but also endows them with the plentiful grace of His Spirit, “that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in them, walking not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

[297] Hares, Guesses after Truth, ii., p. 3. With these distinctions clearly perceived, we shall easily understand what is said in the New Testament Scriptures of the difference, in a practical point of view, as to the condition of believers under the past and the present dispensations respectively. This is spoken of as a state of comparative freedom, that of a certain species of restraint or bondage—not the bondage, indeed, of slaves and mercenaries, which belonged only to the carnal, as opposed to the believing portion of the Church—but the bondage of those who, though free-born children, are still in nonage, and must be kept under the restraint and discipline of an external law. This, however, could in no case be the whole of the agency with which the believer was plied, for then his yoke must have been literally the galling bondage of the slave. He must have had more or less the Spirit of life within, begetting and prompting him to do the things which the law outwardly enjoined—making the pulse of life in the heart beat in harmony with the rule of life prescribed in the law; so that, while he still felt as under tutors and governors, it was not as one needing to be “held in with bit and bridle,” but rather as one disposed readily and cheerfully to keep to the appointed course. This would be the case with him always the more, the more diligently he employed the measure of grace within his reach; and if in a spirit of faith he could indeed “lift the latch and force his way” onwards to the end of those things which were then established, he might even have become insensible to the bonds and trammels of his childhood-condition, and attained to the free and joyful spirit of the perfect man. So it unquestionably was with the Psalmist, and doubtless might have been with all, if they had but used, as he did, the privileges granted them. For such, the law was not a mere outward yoke, nor in any proper sense a burden: it was “within their heart;” they delighted in its precepts, and meditated therein day and night; to listen to its instructions was sweeter to them than honey, and to obey its dictates was better than thousands of gold and silver.^[298] ^[298]See especially Psalms 1, 15, 24, 40, 119.

It is only, therefore, in a comparative sense, that we are to understand the passages in the New Testament Scripture formerly referred to; and in the same sense, also, that similar passages are to be interpreted in Old Testament Scripture,—such, for example, as Jeremiah 31:31-34 : “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand, to bring them out of the land of Egypt . . . but this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be My people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour,” etc. (Comp. Ezekiel 36:25-27, which differs only in particularizing the agency by which the better state of things was to be introduced—the larger gift of the Spirit.) “The discourse here cannot be of a new and more complete revelation of the law of God, for this is common to both economies: no jot or tittle of it can be lost under the New Testament, nor can a jot or tittle be added to it; God’s law rests on His nature, and this is eternally immutable.—(Malachi 3:6) Just as little can the discourse be of the introduction of an entirely new relation, which by no means has the former for its groundwork. In this respect Kimchi rightly remarks: ‘Non erit foederis novitas, sed stabilimentum ejus’ (not a change, but an establishing of the covenant). The covenant with Israel is eternal; Jehovah would not be Jehovah, if an absolutely new beginning could take place.—(Romans 15:8) When, therefore, the subject of discourse is here the antithesis of an Old and New covenant, the former must designate, not the relation of God to Israel in itself, and in all its extent, but rather only the former manifestation of this relation—that through which the Lord, until the time of the prophet, had made Himself known as the God of Israel.”^[299] And in regard to the difference indicated by the prophet, as to the believer’s connection with the law under the two covenants, the learned author, expressing his concurrence in particular with Calvin and Buddeus, goes on to show that this also is not absolute, but only relative. He justly states that the idea of a purely outward giving of the law is inconceivable, as God would then have done for Israel nothing farther than He did for the traitor Judas, in whose conscience He proclaimed His holy law, without giving him any power to repent—that the terms in which the law is spoken of by the Psalmist, in the name of the Old Testament saints, shows it to have been in their experience no longer a law that worketh wrath, but a law in connection with the Spirit, whose commands are not grievous; and that the antithesis between the Old and the New state of things, though in itself but relative, was expressed in the absolute form, merely because the gift of the Old Testament appeared, when compared with the infinitely more important and richer blessing of the New, as so small, that it vanished out of sight.

[299] Hengstenberg’s Christology on Jeremiah 31:31. But something else than that should also vanish from our sight. For if we enter as we should into these views, the idea of the law’s abrogation or abolition under the New Testament, in whatever form proposed, will be repudiated as equally dangerous and ungrounded. The law is in no proper sense abolished by the revelations of the Gospel; nor does the Apostle in any fair construction of his language say that it is. He merely says, that through grace we are not under it, and in a conjugal respect are dead to it. In a certain qualified sense, believers in Old Testament times might be said to have been married to it, or to have been under it; only, however, in a qualified sense, for God Himself—the God of grace as well as of law—was properly their husband (Jeremiah 31:32), and they stood under the covenant of grace before they came under the covenant of law. But though, even in that qualified sense, believers are not now under the law, or married to it, the righteousness required is as much binding upon their consciences, and expected at their hands, as it ever was at any former period of the Church’s history. More so, indeed; for the very reason, as the Apostle tells us, why they are placed less directly under the law, and more under the Spirit, is, that the end of the law might be more certainly attained, and a richer harvest yielded of its fruits of righteousness. Therefore it is, that in the same epistle in which those expressions are used, conformity to the law’s requirements is still held out, and inculcated as the very perfection of Christian excellence.—(Romans 13:8-10) For it is not as if these two, the law and the Spirit, were contending authorities, or forces drawing in two distinct and separate lines. On the contrary, they are essentially and thoroughly agreed—alike emanations of the unchanging holiness of Godhead—the one its outward form and character in which it was to appear, the other its inward spring and pulse of life. What the one teaches, the other wills—what the one requires, the other prompts and qualifies to perform; and as the law at first came as an hand maid to the previously existing covenant of grace, so does it still remain in the hand of the Spirit to aid Him, amid the workings of the flesh and the imperfections of grace, in carrying out the objects for which He condescends to dwell and act in the bosoms of men.

Hence appears the monstrous absurdity and error of Antinomianism, which proceeds on the supposition of the law and the Spirit being two distinct, possibly contending, authorities a doctrine not so much opposed to any particular portion of Scripture, as the common antithesis of all its revelations, and the subversion of all its principles. But let it once be understood that the law and the Spirit have but one end in view, and one path, in a sense, to reach it—that the motions of the Spirit within, invariably, and by the highest of all necessities, take the direction prescribed by the law without—let this be understood, and Antinomianism wants even the shadow of a ground to stand upon.—It is not merely the Antinomians, however, who contend for the abrogation of the law; the same thing is substantially done by many divines who belong to an entirely different class. For example, Archbishop Whately, in his Essay on the Abolition of the Law, maintains this position: “The simplest and clearest way then of stating the case, is to lay down, on the one hand, that the Mosaic law was limited both to the nation of the Israelites, and to the period before the Gospel; but, on the other hand, that the natural principles of morality which, among other things, it inculcates, are, from their own character of universal obligation, and that Christians are bound to obey the moral commandments it contained, not because they are commandments of the Mosaic law, but because they are moral.” This view, which puts the decalogue on a footing with the laws of Solon or Mahomet, in so far as any obligation on the conscience is concerned, is that also maintained, and with a considerable show of learning supported, by Bialloblotzky, in his work De Abrogatione Legis. The form into which the learned author throws his statement is, that the nomothetical authority of the Mosaic law is abolished, but its didactical authority remains; in other words, it has no binding force as a law upon the conscience, but may still be profitably used for direction in the way of duty,—due allowance of course being made for all that belonged to it of temporary appointment and ceremonial observance, which is no longer even a matter of duty. His chief arguments in supporting this view are, that in some things, especially in regard to the Sabbath, marriage, the symbolical rites (for all are thrown, as we observed before, into one mass), Christ and His apostles have corrected the law, and that they oppose the authority of the Spirit to the external tyranny of the law (as if these were two contending masters; and we actually have the passage, “No man can serve two masters,” produced in proof of the argument, p. 63). Such views have been substantially met already; and we simply remark farther, that they necessarily open the widest door for Antinomians and Rationalists: for if, as possessors of the Spirit, we must first judge what part of the law is moral or didactic,—and even when we have ascertained this, still are permitted to hold that we are not connected with it as a matter of binding and authoritative obligation,—it is easy to see what slight convictions of sin will be felt, what loose notions of duty entertained, how feeble a barrier left against either the carnal or the fanatical spirit ridding itself of the plainest obligations. It is quite possible, no doubt, to produce unguarded statements, easily susceptible of an improper meaning, and partly, indeed, expressing such, from Luther’s works on the law. But his real views, when carefully and doctrinally, not controversially expressed, were substantially correct, as will appear from a quotation to be given presently, or from Melancthon’s works, which Luther is well known to have held to be better expositions than his own of their doctrinal views. For example, after speaking (vol. i., p. 309) of the Mosaic law as not availing to justification, and in its civil and ceremonial parts done away, Melancthon adds: “But the moral law, since it is the wisdom of God and His eternal rule of righteousness, and has been revealed that man should be like God, cannot be abolished, but remains perpetually (Romans 3:31; Romans 8:4).” The question, however, naturally arises, Of what use is the law to those who really are under the Spirit? We answer, it would be of none, if the work of spiritual renovation, which His grace is given to effect, were perfected in us. But since this is far from being the case—since imperfection still cleaves to the child of God, and the flesh, in a greater or less degree, still wars against the Spirit, the outward discipline of the law can never be safely dispensed with. Even St Paul was obliged to confess that he found the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and that though he was ever following after, he was conscious of not having yet attained to the full measure of grace and excellence in Christ. Therefore, for his own quickening and direction, as well as for that of others, he felt it needful to press the demands of law, and to look to the exceeding breadth of its requirements. Luther also, and his fellow-labourers, although their views were not always correct as to the relation in which Israel stood to the law, nor by any means clear regarding the precise nature of the change introduced by the Gospel, yet were sound enough on this point. Thus they say in one of their symbolical books: “Although the law was not made for the righteous (as the Apostle testifies, 1 Timothy 1:9), yet this is not to be understood as if the righteous might live without law; for the Divine law is written upon their hearts. The true and genuine meaning, therefore, of Paul’s words is, that the law cannot bring those who have been reconciled to God through Christ under its curse, and that its restraint cannot be irksome to the renewed, since they delight in the law of God after the inner man. . . . But believers are not completely and perfectly renewed in this life; and though their sins are covered by the absolutely perfect obedience of Christ, so as not to be imputed to believers to their condemnation, and though the mortification of the old Adam and the renovation in the spirit of their mind has been begun by the Holy Spirit, yet the old Adam still remains in nature’s powers and affections,” etc.^[300] ^[300]De Abrog. Legis.. p. 72-73.

There are three different respects in which we still need the law of God, and which it will be enough briefly to indicate: 1. To keep us under grace, as the source of all our security and blessing. This we are ever apt, through the pride and self-confidence of the flesh, to forget, even though we have already in some measure known it. Therefore the law must be our schoolmaster, not only to bring us to Christ at the beginning of a Christian life, but also afterwards to keep us there, and force continually back upon us the conviction, that we must be in all respects the debtors of grace. For when we see what a spirituality and breadth is in the law of God, how it extends to the thoughts and affections of the heart as well as to our words and actions, and demands, in regard to all, the exercise of an unswerving devoted love, then we are made to feel that the law, if trusted in as a ground of confidence, must still work wrath, and that, convinced by it as transgressors, we must betake for all peace and consolation to the grace of Christ. Here alone, in His atonement, can we find satisfaction to our consciences; and here alone also, in the strengthening aid of His Spirit, the ability to do the things which the law requires. 2. The law, again, is needed to restrain and hold us back from those sins which we might otherwise be inclined to commit. It is true, that in one who is really a subject of grace, there can be no habitual inclination to live in sin; for he is God’s workmanship in Christ Jesus, created in Him unto good works. But the temptations of the world, and the devices of the spiritual adversary, may often be too much for any measure of grace he has already received, successfully to resist: he may want in certain circumstances the willing and faithful mind either to withstand evil or to prosecute as he should the path of righteousness; and therefore the law is still placed before him by the Spirit, with its stem prohibitions and awful threatenings to move with fear, whenever love fails to prompt and influence the heart. Thus the Apostle: “I am determined to know nothing among you but Christ and Him crucified”—it is my delight, my very life, to preach the doctrines of His salvation; but if the flesh should recoil from the work, and render the spirit unwilling, “a dispensation is committed to me, yea, woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel.” Thus the discipline of the law comes in to supply the imperfections of the Spirit, and curb the still remaining tendencies of sin. 3. And it is yet farther needed to present continually before the eye of the mind a clear representation of the righteousness which, through the grace of the Spirit, believers should be ever striving to attain. While that grace is still imperfect, they are necessarily in danger of entertaining low and defective views of duty; nay, in times of peculiar temptation or undue excitement, they might even mistake the motions of the flesh for the promptings of the Spirit, and under the guise of truth embrace the way of error. But the law stands before them, with its revelation of righteousness, as a faithful and resplendent mirror, in which they may behold, without any danger of delusion or mistake, the perfect image of that excellence which they should be ever yielding to God. “We are free we have the Spirit, and are not subject to bondage.” True, but free only to act as servants of Christ, and not to throw around you a cloak of maliciousness. Believers are free, not to introduce what they please into the service of God, for He is a jealous God, and will not allow His glory to be associated with the vain imaginations of men; they are free to worship Him only in spirit and in truth. Shall any one say he is free to give or withhold, as seems good to him, what may be needed to advance the cause of God in the world to employ or not for holy ends the means and opportunities he enjoys! How impossible! seeing that if he is really filled with the Spirit, the love of God must have been breathed into his soul, so as of necessity to make it his delight to do what he can for the Divine glory, and to engage in the services which bring him into nearest fellowship with Heaven.

Thus the freedom of the Spirit is a freedom only within the bounds and limits of the law; and the law itself must stand, lest the flesh, taking advantage of the weakness of the Spirit’s grace, should in its wantonness break forth into courses which are displeasing to the mind of God. So much for the law in the strict and proper sense,—the law of the ten commandments,—the freedom from which enjoyed by the Christian is not absolute, but relative only; just as the Israelites want of the Spirit was also of a simply relative description. But in regard to what is called the ceremonial law, the freedom is absolute; and to keep up the observance of its symbolical institutions and services after the new dispensation entered, was not only to retain a yoke that might be dispensed with, but also an incongruity to be avoided, and even a danger to be shunned. For, viewed simply as teaching ordinances, intended to represent and inculcate the great principles of truth and duty, they were superseded at the introduction of the Gospel by the appointment of other means, more suitable as instruments in the hand of the Spirit for ministering instruction to the minds of men. The change then brought into the divine administration was characterized throughout by a more immediate and direct handling of the things of God. They were now things no longer hid under a veil, but openly disclosed to the eye of the mind. And ordinances which were adapted to a state of the Church when neither the Spirit was fully given, nor the things of God were clearly revealed, could not possibly be such as were adapted to the Church of the New Testament. The grand ordinance here must be the free and open manifestation of the truth—written first in the word of inspiration, and thenceforth continually proclaimed anew by the preaching of the Gospel; and such symbolical institutions as might yet be needed, must be founded upon the clear revelations of this word not—like those of the former dispensation, spreading a veil over the truth, or affording only a dim shadow of better things to come. Hence the old ritual of service should have fallen into desuetude whenever the new state of things entered; and the tenacity with which the Judaizing Christians clung to it, was the indication of an imperfect enlightenment and a perverted taste. Had they known aright the new wine, they would straightway have forsaken the old. So long as they could get the kernel only through the shell, it was their duty to take the one for the sake of the other. But now, when the kernel itself was presented to them in naked simplicity, still to insist upon having the shell along with it, was the clear sign of a disordered condition,—an undoubted proof that they had not yet come to the full knowledge and appreciation of Gospel truth, and were disposed to rest unduly in mere outward observances. The Apostle, therefore, on this ground alone, justly denounces such Judaizers as carnal,—in spiritual things acting the part of persons who, though of full age, have not put away childish things, but continue in a willing “bondage to the elements of the world.” This, however, was by no means the whole of the misapprehension which such conduct betrayed. For while those ordinances of the former dispensation were in one point of view means of instruction and grace, in another they were signs and acknowledgments of debt. Calling, as they did, continually for acts of atonement and cleansing, and yet presenting nothing that could satisfactorily purge the conscience, they were, even when rigorously performed, testimonies that the heavy reckoning for guilt was not yet properly met—bonds of obligation for the time relieved, but standing over to some future period for their full and adequate discharge. This discharge in full was given by Christ when He suffered on the cross, and brought in complete satisfaction for all the demands of the violated law. He is therefore said to have “blotted out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross.” The charges of guilt and condemnation which that handwriting had been perpetually making against men as transgressors, were now laid in one mass upon the body of the crucified Redeemer, and with its death were for ever abolished. So that those ceremonies being, as Calvin justly terms them, “attestations of men’s guilt, and instruments witnessing their liability,” “Paul with good reason warned the Colossians how seriously they would relapse, if they allowed a yoke in that way to be imposed upon them. By so doing, they at the same time deprived themselves of all benefit from Christ, who, by His eternal sacrifice once offered, had abolished those daily sacrifices, which were indeed powerful to attest sin, but could do nothing to destroy it.”^[301] It was in effect to say, that they did not regard the death of Christ as in itself a perfect satisfaction for the guilt of their sins, but required the purifications of the law to make it complete—at once dishonouring Christ, and showing that they took the Old Testament ceremonies for something else than they really were.

[301] Inst., B. 2., c. 7, § 17.

It has sometimes been alleged, that in the case of the Jewish believers there was still a sort of propriety, or even of obligation, in continuing to observe the ceremonies of Moses—until, at least, the Epistle to the Hebrews was written, formally discharging them from all further attendance upon such services. But there is no real foundation for such an opinion. It is true that no express and authoritative injunction was given at first for the discontinuance of those services; but this arose simply out of accommodation to their religious prejudices, which might have received too great a shock, and among their unbelieving neighbours excited too outrageous an opposition, if the change had at once been introduced. But so far as obligation and duty were concerned, they should have required no explicit announcement on the subject different from what had already been given in the facts of Gospel history. When the veil was rent in twain, abolishing the distinction at the centre, all others of an outward kind of necessity gave way. When the great High Priest had fulfilled His work, no work remained to be done by any other priest. The Gospel of shadows was conclusively gone, the Gospel of realities come. And the compliances which the apostles generally, and Paul himself latterly, made (Acts 21) to humour the prejudices and silence the senseless clamours of the Jews, though necessary at first, were yet carried to an undue and dangerous length. They palpably failed, in Paul’s case, to accomplish the end in view; and, in the case of the Jewish Christians themselves, were attended with jealousies, self-righteous bigotry, growing feebleness, and ultimate decay. “Before Messiah’s coming, the ceremonies were as the swaddling bands in which He was wrapt; but after it, they resembled the linen clothes which He left in the grave. Christ was in the one, not in the other. And using them as the Galatians did, or as the Jews do at this day, they and their language are a lie; for they say He is still to come who is come already. They are now beggarly elements, having nothing of Christ, the true riches, in them.”^[302] ^[302]Bell on Cov., p.140.

Writings of Patrick Fairbairn

A collection of theological writings, sermons, and essays by Patrick Fairbairn, compiled for study and devotional reading.

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