the moral precepts of the Mosaic code are to be practised and taught there. He who spake as never man spake then proceeded to explain them, and to clear them from the false and obscuring glosses put upon them by the Scribes and Pharisees. Viewed in the light of his spiritual interpretation, how comprehensive and heart-searching do they appear! Could any other ten single precepts embody so much truth?* And does not their summary given by Christ embrace the whole wide extent of our duty? "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself," Matt. xxii. 36-40. This was the summary which Moses himself had given, Deut. vi. 5, and Lev. xix. 18. Here Jesus showed himself the "prophet like unto Moses." And notice the expressive words which He adds-" On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Not only the law, but the prophets too. It was as if he had said, "On these two commands is suspended the whole volume of the Old Testament."

The universality of the obligation to obey the moral law appears in a striking light, when we contemplate our Saviour bearing the weight of its curse. What law was it of which it was proclaimed, "Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them ?" Gal. iii. 10—13. It was clearly the law of Moses. But if it were binding on the Jews alone, they alone were under the curse of its violation. The death of Christ redeems from the curse only those who are under the curse. Under the curse of what law does the Gentile world lie? The whole world is said to have gone astray. "All have sinned," Rom. iii. 23. But "sin is the transgression of the law," 1 John iii. 4. What law, then, is it which all mankind have transgressed? There is none on record but that which came by Moses,

Again, what law is it which is "binding on the believer?" The Christian is not sinless. He mourns his daily transgressions. "But where no law is, there is no transgression," Rom. iv. 15. There must be some law, then, after complete conformity to

"Send us," said a wealthy Indian to the missionaries to whom his people had applied for a protector, "send us a man who has learned all your ten commandments."

which his spirit yearns, and whose pure and holy requirements contrast themselves with his imperfections, and endear to him the righteousness of his glorious Surety. It can be no other than that divulged on Mount Sinai, obeyed by the Saviour himself, and by him given, under new sanctions and with the weight of new motives, to all who call him Lord.

It is these moral precepts, into conformity to which it is the design of the gospel to bring us. No tables of stone are deposited among us, with their dread accompaniments of secrecy and condemnation. The law of God is not now written and engraven on stones, but on the fleshy tablets of the hearts of his children. It would appear that it was with direct allusion to its having been thus inscribed on stone in times of old, that, with reference to the New Testament dispensation, it was promised of the very same law-“After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and will write it in their hearts," Jer. xxxi. 31-34.

By some it has been objected that the preface of the ten commandments proves them to have been intended only for the Jewish nation: "I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." This supplies an argument, it is true, which strongly enforces obedience on the Jews. The laws of God had peculiar claims on the regard of those, on whose behalf the Divine power had been so strikingly displayed. But these words by no means restrict the obligation. They do not assert that obedience is claimed from no others. On the contrary, the whole tenor of Scripture is against such a supposition.

The apostles did honour to the decalogue, and maintained its authority. It was to its precepts that Paul referred, when he said, "The law is holy, and the commandment holy and just and good," Rom. vii. 12. One of those commandments he had just quoted-"I had not known sin, but by the law; for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet." More than once elsewhere do we find him alluding to the actual words of the decalogue-Rom. xiii. 9; Gal. v. 14. In his epistle to the Ephesians, it is worthy of notice that he mentions the fifth commandment as the first to which a promise is annexed, Eph. vi. 1-3. But commandments had been given to mankind previously to the promulgation of the law of Moses, and these

had been coupled with promises. Abraham, Jacob, nay, the Israelites themselves, had received such. What, then, is the meaning of the apostle? It is plain that he had the ten commandments in his eye. He considered them by way of emphasis the commandments, and out of the ten, the fifth was the first to which was joined a promise. Will any one doubt that these precepts were obligatory on those to whom he wrote? they were not Jews, but Gentiles.

And

The ten commandments, therefore, are not simply a Jewish institute.

If the views above given are correct, it follows that we must understand in accordance with them the remarks made by the apostle on the glory of the Mosaic dispensation being done away in Christ. The passage to which we allude is in 2 Cor. iii. 7—13: "But if the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not stedfastly behold the face of Moses for the glory of his countenance; which glory was to be done away; how shall not the ministration of the Spirit be rather glorious ?" He could not intend that the moral law was to be done away. It had existed before the commencement of the Mosaic economy, and it existed still. But the dispensation of Moses was not without glory. The Israelites derived illumination from the law he delivered, and even the minutest of his typical observances had some deep meaning hid beneath them. But how far the Christian dispensation, ushered in by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, excelled in glory that which was dispensed by Moses, let us learn by thoughtfully pondering the words, " For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ."

In arguing for the continuance of our obligation to obey the moral law, we are not imposing a yoke on ourselves as the disciples of Christ. He has delivered us from its curse, but he has not the less made it our duty to obey. He has but given us the motive of love, instead of the natural motive of fear. It is as we realise our interest in his law-fulfilling righteousness, that with glowing and grateful hearts we cry, "I will keep the commandments of my God." And "his commandments are not grievous." "Every fresh chain by which we bind ourselves to the Lord makes us feel more free." My burden is light,” says the Saviour. "A light burden indeed," said the holy Bernard, "which carries him that bears it. I have looked through all

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nature for a resemblance of this, and I seem to find a shadow of it in the wings of a bird, which are indeed borne by the creature, and yet support her flight towards heaven."

ON SOCIETY.—No. II.

BUT there is a still higher aspect in which Society may be viewed. The cultivation of the intellect alone will not reduce the disordered mind of man to harmony. The intellect may emit an uncommon light, but it may be an ignis fatuus, to allure and to destroy. It may gleam as the lightning's wing, but its path, like the lightning's, may be marked by scathed and blighted things. Names need not be borrowed as examples from the scroll of fame. Can any reflecting man look round his own neighbourhood, without marking here one and there another, who, though, by the power of their own mental workings, they have called to light the secret stores of earth, and sea, and sky, directed the agencies of nature, and forced the human mind and will to do them homage, are yet lamentably unable to rule themselves. Quickness of perception and fertility of imagination are, in too many cases, linked with moral degradation, and serve as nothing more than fuel for the burning. Intellectual powers, unless swayed by right principles, are often as scorpions to sting and to madden their possessor, and, being gifts which bring with them an additional responsibility, his neglect of their right use renders him the more miserable and the more wicked.

than at any Whose influ

It is therefore required of society that its tone should be that of a high morality. From what fountain do the young imbibe their tastes and opinions at the age when, more other time, they are engaged in their formation? ence is all powerful with them, then when their character is receiving its finishing touches? What hand puts in the last shade, and stamps the whole for life? It is the hand of society. The youthful mind, all warm and glowing from the hearth of domestic affection and counsel, readily receives the impress of the society into which it is cast. See yonder youth in the midst of a circle who are busily talking and laughing away evening hour. He is a stranger in the midst of strangers. It

the

is true, he has been introduced to one after another of those who form the seemingly happy group before him, and kindly received by them all. But it must be the work of time to prepare him to mingle with them freely, and to reciprocate their tastes; for the watchful care of his mother has moulded his character hitherto, in the shape supplied by her own strong sense of duty to God and to her fellow creatures. He has been taught to shrink not only from sin itself, but from the appearance of evil. Moral principle, inculcated by parental authority, and illustrated by parental example, has been round about his childhood as a glazen frame around the tender exotic, at once warding off the touch of danger, and inviting upon it the kindly influence of the solar rays. But now the eye of parental love beams on him no longer; and no longer the voice of parental wisdom calls him to walk in the narrow way. He has been removed from the scenes of his childhood, and dissevered from the associations that wait around the threshold of home, as so many hempen cords to bind him to the path of virtue. It may be said, he has been introduced to the professedly Christian society of the town where his lot is cast; is he not safe there? He would be safe there, if, in professedly Christian society, a due regard were paid to the distinctions between right and wrong. Allusions, coupled with a sneer, are made in his hearing, to what he was taught to regard as important truths; the evils which he was wont to contemplate as frightful, are treated as though they were at the most very venial offences; and practices which he was instructed to abhor, meet his eye at every step. The cold dews of night fall upon those young shoots, which were once girt round by the shelter of a mother's love, and watered by a mother's tears. That quick moral sense is blunted,—the delicate perceptions that made him shrink, as a sensitive plant, from the touch of evil, have been insensibly extracted from him through the power of the new medium in which he breathes. Those around him may say, He is a goodly tree; fair and spreading are his branches, and his strength is the strength of the cedar;—but when he comes back to his home, his mother, satisfied with no cursory survey, will stretch her anxious gaze into the depths of the inner man, and will exclaim, "Alas! my son; a blight has been upon thee; thy young leaves are withered, and some evil hand hath robbed thee of thy choicest buds! Alas! my son."