The Moral Law

( Originally Published 1913 )

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus."—PHIL. ii. 5.

" What advantage then hath the Jew? . . . Much every way : chiefly, because to them were committed the oracles of God."-Rom. iii. I, 2.

THE history of the Bible shows the growth and development of a special religious character, which through many stages and trials was ultimately to become one which had "the mind of Christ" for its standard and model. The foundation of it was laid in the recognition of individual responsibility, the individual relation of the soul to God, its Maker and its Judge. The example of Abraham, the "Friend of God,"—with his keen and high sense of this awful relation, his faith, his heroic nobleness, his freeness and largeness of spirit, the soundness and loyalty of his heart under extremest trial, his solitariness and detachment, " a stranger and sojourner in the land,"—was the stock on which all that was good and excellent in the religious character of his successors was to grow, the type to which it was to conform itself. "Look," it was said, "look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged. Look unto Abraham your father, and unto Sarah that bare you ; for I called him alone, and blessed him, and increased him."—Is. li. t, 2.

This special religious character, a thing different from anything else in the world, was to be nurtured and gradually unfolded in a select nation, chosen for this purpose, whose fortunes were directed with a view to this end, and whose institutions, social, political, and religious, were appointed to be, as it were, its cradle and seed plot. With righteous Abraham, the great example of what God approved, the nation was bound by the closest ties, as his children and family ; and the orders of the common-wealth of Israel were made with the intention that the heirs of the great promise should never lose sight of its origin and its conditions. The Hebrew nation was to be the guardian of that character which Abraham was, as it was to be also the guardian and perpetuator of the great hopes which Abraham had. That character, as it was seen in the Hebrew race, was still in the rudeness and harshness and incompleteness of its immature beginnings. The formation of that strange and complex thing, the traditional and fixed character of a people—so vague and indeterminate in detail, so certain and visible on a large scale—is not the work of a few years or some single influence. It is the work of time, the combined result of many lives and many circumstances and events, through many generations. But from the first the people of Israel were told of their calling. From the first they were told what they existed for, what their existence pointed to. From the first, in all their superstition, and ignorance, and barbarous perverseness, they were told again and again, " Ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation "—" Ye shall be holy, for I am holy." That, in what it meant in the mouth of Apostles after Pentecost, who adopt the words, was what their history was to lead to. The religious character, indeed, as they could understand it, was but inchoate and imperfect. But it had, however crudely, the lineaments and outlines of that which was to last and to grow throughout the ages, till it was made perfect in Jesus Christ.

The early history of Israel is marked by three great features—a great redemption and deliverance ; the transformation of its families and tribes into a nation and a State, a communion and fellowship, not merely by blood, but by a common government and common institutions ; and, lastly, a strict and definite law. That isolation of the individual soul, which for great religious purposes was enforced on Abraham, was now corrected and compensated, for equally great religious purposes, by a discipline which made all Israel feel one, one in kindred, one in worship, one in hope, one in all that could bind brother to brother, in all the necessities and all the blessings of life. But the great governing fact of this period was the fact of the law. It was, that after the deliverance from Egypt, and the constitution of the tribes as a separate people, they were placed under the yoke of a law and the bond of a covenant. The presence, the prominence, the exacting and all-pervading supremacy of law, moral law, religious law, ceremonial law, political and social law, law definite, strict, severe, unbending, distinguishes the last four books of the Pentateuch. How severe, how distasteful this discipline was, how difficult to submit to and to enforce, they also show us. But to impress on Israel, however reluctant, the idea and the reality of law, was the intention of all this early stage of their history, and it was impressed, never to be forgotten, never to this day to loosen its hold on their minds.

Here, then, it seems to me, is the second great stage, in that training of men which the Bible set before us, in the formation of the religious character, which was ultimately to issue in the "mind and likeness" of Christ. Very different and unlike, at this stage of the development, to what was to come of it ; yet an essential preliminary and preparatory step. It was the planting—nay, the burning into the religious mind — of the supremacy of duty and the moral law, and the obligation of obedience to its Lord and Giver. Here, at the outset of this great school of character which we know as the history of Israel, of Judaism, stands as its first great lesson the Decalogue and its applications. There was much besides that was imposed and commanded ; much besides to which was given the name of law ; much which carried with it deep significance, and grave warnings, and vast hopes ; which spoke of sin, and forgiveness, and judgment, and mysterious expiation. But between all this, important and full of influence as it was —between this and the law of the Ten Commandments, there is the interval that lies between the moral law and every other obligation and interest of a moral being—" I will have mercy and not sacrifice." First and foremost in that dispensation, which is so filled with the notion of command and law that we give it emphatically and distinctively the name of the Law ; first and foremost, as its foundation-stone and ground-work, stands a strong, clear, moral rule, the unchangeable law proclaimed on Mount Sinai : those " living oracles," as St. Stephen calls them, which the Great Lawgiver received at his Master's hand, and in which, after all the changes of thousands of years, the heart of man still hears the voice of God.

" Thou leddest Thy people like sheep by the hand of Moses and Aaron." The Priest-hood, the characteristic ceremonial law, was in its own time of the most eventful consequence. It taught, it prophesied, it warned. But it served for its time, and was not meant to last. What was of permanent significance in Judaism was the paramount place of the moral law. Aaron the Priest was great, but Moses the Lawgiver was greater. By placing the Ten Commandments on its forefront, it made good its claim to be an "everlasting covenant"; it taught and laid down the moral conditions of religious character, not only for its own time, but for all time. It was a step in religious history of which we can even now but imperfectly measure the greatness. Think of what the world was then, what it had been, what it was to be long afterwards. We know something of it in its vast conquering and devastating empires, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia—we dimly guess outside of them, in the east, and north, and south, in the boundless " wilderness of the nations" ranging beyond our ken. No one can look on the scene without feeling almost giddy as he contemplates the shifting appearances not only of all things religious, but all things moral. It is like the sickening aspect of a wild, confused waste of waters, where nothing keeps its shape for an instant, but passes into another ; where all whirls about and eddies in hopeless entanglement of form and substance. You seem to see nature running wild—dazzled, bewildered, maddened by the senses and its own ignorance. You see the most fantastic imaginations, the most extravagant caprice, the most savage and insatiate passion, the most monstrous instincts ; the enormous play on a terrific scale of fierce pride and the madness of boundless conquest and absolute power ; and you ask, What really is the rule by which to judge all this ? Is it all only natural ? Has it all an equal claim to assert itself ? Are the most hateful and repulsive forms of blood and impurity only hateful because we are not accustomed to them—on a level with the phenomena of nature, neither more nor less blameworthy?

There is the sense of Divine power ; there is the recognition of right and wrong, of ought and ought not, of duty of some kind; but of what kind ? of what restraint? of what service, either to God or man ? And the moment you ask, the ideas seem to disappear, swept away, dissolved, lost in the clouds and storms of contradiction and confusion. Into this lawless world of tumult and self-will, tyrannous in its blindness, its hatred, its cruelty, its greed, the people of Israel were launched to begin their wonderful and perilous course. They had but too much affinity, too much sympathy, with all the evil that was round them. But there was that among them which was nowhere else. At the head of their march through time and change, like the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, stood, fixed and stable and immovable amid all that was mutable and fluctuating, the moral law. Elsewhere, in other legislation, in other institutions, more or less partially, the moral law disclosed itself ; but here it was the very condition of the existence of a nation, the reason which gave meaning to its being. It might be disobeyed, but it was acknowledged as the tie between God and men, divine in its source, sovereign in its authority. Judaism was a religion, and not only a polity, and embodied a definite religious character, preserved it, continued it, unfolded it, not only in the written letter, but in fact and life. And in moulding the religious character at this stage of it, the law in its elevation as the moral law, in its stern and absolute control, as law—was the stamp and energetic agency.

This, then, as we follow the account given in the Bible of the progress of the religious character, seems the special feature of what, speaking roughly, may be viewed as its second period. It was the presence, the prominence, the visible action of strong and pervading law, and that a law which incorporated the moral law as its supreme and governing element. The soul, which in the history of the patriarchs had learned its relation to God, had now to go through the severer discipline of learning to live according to His will, with an intelligent and serious sense of what and how great the task was. It needed a rule ; it needed teaching how to regard and respect its rule, and how to use it. In the wild scene around of uncontrolled passions and clashing customs it wanted some fixed standard and beacon by which it could make sure of its ground and steady itself in the terrible disorder. And so the law was given. Amid the clouds and thunders of Sinai that beacon was set up, a standard of right and wrong, of what men ought and ought not to do and to wish, which the heart of man felt to be as fixed and sure as the solid earth and the unchanging heavens. The law came in—as St. Paul says, " because of transgressions "—to tame the wandering self-will of nature, to fix the great points and limits within which the soul must bound itself, if it would not lose itself in moral anarchy and ruin. It came in to teach men not only to fear God, but—a much more difficult lesson—to obey Him ; to obey as the moral duty of a dependent creature ; to obey as the only key to confidence, and light, and trustful hope in a being who looks to God as his Father and Ruler. It came in to teach men to obey, that they might learn to rule themselves ; to be trusted with their own fate ; to be, each in his own place and order, lord and king over himself. It came in to impress more solemnly and deeply, on the generations which were to be, the fact of sin ; to remind men, self-forgetful and self-complacent as they easily come to be, of their continual shortcomings, and of what God thinks of them, to open men's eyes to the weakness of their moral efforts. And the law, with its peremptoriness, its rigour, had yet another office. There is no strange self-deceit more deeply and obstinately fixed in men's hearts than this : that those whom God favours may take liberties that others may not ; that religious men may venture more safely to transgress than others ; that good men may allow themselves to do wrong things. There is no more certain fact in the range of human experience than that with strong and earnest religious feeling there may be a feeble and imperfect hold on the moral law, often a very loose sense of justice, truth, purity. The law, as it was held up in its strictness over the children of Abraham, the inheritors of his stupendous promises, the redeemed from the might of Pharaoh, reminded them at the outset of their history, what they found it so hard to realise, that the Lord of Jew and Gentile is no respecter of persons—that "He hath given unto no man license to sin:" that no man has His sanction "to do evil that good may come."

Here, as regards its office in preparing for the true Christian character, in furnishing an elementary yet indispensable portion to it, was the service rendered in its time by the law. We know that it could not, was not meant to, make anything perfect; either the knowledge of God, or the moral standard, or the religious character. Its history, indeed, in its most prominent aspect, is the history of a great failure ; it is the history of a long series of struggles against truth and goodness, the record of a great and apparently unsuccessful moral conflict, a great and awful tragedy, in which the fifth act closes with the perishing of the righteous. Often throughout it, and at the best, men see what is better and approve it, and then follow what is worse. Often we see the will to do good is present ; but how to perform what they would do, men find not. Its history is full, as all history is full, of strange perversions of right, of unaccountable anomalies which now surprise and perplex us, to which we have lost the key. And over and above this, from first to last, in the people as a whole, there is the continual spectacle of resistance and disobedience, undisguised, incorrigible. The weakness of the law is conspicuous ; and yet it was the law which the Psalmist loved so dearly, and which the Prophets interpreted and illuminated. And in the influence which it did exert on the religious character it seemed to narrow and to harden. In the Jewish character, as it came out after centuries of the law, there is that harsh and unhopeful feature to which we give the name of legality ; the slavery to law, the idolatry of law, the pride in law, the bondage to the letter; obstinate, unsympathetic, contemptuous at once and fearful, of everything in the free outside world. But what the law was to do, and what it did, was this—it impressed upon the people of Israel, upon the Christian Church, and ultimately on the human mind for all time, that the indispensable foundation of the religious character was the "honest and good heart," obedient, and sincere in its obedience, according to its light, to the moral law, for its own sake, and the sake of Him Who gave it. It impressed on them and on the world what was then a new lesson -the inseparable connexion of true religion with the highest human morality, justice, truth, self-restraint and self-command, mercy. How fruitful this great step was, and how necessary, the whole history which followed showed.

The open conflict in the world between good and evil is an anxious and often doubtful one. But if that which is on the side of good and truth be faithless and disloyal, the odds are indeed heavy on the side of evil. And the law not only con-fronts and rebukes the sinner ; it also warns the righteous. It is not only a standing witness against public and manifest wickedness. It not only lifts its awful voice when we are, perhaps ruthlessly, made not only to know but to imagine those hideous and unmanageable forms of portentous guilt which lurk in the midst of our civilisation and our religion, those depths of Satan which men can hardly look down into without that deadly fascination which may cost them their souls. But it has a further office. It was given to make us feel and to restrain that moral unsoundness of the conscience and the will which men may keep secret, "each one in the deep of his heart," while wishing to serve God, believing that he serves Him. Decisively and for good it was laid down that if a man was to be the servant of God, righteous in His sight, a religious man in the true sense of the word, his serious rule and standard must be the moral law, the law that bound the soul, without trifling and without evasion, to duty, to goodness, to God its Source and Judge. To us this essential interdependence of the religious character and the moral law is a commonplace : it is not less one of the greatest truths that man has to learn, and one of the most difficult of his lessons—one that over and over again he has shown himself most ingenious in evading. The kindling and absorbing earnestness, which has given itself with ardour to some high religious object, is not safe, wants its only solid and trustworthy foundation, unless it has full in view, unforgotten and deeply reverenced, the great fixed law of moral right, ruling with no reserves over the inner and unseen life. No form of that earnestness can make sure of itself without the guarantee of sincere obedience and self-command in the certainties of duty. Whether in the elevations of worship, or in the joy of self-abandonment and sacrifice, or in the enterprises of an adventurous charity, or in the enthusiasm of a generous hope, or in the zeal which is ambitious in a great cause—truth, or purity, or conquests of souls for Christ—or in the devout quiet of a life that seeks the shade and that works in it--everywhere, beyond all these, the obligations of the law of right and wrong have to be remembered and answered. Everywhere men have failed, and failed deeply, from forgetting them. All history is full of warnings : of great religious characters spoiled or distorted, of great religious efforts hopelessly marred and degenerate, because in the eagerness and confidence of a good intention the Ten Commandments were left on one side, or kept out of view, or it was taken for granted that of course they were obeyed, because people meant to do God service. And we must be blind if we do not still sometimes see among ourselves signs and instances of the same mistake.

At any rate, let us remember the lesson for ourselves. At any rate, in our own case, let us not fall into the deadly self-deceit, that because we are religious in wish, in feeling, we are dispensed from the obligations and restrictions which we see bind others ; because we are, as we think, " good people," because we have the feeling of being in the right way, because God, it may be, has greatly favoured us, we may venture on what conscience persists in warning us is unlawful, is wrong. Let us not think that because we frequent sacraments and delight in divine service, and feel devotion and uplifting of heart in prayer, we need not fear the temptations which are " common to man"; that we can afford to indulge our dislike of trouble, or relax our care and vigilance, or neglect plain duties, or can be bold in things more dangerous still. Not the stern and rigorous Law only, but the New Testament puts this danger before us. It has some dreadful foreshadowings of self-deceit, dreaming of its innocence, and exposed too late. Even good people like to do what their hearts prompt them to, and shut their eyes to the question of right or wrong ; and this is the answer that may one day meet them, when they ask whether they have not been devoted to the service and household of Christ—" I never knew you." Even good people are too ready with excuses to escape disagreeable duties and one day they may be surprised at learning that the duty they avoided was to Christ Himself—" Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to Me." God grant us all the Psalmist's prayer, and to understand God's law in the Psalmist's spirit:

" O let my heart be sound in Thy statutes : that I be not ashamed" (cxix. 8o).

"I will run the way of Thy commandments : when Thou hast set my heart at liberty " (32).

"I see that all things come to an end : but Thy commandment is exceeding broad " (96).

"O ye that love the Lord, see that ye hate the thing that is evil. . . . Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous : and give thanks for a remembrance of His holiness" (xcvii. Io, I2).