tions. He simply asks, "Are the words true? Did God speak these words? If not, there is a much greater objection to them than that they are Judaical; they are blasphemous and wicked. We ought to repent in dust and ashes that we have used them for so many generations. The curse of a frightful lie is upon our heads." He asks again, "If they were true once, are they true now? Is God speaking these words to Englishmen as He spoke them to the Jews? If not, we have nothing to do with them." But he believes we have everything to do with them, and he explains why. He sees in these Commandments what logicians and moralists require, and do not provide. He finds the announcement of a living God, who governs men and makes them free. It is He who speaks to us as He spoke to the Jews. "I am the Lord thy God." He finds an undeviating sign. Where any nation has observed these Commandments it has become free, and acknowledged a Lord of Righteousness; where any nation has declined to observe them, it has sunk into bondage. Thus the omission of the words in the Church Service, "Which has brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," is to him a perilous and vital

omission.

But the interest of this book lies chiefly in the Chapter on the Fourth Commandment. We have in a few pages the whole subject of the Sabbath question treated in a most suggestive and masterly way. The plan with the most advanced theologians of the present day has been to put aside any argument from these Ten Commandments, and either to go back to a passage in Genesis, which is supposed to have no Jewish but a human reference; or to advocate a day of rest on the ground of its physical and social necessity. The difficulty with them has been the question of its being a national command, and it has seemed insuperable when the objection has been put "If you accept the obligation of the command to the Jews, you must not take just what part you please of the Jewish Sabbath, and modify the letter to suit your laxity." Mr. Maurice goes boldly back to the command, admits it was spoken to the Jewish nation, but believes it was no commandment of a merely Jewish and human legislator. He discovers here what he can get from no philosopher, no other legislator, no other national custom-the neverto-be-forgotten assertion that God is the living God who brings out of bondage-that He is "a Lord who rests, whose work is the work of a creating or giving life, whose rest is the rest of delight in beholding that which is very good; a Lord God who commands His subjects to work as He works, to rest as He rests; a Lord God who does not lay down a mere decree respecting rest and work, but who binds them into the succession and order of

the life of His subjects; a Lord God who appoints rest for those human creatures and for those animals that have been deemed, by the rich and powerful of the earth, only made for perpetual toil on their behalf."

Sir Rutherford Alcock is right when he asserts he can find no trace of a Sabbath except among the Jews, or in those nations who have adopted the institution of the Jews. This is of the greatest worth as a fact to Mr. Maurice, who believes no nation, not even the Roman in his highest state of Greco-Roman civilization, has been able to conceive such a notion of God as to reconcile the idea of work with the idea of rest. "The fine Divinity is either always in a bustle about the affairs of crea tures below him, or always reposing in selfish indolence." The true harmonious notion is above any national conception, even above that of the Jews. It came to them, certainly not from them.

The institution of the Sabbath has been supposed to be at variance with the doctrine of the continuity of the working of God; but it is pointed out by the author that the creation was not finished in the sense that God absolutely ceased working, but that the creation was the enduing of creatures with seeds of an everrenewing life. No doctrine of continuity propounded by philosophers is more distinctly the assertion of the capacities of selfrenewal in vegetables, in animals, in man, than the record of creation which is supposed to be at variance with it. The six days say to the most ordinary men and women, and to the profoundest students, "Behold the work of the Lord God; see how He is working, even as you are. The creation is always new, coming forth each day fresh from his hands." The seventh day commemorates a corresponding continuous delight in His work

-an

an ever-recurring rest. "The notion of the rest of God being only on the seventh day is contradicted by the observance of the seventh day, by the renewal of it for each man and each generation of men. The whole institution is therefore a protest against the hard material notions which have been grounded upon it, so far as the Commandment is kept faithfully a deliverance from them."

Any treatment of the Sabbath question must necessarily go into the subject of the substitution of the first day for the seventh. Somehow or other, through the whole of Christendom, an institution has been adopted of a week of six days and one day. This could not have come from any Greek or Roman custom, it could only have come from the despised Jewish race. But now it is the first day instead of the seventh which has associated with it the notion of rest. Mr. Maurice interprets the origin of the Christian

Sabbath by suggesting the truth that the author of the Commandments, who gave them to one nation for the purpose of making that nation a blessing to all nations, sent One who fulfilled all the Commandments, and therefore this one; who exhibited the perfect image of the God who rests and who works; who made it possible for man to rest as God rests, and work as God works; who threw light upon the mystery of death which had come in amongst the work and rest of creation as a disturbing element and apparently contradicted the assertion of God's rest in all His work as very good; who declared death not to be the lord of life or of the universe; in fact, declared himself to be the resurrection and the life and the rest of man. It is natural this highest kind of rest should be associated with the Sabbath. If necessary, the day should be changed to commemorate this perfect rest. "In Him God rested, in Him we may rest." The Commandment about the Sabbath would not have been God's commandment according to Mr. Maurice, if it had not been unfolded-developed at the crisis of its fulfilment to express that fulfilment.

We confess, after all, that though we feel the remarkable power Mr. Maurice has thrown into his treatment of these Ten Commandments as instruments of national reformation, and the wonderful adaptation of the teaching to the special sins of the nations, and of this nation in particular, the question will come up: why should the Church of England prefer to have hung up in her churches the Ten Commandments rather than the Two Commandments upon which hang all the Law and the Prophets? Or why not prefer the Sermon on the Mount where the full depth of the moral law is brought plainly into view; where there is not simply prohibition but very much that is positive and spiritual? The most powerful part of Mr. Maurice's book is that in which he brings out the full force of the Ten Commandments by a reference to this very Sermon on the Mount.

We may admit all Mr. Maurice says about these being the living words of God-about their being uttered to one nation in whom all the nations of the earth were to be blessed. But we do not think he helps us to set aside altogether the objection which is sometimes offered. We have more in the morality of the New Testament than in this moral code. And if to-morrow the Ten Commandments were blotted out of existence, we should still have sufficient to accomplish the reformation of any nation, and of all nations under heaven. We are far from thinking that the one morality in the Old contradicts the morality of the New Testament. But we do believe most firmly, that the less development and less glory of the one pale before the greater development and greater glory of the other.

S. B. B.

238

HOW MR. FRYE WOULD HAVE PREACHED IT. (Continued from p. 189.)

"IF I had been preaching the sermon in my way," said he "I should have told you what you could have guessed, that, having played that act through, I did not care to stay in Boston any longer. I had been married ten years, and I had learned two things: first, that a man can't live, unless he keeps his body under; next, that he can't live and lie at the same time,-that he can't live unless he keeps his ingenuity under, and his cunning and snakiness in general. To learn the first lesson had cleaned me out completely, and I hated Milfold, where I learned it. To learn the second had cleaned me out again, and left me two thousand dollars and more in debt,-so much worse than nothing. And, very naturally, I hated Boston, where I learned that too.

"What did I do? I did what I always had done in trouble. I went to Harry Patrick, who happened to be here on business at the time. Harry had fought for me at school. He had coaxed my father for me when I was in scrapes. He took care of me when I was an apprentice. I have told you what he did for me in Milfold. He established me here. He had me chosen into his Lodge. He lent me money to buy my tools with. When I wanted my cameras and things he helped me to my credit. So of course I went to him. Well, I thought I was done with lying; so I told him just the whole story. There was a quarter's rent due the next Monday. All the quarter's bills at the shops were due, and some of them had arrears behind the beginning of the quarter. Then I had borrowed, in money, twenty-five dollars here, five there, a hundred of one man, and so on,- old fellowworkmen at the machine-shop,-saying and thinking that I should be able to pay them in a few days. This was the reason, indeed, why I had hurried up the negatives, and printed off the impressions as steadily as I had, because the first of October was at hand.

"I told Harry the whole. They say a man never tells all his debts. I suppose that is true. I did not tell him of some of the meanest of mine, and some that were most completely debts of honor. I said to myself that I could manage those myself some day. But then I told no lies. And he, And he, he did, as he always does, the completest and noblest thing that can be done. He gave me three coupon bonds which he had bought only the day

before meaning them for a birthday present for his mother. He gave me three hundred and twenty dollars in cash, and he went with me to the office of the photographic findings people, and gave a note, jointly with me, for the chemicals and the cameras. So I was clear of debt that night, except the little things I had not told; and I had nearly fifty dollars in my pocket.

"And what now?' said he, when I went to thank him again the next morning, and he spoke to me as cheerily as if I had never caused him a moment's care.

"Well, he wanted me to go on with the photograph room. But I hated it. I hated Boston. I hated the old shop. I begged him to let me go with him to Washington. Perhaps I thought I should do better under his wing.

to me.

"So he told me to leave the forty-three dollars with Jenny, and to come with him the next day to Washington. I had never been there before. For two or three weeks that I was hanging round, living at his charges, and hopelessly unable to do a thing for him, seeming like a fool, I suppose, because I know I felt like one, not once did he forget himself, nor speak an impatient word And when he came unexpectedly back to our lodgings one day, an hour after he had gone out, to say that the head of the Department had that morning given him an appointment for me, or the promise of one, in the Bureau of Special Supplies, he was more glad than I was, you would have said. Not really; but he was gentle about it, and took no credit to himself, and would have been glad if I could have believed that The Chief' had heard of me from my own fame, and had sent to him to find out where such a rare bird could be caught.

"So pleasant days began again. Jenny and the children came on. And I would buy books, - and I would take her on excursions, I don't know, Harry went off and I got in debt again. But I worked like a dog at the bureau. I brought home copying for Jenny. Always these odd jobs were my ruin. I was always hoping to help myself through. But I was early at work, and at night I screwed out the gas in the office; and so I got promoted. That helped, but it ruined too. Promotion, too, was an odd job.' "In my new post I had the oversight of all the accounts from the Artificers' Department in the field. By one of the intricacies, which I need not explain, they were in the habit of sending over for us to use, from the Quartermaster-General's, the originals of all the reports they received, for us to see what we wanted by way of confirming our vouchers; and we then sent them all back to them. This was because we were ahead of them. They were some weeks behindhand, and we were 'fly,' as our jargon called it. So it happened that I used to see Harry's own official reports to their office, even before they read them themselves.