is quite clear that the Will which issued these laws was that of the nation, not merely at the instant when the Decalogue was promulgated, but through growing ages. Indeed, in Deuteronomy the context of the Ten Commandments overtly appeals to the historic sense of the community by a reference to the great event of the people's deliverance, ages back, "out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." The idealistic trend of the tribe as a growing nation through centuries crystallised itself in these words, and through them brought to bear the sanction of its authority upon each living member of the race, binding him in loyalty to itself, and exacting of him obedience and service. If, then, it be true that always and everywhere the Ideal Will of any society more or less constrains the will of the individual members, and that the welfare of the community is the higher law for the individual, the imperative mood is more than a poetic licence. It is a necessity of political speech, as the expression of the actual pressure of the Community as an Ideal and a fact upon the individual. It is the only means of conveying in words the binding authority of the community over each of its members. As compilers, therefore, of the nation's manual of ethical religion, we shall, by the nature of our task, find ourselves constrained to retain the imperative mood if the authority of the moral code of the community is to be indicated in summary form. Although it is Righteousness, Duty, the Moral Law, which issues the decrees, it is not Duty as an abstraction, not Righteousness removed from the effective energies of human society. It is the Moral Law teeming and tingling with a nation's life, pushing and driving forward the individual will under the pressure of public opinion. and political sanctions. In the Ten Commandments themselves the actual will of the community is not given authority irrespective of whether the community be right or wrong in its positive demands. It does not seek to constrain by attaching extraneous sanctions of legal rewards and punishments. The actual will is recognised only so far as it makes for the weal of the community. It is therefore ly the ideal community which speaks. The Ten Commandments appeal to each individual's own moral judgment. This makes them pedagogically and ethically justifiable, since each human being always has latent or active within him the ideal will of the community to which he belongs. His intuition is the ideal of the surrounding society alive within his inmost personality, and it is for him rightfully the final court of appeal as to what the true injunctions of the general will may This general will is undoubtedly for each individual an outside will-outside of his whims-and therefore it may command him; but it is also his inner ideal, his higher nature, his tribal self, the essence of his moral personality. be. I have already indicated incidentally who it is that is commanded to obey in the Decalogue, and need dwell further on this point only for a moment. I have thrown this question into prominence only in order to call attention to the fact that it is not the community as a whole that is appealed to, but each individual member; and my object in calling attention to this point is in order, when I come to speak of the Lord's Prayer, to make more vivid the contrast between it and the commandments. For, as I read the former, its implication is that it emanates from those very centres, individual and multitudinous, of spiritual activity towards which the Decalogue is directed. In the commandments the point of sovereignty-as I shall reiterate-is the community; in the Lord's Prayer it is the individuals. Granting, then, that the imperative form is consistent with such national idealism as we are attempting here to incorporate into a manual of religious services, we may turn to consider how much of the actual material contained in the Ten Commandments of Deuteronomy is of enduring and supreme value. For this purpose it may be well to divide the ten into two groups, at the point suggested by the division of them implied in Christ's summation of the Law. Alluding to the first four, and indeed quoting from the 6th chapter of Deuteronomy (v. 5), Christ declared that the first and great commandment was to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. Fusing into one the last six, and taking the very words from the 18th verse of the 19th chapter of Leviticus, he declared that the second commandment was to love thy neighbour as thyself. He further asserted that on these two hang all the Law and the Prophets. The first four thus grouped together are generally regarded as purely theological. By this is meant that they are supernaturalistic, that they enjoin the worship of an intelligent agency other than man. It is therefore inferred that for anyone who has ceased to believe in a personal Creator of the universe they can have no longer any import. In contrast to them, it is generally maintained that the remaining six commandments are purely moral, human and naturalistic. The first group are said to treat of Jehovah-worship, the second of neighbour-love. But, upon closer examination, it will be found that the first four commandments are not to be disposed of so easily. They may be theological, in the sense that they treat of worship and of a God to be worshipped; but they are not necessarily supernaturalistic. For the question confronts us here whether the God of which they speak may not be some factor wholly within the realm of verifiable experience, and within the hierarchy of human goods. Let us consider what the first four commandments would mean in the light of the closing lines of Matthew Arnold's sonnet entitled "The Divinity." Arnold says God's wisdom and God's goodness!—aye, but fools The problem before us is whether the first four commandments survive the shifting of our point of view from the notion of God as the personal Creator of the universe to the idea of God as human wisdom and human goodness. Still further, we must, wholly on grounds of national and world-wide social expediency, decide what reality Englishmen to-day ought to worship. Having thus decided, we must attempt to bring the nation's language and forms of devotion into agreement with our convictions. Before we can judge as to the political propriety of discarding the commandment "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God," we must find out, on the basis of our own independent moral experience, whether the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" covers the whole sphere of ethical law. Many persons in our day who have rejected supernaturalism have set up this one commandment as embracing the whole of morality and religion. But I ask: Does it embrace the whole sphere of duty? Is it even the first and great commandment? Or is it, as Christ said, only the second? And if it be but second, what is to be our first? And when we have found that, into what subdivisions will it fall? We shall, I believe, upon reflection, come to the conclusion that the whole of the moral law is by no means contained under the conception of love to one's neighbour. Indeed, we shall find that that very love itself receives its dignity from being subject to a commandment which binds us to something higher than an individual person. The ethical life is deeper and its discipline more organic than mere kindness or affection for other individual mortals. We must not only love men, but the Ideal latent in men ; we must not only love men, but love Justice, as the standard of relationship that should hold among them; we must not only love men, but must love Love. Not only our neighbour must be cherished, but Righteousness must be revered as the spiritual bond of man to man. Less tender perhaps, possibly less gentle than devotion to individual persons, is this devotion to the Moral Law itself; but it is more binding and inexorable, more sublime and awful. If, now, Christ meant Righteousness when he spoke of the Lord thy God, if he meant Righteousness worshipped as the sovereign reality of life, we must assent to his declaration that the first and great commandment is, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might." Indeed, whether he actually meant this or not, and whether the ancient prophets before him meant it or not, is in purely ethical religion a matter of subordinate importance. If we mean it, and know well why we mean it, that is sufficient. Those of us who would teach faith in morality, and would attempt to destroy as an illusion the belief that anything else can deliver man, must declare that to love Righteousness with utter singleness of mind will for ever remain the great commandment. In a universal code of |