1. Elemental Law, or law inwrought into the elements, substances, and forces of the rational and irrational creation. This is twofold:

A. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of the material universe;—this we call physical, or natural law. Physical law is not necessary. Another order of things is conceivable. Physical order is not an end in itself; it exists for the sake of moral order. Physical order has therefore only a relative constancy, and God supplements it at times by miracle.

Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 210—“The laws of nature represent no necessity, but are only the orderly forms of procedure of some Being back of them.… Cosmic uniformities are God’s methods in freedom.” Philos. of Theism, 73—“Any of the cosmic laws, from gravitation on, might conceivably have been lacking or altogether different.… No trace of necessity can be found in the Cosmos or in its laws.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality: “Nature is not necessary. Why put an island where it is, and not a mile east or west? Why connect the smell and shape of the rose, or the taste and color of the orange? Why do H2O form water? No one knows.” William James: “The parts seem shot at us out of a pistol.” Rather, we would say, out of a shotgun. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 33—“why undulations in one medium should produce sound, and in another light; why one speed of vibration should give red color, and another blue, can be explained by no reason of necessity. Here is selecting will.”

Brooks, Foundations of Zoölogy, 126—“So far as the philosophy of evolution involves belief that nature is determinate, or due to a necessary law of universal progress or evolution, it seems to me to be utterly unsupported by evidence and totally unscientific.” There is no power to deduce anything whatever from homogeneity. Press the button and law does the rest? Yes, but what presses the button? The solution crystalizes when shaken? Yes, but what shakes it? Ladd, Philos. of Knowledge, 310—“The directions and velocities of the stars fall under no common principles that astronomy can discover. One of the stars—‘1830 Groombridge’—is flying through space at a rate many times as great as it could attain if it had fallen through infinite space through all eternity toward the entire physical universe.… Fluids contract when cooled and expand when heated,—yet there is the well known exception of water at the degree of freezing.” 263—“Things do not appear to be mathematical all the way through. The system of things may be a Life, changing its modes of manifestation according to immanent ideas, rather than a collection of rigid entities, blindly subject in a mechanical way to unchanging laws.”

Augustine: “Dei voluntas rerum natura est.” Joseph Cook: “The laws of nature are the habits of God.” But Campbell, Atonement, Introd., xxvi, says there is this difference between the laws of the moral universe and those of the physical, namely, that we do not trace the existence of the former to an act of will, as we do the latter. “To say that God has given existence to goodness, as he has to the laws of nature, would be equivalent to saying that he has given existence to himself.” Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 91—“Moral law, unlike natural law, is a standard of action to be adopted or rejected in the exercise of rational freedom, i. e., of moral agency.” See also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:531.

Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:190—“In moral law there is enforcement by punishment only—never by power, for this would confound moral law with physical, and obedience can never be produced or secured by power. In physical law, on the contrary, enforcement is wholly by power, and punishment is impossible. So far as man is free, he is not subject to law at all, in its physical sense. Our wills are free from law, as enforced by power; but are free under law, as enforced by punishment. Where law prevails in the same sense as in the material world, there can be no freedom. Law does not prevail when we reach the region of choice. We hold to a power in the mind of man originating a free choice. Two objects or courses of action, between which choice is to be made, are presupposed: (1) A uniformity or set of uniformities implying a force by which the uniformity is produced [physical or natural law]; (2) A command, addressed to free and intelligent beings, that can be obeyed or disobeyed, and that has connected with it rewards or punishments” [moral law]. See also Wm. Arthur, Difference between Physical and Moral Law.

B. The expression of the divine will in the constitution of rational and free agents;—this we call moral law. This elemental law of our moral nature, with which only we are now concerned, has all the characteristics mentioned as belonging to law in general. It implies: (a) A divine Lawgiver, or ordaining Will. (b) Subjects, or moral beings upon whom the law terminates. (c) General command, or expression of this will in the moral constitution of the subjects. (d) Power, enforcing the command. (e) Duty, or obligation to obey. (f) Sanctions, or pains and penalties for disobedience.

All these are of a loftier sort than are found in human law. But we need especially to emphasize the fact that this law (g) Is an expression of the moral nature of God, and therefore of God’s holiness, the fundamental attribute of that nature; and that it (h) Sets forth absolute conformity to that holiness, as the normal condition of man. This law is inwrought into man’s rational and moral being. Man fulfills it, only when in his moral as well as his rational being he is the image of God.

Although the will from which the moral law springs is an expression of the nature of God, and a necessary expression of that nature in view of the existence of moral beings, it is nonetheless a personal will. We should be careful not to attribute to law a personality of its own. When Plutarch says: “Law is king both of mortal and immortal beings,” and when we say: “The law will take hold of you,” “The criminal is in danger of the law,” we are simply substituting the name of the agent for that of the principal. God is not subject to law; God is the source of law; and we may say: “If Jehovah be God, worship him; but if Law, worship it.”

Since moral law merely reflects God, it is not a thing made. Men discover laws, but they do not make them, any more than the chemist makes the laws by which the elements combine. Instance the solidification of hydrogen at Geneva. Utility does not constitute law, although we test law by utility; see Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 53–71. The true nature of the moral law is set forth in the noble though rhetorical description of Hooker (Eccl. Pol., 1:194)—“Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is in the bosom of God; her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in a different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy.” See also Martineau, Types, 2:119, and Study, 1:35.

Curtis, Primitive Semitic Religions, 66, 101—“The Oriental believes that God makes right by edict. Saladin demonstrated to Henry of Champagne the loyalty of his Assassins, by commanding two of them to throw themselves down from a lofty tower to certain and violent death.” H. B. Smith, System, 192—“Will implies personality, and personality adds to abstract truth and duty the element of authority. Law therefore has the force that a person has over and above that of an idea.” Human law forbids only those offences which constitute a breach of public order or of private right. God’s law forbids all that is an offence against the divine order, that is, all that is unlike God. The whole law may be summed up in the words: “Be like God.” Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 101–126—“The realization of the nature of each being is the end to be striven for. Self-realization is an ideal end, not of one being, but of each being, with due regard to the value of each in the proper scale of worth. The beast can be sacrificed for man. All men are sacred as capable of unlimited progress. It is our duty to realize the capacities of our nature so far as they are consistent with one another and go to make up one whole.” This means that man fulfills the law only as he realizes the divine idea in his character and life, or, in other words, as he becomes a finite image of God’s infinite perfections.

Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 191, 201, 285, 286—“Morality is rooted in the nature of things. There is a universe. We are all parts of an infinite organism. Man is inseparably bound to man [and to God]. All rights and duties arise out of this common life. In the solidarity of social life lies the ground of Kant’s law: So will, that the maxim of thy conduct may apply to all. The planet cannot safely fly away from the sun, and the hand cannot safely separate itself from the heart. It is from the fundamental unity of life that our duties flow.… The infinite world-organism is the body and manifestation of God. And when we recognize the solidarity of our vital being with this divine life and embodiment, we begin to see into the heart of the mystery, the unquestionable authority and supreme sanction of duty. Our moral intuitions are simply the unchanging laws of the universe that have emerged to consciousness in the human heart.… The inherent principles of the universal Reason reflect themselves in the mirror of the moral nature.… The enlightened conscience is the expression in the human soul of the divine Consciousness.… Morality is the victory of the divine Life in us.… Solidarity of our life with the universal Life gives it unconditional sacredness and transcendental authority.… The microcosm must bring itself en rapport with the Macrocosm. Man must bring his spirit into resemblance to the Worldessence, and into union with it.”

The law of God, then, is simply an expression of the nature of God in the form of moral requirement, and a necessary expression of that nature in view of the existence of moral beings (Ps. 19:7; cf. 1). To the existence of this law all men bear witness. The consciences even of the heathen testify to it (Rom. 2:14, 15). Those who have the written law recognize this elemental law as of greater compass and penetration. (Rom. 7:14; 8:4). The perfect embodiment and fulfillment of this law is seen only in Christ (Rom. 10:4; Phil. 3:8, 9).

Ps. 19:7—“The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul”; cf. verse 19:1—“The heavens declare the glory of God” = two revelations of God—one in nature, the other in the moral law. Rom. 2:14, 15—“for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them”—here the “work of the law” =, not the ten commandments, for of these the heathen were ignorant, but rather the work corresponding to them, i. e., the substance of them. Rom. 7:14—“For we know that the law is spiritual”—this, says Meyer, is equivalent to saying “its essence is divine, of like nature with the Holy Spirit who gave it, a holy self-revelation of God.” Rom. 8:4—“that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit”; 10:4—“For Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to every one that believeth”; Phil. 3:8, 9—“that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness, which is from God by faith”; Heb. 10:9—“Lo, I am come to do thy will.” In Christ “the law appears Drawn out in living characters.” Just such as he was and is, we feel that we ought to be. Hence the character of Christ convicts us of sin, as does no other manifestation of God. See, on the passages from Romans, the Commentary of Philippi.

Fleming, Vocab. Philos., 286—“Moral laws are derived from the nature and will of God, and the character and condition of man.” God’s nature is reflected in the laws of our nature. Since law is inwrought into man’s nature, man is a law unto himself. To conform to his own nature, in which conscience is supreme, is to conform to the nature of God. The law is only the revelation of the constitutive principles of being, the declaration of what must be, so long as man is man and God is God. It says in effect: “Be like God, or you cannot be truly man.” So moral law is not simply a test of obedience, but is also a revelation of eternal reality. Man cannot be lost to God, without being lost to himself. “The ‘hands of the living God’ (Heb. 10:31) into which we fall, are the laws of nature.” In the spiritual world “the same wheels revolve, only there is no iron” (Drummond, Natural Law in the Spiritural world, 27). Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:82–92—“The totality of created being is to be in harmony with God and with itself. The idea of this harmony, as active in God under the form of will, is God’s law.” A manuscript of the U. S. Constitution was so written that when held at a little distance the shading of the letters and their position showed the countenance of George Washington. So the law of God is only God’s face disclosed to human sight.

R. W. Emerson, Woodnotes, 57—“Conscious Law is King of kings.” Two centuries ago John Norton wrote a book entitled The Orthodox Evangelist, “designed for the begetting and establishing of the faith which is in Jesus,” in which we find the following: “God doth not will things because they are just, but things are therefore just because God so willeth them. What reasonable man but will yield that the being of the moral law hath no necessary connection with the being of God? That the actions of men not conformable to this law should be sin, that death should be the punishment of sin, these are the constitutions of God, proceeding from him not by way of necessity of nature, but freely, as effects and products of his eternal good pleasure.” This is to make God an arbitrary despot. We should not say that God makes law, nor on the other hand that God is subject to law, but rather that God is law and the source of law.

Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 161—“God’s law is organic—inwrought into the constitution of men and things. The chart however does not make the channel.… A law of nature is never the antecedent but the consequence of reality. What right has this consequence of reality to be personalized and made the ruler and source of reality? Law is only the fixed mode in which reality works. Law therefore can explain nothing. Only God, from whom reality springs, can explain reality.” In other words, law is never an agent but always a method—the method of God, or rather of Christ who is the only Revealer of God. Christ’s life in the flesh is the clearest manifestation of him who is the principle of law in the physical and moral universe. Christ is the Reason of God in expression. It was he who gave the law on Mount Sinai at well as in the Sermon on the Mount. For fuller treatment of the subject, see Bowen, Metaph. and Ethics, 321–344; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257–274; Whewell, Elements of Morality, 2:35; and especially E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 79–108.

Each of the two last-mentioned characteristics of God’s law is important in its implications. We treat of these in their order.

First, the law of God as a transcript of the divine nature.—If this be the nature of the law, then certain common misconceptions of it are excluded. The law of God is

(a) Not arbitrary, or the product of arbitrary will. Since the will from which the law springs is a revelation of God’s nature, there can be no rashness or unwisdom in the law itself.

E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 193—“No law of God seems ever to have been arbitrarily enacted, or simply with a view to certain ends to be accomplished; it always represented some reality of life which it was inexorably necessary that those who were to be regulated should carefully observe.” The theory that law originates in arbitrary will results in an effeminate type of piety, just as the theory that legislation has for its sole end the greatest happiness results in all manner of compromises of justice. Jones, Robert Browning, 43—“He who cheats his neighbor believes in tortuosity, and, as Carlyle says, has the supreme Quack for his god.”

(b) Not temporary, or ordained simply to meet an exigency. The law is a manifestation, not of temporary moods or desires, but of the essential nature of God.

The great speech of Sophocles’ Antigone gives us this conception of law: “The ordinances of the gods are unwritten, but sure. Not one of them is for to-day or for yesterday alone, but they live forever.” Moses might break the tables of stone upon which the law was inscribed, and Jehoiakim might cut up the scroll and cast it into the fire (Ex. 32:19; Jer. 36:23), but the law remained eternal as before in the nature of God and in the constitution of man. Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch: “The moral laws are just as stable as the law of gravitation. Every fuzzy human chicken that is hatched into this world tries to fool with those laws. Some grow wiser in the process and some do not. We talk about breaking God’s laws. But after those laws have been broken several billion times since Adam first tried to play with them, those laws are still intact and no seam or fracture is visible in them,—not even a scratch on the enamel. But the lawbreakers—that is another story. If you want to find their fragments, go to the ruins of Egypt, of Babylon, of Jerusalem; study statistics; read faces; keep your eyes open; visit Blackwell’s Island; walk through the graveyard and read the invisible inscriptions left by the Angel of Judgment, for instance: ‘Here lie the fragments of John Smith, who contradicted his Maker, played football with the ten commandments, and departed this life at the age of thirty-five. His mother and wife weep for him. Nobody else does. May he rest in peace!’ ”

(c) Not merely negative, or a law of mere prohibition, since positive conformity to God is the inmost requisition of law.

The negative form of the commandments in the decalogue merely takes for granted the evil inclination in men’s hearts and practically opposes its gratification. In the cage of each commandment a whole province of the moral life is taken into the account, although the act expressly forbidden is the acme of evil in that one province. So the decalogue makes itself intelligible: it crosses man’s path just where he most feels inclined to wander. But back of the negative and specific expression in each case lies the whole mass of moral requirement: the thin edge of the wedge has the positive demand of holiness behind it, without obedience to which even the prohibition cannot in spirit be obeyed. Thus “the law is spiritual” (Rom. 7:14), and requires likeness in character and life to the spiritual God; John 4:24—“God is spirit, and they that worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

(d) Not partial, or addressed to one part only of man’s being,—since likeness to God requires purity of substance in man’s soul and body, as well as purity in all the thoughts and acts that proceed therefrom. As law proceeds from the nature of God, so it requires conformity to that nature in the nature of man.

Whatever God gave to man at the beginning he requires of man with interest; cf. Mat. 25:27—“thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the bankers, and at my coming I should have received back mine own with interest,” whatever comes short of perfect purity in soul or perfect health in body is non-conformity to God and contradicts his law, it being understood that only that perfection is demanded which answers to the creature’s stage of growth and progress, so that of the child there is required only the perfection of the child, of the youth only the perfection of the youth, of the man only the perfection of the man. See Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, chapter 1.

(e) Not outwardly published, since all positive enactment is only the imperfect expression of this underlying and unwritten law of being.

Much misunderstanding of God’s law results from confounding it with published enactment. Paul takes the larger view that the law is independent of such expression; see Rom. 2:14, 15—“for when Gentiles that have not the law do by nature the things of the law, these, not having the law, are the law unto themselves; in that they show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith, and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing them:” see Expositor’s Greek Testament, in loco: “ ‘written on their hearts,’ when contrasted with the law written on the tables of stone, is equal to ‘unwritten’; the Apostle refers to what the Greeks called ἄγραφος νόμος.”

(f) Not inwardly conscious, or limited in its scope by men’s consciousness of it. Like the laws of our physical being, the moral law exists whether we recognize it or not.

Overeating brings its penalty in dyspepsia, whether we are conscious of our fault or not. We cannot by ignorance or by vote repeal the laws of our physical system. Self-will does not secure independence, any more than the stars can by combination abolish gravitation. Man cannot get rid of God’s dominion by denying its existence, nor by refusing submission to it. Psalm 2:1–4—“Why do the nations rage.… against Jehovah.… saying, Let us break their bonds asunder.… He that sitteth in the heavens will laugh.” Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 94—“The fact that one is not aware of obligation no more affects its reality than ignorance of what is at the centre of the earth affects the nature of what is really discoverable there. We discover obligation, and do not create it by thinking of it, any more than we create the sensible world by thinking of it.”

(g) Not local, or confined to place,—since no moral creature can escape from God, from his own being, or from the natural necessity that unlikeness to God should involve misery and ruin.

“The Dutch auction” was the public offer of property at a price beyond its value, followed by the lowering of the price until some one accepted it as a purchaser. There is no such local exception to the full validity of God’s demands. The moral law has even more necessary and universal sway than the law of gravitation in the physical universe. It is inwrought into the very constitution of man, and of every other moral being. The man who offended the Roman Emperor found the whole empire a prison.

(h) Not changeable, or capable of modification. Since law represents the unchangeable nature of God, it is not a sliding scale of requirements which adapts itself to the ability of the subjects. God himself cannot change it without ceasing to be God.

The law, then, has a deeper foundation than that God merely “said so.” God’s word and God’s will are revelations of his inmost being; every transgression of the law is a stab at the heart of God. Simon, Reconciliation, 141, 142—“God continues to demand loyalty even after man has proved disloyal. Sin changes man, and man’s change involves a change in God. Man now regards God as a ruler and exactor, and God must regard man as a defaulter and a rebel.” God’s requirement is not lessened because man is unable to meet it. This inability is itself non-conformity to law, and is no excuse for sin; see Dr. Bushnell’s sermon on “Duty not measured by Ability.” The man with the withered hand would not have been justified in refusing to stretch it forth at Jesus’ command (Mat. 12:10–13).

The obligation to obey this law and to be conformed to God’s perfect moral character is based upon man’s original ability and the gifts which God bestowed upon him at the beginning. Created in the image of God, it is man’s duty to render back to God that which God first gave, enlarged and improved by growth and culture (Luke 19:23—“wherefore gavest thou not my money into the bank, and I at my coming should have required it with interest”). This obligation is not impaired by sin and the weakening of man’s powers. To let down the standard would be to misrepresent God. Adolphe Monod would not save himself from shame and remorse by lowering the claims of the law: “Save first the holy law of my God,” he says, “after that you shall save me!”

Even salvation is not through violation of law. The moral law is immutable, because it is a transcript of the nature of the immutable God. Shall nature conform to me, or I to nature? If I attempt to resist even physical laws, I am crushed. I can use nature only by obeying her laws. Lord Bacon: “Natura enim non nisi parendo vincitur.” So in the moral realm. We cannot buy off nor escape the moral law of God. God will not, and God can not, change his law by one hair’s breadth, even to save a universe of sinners. Omar Kháyyám, in his Rubáiyat, begs his god to “reconcile the law to my desires.” Marie Corelli says well: “As if a gnat should seek to build a cathedral, and should ask to have the laws of architecture altered to suit its gnat-like capacity.” See Martineau, Types, 2:120.

Secondly, the law of God as the ideal of human nature.—A law thus identical with the eternal and necessary relations of the creature to the Creator, and demanding of the creature nothing less than perfect holiness, as the condition of harmony with the infinite holiness of God, is adapted to man’s finite nature, as needing law; to man’s free nature, as needing moral law; and to man’s progressive nature, as needing ideal law.

Man, as finite, needs law, just as railway cars need a track to guide them—to leap the track is to find, not freedom, but ruin. Railway President: “Our rules are written in blood.” Goethe, Was Wir Bringen, 19 Auftritt: “In vain shall spirits that are all unbound To the pure heights of perfectness aspire; In limitation first the Master shines, And law alone can give us liberty.”—Man, as a free being, needs moral law. He is not an automaton, a creature of necessity, governed only by physical influences. With conscience to command the right, and will to choose or reject it, his true dignity and calling are that he should freely realize the right.—Man, as a progressive being, needs nothing less than an ideal and infinite standard of attainment, a goal which he can never overpass, an end which shall ever attract and urge him forward. This he finds in the holiness of God.

The law is a fence, not only for ownership, but for care. God not only demands, but he protects. Law is the transcript of love as well as of holiness. We may reverse the well-known couplet and say: “I slept, and dreamed that life was Duty; I woke and found that life was Beauty.” “Cui servire regnare est.” Butcher, Aspects of Greek Genius, 56—“In Plato’s Crito, the Laws are made to present themselves in person to Socrates in prison, not only as the guardians of his liberty, but as his lifelong friends, his well-wishers, his equals, with whom he had of his own free will entered into binding compact.” It does not harm the scholar to have before him the ideal of perfect scholarship; nor the teacher to have before him the ideal of a perfect school; nor the legislator to have before him the ideal of perfect law. Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 134—“The moral goal must be a flying goal; the standard to which we are to grow must be ever rising; the type to which we are to be conformed must have in it inexhaustible fulness.”

John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:119—“It is just the best, purest, noblest human souls, who are least satisfied with themselves and their own spiritual attainments; and the reason is that the human is not a nature essentially different from the divine, but a nature which, just because it is in essential affinity with God, can be satisfied with nothing less than a divine perfection.” J. M. Whiton, The Divine Satisfaction: “Law requires being, character, likeness to God. It is automatic, self-operating. Penalty is untransferable. It cannot admit of any other satisfaction than the reëstablishment of the normal relation which it requires. Punishment proclaims that the law has not been satisfied. There is no cancelling of the curse except through the growing up of the normal relation. Blessing and curse ensue upon what we are, not upon what we were. Reparation is within the spirit itself. The atonement is educational, not governmental.” We reply that the atonement is both governmental and educational, and that reparation must first be made to the holiness of God before conscience, the mirror of God’s holiness, can reflect that reparation and be at peace.

The law of God is therefore characterized by:

(a) All-comprehensiveness.—It is over us at all times; it respects our past, our present, our future. It forbids every conceivable sin; it requires every conceivable virtue; omissions as well as commissions are condemned by it.

Ps. 119:96—“I have seen an end of all perfection.… thy commandment is exceeding broad”; Rom. 3:23—“all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God”; James 4:17—“To him therefore that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” Gravitation holds the mote as well as the world. God’s law detects and denounces the least sin, so that without atonement it cannot be pardoned. The law of gravitation may be suspended or abrogated, for it has no necessary ground in God’s being; but God’s moral law cannot be suspended or abrogated, for that would contradict God’s holiness. “About right” is not “all right.” “The giant hexagonal pillars of basalt in the Scottish Staffa are identical in form with the microscopic crystals of the same mineral.” So God is our pattern, and goodness is our likeness to him.

(b) Spirituality.—It demands not only right acts and words, but also right dispositions and states. Perfect obedience requires not only the intense and unremitting reign of love toward God and man, but conformity of the whole inward and outward nature of man to the holiness of God.

Mat. 5:22, 28—the angry word is murder; the sinful look is adultery. Mark 12:30, 31—“thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.… Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”; 2 Cor. 10:5—“bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ”; Eph. 5:1—“Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children”; 1 Pet. 1:16—“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy.” As the brightest electric light, seen through a smoked glass against the sun, appears like a black spot, so the brightest unregenerate character is dark, when compared with the holiness of God. Matheson, Moments on the Mount, 235, remarks on Gal. 6:4—“let each man prove his own work, and then shall he have his glorying in regard of himself alone, and not of his neighbor”—“I have a small candle and I compare it with my brother’s taper and come away rejoicing. Why not compare it with the sun? Then I shall lose my pride and uncharitableness.” The distance to the sun from the top of an ant-hill and from the top of Mount Everest is nearly the same. The African princess praised for her beauty had no way to verify the compliments paid her but by looking in the glassy surface of the pool. But the trader came and sold her a mirror. Then she was so shocked at her own ugliness that she broke the mirror in pieces. So we look into the mirror of God’s law, compare ourselves with the Christ who is reflected there, and hate the mirror which reveals us to ourselves (James 1:23, 24).

(c) Solidarity.—It exhibits in all its parts the nature of the one Law giver, and it expresses, in its least command, the one requirement of harmony with him.

Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; Mark 12:29, 30—“The Lord our God, the Lord is one: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; James 2:10—“For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all”; 4:12—“One only is the lawgiver and judge.” Even little rattlesnakes are snakes. One link broken in the chain, and the bucket falls into the well. The least sin separates us from God. The least sin renders us guilty of the whole law, because it shows us to lack the love which is required in all the commandments. Those who send us to the Sermon on the Mount for salvation send us to a tribunal that damns us. The Sermon on the Mount is but a republication of the law given on Sinai, but now in more spiritual and penetrating form. Thunders and lightnings proceed from the N. T., as from the O. T., mount. The Sermon on the Mount is only the introductory lecture of Jesus’ theological course, as John 14–17 is the closing lecture. In it is announced the law, which prepares the way for the gospel. Those who would degrade doctrine by exalting precept will find that they have left men without the motive or the power to keep the precept. Æschylus, Agamemnon: “For there’s no bulwark in man’s wealth to him Who, through a surfeit, kicks—into the dim And disappearing—Right’s great altar.”

Only to the first man, then, was the law proposed as a method of salvation. With the first sin, all hope of obtaining the divine favor by perfect obedience is lost. To sinners the law remains as a means of discovering and developing sin in its true nature, and of compelling a recourse to the mercy provided in Jesus Christ.

2 Chron. 34:19—“And it came to pass, when the king had heard the words of the law, that he rent his clothes”; Job 42:5, 6—“I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; But now mine eye seeth thee; Wherefore I abhor myself, And repent in dust and ashes.” The revelation of God in Is. 6:3, 5—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—causes the prophet to cry like the leper: “Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips.” Rom. 3:20—“by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified in his sight; for through the law cometh the knowledge of sin”; 5:20—“the law came in besides, that the trespass might abound”; 7:7, 8—“I had not known sin, except through the law: for I had not known coveting, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet: but sin, finding occasion, wrought in me through the commandment all manner of coveting: for apart from the law sin is dead”; Gal. 3:24—“So that the law is become our tutor,” or attendant-slave, “to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith” = the law trains our wayward boyhood and leads it to Christ the Master, as in old times the slave accompanied children to school. Stevens, Pauline Theology, 177, 178—“The law increases sin by increasing the knowledge of sin and by increasing the activity of sin. The law does not add to the inherent energy of the sinful principle which pervades human nature, but it does cause this principle to reveal itself more energetically in sinful act.” The law inspires fear, but it leads to love. The Rabbins said that, if Israel repented but for one day, the Messiah would appear.

No man ever yet drew a straight line or a perfect curve; yet he would be a poor architect who contented himself with anything less. Since men never come up to their ideals, he who aims to live only an average moral life will inevitably fall below the average. The law, then, leads to Christ. He who is the ideal is also the way to attain the ideal. He who is himself the word and the Law embodied, is also the Spirit of life that makes obedience possible to us (John 14:6—“I am the way, and the truth, and the life”; Rom. 8:2—“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death”). Mrs. Browning, Aurora Leigh: “The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver, Unless he had given the Life too with the Law.” Christ for us upon the Cross, and Christ in us by his Spirit, is the only deliverance from the curse of the law; Gal. 3:13—“Christ redeemed as from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us.” we must see the claims of the law satisfied and the law itself written on our hearts. We are “reconciled to God through the death of his Son,” but we are also “saved by his life” (Rom. 5:10).

Robert Browning, in The Ring and the Book, represents Caponsacchi as comparing himself at his best with the new ideal of “perfect as Father in heaven is perfect” suggested by Pompilia’s purity, and as breaking out into the cry: “O great, just, good God! Miserable me!” In the Interpreter’s House of Pilgrim’s Progress, Law only stirred up the dust in the foul room,—the Gospel had to sprinkle water on the floor before it could be cleansed. E. G. Robinson: “It is necessary to smoke a man out, before you can bring a higher motive to bear upon him.” Barnabas said that Christ was the answer to the riddle of the law. Rom. 10:4—“Christ is the end of the law unto righteousness to every one that believeth.” The railroad track opposite Detroit on the St. Clair River runs to the edge of the dock and seems intended to plunge the train into the abyss. But when the ferry boat comes up, rails are seen upon its deck, and the boat is the end of the track, to carry passengers over to Detroit. So the law, which by itself would bring only destruction, finds its end in Christ who ensures our passage to the celestial city.

Law, then, with its picture of spotless innocence, simply reminds man of the heights from which he has fallen. “It is a mirror which reveals derangement, but does not create or remove it.” With its demand of absolute perfection, up to the measure of man’s original endowments and possibilities, it drives us, in despair of ourselves, to Christ as our only righteousness and our only Savior (Rom. 8:3, 4—“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the ordinance of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit”; Phil. 3:8, 9—“that I may gain Christ, and be found in him, not having a righteousness of mine own, even that which is of the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith”). Thus law must prepare the way for grace, and John the Baptist must precede Christ.

When Sarah Bernhardt was solicited to add an eleventh commandment, she declined upon the ground there were already ten too many. It was an expression of pagan contempt of law. In heathendom, sin and insensibility to sin increased together. In Judaism and Christianity, on the contrary, there has been a growing sense of sin’s guilt and condemnableness. McLaren, in S. S. Times, Sept. 23, 1893:600—“Among the Jews there was a far profounder sense of sin than in any other ancient nation. The law written on men’s hearts evoked a lower consciousness of sin, and there are prayers on the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets which may almost stand beside the 51st Psalm. But, on the whole, the deep sense of sin was the product of the revealed law.” See Fairbairn, Revelation of Law and Scripture; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 187–242; Hovey, God with Us, 187–210; Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:45–50; Murphy, Scientific Bases of Faith, 53–71; Martineau, Types, 2:120–125.