rance, the grossness, the cruelty, the savagery, the superstition, of the Jewish people in many passages of their history. Their wavering allegiance to their peculiar institutions is confessed with candour and sadness by their own historians. Textual difficulties, too, abound in the Hebrew Scriptures in proportion to their antiquity, just as might be expected. The writers are by no means free from national partiality (what national historian ever was?); and they abound in unconscious, more often (we trust) than conscious, exaggerations and colourings of the facts which they record. The more ancient parts of the history, written (in their present form at least) long centuries after the events, are by no means free from retrospective theories and philosophizings. All this is freely granted and avowed.

But still the great phenomenon exists, inseparable from their history, their language and literature, inseparable from the remnant of the nation itself:-the great principle of Judaism is the grand idea of One Only God of Creation and Providence. This is the perpetual inspiration of their history and of their poetry. They are a nation ostensibly devoted to the worship of One Unseen Being. They are self-reproached and self-condemned in all their idolatries. They commonly ascribe their own sufferings, public or private, to their own backslidings. They even misinterpret, as we may think, many of the natural events of Providence in their history, by giving them this theoretical colouring from their own theology, and making conscience the witness against themselves.

Moses was the founder of their Law. He matured and methodized the various institutions which they had derived from their forefathers, legalized various existing customs, limited and restrained certain others, and enjoined various new ones suitable to their new prospects as about to become a settled nation. He instituted a

ritual of national worship, and provided a priesthood for its due celebration.

Whether THE LAW, as we have it in the Pentateuch, differ much or little from the Law as promulgated by Moses himself, those books are, to us at least, the original source of information. We can ascend no higher. And in order to gain a tolerable idea of the contents of the Mosaic Law, it is necessary to digest them into the order of their subjects, instead of perusing them in that miscellaneous narrative order in which the books of Moses present them to us, as given to the Israelites in the desert, and journalized in the record.

We may conveniently arrange the Jewish institutions under two heads:

I. The Moral and Civic Law, in which Moses appears as statesman, legislator and moralist; and II. The Ecclesiastical and Ritual Law, in which the

ceremonial peculiarity of Judaism is developed. THE MORAL LAW is nobly epitomized (as we have already observed) in the great commandments of Sinai. Its principles are applied more at large by Moses to the various details of social and civic life, in a manner that redounds infinitely to the credit of the Jewish institutions, when compared with those of contemporary or even of later nations. If, in some instances, the Law fell beneath the standard of Christian morals, this should not be matter of surprise. We must test it by its own time, not by the "fulness of time" for which it was preparatory.

It is very curious to notice that the Mosaic institutions do not recognize a king as the head of the government, though the proudest times of national history were those of the early Hebrew monarchy. The great God himself is to be their King. The judges and elders, and in part the priests, are the administrators of His Law. Moses,

indeed, anticipates the probability of the nation desiring to have a king, "like other nations ;" and pointing to it as an infringement of his system, to be permitted but not approved, enjoins the limitation of his military equipment and domestic magnificence;-limitations quite neglected, indeed, by the Jewish monarchs from David. downwards, but which, standing as they do in the Pentateuch, seem (we must observe in passing) to defy the theory of that work having been originally produced so late as the days of the monarchy. Something more courtly would have been more likely to be found in a monarchical Pentateuch. It would have been the last thing thought of, to introduce Moses as protesting against the then established kingly government. More likely he would have been made to predict it as an improvement upon the irregular government by judges and prophets. (See Deut. xvii. 14-20; also 1 Samuel viii.) This by the way.

The Law fully recognized the clanship (so to call it) and patriarchal self-government of the various tribes, which together constituted a kind of federation for national purposes, while each obeying its own elders, rulers and judges, within its own borders.

Polygamy, then, as now, customary in the East, the Law of Moses did not forbid; but it contained many provisions against its worst abuses, and such as tended to restrict the practice to cases in which a family name and estate were preserved from extinction by its means. Except in kingly and noble families, it prevailed but little beyond this class of exigencies, which, to Jewish feelings, were of great importance. With a view to the preservation of families from extinction, Moses also enacted that singular law of the levirate (existing as a custom before he made it a law), by which, if a man died without issue, his brother or nearest male relative was

expected (even if already a married man) to take the widow to wife, and the first child of that marriage was accounted as the representative of the deceased brother. Other regulations tended in like manner to the preservation of property in the hands of each tribe and each family; as, for instance, that law of entail which forbade the alienation of land by sale for more than fifty years, and the law forbidding an heiress to marry into any other tribe than her own.

Divorce was not forbidden, but was restrained by the injunction of certain formal proceedings, which made it in all cases a matter of deliberation instead of sudden passion, and in most cases matter of judicial procedure. Adultery was punishable with death.

The patria potestas, or power of parents over their children, probably an absolute power of life and death before the time of Moses, was restrained by the Mosaic Law within more decent limits, judicial proceedings being required to be taken in any such case.

Murder was capitally punished. Accidental manslaughter and justifiable homicide were shielded from the customary vengeance of the next kinsman by a remarkable and ingenious provision. The custom of ages had made it a point of stern honour for the nearest relative of the slain to take upon himself the office of bloodavenger, and to pursue to the death him who had been even the innocent or involuntary cause of his relative's death. The Mosaic Law moderated this savage custom, by appointing six cities of refuge in various parts of the country, to any of which the homicide might flee, and the magistrates of which should decide whether the case was one of murder or of mere manslaughter. If the former, the criminal was given up to the blood-avenger. But if the latter, he might remain safe in the city of refuge till the death of the high-priest; after which, he

was at liberty to return to his own residence, wherever it might be.

The laws respecting bond-servants and slaves were a great advance in the cause of humanity upon the laws and customs of the time; while they are themselves a sad memorial enough of the destitution of rights in which those unhappy classes were still left.

There is a fine spirit of natural justice running through the Mosaic laws as regards theft, fraud, and injury to property. Restitution, or compensation, with something added over and above, was the leading principle. "Retaliation" seems to have been adjudged in some cases, if we are not rather to read such hints as figuratively enjoining full compensation. The law forbidding to lend money at interest to a fellow Jew, and that which cancelled debts at the end of seven years, if economically unsound, were plainly designed and calculated to produce social kindness and liberality, and to foster patriotism; while the law of pledges, forbidding to take in pledge the implements or means of any one's livelihood, or to retain the upper garment (practically the poor man's blanket) during the night, reminds one of certain provisions in the English Magna Charta, and reproaches the doings of our modern pawn-shops in times of scarcity and distress. The Law of Moses did not neglect to provide, in various ways, for humanity towards animals.

But the RITUAL or CEREMONIAL side of the Jewish Law is that which demands the chief attention of the theologian, or of the intelligent Christian, as illustrating the relation of Judaism to the Gospel,-a relation seldom perhaps clearly understood, often greatly misunderstood.

Though the Jews were to worship the One Unseen God, and to abstain from all rival worship, they were permitted, and indeed commanded, to approach Him with sacrifice and outward ceremony, corresponding in the