Who expects in realities of
any kind the sharp outline and exclusive character of scientific
classification? It is the predominance of the characterizing constituent
that gives the name and class. Do not even our own statute laws, though
co-existing with a separate religious Code, contain many 'formulae' of
words which have no sense but for the conscience? Davison's stress on
the word 'covet', in the tenth commandment, is, I think, beyond what so
ancient a Code warrants;--and for the other instances, Michaelis would
remind him that the Mosaic constitution was a strict theocracy, and that
Jehovah, the God of all, was their 'king'. I do not know the particular
mode in which Michaelis propounds and supports this position; but the
position itself, as I have presented it to my own mind, seems to me
among the strongest proofs of the divine origin of the Law, and an
essential in the harmony of the total scheme of Revelation.
Disc. IV. Pt. II. p. 180.
But the first law meets him on his own terms; it stood upon a present
retribution; the execution of its sentence is matter of history, and
the argument resulting from it is to be answered, before the question
is carried to another world.
This is rendered a very powerful argument by the consideration, that
though so vast a mind as that of Moses, though perhaps even a Lycurgus,
might have distinctly foreseen the ruin and captivity of the Hebrew
people as a necessary result of the loss of nationality, and the
abandonment of the law and religion which were their only point of
union, their centre of gravity,--yet no human intellect could have
foreseen the perpetuity of such a people as a distinct race under all
the aggravated curses of the law weighing on them; or that the obstinacy
of their adherence to their dividuating institutes in persecution,
dispersion, and shame, should be in direct proportion to the wantonness
of their apostasy from the same in union and prosperity.
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