which has formed a model for the present government of France. Moreover, the king of Israel is not to debase himself by the lusts of the harem; nor to tax his people in order to lay up a great treasure; and he is strictly forbidden to multiply horses and chariots, which were the great instruments of aggressive war, the game of kings and the scourge of nations.

Now suppose the President of the Southern States were to make himself a king, with the powers of an Eastern monarch, could he with justice plead the Scripture as establishing monarchy and calling on the people to submit to it as a divine and universal institution?

We might apply the principle to things nearer the sanctuary. It was the custom of all primitive nations to set apart certain families or a certain tribe for religious functions; without which, before letters, or before the general use of them, there could scarcely be any certainty or stability of religion. The priest caste of Egypt, the Brachmans, the Chaldees, the hereditary guilds which kept up the worship of certain Gods in ancient Greece and Italy, were instances of the kind. But this separation had a tendency to produce caste, with all its hateful and pestilential incidents. Probably there is nothing more depraved or odious in the whole range of human aberrations than the relations between the Brachmans and the Sudras as set forth in the Hindoo laws.

The Hebrew lawgiver sets apart the tribe of Levi to keep up the religion and ritual of the nation: but in the very act of setting it apart he takes care that it shall not be a caste. "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Take the Levites from among the children of Israel, and cleanse them. And thus shalt thou do unto them, to cleanse them: Sprinkle water of purifying upon them, and let them shave all their flesh, and let them wash their clothes, and so make themselves clean. Then let them take a young bullock with his meat offering, even fine flour mingled with oil, and another young bullock shalt thou take for a sin offering. And thou shalt

bring the Levites before the tabernacle of the congregation : and thou shalt gather the whole assembly of the children of Israel together: and thou shalt bring the Levites before the Lord and the children of Israel shall put their hands upon the Levites and Aaron shall offer the Levites before the

:

Lord for an offering of the children of Israel, that they may

execute the service of the Lord." * Thus the sacred tribe is ordained to its office by the laying on of the hands of the whole people. Nor is there any restriction of religious knowledge and teaching to the Levite, as there is to the Brachmans and other priestly castes. The performance of the ritual alone is confined to the hereditary priesthood: the spiritual life of the nation is left free, and it finds its organs in the prophet and the psalmist, not in the priest.

Yet an argument has been sought in the ordinances of the Old Law concerning the Levites for the establishment in the Church of Christ of a priestly Order, self-ordained, and invested not only with the exclusive right of performing public worship, but with the sole custody of religious truth.

So with regard to the nature of the Jewish worship. All the nations worshipped God by sacrifice and through outward forms till the mind of man had been raised high enough to worship in spirit and in truth. The Hebrew lawgiver did. not originate sacrificial rites; but he elevated and purified them, and guarded them against the most horrible aberrations as to the nature of God and the mode of winning His favor and averting His wrath; as all who know the history of heathen sacrifices, Eastern or Western, must perceive. The scape-goat has been and is a subject of much mockery to philosophers. Moses did not introduce that symbolic way of relieving the souls of a people from the burden of sin and assuring them of the mercy of God: but he took care that the scape-goat should be a goat, and not, as at polished Athens and civilized Rome, a man.

*Numb. viii. 5- 11.

The religious system of the Jews was primitive, and therefore gross compared with Christian worship. It was spiritual compared with the religious system of the most refined and cultivated heathen nations. Nevertheless, to those who did not consider it in this comparative point of view, or with reference to the time of its institution, it has supplied arguments for introducing unspiritual forms, and something resembling sacrifice, into Christian worship.

It has been said by enemies of the Bible, with some exaggeration, but also unfortunately with some truth, that modern fanatics "feed their pride on the language of the Chosen People." This is another case of the same kind. In ancient times, before Humanity was one, each nation was the "Chosen People" of a God of its own: but the Hebrew nation was the Chosen people of the true God. And as the Chosen People of the true God, the Jews were taught, compared with other nations, not national pride but national humility. They were taught, not that they had sprung of a divine seed and won their land by their own might and valor, but that "a Syrian ready to perish was their father"; that they had been bondsmen in the land of Egypt; and that they had been brought out of their bondage, not by their own arm, but by the arm of their God, to whom they owed their land and all they had. "And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and His statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord's thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. Only the Lord had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and He choose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day. Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked. For the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord

of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: He doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye, therefore, the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God; Him shalt thou serve, and to Him shalt thou cleave, and swear by His Name. He is thy praise, and He is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen. Thy fathers went down into Egypt with threescore and ten persons; and now the Lord thy God hath made thee as the stars of heaven for multitude." * This, though the language of a "Chosen People," is, compared with the self-praise of the Greeks and Romans, far from being the language of national pride. Yet there are some expressions in the passage which could not be used without fanaticism, by any nation or community, now that we know the relation in which all men alike stand to God, and to each other.

Finally, to ascend to the highest sphere of all, the Hebrews had, like other ancient nations, a national Deity, whose name was Jehovah. The national Deity of the Hebrews, unlike those of other nations, was God indeed. All His attributes were those of the true God, though but partially revealed: and His worship has consequently passed into the worship of the Universal Father without break or incongruity, as the light of dawn brightens and broadens into the light of day. But it is as God the universal Father of all that He is worshipped by Christians, not as Jehovah the Deity of the Hebrew nation.

*Deut. x. 12-22.

SECTION II.

HAVING thus seen the relation of the Old Testament to primitive institutions, customs, and ideas generally, we come to the particular case of Slavery.

Slavery is found existing in all barbarous nations, from the Chinese to the ancient Germans. Civilized nations have gradually emerged from it. Russia, the last-born of civilization, has just emancipated her serfs. Within the pale of Christendom, the institution now remains only in the slaveowning communities of America, and in the dependencies of Spain. And in these countries it is found in connection with a certain kind of agriculture, which is supposed to require negro laborers working in large gangs. In the Dutch dependency of Java it exists in a qualified form, and the party of humanity in Holland is now demanding its abolition.

The authors of the Declaration of Independence, on which the American Constitution for the Slave as well as for the Free States is founded, say: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Supposing the negro to be a man, the slave-owners who have set their hands to these sentiments have pronounced the doom of their own institution and saved its adversaries further trouble. But it must, in fairness to them, be owned that they have set their hands to too much. It can scarcely be held that liberty, political or personal, is the inalienable right of every human being. Children possess neither political nor personal liberty till they arrive at what the law, a law which they had no share in making, pro