The Decalogue as a Legal System.
By John M. Stearns
WHAT is usually termed the ten commandments, or the decalogue, is a complete system of law and government. But though written by the finger of God on the tables at Sinai, it was not for the first time enacted then and there. It had antecedents and authority from the creation, more or less distinctly noted in the Sacred Narrative. Allegiance of man to God, was the law of Eden; and paying homage to other beings than the Deity was rebuked and punished. The crime of Cain was a profane use of the forms of worship, while envy of his brother and covetousness of his fortune, induced the crime of murder; and lying and falsehood were brought in to conceal this crime. At least four of the distinct commands of the decalogue were violated by Cain, and such violations directly or incidentally appear in the Sacred Record. The institution of marriage was established by God in Eden, was respected by the antediluvian patriarchs; and the violation of this law is noted as a chief sin of the victims swept away by the flood. They were exceedingly wicked, and took them wives of all that they chose, and God determined their destruction. Noah and his wife were saved from the waters of the flood. And God said to him, “Thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.” His sons also respected the primitive institution of marriage. They had each but one wife, as St. Peter tells us that Noah prepared an ark to the saving of his house, wherein eight souls were saved from the flood. Even the name and person of God carried with them the idea of his character and government. “Enoch walked with God, and was not; for God took him”—that is, he obeyed God in his conduct and life. The right of property—as sacred to its possessor as the person by whose labor, industry, and care it was accumulated and preserved—is recognized as early as the days of Cain and Abel. Abel’s offering was the firstling of his flock. If the rights of property were thus sacred, the commandment against theft had even then force and authority. Abraham, and Lot, and Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph, accumulated estates. Idolatry became a characteristic of the age of Nimrod. The recent destruction of the flood had taught men the force of divine authority. This sentiment of respect for government above man, was sought to be appropriated by this mighty hunter of the East, to sustain his personal and despotic authority. So he caused a vast and high tower to be erected in the plains of Shinar, designing that the tower of Babel should stand, in the place of God, to protect the people against a future flood. Thus the followers of Nimrod, constituting a primitive nation, established idolatry as an incident of national power, until God, offended with their impiety, confounded their language, and vindicated what he afterward wrote as the second commandment of his law. The Sabbath, as instituted by the example of God in creation, was still a subsisting institution in the days of Moses. “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy” showed that this sacred institution subsisted as a religious tradition of by-gone ages. That honor to parents, as enforced in the fifth commandment, was not a new idea, is evident from the entire domestic history of the patriarchs. Witness the respect shown to Noah by his two more worthy sons; the deference of Isaac, in the matter of his marriage, to the wishes of his father; the burial of Abraham and Isaac by their respective children; the care and sustenance of Jacob by Joseph, his son; the dying scene of this distinguished patriarch; his funeral obsequies, and the funeral march to a distant and foreign land, to the cave of Machpelah, where his mortal form was placed beside the dust of his father. These all testify how the fifth commandment thus controlled God’s chosen servants. These ten simple commandments had been the subsisting laws by which God had sought to govern the human race for twenty-five hundred years before their special consecration and enactment, amidst the fires and thunderings of Sinai. They were, in fact, the rescripts and digest of God’s moral law. Taking these two tables as a whole, they embrace the most complete and perfect system of law that the world has ever known. No virtue known to the moral world herein fails of approval and commendation; and no vice or crime of which man was ever guilty escapes condemnation. These laws are definite and precise in their requirements, and still universal in their application. The law libraries of the world, with their mixed dialects, and ancient lore, and mammoth tomes, innumerable reports, and multitudinous variety of discussions by men of judicial acumen and giant learning, do not give us one idea of crime or virtue, right or wrong, of the propensities or delinquencies of human life, beyond what is embodied in these sacred tables. Notwithstanding the ridicule sought to be thrown on a resolution of one of the early legislatures of Connecticut, that God’s law should be the law of the colony until special laws should be enacted by the government, or to that effect, it is believed that few cases arise claiming adjudication from our courts of law that would not be better determined by a careful respect to the commands of the decalogue. These simple aphorisms, so to speak, throw a searching light on the incidents and character of crime, and afford the safest criterion to discriminate between the false and the true. Virtue and purity of life have here a standard for their justification against false charges and untoward appearances. This decalogue, as a whole, is one of the most convincing proofs of divine revelation and the divine government. Human wisdom and human learning are entirely inadequate to the production of so perfect a system of law and government; so definite and yet so universal, so brief and yet so comprehensive!—JOHN M. STEARNS, Counsellor-at-law, in “The Christian Union.”