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THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

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Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 12, 1861

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 17, No. 13.

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THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

By Editor

In the Ladies' Repository for Jan., 1861, we notice an elegant frontispiece, illustrative of the ten commandments. The central figure is Moses receiving the tables from the hand of the Lord, while around it are ten smaller tables, each with its appropriate commandment, accompanied with an illustration showing the practice or violation of that commandment. But what does this mean? Judging from an almost universal custom, we should conclude that we have a new version of the ten commandments for the gospel dispensation. And if the Editor of the Repository will compare diligently his own practice with the commandments graven on the tables which Moses is represented as receiving, he will find that every week he is at variance with them in one very important particular. And if men are to continue to practice according to the new version, which substitutes the first for the seventh day of the week in the fourth commandment, to suit the present time we should have illustrations showing how and when this change was effected, and by what authority it was done, rather than illustrations of the giving of the old version to Moses, one tenth of which is by the practice of the present day rendered in reality null and obsolete. There is, however, one good feature in this question respecting the commandments. Men have happily been taught to reverence them, all unconscious of the discrepancy which exists between said commandments and their own practice. And now, when, by increasing light, they are called to choose between God's precepts and human custom, whether they will give up the law or change their practice, the honest in heart will still hold the commandments paramount, and make their practice correspond thereto. The illustration in question, is another example that it is not until men have their attention called to the subject, and are brought to see that the claims of the commandment interfere with their worldly interest, that they are willing to argue for the abolition of the tables as God gave them to Moses, or even for their modification.