Deuteronomy 5:8-10 You shall not make you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath… Let a man, righteous or unrighteous, be punished for a crime he has not committed, how his sense of justice is outraged! — what burning resentment springs up within him against those who inflict it upon him! His quarrel is with his fellow men, with all the world, if it condemn him, innocent, to suffer with the guilty. There is nothing in the nature of things which decrees that that law shall be so, and not otherwise. Of all the laws framed by man, one thing only may be safely predicted, that by man they will be changed. The laws which are framed by any nation may be good, but they cannot stand forever. They are the embodiment of that nation's conception of justice. But that conception must become larger as the nation's mind and heart grow greater. If we knew justice in the abstract, then the work of our law makers would be comparatively easy; all their task would be to apply their knowledge to the concrete. But we cannot know absolute justice, therefore we should be content if our changing laws are steps ever leading upwards to our ideal of perfectly just relationship. But there are other greater laws than these — laws which do not denote the progress of time, but stand through time the representatives of the eternal; remain, amid a world of change, the symbols of the unchangeable, working themselves out unerringly and unpityingly. Surely to rebel against such laws is only to invoke despair. We are all proud to call ourselves the heirs of past ages. But to be the victims of them — does that not seem hard? The old theological dogma of predestination, the doctrine which taught that mankind was divided into elect and non-elect, that ere a man was his doom was, and he might not pass it, seems to us peculiarly revolting. The injustice of it could not but arouse and inflame the worst passions in a strong nature. It was the death knell of striving and aspiration. That it was an evil doctrine few will be found to deny. Why, then, did it live so long and die so hard? Simply because there was a measure of truth in it. But the truth in it was pushed to an extreme and became falsehood. Science restated the law in her own terms. She does not pursue the unhappy individual beyond the grave and through all eternity with her doom of predestined and unalterable evil. She simply delivers him up to the law she has discovered, and repeats in language, and with proofs that cannot be gainsaid, "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children." The law of heredity is one which is filling a larger and larger place in the science and thought of our day. Its influence is traced in a physical organism, in our mental endowments, and in our moral power. Men who have made mental diseases their special study tell us that our work, worry, violent grief or pain, all these and the many kindred ills which tend to induce madness, are not to be reckoned for number against the cases in which the influence of heredity can be clearly traced. And putting aside these cases of what we may call accidental insanity, and considering only the hereditary, we find that always the progenitor of it was sin. But not only do the sins of our fathers descend upon us in suffering of body, or in varying peculiarities of mind; they find us out in our moral nature as well, in a predisposition to like sins as our forefathers sinned, in a weakness of our will before certain temptations. It is an appalling thing. It wakes within us a new fear of our fellows and a new dread of ourselves. Is there a grown-up man or woman who cannot furnish an analogy from iris own experience? After we have striven and agonised and prayed, and by sore trial and long strife have built up habits of virtue to ourselves, have we never seen them all fall off from us, and known ourselves stripped and naked of our virtue and our strength, one with the weakness and sin that beset us, knowing, even in the midst of our frenzied cry to be kept back from that sin, that we shall have surrendered our will to it? And so our sin-convicted souls let go their much-prized doctrines of free will, and own their will fettered by low desires, in bondage to the sins of the past; and in our misery we grasp at the truth in the doctrine of heredity that in the dogma of predestination we scoffed at and denied. But there is another side to the law. The second part of our text proclaims it to us — "showing mercy unto thousands of them that love Me and keep My commandments." The phraseology of the position of the two clauses leads us into an error which only thought on the subject can correct. The entire text calls up before our mental vision two distinct classes of people. On the one hand we see the suffering descendants of sinful progenitors working out the law unto the third and fourth generations; on the other hand we see the happy thousands who love God and keep His commandments, delighting themselves in His mercy, or, as the marginal note of the Revised Version permits us to put it, we see the mercy of God upon those who keep His commandments, descending through a thousand Generations. But when we look at it more closely we see that we have been deceived into making such a division. In real life such a division is not possible. These are the two extremes between which all men are comprehended. Further, as there is not one, nor ever has been, who is wholly evil or wholly good, it follows that while there is not one of us who does not suffer in some degree from the sins of those now dead, also there is not one of us who is so poor as not to have the heritage of God's mercy bequeathed to us from some progenitor who has won it for us by loving God and keeping His commandments. Science tells us the selfsame tale. It is not only evil that persists, but good also. We do not hear so much about it. We all know and think too much of the evil that is in the world, and too little of the good. And so we turn towards pessimism, and call our dark imaginings truths. The sins are visited unto the third and fourth generation. God's mercy extends unto a thousand generations. What a wealth of meaning and truth is hidden there! Think of the numbers merely. Three or four, even generations, we have no difficulty in figuring to ourselves. They exist at one time among us. But a thousand generations! The imagination exults in the comparison between three and four and a thousand. But let us consider the truth of it as attested by our reason and experience. Evil has two ends, and two only, which are possible to it. The one is tsar it shall be overcome of good, and by being so its history becomes merged in that of good, and its existence as evil is ended; the other is that it shall persist until it die. The inevitable tendency of evil is toward self-destruction. Evil repeated and repeated does not gain strength and power by every repetition. For a time it does, but by and by at every repetition it becomes weaker; each reproduction of itself means a fresh drain upon a vital power that has no perennial fount of life to draw upon, so that it becomes exhausted. The imagination even cannot conceive of a thing growing ever increasingly evil, till it is wholly so, and yet continuing to live. But we, who know good and evil struggling together within ourselves, are tempted to think the one as great as the other because it is as close to us. "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" — that is truth! Yes, the surface of truth. The mercy of God is unto a thousand generations — that is truth! — yes, fundamental truth, the secret of our nature, the source of our undying hope. And that truth we find everywhere. If we examine our store of experience and observation we find it written there. And if we bid our intellect pronounce upon it, she divorces good from evil that we may see the nature of each. She shows us evil, cut off from the good to which it clings, hurling itself in headlong flight down to everlasting nothingness. She shows us good, following the law of its nature, climbing with slow, sure step the heights of heaven. (A. H. Moncur Sime.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth: |
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