be received in any commonwealth;" from which we may conclude that the
Church does not feel bound to enforce, as "of necessity," polygamy,
prostitution, murder of heretics, and slavery. She does not venture to
designate such precepts as immoral, but she does not feel bound in
conscience to enforce them, for which small concession we must feel
grateful. Passing from the law of the land to the Bible itself, we find
that the Mosaic code must certainly be recognised as divine. Jesus
himself proclaims: "Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the
prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil," and this is
emphasised by the declaration: "Whosoever, therefore, shall break _one
of these least_ commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called
least in the kingdom of heaven." The Broad Church party will be very
little, if this be true. Turning to the Old Testament, we find that some
of the most immoral precepts are spoken by God himself, immediately
after the "Ten Commandments;" surely that which "The Lord said" out of
"the thick darkness where God was," from the top of Sinai "on a smoke,
with the thunderings and lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet," can
scarcely be reverently designated as "the outcome of a barbarous age"?
Yet it is under these circumstances that God taught that a Hebrew
servant might be bought for seven years; that a wife might be given him
by his master, and that the wife and the children proceeding from the
union belonged to the master; that the servant could only go free by
deserting his wife and his own children and leaving them in slavery (Ex.
xxi. 1-6). It was under these circumstances that God taught that a man
might sell his daughter to be a "maid servant" (the translator's
euphemism for concubine), and that, "if she please not her master" she
may be bought back again, or if he "take him another" (translator
supplying "wife" as throwing an air of respectability over the
transaction) she may go free (Ibid. 7-11). It was under these
circumstances that God taught that if a man should beat a male or female