thy day may be lengthened in the land which the Lord thy God gives thee.'

'Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among the people, neither shalt thou stand against the blood of thy neighbour: I am the Lord.'

Descending deeper to the very source of human actions, the lawgiver commanded:

Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thy heart; thou shalt in anywise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him.'

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people; but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself."

Reverence due to God and the inviolable sanctity of His name, though proclaimed before in the third commandment, were again enforced with the utmost rigour: "He that blasphemes the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him; as well the stranger as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemes the name of the Lord, shall be put to death."

But Moses passed beyond the limits of civil and penal laws, to touch on duties which lie entirely in the sphere of feeling and humanity. The stranger, the widow, and the fatherless were sacred before the Lord: If thou afflict them in any way, and if they cry to Me, I will surely hear their cry, and My wrath shall be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall be widows, and your children orphans.' The helpless, the poor, the destitute stood under God's special protection, and every Hebrew was called upon to afford them help and to show them kindness. A stranger had the Israelite been in the land of Egypt; he had felt the bitterness of bondage; he could, therefore, sympathise with the stranger in his own land. The duty of hospitality, so readily observed

in the East, was by the Israelites raised into a sacred obligation. Their tent was open to the wanderer; a feast was prepared to welcome him; and his host would usually accompany him on his way for some distance when he rose to depart. The laws for the poor, which of course included the widow and the orphan, were most precise. In mentioning the poor, we must not imagine to ourselves a considerable portion of the population reduced to beggary and squalid poverty, such as we see, alas! now in every country of the world. Among the small Hebrew community, the landed property was almost equally divided, and there were none actually very wealthy and none ought properly to have been in want. But yet, from various reasons, there were instances when an Israelite fell hopelessly from the happy and enviable condition of independence, and this occurred so constantly that the words of Moses were not misapplied: "The needy shall not cease from amidst the land.' In such cases, the benevolence of his brethren was instantly put to a test. There could be no fearful and enduring suffering where the laws of humanity were so forcibly and intelligibly enjoined. For Moses ordained that

1. The spontaneous produce of the fields, the orchards, and the vineyards, in every seventh year, when they were not cultivated, belonged to the poor as well as to the proprietors.

2. In every harvest, the borders of the fields were to be preserved and left to the poor and the stranger: according to tradition these borders must at least be the sixtieth part of the field; and the law applied to all sorts of corn and legumes, the vine and olive, the nut- and date-trees. No poor man could be refused, and none was to be favoured in this privilege.

3. The proprietor was not allowed to glean the vineyard after the gathering, nor take up the grapes which

fell off; all this belonged likewise to the poor and the stranger.

4. When thou cuttest down thy harvest in thy field, and hast forgotten a sheaf in the field, thou shalt not go again to fetch it; it shall be for the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow; that the Lord thy God may bless thee and all the works of thy hands.'

5. When thou beatest thy olive-tree, thou shalt not go over the boughs again: it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.'

6. At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thy increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: and the Levite, because he has no part nor inheritance with thee, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, who are within thy gates, shall come and shall eat and be satisfied, that the Lord thy God may bless thee in all the works of thy hand which thou doest.'

If a man borrowed money in times of need, the creditor was not permitted to demand interest for the loan, lest the poor man be still more hopelessly entangled in want and led into ruin. And if a garment were given as a pledge for the money, it was to be returned before sunset, for, says the merciful lawgiver, that is his covering only, it is his raiment for his skin: wherein shall he sleep? And it shall come to pass that when he cries to Me, I will hear him, for I am compassionate.'

6

The ninth commandment, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,' was developed with particular care. No unfounded report was accepted; perjury was forbidden as a heinous crime. In cases of hidden or insufficiently proved offences, which could, for this reason, not be made amenable to the law, the honest witness was to raise his voice fearlessly for the assertion of truth. Judicial impartiality was in all cases to be

rigidly maintained: even the poor were not to be sheltered or favoured by a false and misplaced compassion.

In some instances, the very laws of property were converted into precepts of morality. The property of man was to be sacred in the eyes of his neighbour, and no private enmity was to interfere with the rigid observance of this principle. Thus, in the words of the Bible: If thou meet thy enemy's ox or his ass erring about, thou shalt surely bring it back to him. If thou seest the ass of him that hates thee, lying under its burden, forbear to leave it to it: thou shalt leave it only with him.'

We now arrive at one of the most characteristic and important parts of the Mosaic legislation-that which refers to the Sabbath year and the year of jubilee. The Sabbath itself, specially enjoined in the fourth commandment, was repeated and enlarged upon in the later laws of Sinai; it was, besides, made the foundation of the peculiar civil arrangement that every seventh year was to be instituted as the Sabbath year' or 'year of release.' The Israelites were essentially an agricultural people; all their wealth was in the soil which they tilled, and in the flocks and herds that grazed on their pastures. For six years, the land was theirs for sowing and planting, for reaping and gathering in; but in the seventh year, which, as it were, was the Lord's and not the husbandman's, the fields, the vineyards, and the olive groves were to rest; the produce which they brought forth spontaneously, belonged for common use to the proprietors, the servants, the poor, the stranger, and the beasts. No debts were exacted in the seventh year except from strangers, and all pledges were to be redeemed. In fact, it was the year of goodwill, of kindness, of charity, when men acknowledged that the earth with all its wealth was the Lord's, and that they were only sojourners and strangers upon it. Like the Sabbath, it tended to purify the mind from selfishness

and worldliness, to instil into the heart a feeling of love and benevolence, and to ennoble the faith in God by practical virtue.

The beautiful ideas implied in these institutions were still further carried out, in a manner that entered even more deeply into the national life of the people. As the years rolled on, and when the Sabbath year had been repeated seven times, that is to say, after every forty-nine years, the year of jubilee' was to be held. The fiftieth year, devoted to rejoicing, and ushered in by the solemn blast of the trumpet, proclaimed universal liberty. All persons were restored to their original condition in which they were placed by the Divine Law and by the first distribution of the land. Every slave was freed, every pledge restored, every debt cancelled. Every hired servant and poor bondman might return to his own family and to the possessions of his fathers. In that year also the land was the Lord's, and men might neither sow nor reap.

The Mosaic legislation constantly brought the Israelites and the land they inhabited into direct relation with their Creator; and this principle appears nowhere more strikingly than in the Hebrew festivals.

Most of them celebrated special or historical events, and were designed to recall the love and mercies of a bountiful God. But they were besides connected with the chief epochs of the agricultural year. They were solemnized in the spring-time, summer, and autumn, at the beginning and end of the corn-harvest, and at the conclusion of the ingathering of fruit. On each of these festivals the Israelites were called upon to attend at the Temple of Jerusalem. There the fruits of the earth were laid before the altar, and the pious and grateful husbandman poured forth his song of thanksgiving and of praise to the Almighty who had blessed the labour of his hands. But the voice of the past was heard again in the voice of the present,