Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/132

 The Ten Commandments are commonly divided into two Tables — that which concerns the worship of God, and that which treats of the relations of men to each other. First and foremost is the idea of. That is central and supreme, standing in the very front of the law, as it does of the Bible. The first sentence of the Bible is "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Author of all things, He is the beginning and the end of all law, as of all religion. The first command of the Decalogue announces the principle of Monotheism — that there is only one living and true God, who is the Creator of all things, and the only object of human worship. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." How short the sentence, and yet it rules the world! This morning, as the sun came from the East, it touched the gilded domes, not only of Cairo and Damascus and Constantinople, but of ten thousand mosques all over the Mohammedan world, and from all their minarets the voice of the muezzin cried "God is God: there is no God but God" — words which were but the faint, far-off echo of those spoken on Sinai two thousand years before Mahomet was born. What meaning did the word God convey to the mind of the Hebrew who had come out of Egypt? It did not recall the legend of Isis or Osiris. It did not present for his worship the vague incarnation of a principle of good or evil, but a living Being, a Divine Guardian and Protector. Well might that sacred name stand in the very front of a law of which God was the beginning and the end.

The second command is aimed at the idolatrous worship which the Israelites had learned in Egypt, and to which they clung with such strange infatuation. The third, "Not to take the name of God in vain," inculcated that reverence in word which must accompany obedience in act. The fourth has this peculiarity, that whereas a