Page:Sermons on the Ten Commandments.djvu/16

 Under the light of this view, we can now see why the Commandments were proclaimed with so much solemnity by God himself from Mount Sinai. It was in order to make them laws of religion, and not merely moral and civil laws. It was, that not only the Israelites, but all mankind after them, who should read these commandments, might, when they kept them, think of God and heaven, and not merely of the world;—that, when they refrained from killing or stealing, or bearing false witness, or committing adultery, they might do so, not merely because it was opposed to the laws of the land or of civil society, but because it was forbidden by the law of God: and that, refraining with this end in view, their spirits might be conjoined with the Lord and heaven. This was the great reason for that sublime enunciation of those Commandments from Mount Sinai.

It was for a similar reason that the law of the Ten Commandments was called a Covenant. Covenant, in the spiritual sense, signifies conjunction; for when it is said that two persons make a covenant together, it means that they make an agreement in regard to some act or thing, and so far as both parties are faithful to the agreement, their minds are in a kind of conjunction. Now, the law of the Divine commandments is a covenant between God and man; a covenant, in which God promises, expressly or impliedly, that if man will do what is there commanded, and refrain from doing what is there forbidden, he shall be gifted with eternal life and its blessedness. And if man keep his part of the Covenant, the Lord will assuredly