ring it on trivial occasions--which would
tend to diminish the reverence due to Him--or by profaning it with an
invocation to a false testimony, whereby the detestable crime of perjury
would be consummated.

[Note 4: Public, as compared with private worship, has the undoubted
advantage of being in itself a public homage to the omnipotence of God,
and a solemn testimony of the dependence of man on Him. True, solitary
worship is often more likely to be attended with the requisite mental
abstraction from all worldly objects, and intellectual elevation of the
soul towards its Divine Source--a condition of mind indispensable to
establish a true spiritual communion in Prayer, and without which all
our orisons and ritual ceremonies would be but mechanical and
meaningless performances, a body without soul. It is this condition of
the mind that, in Talmudical style, is called [Hebrew: het-nun-vav-kaf],
as is well known, and that later ascetic writers termed [Hebrew:
tav-vav-dalet-dalet-vav-bet-het-he], from the circumstance that it is
superinduced by solitary meditation. But whenever this condition
is attained in a public service, then indeed is that service
"divine," and humanity is exalted in its approach to the Throne of
Mercy.--THE TRANSLATOR.]

CHAPTER XIII.

LXXXIII. ON determining the duties of the individual towards his
fellow-men, and towards all that surrounds him in nature, revelation did
not think it proper to refer the motives to human intelligence, and to
allow the bases of justice and benevolence to rest on human reason
alone; but it said, "Do what is right and just and good in the eyes of
the Eternal thy God; and refrain from all that is not such, because it
pleases not thy God," whereby it wished to proclaim that the notions of
just and unjust, of good and evil, of rights and duties, should be
considered as emanating from, and prescribed by, the Divine wisdom, and
therefore obligatory only because agreeable to the Divine will. In this
also the revealed word purposed to come to the assistance of human
frailty, and to render superfluous the abstrusities--as arbitrary as
uncertain and controvertible--about which eminent philosophers tortured
their brains, for many centuries, to fix, as they thought, the
principles of the so-called _Jure_ in its innumerable ramifications of
natural and positive, public and private, civil and criminal,
commercial, maritime, canonical, feudal, of police, of finance, of war,