oncession 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
slave to death, he should not be punished, providing the slave did not
die till "a day or two" after, because the slave was only "his money"
(Ibid. 20, 21). Why blame a Legree, when he only acts on the permission
given by God from Mount Sinai? Dr. Colenso writes: "I shall never forget
the revulsion of feeling with which a very intelligent Christian native,
with whose help I was translating these words into the Zulu tongue,
first heard them as words said to be uttered by the same great and
gracious Being whom I was teaching him to trust in and adore. His whole
soul revolted against the notion, that the great and blessed God, the
merciful Father of all mankind, would speak of a servant, or maid, as
m