e of provocation, love wants not only to abstain
from evil but to do good. And how may it satisfy this instinct when its
object is the eternal God, Who, if He were hungry, would not tell us? It
finds the necessary outlet in worship, in adoring communion, in the
exclusion for awhile of worldly cares, in the devotion of time and
thought to Him. Now, the foundation upon which all the institutions of
religion may be securely built, is the day of rest. Call it external,
formal, unspiritual if you will; say that it is a carnal ordinance, and
that he who keeps it in spirit is free from the obligation of the
letter. But then, what about the eighth commandment? Are we absolved
also from the precept "Thou shalt not steal," because it too is
concerned with external actions, because "this ... thou shalt not steal
... and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in
this one saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"? Do we say,
the spirit has abolished the letter: love is the rescinding of the law?
St. Paul said the very opposite: love is the fulfilling of the law, not
its destruction; and thus he re-echoed the words of Jesus, "I am not
come to destroy the law, but to fulfil."

All men know that the formal regulations which defend property are
relaxed as the ties of love and mutual understanding are made strong;
that to enter unannounced is not a trespass, that the same action which
will be prosecuted as a theft by a stranger, and resented as a liberty
by an acquaintance, is welcomed as a graceful freedom, almost as an
endearment, by a friend. And yet the commandment and the rights of
property hold good: they are not compromised, but glorified, by being
spiritualised. As it is between man and his brother, so should it be
between us and our Divine Father. We have learned to know Him very
differently from those who shuddered under Sinai: the whole law is not
now written upon tables of stone, but upon fleshly tables of the heart.
But among the precepts which are thus etherialised and yet established,
why should not the fourth commandment retain its place? Why should it be
supposed that it must vanish from the Decalogue, unless the gathering of
sticks deserves stoning? The institution, and the ceremonial application
of it to Jewish life, are entirely different things; just as respect for
property is a fixed obligation, while the laws of succession vary.

Bearing this distinction in mind, we come to the questi