Obviously such a people were not fit for freedom, or even for the conquest of the promised land.  They were as timid and cowardly as they were rebellious.  Even the picked men sent out to explore Canaan, with the exception of Caleb and Joshua, reported nations of giants impossible to subdue.  A new generation must arise, disciplined by forty years’ experience, made hardy and strong by exposure and suffering.  Yet what nation, in the world’s history, ever improved so much in forty years?  What ruler ever did so much for a people in a single reign?  This abject race of slaves in forty years was transformed into a nation of valiant warriors, made subject to law and familiar with the fundamental principles of civilization.  What a marvellous change, effected by the genius and wisdom of one man, in communion with Almighty power!

But the distinguishing labor of Moses during these forty years, by which he linked his name with all subsequent ages, and became the greatest benefactor of mind the world has seen until Christ, was his system of Jurisprudence.  It is this which especially demands our notice, and hence will form the main subject of this lecture.

In reviewing the Mosaic legislation, we notice both those ordinances which are based on immutable truth for the rule of all nations to the end of time, and those prescribed for the peculiar situation and exigencies of the Jews as a theocratic state, isolated from other nations.

The moral code of Moses, by far the most important and universally accepted, rests on the fundamental principles of theology and morality.  How lofty, how impressive, how solemn this code!  How it appeals at once to the consciousness of all minds in every age and nation, producing convictions that no sophistry can weaken, binding the conscience with irresistible and terrific bonds,—­those immortal Ten Commandments, engraven on the two tables of stone, and preserved in the holy and innermost sanctuary of the Jews, yet reappearing in all their literature, accepted and reaffirmed by Christ, entering into the religious system of every nation that has received them, and forming the cardinal principles of all theological belief!  Yet it was by Moses that these Commandments came.  He is the first, the favored man, commissioned by God to declare to the world, clearly and authoritatively, His supreme power and majesty, whom alone all nations and tribes and people are to worship to remotest generations.  In it he fearfully exposes the sin of idolatry, to which all nations are prone,—­the one sin which the Almighty visits with such dreadful penalties, since this involves, and implies logically, rebellion against Him, the supreme ruler of the universe, and disloyalty to Him as a personal sovereign, in whatever form this idolatry may appear, whether in graven images of tutelary deities, or in the worship of Nature (ever blind and indefinite), or in the exaltation of self, in the varied search for pleasure, ambition, or wealth,