Why such a difference in penalties, for the same act? Answer. 1. The relation violated was obvious—the distinction between parents and others self-evident, dictated by a law of nature. 2. The act was violence to nature—a suicide on constitutional susceptibilities. 3. The parental relation then, as now, was the focal point of the social system, and required powerful safe-guards. “Honor thy father and thy mother,” stands at the head of those commands which prescribe the duties of man to man; and throughout the Bible, the parental state is God’s favorite illustration of his own relations to the human family. In this case, death was to be inflicted not for smiting a man, but a parent—a distinction made sacred by God, and fortified by a bulwark of defence. In the next verse, “He that stealeth a man,” &c., the SAME PRINCIPLE is wrought out in still stronger relief. The crime to be punished with death was not the taking of property from its owner, but violence to an immortal nature, the blotting out of a sacred distinction—making MEN “chattels.”
The incessant pains taken in the Old Testament to separate human beings from brutes and things, shows God’s regard for this, his own distinction. “In the beginning” he proclaimed it to the universe as it rose into being. Creation stood up at the instant of its birth, to do it homage. It paused in adoration while God ushered forth its crowning work. Why that dread pause and that creating arm held back in mid career and that high