to me.  But when I take my neighbor himself, and first make him property, and then my property, the latter act, which was the sole crime in the former case, dwindles to nothing.  The sin in stealing a man, is not the transfer from its owner to another of that which is already property, but the turning of personality into property.  True, the attributes of man remain, but the rights and immunities which grow out of them are attributed.  It is the first law both of reason and revelation to regard things and beings as they are; and the sum of religion, to feel and act towards them according to their value.  Knowingly to treat them otherwise is sin; and the degree of violence done to their nature, religions, and value, measures its guilt.  When things are sundered which God has indissolubly joined, or confounded in one, which he has separated by infinite extremes; when sacred and eternal distinctions, which he has garnished with glory, are derided and set at nought, then, if ever, sin reddens to its “scarlet dye.”  The sin specified in the passage, is that of doing violence to the nature of a man—­to his intrinsic value as a rational being, and blotting out the exalted distinction stamped upon him by his Maker.  In the verse preceding, and in that which follows, the same principle is laid down.  Verse 15, “He that smiteth his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.”  V. 17, “He that curseth his father or his mother, shall surely be put to death.”  If a Jew smote his neighbor, the law merely smote him in return; but if the blow was given to a parent, it struck the smiter dead.  The parental relation is the centre of human society.  God guards it with peculiar care.  To violate that, is to violate all.  Whoever trampled on that, showed that no relation had any sacredness in his eyes—­that he was unfit to move among human relations who had violated one so sacred and tender.  Therefore, the Mosaic law uplifted his bleeding corpse, and brandished the ghastly terror around the parental relation to guard it from impious inroads.

Why such a difference in penalties, for the same act?  Answer. (1.) The relation violated was obvious—­the distinction between parents and others manifest, dictated by natural affection—­a law of the constitution. (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 safeguards. “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 whole human family.  In this case death was to be inflicted not for smiting a man, but a parent—­a distinction cherished by God, and around which, He threw up a bulwark of defence.  In the next verse, “He that