Knowingly to treat them otherwise is sin; and the degree of violence done to their nature, relations, 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.  In the verse preceding the one under consideration, 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.”  Verse. 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 tramples on that, shows that no relation has any sacredness in his eyes—­that he is unfit to move among human relations who violates 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 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