time, there is a family of families, called a community, embracing hundreds of individuals connected by ties of blood so attenuated that they possess no binding influence.  Common interests, affinities, and sentiments supply the place of family relationship, and make laws of amity and equity for them as a population.  Next we have a community of communities, or a commonwealth of these individual populations, generally called a nation.  Here is a lesson for the moral nature.  Here are thousands and tens of thousands of men who never saw each others’ faces.  Will this expanded orb of humanity revolve around the same centre as the first family circle, or the first independent community?  How can you give it cohesion and harmony?  Extend the radii of family relationship and influence to its circumference in every direction.  Throne the sovereign in a parent’s chair, to execute a father’s laws.  He shall treat them as children, and they each other as brethren.  Here is a grand programme for human society.  Here is a vigorous discipline for the wayward will and temper of the human heart.  How is a man to feel and act in these new conditions?  How is he to regulate his hates and loves, his passions and appetites, to comply properly with these extended and complicated relationships?

About half way from Adam’s day to ours, there came an utterance from Mount Sinai that anticipated and answered these questions once for all, and for one and all.  In that august revelation of the Divine Mind, every command of the Decalogue swung open upon the pivot of a not, except one; and that one referred to man’s duty to man, and the promise attached to its fulfilment was only an earthly enjoyment.  All the rest were restrictive; to curb this appetite, to bar that passion, to hedge this impulse, to check that disposition; in a word, to hold back the hand from open and positive transgression.  Even the first, relating to His own Godhead and requirements, was but the first of the series of negatives, a pure and simple prohibition of idolatry.  No reward of keeping this first great law, reaching beyond the boundary of a temporal condition, was promised at its giving out.  With the headstrong passions, lusts, appetites, and tempers of flesh and blood bridled and bitted by these restrictions, and with no motives to obedience beyond the awards of a short life on earth, the human soul groped its way through twenty centuries after the Revelation of Sinai, feeling for the immortality which was not yet revealed to it, even “as through a glass darkly.”  Here and there, but thinly scattered through the ages, divinely illumined men caught, through the parting seams of the veil, a transient glimpse and ray of the life to come.  Here and there, obscurely and hesitatingly, they refer to this vision of their faith.  Here and there we seem to see a hope climbing up out of a good man’s heart into the pathless mystery of a future existence, and bringing back the fragment of a leaf which it believes must have grown on one of the trees of life immortal.  Moses, Job, David, and Isaiah give us utterances that savor of this belief; but they leave us in the dark in reference to its influence upon their lives.  We cannot glean from these incidental expressions, whether it brought them any steady comfort, or sensibly affected their happiness.