God, in accordance with his covenant with Abraham, set apart Israel, through the ministry of Moses, to be his peculiar and holy people, his witness in the midst of an apostate world, to keep alive the services and precepts of true morality and true religion, till, in the fulness of time, Jesus Christ should come in the flesh, and begin the Christianizing of all nations. To effect these objects, He renewed his revelation of the eternal and unchangeable moral law, from Sinai, in the Decalogue; and he also gave, by the intervention of Moses, various religious and civil laws, which were peculiar to the Jews, and were never intended to be observed after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The great object of all this legislation, was to set apart the Jewish nation as a holy people, peculiarly dedicated to purity of moral life, and the maintenance of true religion, amidst corrupt and idolatrous generations. To effect this, God found it necessary to raise a barrier to familiar social intercourse between the Israelites and their corrupting heathen neighbours; and sundry of the expedients by which this barrier was raised, were prohibitions of usages which would have been, in themselves, neither right nor wrong, but morally indifferent, as the eating of pork. Some of those laws having the same object in view, required acts in their original nature indifferent; such as circumcision and eating the Passover. But it is totally inconsistent with the holiness of God, and with his purpose of setting Israel apart to a holy life, that any of those peculiar laws should require acts in themselves wicked, or forbid things in themselves morally binding. It would be impiety to represent God as capable of commanding what is wrong; and to enjoin sin in order to make people holy, would be a folly and a contradiction. God's revealed will, so far as it is revealed for a rule of life, either permanent or temporary, can contain nothing but what is right, and pure, and just. If it had been a positive moral duty to eat pork, this holy God would never have made the prohibition to eat it a part even of the temporary, ceremonial laws of his servants. Had it been morally wrong to kill, roast, and eat a lamb, God would never have enjoined on them the institution of the Passover. These conclusions are as plain as the alphabet.