which shows man to be capable of recognizing and obeying or breaking a moral law? I have somewhere read a suggestion that the polity which is said to have been given to the Hebrew people on the Mount of Sinai, and which is described as ten statutes written on two tablets of stone, consisted of five laws on one tablet and five on the other; one set of them expressing the relations of the Hebrews to the Deity, and the other being the fundamental laws of the social life which the Hebrews were commanded to lead. This division is not accurate, because the commandments which express the relations of the Hebrews to the Deity are four in number, and the commandments which were to constitute their social law are six. But that there is a line of demarkation between the two kinds of laws is obvious, and how they were written on the tablets, or whether they were written at all, is immaterial. Looking, then, first at the social law, whether there was more or less of the same ethical character in the codes of other ancient peoples, or whether the social law which is said to have been delivered to Moses and by him communicated to his nation stands as an embodiment of morality unequaled by anything that had preceded it, it is certain that it found the Hebrew people capable of the idea of law as a divine command. It is true that the corner-stone of the whole superstructure is to be found in the fact that the several commands which constituted this social code--"Honor thy father and thy mother," "Thou shalt do no murder," "Thou shalt not commit adultery," "Thou shalt not steal," "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house," etc.--were addressed to a people to whose representatives the Almighty is supposed to have revealed himself amid "thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud, and all the people that were in the camp [below] trembled." It is also true that the first of these awful annunciations was said to have been, "I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before [or beside] me."[120] So that the source whence all the following commands proceeded was the one and only God, who is described as having thus revealed himself in fire and cloud and earthquake, and thus to have secured instant and implicit faith in what he spoke. But what he is asserted to have said was addressed to human minds. This is in one aspect the most important fact in the whole Hebrew history. It makes no difference whether Moses performed a piece of jugglery, or whether he actually went within the fire and the cloud, and actually spoke with God and received his commands. The indisputable truth remains that the individual minds of the Hebrew people, whom Moses had led out of Egypt, received and obeyed, as divine commands, an original and unique moral code, because