This notion of forbidding an action, or abstinence from action, in a code of laws as being “base”—not as being “subject to a penalty of such a kind,” or “a fine of so much,” was quite new to me. I had given some time to the study of Roman law, and had always assumed that when the law says “Do this,” it adds a punishment in some form or other, “Do this, or you shall suffer this or that.” But here, embedded in the Law of Moses, was a law, or rather a recommendation, without penalty. And presently I found that the last of their Ten Greater Laws—if I may so call them—was of the same kind. It could not possibly be enforced—for it forbade “coveting”! Only a few days ago, before I had bought these books from Sosia, I had read in Paul’s epistle to the Romans “I should not have known covetousness if the law had not said, _Thou shalt not covet_”; and these words had puzzled me a good deal. I had thought that they must refer to some “law” of a spiritual kind, such as we might call “the law of the conscience” or “the law of our higher nature,” or the like. Yet I felt that this interpretation did not quite agree with the context. Now I found, to my utter astonishment, that this was the very letter of the first clause of the tenth of the Greater Laws, “Thou shalt not covet.” To crown all, I found that elsewhere the whole of the code was based by the Lawgiver on two fundamental precepts. The first was, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” and this love was to call forth all the powers of mind and soul and body. The second was, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” How was either of these to be enforced? “Love,” say all the poets, “is free.” The Law neither prescribed nor suggested any means of enforcing these two Great Commandments of “loving.” And how could “love” be at once “free,” as poetry protests, and yet a part of the Law, as Moses testified? There seemed no answer to this question, unless some God could make us willing and eager to enforce the two commandments on ourselves, constraining us (so to speak) by love to love both Him and one another. “Truly,” said I, “this Law of Moses is very ambitious.” It seemed to aim at more than Law could accomplish. It reminded me of a sentence I had found in one of my new volumes, entitled “Proverbs,” “The light of the Lord is as the breath of men; He searcheth the storehouses of the soul.”