By the term "religion," we mean that divine code mercifully revealed by God to mankind, in the old and new dispensations, as their rule of faith and practice. Its precepts have reference both to the corporal and spiritual, the temporal and eternal welfare of men. Religion, it is true, in its higher sphere, addresses itself to the soul. It embraces the affections, emotions, and sentiments of our spiritual nature, and its direction is always toward the infinite fountain of love and wisdom. Yet its scope, while for eternity, is for time also. When God first revealed himself to Moses, the Israelites were fast relapsing into heathenism, with, its pernicious and degrading habits of life. Under the divine inspiration, however, the prophet imbued them anew with faith in the true God, and presented them at the same time with an admirable code of practical life. He taught them to love and fear God, to obey his commandments, to live soberly and uprightly in themselves, and to practise justice and love toward each other. He continually placed before them the divine promises of not only eternal but also temporal rewards for obedience, and, in like manner, the threatened penalties of disobedience. Viewed even as practical rules of living for earthly life alone, his are models of excellence. No man has ever done more toward retaining that tabernacle of the human soul, the earthly body, in a pure and healthy condition than this great lawgiver. Contrast the precepts given by God through him to the Israelites after he had brought them out of the land of Egypt, with those of the Egyptians, of the Canaanites, and other heathen nations of the period. How wise and elevating are the tendencies of the one! What injustice, inhumanity, and degradation mark the other! {117} On the one hand, love supreme to God and to one's neighbor as one's self, joined with forbearance, justice, truthfulness, honesty, chastity, temperance, cleanliness even, and rigid adherence to what would now be termed sound sanitary principles; while on the heathen side, what may be comprised in three words--selfishness, sensuality, and force. The fruits of obedience to the former were, even here, comparative immunity from disease and its sufferings, with enhanced material prosperity and happiness, and with increased longevity; while to the other there came the legitimate penalties of inordinate self-indulgence, of selfishness and evil-living; the fruits of the laws of life which heathenism gave to them.