For be assured, though we have read the New Testament, named the name of Jesus, and quite looked down on the Jews, some of us have not yet climbed up so far as to Moses and his Jewish law. In the Bible’s older Testament there are needed examples for us yet. Not all of us have learned that majestic, unchangeable fact, that God is Sovereign; nor those related facts that, if we _will_ perpetrate _the wrong_, we must suffer the penalty; that we can not dodge the consequences of what we do; that indolence must sap our strength; that selfishness must end in wretchedness; that falsehood is a mint, coining counterfeits that must return upon our hands; that hypocrisy to-day is disgrace to-morrow. This is law, everlasting, unrepealable law; and our poor attempts to resist, or nullify it, avail not so much as a puff of mortal breath against the gulf stream in the Atlantic. Blessed will it be for our peace, when we accept it, and bow to it, turning it into a law of liberty. Remember that the grandest examples of sainthood, or spiritual life, that the ages have seen, have been souls that recognized this truth—the firm, Puritanical element, in all valiant piety; and without it mere amiable religious feeling will be quite sure to degenerate into sentimentality. We need to stand compassed about with the terrible splendors of the mount, and with something of the somber apparatus of Hebrew commandments, to keep us from falling off into some impious, Gentile idolatries of the senses. Holy places, and holy days, and solemn assemblies, still dispense sanctity. Our appetites have to be hedged about with almost as many scruples of regimen for Christian moderation’s sake, as the Jew’s for his monotheism. “We wish,” says some one, “that it was not so difficult to be good. We wish that we could be self-indulgent, and yet be good for all that; that we could idle off our time, and yet be wise for all that.” The worldling wishes that he could combine his worldliness now with a heaven hereafter; the voluptuary, that he could have “the clear eye and the steady hand of the temperate;” the vain, ambitious, capricious woman, that she could exhibit the serenity that comes of prayer. But Sinai stands unmoved, at the outset of every life-journey through the wilderness; and at the further end, beyond the river, Ebal with his curses, and Gerizim with its blessings. “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” [_March 25._] THREE DISPENSATIONS.