The Expositor's Bible: The Book of DeuteronomyHarper, Andrew
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Deuteronomy
Harper, Andrew
Bible. Deuteronomy -- Commentaries
trust to their taste to keep them firm in the pursuit of goodness,
but the bulk of men have always needed, and will always need, the
severer compulsion of duty. They need an objective standard; they
need a God, the embodiment and enforcer of all that duty demands of
them; and when they bend themselves to the yoke of obligation thus
imposed, they enter into a world of heavenly beauty which seizes and
enraptures the soul. The mere æsthetic beauty of Greek mythology
pales, for the more earnest races of mankind at least, before this
Diviner loveliness, and it is the special gift of the Hebrew as well
as of the Teutonic races to be sensitive to it, just as they fall
behind others in æsthetic sensitiveness. Wordsworth felt this, and
has expressed it inimitably in his "Ode to Duty"--
"Stern Lawgiver! yet Thou dost wear
The Godhead's most benignant grace
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon Thy face."
That expresses the Hebrew feeling also. Drawn upwards by the
infinite and unchangeable love and goodness of Yahweh, the Hebrews
felt the clog of their innate sinfulness as no other race has done.
The stern "thou shalt nots" of the Decalogue consequently found an
echo in their hearts. Won by the beauty of holiness, they gladly
welcomed the discipline of the Divine law, and by doing so they
established human goodness on a foundation immeasurably more stable
than any the gracefulness of Greek imaginations could hope to lay.
CHAPTER VI
_THE MEDIATORSHIP OF MOSES_
DEUT. v. 22-33
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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