What is the object of the Divine laws? This is a question that naturally rises in the minds of those to whom they are addressed. But the question has been anticipated by Him “who knoweth the thoughts of the sons of man,” and the answer is found in clear and distinct words in the fountain of living waters, the Torah, that never fails to satisfy our thirst for truth: “Thou shalt keep his statutes and his commandments which I command thee this day, that it may be well with thee and thy children after thee” (Deut. iv. 40). “And now, O Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul: to keep the commandments of the Lord and his statutes which I command thee this day, for thy good” (ibid. x. 12, 13). It is for our benefit, for our well-being, that the laws were revealed to us; they serve to make us good and happy; they train us in the mastery over our appetites and desires, in the practice of charity and justice, and in the conception of noble, pure, and lofty ideas, and bring us nearer and nearer in perfection the Being in whose image and likeness we have been created. What share each individual precept has in the attainment of this end we cannot state with certainty, because in the Torah the reason and purpose of each precept is, with very few exceptions, withheld from us. In many cases our reflection on the nature of a special law, or on the context in which it occurs in the Pentateuch, leads to a discovery of some reason for it. But, whatever reason we may thus discover, we must not lose sight of the fact that it is we who have found it, we whose knowledge is imperfect, and that we or others might in future discover a better reason. If we, e.g., find that certain dietary laws serve to train us in temperance, and see that the virtue of temperance is frequently recommended in the Bible, we may well obey these dietary laws, and strive to be temperate in every respect in accordance with the spirit we detect in them. It would, however, be a gross error if, believing the training in temperance to be their only object, we assumed that we could neglect them, and attain the same object by substituting our own insufficient knowledge and imperfect reason for the Will and Wisdom of the most perfect Being. Moralists, our teachers and preachers of ancient and modern times, have found in these precepts an inexhaustible treasure of lessons exhorting to virtue and warning against vice, and the great variety of inferences thus drawn from the same source proves the error of those who imagine that their own exposition is the only right one. Whatever reason we assign to a religious precept, and whatever wholesome lesson we derive from it, our first duty towards the commandment, and towards Him who commanded it, is strict and unconditional obedience.