The time was when men accepted the existence of a moral order with the same implicit, unquestioned confidence, that all men to-day accept the existence of a natural order. In Homer’s Themistes we have an illustration of this confidence. The very word by which the decision of a judge is described attributes it to Themis, the invisible embodiment of justice. Thus the judge is but the channel through which the decision passes from the unseen moral order into the Greek court of justice. The judge is not respected because he has authority to make the decision, but because his vocation makes him the vehicle through which the decision of a higher power is rendered. Moses said to the people of Israel, “Thou shalt not lie,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” but these were not his words simply, but the words through which a moral order was interpreted. The solemn and awful import given to these commands did not arise from the vehicle through which they passed into the Hebrew social order, but from the fact that they inhered in the very constitution of man as a social being, and when they were uttered, they were felt to come from the God who fashioned man’s life and set him in communities and states. They had the same sort of authority in the moral realm that the declarations of Newton, concerning the power of gravity, had in the natural. Newton did not conceive in his own brain the laws of gravity, he saw them and formulated them. Nor did Moses create the Ten Commandments, he saw them and interpreted them. The laws of gravity were transcripts from the will of God concerning matter, the Ten Commandments were transcripts from the will of God concerning men. When natural bodies come together, it would be found that they always attracted each other in proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their distance. When men come together, it would always be found, that if they were to live together in harmony and health; if they were to advance and get above the planes of the brutes and the savages; they must abstain from lying, and stealing, and adultery, and thus be truthful, and honest, and virtuous. The laws of gravity were not arbitrary rules, ordained to oppress suns and systems without rhyme or reason. Order of some sort had to be preserved among the millions of blazing, rolling worlds. Nor were the Ten Commandments arbitrary lines of conduct imposed upon men at the pleasure of a great, omnipotent tyrant. Men could not live apart, out of touch and contact with one another. Thus living, they were lower than the beasts that perish. They could not live together without rules of some sort to regulate their lives. And laws which looked to the preservation of truthfulness, honesty, and virtue, were thought better than laws which looked to the production of lying, dishonesty, and adultery.