In the third month after leaving Egypt, they came into the wilderness of Sinai, and the whole congregation camped before the mount. Then God called Moses to come to Him to the top of the mountain; and here God spoke to him, and sent him down to repeat to the congregation all the words which He had told him. And God told Moses that it was a very solemn thing for Him to speak in their hearing, so they were to set bounds round the mount, that no one should come too close. God said that He would come to Moses in a thick cloud; but that the people should hear His Voice when He spoke, and should believe Moses for ever. While God was telling Moses all these Commandments, on the top of the mountain, there were thunderings and lightnings, and the voice of a trumpet exceeding loud, so that all the people in the camp trembled. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord Jehovah descended upon it in fire; and even the mountain trembled at the Presence of the Holy God. And this was the First Commandment— "Thou shalt have no other gods before ME!" Nothing else in the world nearer and dearer to us than God! I heard the other day of a terribly injured soldier, who sent this message to one who had written to sympathize in his great deprivation: "Don't pity me; the sacrifice has been worth it; for I have found God!" Oh! What it is to learn that! Now we come to the Second Commandment—"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." [Illustration: Moses cast down the two Tablets which God had written.] When the Children of Israel stood round that mount, and heard God say that, if they would obey His voice, they should be a peculiar treasure to Him, they promised that they would faithfully keep all that the Lord said. But I am sorry to tell you that they soon forgot their promises, and did the very thing God had told them not to do. And this was how it all happened. Moses was up on the mount with God for forty days and forty nights, and God gave Moses the two Tablets of stone, on which God Himself had written His Ten Commandments. But forty days and forty nights seemed a long time to the thousands of people waiting below on the plains; and they "gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said, Up! make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him!" Then Aaron bade them bring him gold from their ornaments, and he cast the gold into the fire, and it melted down into a great piece of gold, which looked like a calf. Aaron took a tool and moulded it, and the people said, "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt!" Then they offered sacrifices to the golden calf, and feasted, and rose up to dance. "And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for the people have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. Now, therefore . . . let Me alone, that I may consume them!"