IX. _Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour._ This commandment, converted from the negative――the prohibition of wilful slander――to the positive, becomes an injunction to make the law of love the motive of all our speech, with as tender a regard to others’ reputation as to our own. We may have to speak painful truth against others, to rebuke, to accuse, to punish, etc., but the motive of all speech is to be a deliberate good will. X. _Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, etc._ The ten commandments, as has been remarked, began and ended with an injunction bearing not upon the outward conduct, but upon the heart. This one affords no discouragement to our vital instinct of making the best of ourselves, but it bids us have regard to what we can ascertain of the divine intention for ourselves. We are to realize God’s purpose for us, and to desire that every one else should do the same. Thus this commandment prohibits envy or jealousy at another’s success or abilities: discontent with what God has allowed us: ambition properly so called, i.e. the desire to compass greatness, without regard to the will of God. The New Testament even tends to make us personally prefer the humbler to the higher place, and obedience to authority. But, on the other hand, it says all that is possible to encourage a “divine discontent” with the disorder of the world, which is the work of evil wills resisting the will of God, that sort of discontent which makes a man a fellow-worker with Christ for the realization of the kingdom of heaven. * * * * * I have thought this analysis of the ten commandments in their deepest principles, inadequate as it is, might be worth making, partly because I cannot feel altogether satisfied with such as are commonly current,[94] partly because the attempt to make such an analysis deepens in my own mind the conviction that if the ten commandments were not――as our Lord teaches us they were not――perfect, they were none the less, in the truest sense, “the word of God,” for the moral education of His chosen people, and through them of the human race. Their principles are extraordinarily complete and suggestive, and there is no early moral legislation which seems to me to be even comparable to them. APPENDIX III THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH IN REGARD TO DIVORCE ABOVE, in the text of the exposition, it has been maintained (1) that Christ, by a distinct act of legislation, prohibited divorce among His disciples in such sense as allows of remarriage, except in the case of the adultery of one of the parties, in which case He did not prohibit it; but (2) that the Church law and tradition in England, as in the whole Western Church, maintains the absolute indissolubility of the marriage tie. Both propositions, however, are denied, and it is necessary to make some remarks upon the respective denials.