Then the road to eternal life is the keeping of the commandments! Had the Lord _not_ said so, what man of common moral sense would ever dare say otherwise? What else can be the way into life but the doing of what the Lord of life tells the creatures he has made, and whom he would have live for ever, that they must do? It is the beginning of the way. If a man had kept all those commandments, yet would he not therefore have in him the life eternal; nevertheless, without keeping of the commandments there is no entering into life; the keeping of them is the path to the gate of life; it is not life, but it is the way--so much of the way to it. Nay, the keeping of the commandments, consciously or unconsciously, has closest and essential relation to eternal life. The Lord says nothing about the first table of the law: why does he not tell this youth as he did the lawyer, that to love God is everything? He had given him a glimpse of the essence of his own life, had pointed the youth to the heart of all--for him to think of afterwards: he was not ready for it yet. He wanted eternal life: to love God with all our heart, and soul, and strength, and mind, is to know God, and to know him _is_ eternal life; that is the end of the whole saving matter; it is no human beginning, it is the grand end and eternal beginning of all things; but the youth was not capable of it. To begin with that would be as sensible as to say to one asking how to reach the top of some mountain, 'Just set your foot on that shining snow-clad peak, high there in the blue, and you will at once be where you wish to go.' 'Love God with all your heart, and eternal life is yours:'--it would have been to mock him. Why, he could not yet see or believe that that was eternal life! He was not yet capable of looking upon life even from afar! How many _Christians_ are? How many know that they are not? How many care that they are not? The Lord answers his question directly, tells him what to do--a thing he can do--to enter into life: he must keep the commandments!--and when he asks, 'Which?' specifies only those that have to do with his neighbour, ending with the highest and most difficult of them. 'But no man can perfectly keep a single commandment of the second table any more than of the first.' Surely not--else why should they have been given? But is there no meaning in the word _keep_, or _observe_, except it be qualified by _perfectly_? Is there no keeping but a perfect keeping? 'None that God cares for.' There I think you utterly wrong. That no keeping but a perfect one will _satisfy_ God, I hold with all my heart and strength; but that there is none else he cares for, is one of the lies of the enemy. What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?