In reviewing the Mosaic legislation, we notice both those ordinances
which are based on immutable truth for the rule of all nations to the
end of time, and those prescribed for the peculiar situation and
exigencies of the Jews as a theocratic state, isolated from
other nations.

The moral code of Moses, by far the most important and universally
accepted, rests on the fundamental principles of theology and morality.
How lofty, how impressive, how solemn this code! How it appeals at once
to the consciousness of all minds in every age and nation, producing
convictions that no sophistry can weaken, binding the conscience with
irresistible and terrific bonds,--those immortal Ten Commandments,
engraven on the two tables of stone, and preserved in the holy and
innermost sanctuary of the Jews, yet reappearing in all their
literature, accepted and reaffirmed by Christ, entering into the
religious system of every nation that has received them, and forming the
cardinal principles of all theological belief! Yet it was by Moses that
these Commandments came. He is the first, the favored man, commissioned
by God to declare to the world, clearly and authoritatively, His supreme
power and majesty, whom alone all nations and tribes and people are to
worship to remotest generations. In it he fearfully exposes the sin of
idolatry, to which all nations are prone,--the one sin which the
Almighty visits with such dreadful penalties, since this involves, and
implies logically, rebellion against Him, the supreme ruler of the
universe, and disloyalty to Him as a personal sovereign, in whatever
form this idolatry may appear, whether in graven images of tutelary
deities, or in the worship of Nature (ever blind and indefinite), or in
the exaltation of self, in the varied search for pleasure, ambition, or
wealth, to which the debased soul bows down with grovelling instincts,