140 ABROGATION OF THE SABBATH. 



The Decalogue — " distinctive of Judaism." 



The texts he has cited (Acts. xxi. 20 — 25 ; Meb. x. 28) are 

 most certainly not exceptions to this statement. 



In the present instance, it may be observed that the prac- 

 tical controversy being admitted by J. N. B. to "include 

 what was distinctive of Judaism'^ (p. 73), the Decalogue — as 

 a code — was actually as ''distinctive" as any other portion of 

 the Jewish law.* " Throughout all history, we discover no 

 (race of ' the Decalogue/ among the nations of antiquity/' 

 Nay, two of its provisions (the second and fourth command- 

 ments) were unknown to the moral law of the Romans. f Of 

 these two '' distinctive" precepts, the former was expressly 

 enjoined upon the Gentile Church by the Council, while the 

 latter was as expressly rejected by its decisive silence. Two 

 other prohibitions of the Mosaic law {Uxod. xxii. 16; and 

 Levit. xvii. 12) were conjoined with this one selected from the 

 Decalogue. The " seventh commandment" I do not conceive 

 to have been involved in this re-enactment any more than the 

 sixth commandment, or the eighth. Of these three require- 

 ments, gleaned from the ^' whole 'Law of Moses/ " two are 

 in modern ethics "moral" precepts, the other a "positive" one. 

 I am " compelled to admit/' says J. N. B., "that the obvious 

 reason why these two points of the moral law were at all re- 

 ferred to, was that they were the only ones likely to be trans- 



(see pp. 18, 73), and at other times to exclude all but the Decalogue! 

 (seej9. 58.) 



* " The Decalogue -was but part of the Jeivish law, if you consider 

 it not as written in Nature, but in tables of stone ; and the Jewish law 

 was given as a law to no other people but to them. So that even in 

 Moses' s days it bound no other nations of the world. Therefore it 

 needed not any abrogation to the Gentiles, but a declaration that it 

 did not bind them." — (Baxtee's Works, vol. iii. On the Lord's Day, 

 chap. vii.) 



f Thus, the Roman Emperor Julian (as has already been noticed) 

 expressly mentions these two precepts as peculiar to the Jewish law ; 

 and quotes the remaining precepts of the Decalogue as recognized and 

 enforced by all nations. (See ante, p. 118.) 



