Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/33

They would bear with lies no longer. They shook the dust of Egypt from their feet, and the prate and falsehood of it from their souls, and they withdrew, with all belonging to them, into the Arabian desert, that they might no longer serve cats and dogs and bulls and beetles, but the Eternal Spirit who had been pleased to make his existence known to them. They sung no pæans of liberty. They were delivered from the house of bondage, but it was the bondage of mendacity, and they left it only to assume another service. The Eternal had taken pity on them. In revealing his true nature to them, he had taken them for his children. They were not their own, but his, and they laid their lives under commandments which were as close a copy as, with the knowledge which they possessed, they could make, to the moral laws of the maker of the universe. In essentials the Book of the Law was a covenant of practical justice. Rewards and punishments were alike immediate, both to each separate person and to the collective nation. Retribution in a life to come was dropped out of sight, not denied, but not insisted on. The belief in it had been corrupted to evil, and rather enervated than encouraged the efforts after present equity. Every man was to reap as he had sown—here, in the immediate world—to live under his own vine and fig-tree, and thrive or suffer according to his actual deserts. Religion was not a thing of past or. future, an account of things that had been, or of things which one day would be again. God was the actual living ruler of real every-day life; nature-worship was swept away, and in the warmth and