HKB
COMMENT.
I earnestly entreat the reader to pause awhile, and to join with me in reflecting on the preceding Aphorism. It has been my aim throughout this work to enforce two points: 1. That MORALITY arising out of the Reason and Conscience of Men, and PRUDENCE, which in like manner flows out of the Understanding and the natural Wants and Desires of the Individual, are two distinct things. 2. That Morality with Prudence as its instrument has, considered abstractedly, not only a value but a worth in itself. Now the question is (and it is a question which every man must answer for himself)--From what you know of yourself; of your own heart and strength; and from what history and personal experience have led you to conclude of mankind generally; dare you trust to it? Dare you trust to it? To it, and to it alone? If so, well! It is at your own risk. I judge you not. Before Him, who cannot be mocked, you stand or fall. But if not, if you have had too good reason to know, that your heart is deceitful and your strength weakness: if you are disposed to exclaim with Paul--the Law indeed is holy, just, good, spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin: for that which I do, I allow not; and what I would, that I do not!--in this case, there is a voice that says, Come unto me: and I will give you rest. This is the Voice of Christ: and the conditions, under which the promise was given by him, are that you believe in him, and believe his words. And he has further assured you, that if you do so, you will obey him. You are, in short, to embrace the Christian Faith as your Religion--those Truths which St. Paul believed after his conversion, and not those only which he believed no less undoubtingly while he was persecuting Christ, and an enemy of the Christian Religion. With what consistency could I offer you this volume as Aids to Reflection, if I did not call on you to ascertain in the first instance what these truths are? But these I could not lay before you without first enumerating certain other points of belief, which though truths, indispensable truths, and truths comprehended or rather presupposed in the Christian scheme, are yet not these truths. (John i. 17.)
While doing this, I was aware that the Positions, in the first paragraph of the preceding Aphorism, to which the numerical marks are affixed, will startle some of my Readers. Let the following sentences serve for the notes corresponding to the marks:
1 Be you holy: even as God is holy.--What more does he require of thee, O man! than to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with the Lord thy God?[87] To these summary passages from Moses and the Prophets (the first exhibiting the closed, the second the expanded, Hand of the Moral Law) I might add the Authorities of Grotius and other more orthodox and not less learned Divines, for the opinion that the Lord's Prayer was a selection, and the famous passage [The hour is now coming, &c., John v. 28, 29.] a citation by our Lord from the liturgy of the Jewish Church. But it will be sufficient to remind the reader, that the apparent difference between the prominent moral truths of the Old and those of the New Testament results from the latter having been written in Greek; while the conversations recorded by the Evangelists took place in Hebrew or Syro-Chaldaic or Aramaic.--Hence it happened that where our Lord cited the original text, his biographers substituted the Septuagint version, while our English version is in both instances immediate and literal--in the Old Testament from the Hebrew Original, in the New Testament from the freer Greek translation. The text, I give you a new commandment, has no connection with the present subject.