1. The Decalogue is a concise but comprehensive summary of the fundamental duties of an Israelite towards God and his neighbour. Jehovah is to be the only God recognized by Israel; He is to be worshipped under no material form; His name is to be reverenced; and the “Sabbath” is weekly to be kept holy in His honour. Respect is to be paid to parents; murder, adultery, theft, and false witness-the commonest, perhaps, of the graver offences, especially in a society in which the hand of the law is not strong-are forbidden; the Israelite is not even to entertain the desire to possess anything of a neighbour's. Within a brief compass, the Decalogue thus lays down the fundamental articles of religion (sovereignty and spirituality of God), and asserts the claims of morality in the chief spheres of human relationship (home, calling, society). By a few salient and far-reaching precepts, pointedly expressed and easily remembered, it covers the whole religious and moral life; and provides a summary of human duty, capable of ready expansion and adjustment even to the highest Christian standards, and unsurpassable as a practical rule of life. The Decalogue, moreover, brings morality into intimate connexion with religion; and, in an age when popular religion was only too readily satisfied with a formal ceremonialism, it emphasized, not ritual, but spirituality, reverence, and respect for the rights of other men (cf. Rom_13:9), as what was pleasing in God's sight, and demanded by Him.
2. The potential value of the two tables is in their union. Herein lies the absolute uniqueness of the Decalogue. It accomplished what no other code of antiquity accomplished-the indissoluble union of religion and morals. Religion without morals disintegrates into the rottenness of superstition, full of maggots and all uncleanness. Morals without religion lack the power of life and petrify into legality. A worm-eaten log or a petrified stump is a sad contrast to the living, fruitful tree.
Moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. The noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan Empedocles as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a joyful emotion, to make moral action perfect. An obscure indication of this necessity is the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man, this sense of labour and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification; it paralyses him; under the weight of it, he cannot make way towards the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is, that it has lighted up morality; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. Even the religions with most dross in them have had something of this virtue; but the Christian religion manifests it with unexampled splendour.1 [Note: Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism.]
