I ASK you then to believe, as I do most devoutly believe, that the moral law was not written for men alone in their individual character, but that it was written as well for nations, and for nations great as this of which we are citizens.* If nations reject and deride that moral law, there is a penalty which will inevitably follow. It may not come at once, it may not come in our lifetime; but rely upon it the great Italian is not a poet only, but a prophet, when he says
“The sword of heaven is not in haste to smite,
Nor yet doth linger.”*
We have experience, we have beacons, we have landmarks enough. We know what the past has cost us; we know how much and how far we have wandered, but we are not left without a guide. It is true we have not, as an ancient people had, Urim and Thummim — those oraculous gems on Aaron’s breast — from which to take counsel,* but we have the unchangeable and eternal principles of the moral law, to guide us, and only so far as we walk by that guidance can we be permanently a great nation, or our people a happy people.
* Bright does not enlarge on what this law is, but he makes it clear that it is Christian, and the whole tenor of his speech agrees well with these words of St Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12: “We beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more; And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.”
* The poet is Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), in The Divine Comedy: Paradise Canto XXII.
* Mentioned in e.g. Exodus 28:30, the Urim and Thummim (traditionally, ‘lights and perfections’) were precious objects attached to the High Priest’s vestments and apparently used for divination. When King Saul enquired of the Lord concerning the army of the Philistines, “the Lord answered him not, neither by dreams nor by Urim, nor by prophets”. See 1 Samuel 28:5-6.