THERE is in the British Museum in London a cast of a basalt stele, discovered in recent times among the ruins of Babylon, inscribed in ancient Babylonian characters, bearing the text of a code of laws drawn up about twenty-two hundred years before Christ, by Khammurabi, king of Babylon. This code of laws was based upon a large number of still more ancient laws and customs which had been in use for centuries. Many of them bear a significant resemblance to those of the Mosaic decalogue, and thus serve to emphasize the fact revealed in Christian Science that throughout all ages in human affairs, divine revelation, control, direction, has been ever operative. There has been present an impartial and universal, though often forgotten, Principle of good, whose laws have echoed and reechoed "from everlasting," and will continue to echo whenever human desire for Rightness cries out for divine guidance.
This human cry for good found its answer on Mount Sinai in a fuller revelation of the law of righteousness, revealed this time to Moses, the one man whose denial of the baseless claims of materiality had been sufficient to enable him to perceive and to impart these life-giving precepts, thus guiding the early footsteps of the children of Israel toward the promised goal of national and spiritual independence.
In the fourth commandment of this law we see that divine Mind sought to prevent this budding nation from falling into the sin of oppression, arising from self-indulgence and the desire for material aggrandizement, by which they themselves had been victimized, and the fatal results of which they had witnessed on their oppressors in the plagues of Egypt and at the Red sea. The provision of a regular rest day must therefore have been greatly appreciated by the Israelites after their hard experiences under the taskmasters of Egypt, whose greed, racial jealousy, and fear of the prosperity of the Israelites had imposed upon the latter conditions of labor which made rest days a practical impossibility.
