Bible Commentaries

Exodus 19:4-5

A great deliverance, whether of a man or of a society, is a great claim on the life that is saved. The Israelites carried with them a grand inheritance of holiness and truth. They were saved because of it. As a nation they betrayed it.

—Edward Thring.

References.—XIX:6 , 6.—Bishop Gibson, The Old Testament in the New, p31. XIX:6.—Bishop Diggle, Sermons for Daily Life, p100.

Exodus 19:10

After the deification of the emperors we are told that it was considered impious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences demanding of him a similar collectedness.

—Pater, Marius the Epicurean, i. p24.

Exodus 19:11

Lady Beaumont told me that when she was a child, previously to her saying her prayers, she endeavoured to think of a mountain or great river, or something great, in order to raise up her soul and kindle it.

—Coleridge, Anima Poetæ, p56.

Exodus 19:16

Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder: I know more or less the history of these; the rise, progress, decline and fall of these. Can thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries of years, make God's laws more godlike to me? Brother, No. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now; and do not heed the thunder and the terror any longer! Perhaps I am above being frightened; perhaps it is not Fear, but Reverence alone, that shall now lead me.

—Carlyle, Past and Present.

Reference.—XIX:20.—K. Moody-Stuart, Light from the Holy Hills, p35.