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I. Consider, first, what it means — THE RIGHTS OF PROPERTY.

1. In a country like this, long occupied and thickly peopled, almost everything belongs to somebody; and most of us possess a few things that we call our own, either earned or inherited, or otherwise received. In a new country the first-comers enter upon unoccupied ground, and each, while making his own claim, recognizes the claims of others. The relations of property are expressed by the possessive pronouns, and it is remarked that these are found in all languages. On what, then, is this right of property grounded? Not on social compact, not on the law of the land, not on the principle of utility, but on the will of God revealed in the constitution of our nature, and in the teaching of His Word. All acquired property is the product of labour, or the fruits of labour; and why do men labour? Is it not for the means of living? If, then, the constitution of our nature is such that we must labour for the means of living, it must be the will of Him who made us that we should receive and possess the fruits of our labour (see Proverbs 16:26; Ephesians 4:28; 2 Thessalonians 3:10).

2. The principle of possession excludes the principle of communism. If the fruit of my labour is mine, the fruit of another man's labour is his to do as he will with it. Communism has always ended in disaster; and always must. It is a tissue of mistakes. It is wrong in its original inference that the principle of property is the cause of destitution, whereas the real cause is selfishness and sin; it is wrong in its ruling idea that all should share and share alike, a notion which would tax industrious people for the benefit of idlers, and rob the skilful for the advantage of the incompetent; it is wrong in its proposed method, for force is no remedy, and the circumstances of men can only be mended by mending the men themselves; and it is wrong in its cherished hopes, for if by some fatal success the communists should break down the present social system and suppress private wealth, the result would be to take all heart of enterprise out of the world's workers, to dry up the waters of progress at their source, and to crush the human race under a final incubus of intolerable woe. Not in the suppression of property, but in a wise understanding of its uses, and in a right direction of its powers, lies the redress of human wrongs, with the hope of a good time coming.

II. What it ensures — THE USE OF PROPERTY.

1. Property has economical uses. It increases, protects, and stores, the produce of the earth.

2. Property has also its moral uses.

(1) Its steady stimulation of labour is alone a mighty helper of our manhood. It is where men have to work that they acquire robustness of frame, alertness of mind, and firmness of moral fibre.

(2) The way in which a man acquires property, and the way in which he uses it — resisting temptation to get it unlawfully, and making it a field for exercise of all the virtues; or dealing oppositely, so as to win it by fraud, and use it for vice — these things make all the difference between a hero and a scoundrel, between a son of God and a child of the devil.

III. What it forbids — THE VIOLATION OF PROPERTY.

1. There are robberies over and above those which policemen investigate. Private gambling. Betting. Extravagance and petty theft on the part of domestic servants.

2. Fraud, or the withholding of a man's due. "Trade practices."

IV. What it involves — THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF PROPERTY. We are God's stewards.

(W. J. Woods, B. A.)

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KJV: Thou shalt not steal.

WEB: "You shall not steal.