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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

THE
TEN COMMANDMENTS WITH
A CHRISTIAN APPLICATION
TO PRESENT CONDITIONS

BY
HENRY SLOANE COFFIN . * i
MINI8TEB IN THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, AND ASSOCIATE
PROFESSOB IN THE UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, NEW YORK CITY
Omnis conaummationis vidifinem; latum mandatum tuum nimis.
Psalm, cxviii (119): 96 Vulgate

HODDER & STOUGHTON
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

Copyright, 1915,
Bt Geoeqb H. Doran Company

TO
EDWARD S. HARKNESS
Non est vera amicitia, nisi cum earn Tu agglutinas inter in-
hcerentes Tibi. Augustine, Conf. 4:iv.

PREFACE
The outbreak of the Great War in the sum
mer of 1914 seemed to many to set us abruptly
in the midst of another age. We had come to
think of ourselves as hving in an earth which,
with all its selfishness, was slowly but surely
responding to the touch of the Spirit of Christ.
Americans looked upon the huge armaments of
Europe as absurd anachronisms; the growth
of intelligence and the spread of Christian
ideals had made a conflict between the great
powers unthinkable. We were startled and
appalled to find ourselves suddenly thrust back
into a day of pagan horrors. The folly of the
strife bewildered us: whither had wisdom
flown ? Its iniquity filled us with loathing : had
righteousness been overthrown? We were
driven to ask ourselves afresh what was wis
dom and what was righteousness. The moral
bases of life were re-examined; the primary
ethical ideals of Christianity were scanned with
a new interest. We were ready to sit at Christ's
feet and learn of Him, and to go with Him

8 PREFACE
to the wisdom He commended in "them of old
time." A restatement of the Ten Command
ments seemed timely; their application an ur
gent necessity.
The following sermons were preached in the
autumn and winter of 1914-1915. They were
printed in pamphlet form at the request of
those who heard them, and found a rapid dis
tribution; they are now given to a wider pub
lic in the hope that they may lead to a more
eager and resolute search after the Kingdom
of God and His righteousness.
July, 1915.

CONTENTS
The First Commandment
FAGS
"Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me" . 11
The Second Commandment
"Thou Shalt Not Make Unto Thee a Graven
Image"  31
The Third Commandment
"Thou Shalt Not Take the Name of the Lord, Thy
God, in Vain"  51
The Fourth Commandment
"Remember the Sabbath Day to Keep It Holy" . 71
The Fifth Commandment
"Honour Thy Father and Thy Mother" ... 91
The Sixth Commandment
"Thou Shalt Not Kill"  Ill
The Seventh Commandment
"Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery" . . . .131
The Eighth Commandment
"Thou Shalt Not Steal"  153
9

10 CONTENTS
The Ninth Commandment
PAGE
"Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy
Neighbour"  177
The Tenth Commandment
"Thou Shalt Not Covet Anything That Is Thy
Neighbour's"  197

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx :3: "Thou shalt have no other gods before
Me." Were this commandment to be phrased to
day, it might read : "Thou shalt have at least
one God." Our danger apparently lies not in
worshipping too many deities, but in worship
ping none at all. There are numbers of men
and women who seem to look up to nothing.
Instead of praying, they plan; instead of as
piring to a perfection on high, they cherish
their own ideals ; instead of trusting with child
like dependence to a Power outside themselves,
they resolutely push their own way ; instead of
opening their spirits to intercourse with An
other, they think hard; instead of casting their
burden upon Him, they throw it over their
own shoulders. In a brilliant essay, Sainte
Beuve pictures the great preacher, Bossuet, as
seeking "something that may awaken in the
13

14 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
human heart that terrible thought of seeing
nothing above itself." The difficulty with
many people is not in finding some rock that
is higher than they, to which to lead them;
but to induce them to raise their eyes to any
point on the rock loftier than themselves. Cer
tain minds have a fatal faculty for reducing
everything and every one to their own level.
They are incapable of seeing in men vastly
better than themselves the virtues in which
these excel them; but they quickly detect the
faults akin to their own. Firm in their com
placency, they look out on the world with eyes
slightly downcast, prepared to find all objects
in their field of vision beneath them. And
whatever is above remains out of their sight.
The only hope for them is that some circum
stance will lay them flat on their backs in ut
ter helplessness, and compel them to look up;
then, perhaps, a new world will swim within
their ken, the world of things high and lofty,
the mountain-tops and the stars and the over
arching sky, — the age-old symbols of God.
Most men are fortunately not quite so self-
assured and self-satisfied. They look out and
up; and awesome sights greet their eyes.

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 15
"There are moments," says Victor Hugo,
"when, whatever the attitude pf the body, the
soul is on its knees." Truth commands their
loyalty; justice enlists their conscience; beauty
captivates their spirits; love masters their
hearts. They discover what it is to surrender
themselves to the lordship of something they
cannot but obey. In that experience, whether
or not they call the object of their devotion
"God," religion is born.
"What means it," asks Martin Luther, "to
have a God?" and replies, "Whatever thy
heart clings to and relies upon, that is proper
ly thy God." And it is just here that we mod
erns find ourselves in peril of the old poly
theism, against which this First Commandment
is a solemn warning. Not to speak of the
common idolatry of trust in people, — such
idolatry as Luther himself once acknowledged
when he said, "I expect more goodness from
Kate, my wife, and Philip Melancthon, and
from my other friends, than from my sweet
and blessed Saviour," — or of the crude trust
in dollars, we are polytheists in this, that we
rely upon different things in different circum
stances, or in different spheres of our life; so

16 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
that unconsciously we bring back under other
names, or rather unnamed, the many deities
of the heathen credulity.
Many of us, for instance, have one god for
the hearth and another for the market-place.
We confide our homes to love. We trust
wife or husband utterly, because love binds
them to us. We expect parents and children
to fulfil their duties to one another, to hold
fast to each other through all the years their
lives are spared, because this household deity,
affection, can be depended on. And we wor
ship the domestic god with appropriate rites.
He has his sacraments of the kiss and the
remembered personal festivals. He has his
ten commandments, — ten reduced to one, for
love is the fulfilling of his law. And he pos
sesses our whole-hearted allegiance; what love
cannot do with wife or husband, nothing else
can accomplish; when love fails with children
or with parents, there is naught stronger or
wiser to fall back upon. And love proves itself
trustworthy; it seeketh not its own, is not
provoked, taketh not account of evil, beareth
all things, believeth all things, hopeth all
things, endureth all things, and never faileth.

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 17
But when we close the door of our home and
go out into the world of business, we seem to
have passed into a realm where some other
divinity bears sway. Instead of looking with
trust at those with whom we trade, we eye
them sharply. Instead of depending upon
mutual affection to keep us and those with
whom we have dealings faithful to our obliga
tions, we rely on self-interest. Men will do
business with us and we with them, so long as
it is profitable, and no longer. The tie which
unites hves in this sphere is selfishness ; so long
as men's interests lie in the same direction,
they pull together; the instant their interests
clash, they pull apart. And this god of the
market-place, too, has his appropriate rites.
His revered highpriests are the financially
powerful; his sacraments are business con
tracts, enforceable by the strong hand of law;
his ten commandments are the so-called "rules
of the game," and they rest on the assumption
that every man is for himself first, last and
always. The god of the hearth is love; the
god of the market-place is self-interest. Fam
ily is family, business is business ; and the an
cient polytheism is with us still.

18 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Or we have one god for the individual and
another for society. The divmity of the in
dividual is forgiving and redeeming, and his
devotee must also forgive and try to redeem
those who injure him. When we are wronged,
we feel that our first duty is to rid our hearts
of illwill and vindictiveness; and our next
duty is to do all in our power for the man
who has wronged us, that we may help him
never to wrong another again. Our private
deity requires us to love our enemies and do
them good. We dare not ask him to pardon
our sins, save as we pray, "Forgive us our
debts as we forgive our debtors." But the god
of society is apparently a different being.
When a man wrongs the community by com
mitting a crime, the first duty of the commun
ity, in the name of its god, is to protect itself
and imprison the off ender. Its next is to try
to pay him back for the harm he has done,
apportioning a penalty to fit his offence: so
many years for grand larceny, so many months
for petty larceny; imprisonment for murder
in the second degree, death for murder in the
first. The god of forgiveness and redemption
seemingly has no jurisdiction in the social

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 19
treatment of wrong, unless it be for very young
or trivial offenders, whom we deal with by the
probation system.
The deity of the individual is a god of jus
tice. If some one injures him, he does not
feel that he can give way to his resentment and
attack the aggressor with knife or pistol, or
proceed to take part of his possessions from
him. He must carry his grievance to a duly
constituted court, where it will be impartially
heard; and he must abide by the decision of
that court, whether his feelings are satisfied
by its verdict or not. But the deitjr of a na
tion seems not to be this god of justice, but a
god of force. If a nation is wronged, unless
the wrong is of the most trifling kind, it re
fuses to have it tried by a tribunal. Its na
tional honour justifies it in resorting to arms,
and, if possible, compelling its assailant to cede
it territory, or pay it an indemnity, or lose its
independence altogether.
Or again, the god of one group or class
often does not seem to them to be the god
of some other group. A nation going to war
asserts that its god and the god of its fathers
will assure it victory, as though its enemies

20 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
and their fathers were under the protection
of some lesser deity. A group of wealthy
people will speak of the god who sanctions the
ownership of property, and solemnly warns
"Thou shalt not steal," when radical legislation
threatens to take something from them, or
strikers offer violence to their belongings ; but
they apparently think that some other deity
sanctions the right of the labourer to his job
and to a living wage. On the other hand, a
group of working men will insist that the god
of justice and of the future approves of their
violent methods of obtaining their demands;
and speak as if all his sympathy and tender
ness were with them, while the capitalists
against whom they are striving are under some
outworn pagan god of property — a god of the
past. On every hand we find ourselves hving not
under one God, but under many. Whatever
may be our nominal religion, we are practically
polytheists, and as really polytheists as the
crude savages who people the world with mul
titudes of discordant spirits. Our gods clash:
the god of the hearth with the god of the shop ;
the god of persons with the god of nations;

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 21
the god of Russians with the god of Germans ;
the god of property with the god of humanity.
There is as much war among our deities as
among the quarrelling Olympians of Homer,
or the contending divinities of Ammon and
Moab, of Philistia and Judah.
The baneful result of many gods is to rob
hfe of its unity. We are not whole men with
natures all of one piece, but "things of shreds
and patches," crazy-quilt natures, mixtures of
half a dozen species of Dr. Jekyll with as
many varieties of Mr. Hyde. His wife and
children know one Zacchaeus — kindly, genial,
devoted; those who do business with the farmer
of taxes in the city of Jericho are familiar
with quite another Zacchaeus — shrewd, grasp
ing, hard. His personal friends know one
Zacchaeus; the community which considers
him a social outcast knows another. That on
which he depends, his god, in these different
relations, makes him now this, now that, now
something else — a composite Zacchaeus. Eli
and young Saul and David know and dearly
love one Samuel; Agag and the Philistines
know a very different Samuel. This devout
prophet thought he beheved in one God; but

22 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
he did not yet know that the God of Israel
was also the God of Philistia, so he devoutly
hewed Agag in pieces before Jehovah in Gil
gal. The deity on whom we rely and after
whom we fashion ourselves in our relations
with our friends — the deity of respect and
sympathy and willing service — is seldom the
deity on whom we depend and whom we imi
tate in our office, or as patriots when we think
of our country's relation with Mexico or
Japan. Many gods make us many unlike
men in one disunited and discordant person
ahty. Our name is legion, for we are many.
No doubt most of us have taken for granted
that if there be a God at all, there cannot be
more than one. We may have felt ourselves
tempted to atheism or to agnosticism, but
hardly to polytheism. But is the belief in one
God we have inherited from Israel really a
truer explanation of the facts of hfe than the
belief in gods many, which was held by peo
ples so intelligent as Greeks and Romans?
For example, is it clear that the God of our
hearts is also the God of nature? There is
nothing about which we feel more intensely
than the distinction between right and wrong;

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 23
right we must love and wrong we must hate ;
but nature seems to have nothing akin to our
consciences. In Thomas Hardy's tragic novel, Tess of
the D'Urbervilles, after his heroine's moral
downfall, he concludes a chapter with this pic
ture: "Walking among the sleeping birds in
the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a
moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-
laden bough, she looked upon herself as a fig
ure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of In
nocence. But all the while she was making a
distinction where there was no difference.
Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite
in accord. She had been made to break an
accepted social law, but no law known to the
environment in which she fancied herself such
an anomaly." Was the God of her conscience,
as Hardy appears to think, a moral hobgob
lin by which she was terrified without reason?
Is the God of conscience a small private di
vinity, while some great conscienceless Force
dominates the world outside? Or is the whole
structure and fabric of the universe shot
through with righteousness?
Again, are we convinced that the God of

24 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
our homes, to whori we give the family name,
"Our Father," is the Deity actually in control
of the commercial affairs and the international
contacts of men? Could He successfully con
duct them, if we would let Him? Can the
same Spirit, upon which we rely in our house
holds, be confided in to direct aright these
other spheres? Will Love work practically,
and prove itself the dominant might in every
part of this and of all other worlds?
The religious experience of mankind has
certainly been against polytheism. Even in
Greece and Rome, the more thoughtfully de
vout came to feel their way past the many
gods to a mysterious One. Israel was led to
discover that its Jehovah was no private Pro
tector of its twelve tribes —
"A god they pitted 'gainst a swarm
Of neighbour gods less vast of arm" —
but the Lord of the whole earth. Believing
souls discover that they can no more have
several gods than several wives. One God,
if they really come into fellowship with Him,
claims them for Himself alone, and is jealous
with love's jealousy. And He succeeds in so

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 25
completely engrossing their every capacity,
that they have no unused remainders to devote
to other divinities.
In William Morris' Sir Galahad, the
knight is represented in an irreligious mood,
"with no touch of awe upon him," when he is
attracted by the ringing of a bell, and finds
himself entering a chapel, where he sees,
"One sitting on the altar as a throne,
Whose face no man could say he did not know."
Instinctively Sir Galahad kneels,
"for he felt
The first time what a thing was. perfect dread."
When God makes His own divine impres
sion upon us in Jesus Christ, we experience
such a perfect and complete abasement — our
minds mastered by One who grips them as
the final Truth, our consciences held by One
who is to them their ideal of Right, our admi
ration called out by One who seems the alto
gether Lovely, our hearts kindled by One who
sets them all aflame with love — our whole
self goes out in such response to Him, that
we have nothing left to give to another.
This old commandment did not read "There

26 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
is but one God." People might argue that
proposition endlessly. It read: "Thou shalt
have no other gods before Me." In having,
in trusting this God, we find Him engrossing
all the capacity for the Divine within us. We
find as a matter of experience that we cannot
trust God in Christ, without His drawing us
to trust Him altogether. We are forced either
to give Him our all, or nothing. We cannot
serve Him with a fraction of ourselves; it
requires as much as in us is to obey Him ; and
when He answers our obedience with His
comradeship, He fills our every need and more.
If Martin Luther is correct "that to have a
God means to have something in which the
heart puts all its trust," Jesus of Nazareth
has the power to capture our entire trust,
and to be the God who has us. We give Him
our adoration, our confidence, our loyalty, and
not a part but the whole of our soul's
devotion. But to worship Jesus as God seems to some
minds to break this First Commandment:
"Thou shalt have no other gods before
Me." There is a common form of stating
the deity of Christ which leaves the Christian

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 27
with at least two gods — the Creator of the
Universe and the Jesus of history. But that
on which we rely and which we worship in
the Father and the Son is the same divinity,
is Christlike love. It is that which bows
us in adoration before Jesus, when He stands
at our side, a Man in all points like ourselves ;
it is that which we adore with Him in His
God and Father, the Lord of heaven and
earth. For us, as for Paul, "There is one
God, the Father, of whom are all things, and
we unto Him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom are all things and we through
Him." We follow Jesus in placing the trust
of our hearts utterly in One who is love, and
we find that love made plain and embodied in
the Jesus we follow. When we adore Jesus,
we worship God in Him; when we pray to
Jesus, we pray to God through Him. There
is for us one God, and He is manifest to us
fully in Christ.
And how all important it is that, having
been mastered by the true God, we should
come back to this first principle that we can
have no other god beside. The only hope of
lasting peace on earth is that all nations shall

28 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
so rely on Christlike love that they will allow
nothing else to control their pubhc policies.
The only solution of our industrial conflicts
is that all who have any part in the world's
work, — investors, managers, working men and
women — shall really believe in the Godship
of Christlike love, and let this God lead them
into His economic order of brotherly striving
for the common enrichment of the whole
household of His children. The only prospect
of our becoming complete selves, whole men
and women, lies in our loving this God with
all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all
our strength, so that no fractions of our per
sonalities pass out under the sway of other
and ahen ideals.
We said that God in Christ has the ability
to claim and engross our all. That is true,
provided we are wilhng to put our all into
the life He is wilhng to share with us. Hus
band and wife can occupy each other's entire
hearts; and they do, if each puts a whole self
into their common life. But many married
couples have very imperfectly shared interests ;
and in the unshared interest hes the peril of
infidelity. Have we a purpose with which

THE FIRST COMMANDMENT 29
God in Christ cannot sympathise? Has He
a purpose into which we are not cordially
entering? Look at Him, and keep looking at
Him, as He opens His mind and heart to us
in the life and cross of His Son, and is there
not a love there for all mankind and for our
selves, which "demands our soul, our life, our
all"?

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:4: "Thou shalt not make unto thee a
graven image."
This is a commandment for which we can
easily discover a temporary justification. In
the age of Moses and of Israel's great proph
ets, in a world full of image-worshippers, it
is difficult to see how the spirituality of God
could have been safeguarded except by a dras
tic prohibition against any likeness of any
thing in heaven, or earth, or sea. Pictorial art
vastly enriches life; but if one must sacrifice
either spiritual religion or sculpture and paint
ing, there can be no question which is the more
valuable to retain. As it is better for a man
to forego the development of his nature alto
gether on some hnes, rather than imperil his
moral health; better for him (in Christ's
words) "to enter into life maimed," rather
than having two eyes and two hands to be
wrecked in character; so it is better that life
should be artistically impoverisl
ligiously degraded. 33

34 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
But in our age is this commandment needed?
And in what sense? It is a sweeping prohi
bition of all painting and sculpture whatso
ever ; and many earnest Christians at different
ages in the history of the Church have fol
lowed it, and have looked askance at devotees
of art. Those who delighted most in beauty
of form and colour have often slighted the
beauty of holiness; and in protest those to
whom righteousness has been the supreme end
in life have looked with suspicion on the cult
of loveliness. Some exceedingly conscientious
and earnest epochs have been hideous; and
on the other hand some of the most artistic
periods in the world's history have been both
immoral and undevout. There is a sincere
confession in a sonnet which Michael Angelo
wrote in his old age: —
Now hath my life across a stormy sea,
Like a frail bark, reached that wide port where all
Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall
Of good and evil for eternity.
Now know I well how that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed,

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 35
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul, that turns to His great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.
Art, made life's chief purpose, starves the
soul ; but to condemn art altogether is to starve
another side of our nature. Thackeray has
more than one bitter thrust at the current
evangehcal religion dominant in Britain and
this country a generation ago because of its
contentment with ughness and its fear of aught
which charmed with its beauty. He makes
Major Dobbin say in Vanity Fair, "that for
his part, every beauty of art and nature made
him thankful as well as happy, and that the
pleasure to be had in listening to fine music,
as in looking at the stars in the sky or at a
beautiful landscape or picture, was a benefit
for which we might thank heaven as sincerely
as for any other worldly blessing." To which
Amelia utters some feeble objections basied
on the current religious ideas of the day.
We have moved a long way since then, and
are happily more Christian. Our Lord's own
keen appreciation of lovely sights and His

36 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
incomparable artistic skill in the one medium
available to Him — language — must make us
sympathetic with all who render life richer
by chisel or brush. We cannot forget that all
things fair are as truly reflections of God as
all things true and just; that God is Right
eousness and Truth and
"that Beauty
Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world."
We do not rightly worship Him with holi
ness alone, but in the beauty of holiness.
But granting that this commandment was
far too sweeping, what shall we say of its nar
rower apphcation to pictorial representations
of Deity? William Blake once remarked:
"There are three powers in man of conversing
with Paradise — Poetry, Painting and Music."
If we are to have intercourse with the
Unhearable, the Unseeable, the Unf eelable, we
must find some ways of intercommunication.
If our spirits are to carry on commerce with
God, we must discover means of transit by
which He may send what He wills to us,
and we what we wish to Him. Poetry, the
making of thought-images, is one method.

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 37
And the Bible is throughout poetic in this
sense that it employs picturesque words to
make us see God. He is a Rock, a Shield, a
Sun, a High Tower, a Home. Music, which,
as Tiecke put it, "teaches us to feel feeling,"
is another method of setting us in contact
with God. The Bible's prose is musical, and
its rhythm affects us, as well as its imagery
of thought; its poetical passages, while they
are not rhymed, are marvellously musical, and
lend themselves easily to use with voice and
instrument, as in chants and anthems. Both
poetry and music were freely enlisted by the
Hebrews in the service of their faith. Why
was it that they barred sculpture and painting?
A graven image, even to the crudest wor
shipper, is probably very seldom identified
with his god; it is only a symbol of his god.
There is a peril that the god and the symbol
shall be confused; but it is a peril hke that
which Jesus took in instituting the Lord's
Supper. Why should it be thought so much
more dangerous to paint on canvas or carve
a representation of Divinity than to draw
a thought of God on the wall of the mind or
grave an image of Him in the intellect? The

38 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Christian Church very early discarded this
Jewish commandment; there are rough draw
ings in the catacombs, and Christian artists of
the most saintly and devout characters — a Fra
Angelico for example — dedicated their lives
to imaging the Divine. The chief artistic
treasures of the Christian centuries are paint
ings which try to portray Biblical scenes or
persons — Christ, the Virgin Mother, even God
the Father. But from time to time there have
been vigorous protests from spiritually minded
men who have felt that these pictorial rep
resentations were an injury to real religion.
One thinks of the Iconoclasts in Byzantium,
the early Protestants who smashed the carved
figures on the cathedrals of France and Hol
land, the Puritans who destroyed stained glass
windows, reduced the architecture of their
churches to the most baldly simple lines,
and could not abide sacred painting or sculp
ture. Were they right?
John Addington Symonds, the historian of
The Renaissance in Italy, will certainly not be
discounted as one who lacked artistic appre
ciation; but in his volume on The Fine Arts,
he ranges himself entirely on the side of the

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 39
Iconoclasts. "The spirit of Christianity and
the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not
because such art is immoral, but because it
cannot free itself from sensuous associations.
When the worshipper would fain ascend on
wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable,
unrealised, how can he endure the contact of
these splendid forms, in which the lust of the
eye and the pride of life, professing to sub
serve devotion, remind him rudely of sensuous
existence? Religion has its proper end in
contemplation and in conduct. Art aims at
presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts
and feelings with a view to intellectual en
joyment. There are many feelings which can
not properly assume a sensuous form; and
these are precisely religious feelings, in which
the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual
world behind, to seek her freedom in a
spiritual region. As meteors become luminous
by traversing the grosser element of our ter
restrial atmosphere, so the thoughts that art
employs must immerse themselves in sensuous-
ness. Our deepest thoughts about the world
and God are incapable of personification by
any aesthetic process."

40 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Admitting that art may, and often has, de
graded rehgion by attempting to set forth in
form and colour that which cannot be so de
scribed, is it not true that art has many times
proved itself a valuable assistant to worship?
Dion Chrysostom, speaking of the colossal
figure of Zeus, carved by Phidias in the temple
at Olympia, says, "Whosoever among mortal
men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having
drunk the cup of many sorrows and calami
ties, when he stands before this image, me
thinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and
woes of this mortal life." And in Christian
circles there are paintings of the Face of
Christ or figures of Him (Thorwaldsen's, to
name but one) , which have gained a fixed place
in the affection of devout hearts. Many of
our Roman Catholic brethren, and possibly
some Protestants, find the Crucifix an aid to
devotion. Are we to condemn with the
severity of this Commandment the making of
any representation whatsoever of the Divine?
Most of us will answer, No, Such painted
or carved images, if properly used, cannot be
considered evil; they may be, as their users
assert, helps to devotion. But it is surely not

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 41
without significance that no authentic memory
whatever remains in the earth of the personal
appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. Many of
His sayings have been carefully preserved in
the very words He used; occasionally a ges
ture or look is mentioned in the narrative of a
memorable act ; we possess unf orgetable word-
pictures of what He did and suffered, but not
a syllable to recall what He was to men's eyes.
We do not know whether He was tall or short,
stout or slight, dark or fair. Not a hint is
given us of the shape of a single feature of
His face nor of the colour of His eyes. How
accurate and full is the portrait of His spirit,
His mind and heart! How completely lost
in oblivion is His outward form! A careful
Providence has done His best to teach us that
the religious meanings of all things, of the
Word made flesh Himself, lie not on their sur
face, where the eye can see them, but hidden,
where they can be reached only by the eyes of
the heart. An image, a painting, runs the risk
of giving us superficial impressions, and con
cealing the message to the heart and the
conscience. We seem to be so constituted that
when we dwell with satisfaction on that which

42 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
pleases our sight, we dull our inward vision.
Those who rejoice most heartily in pictured
symbols of the Divine, are seldom those whose
consciences grave Him in righteousness in
their own or their world's life.
This ancient decree points out a genuine
peril; and the history of religion enforces its
lesson. It is they who endure as seeing Him
who is invisible, without insisting on seeing
some representation of Him with their eyes,
who succeed in making His character most
manifest in what they themselves are, and in
what they make their homes, their work, their
country, to be. We do not go for our stimuh
to righteousness, nor for our highest thought
of God, to the Greeks of the Golden Age of
Pericles or to the Italians of the Renaissance,
but to image-forbidden Hebrews and to
image-destroying Reformers, Protestants and
Puritans. But very unfortunately Protestants and
Puritans have not as yet satisfactorily evolved
an art of their own that harmonises with their
religion; and the artistic impulse, which cannot
be neglected, constantly revives forms not in
keeping with the faith of freed spirits. Ben-

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 43
jamin Jowett, the celebrated master of Balliol
College, Oxford, after a tour through some of
the cathedrals of England, observed: "It is
the great misfortune of Protestantism never
to have had an art or architecture. Hence it
is always being dragged back through the
medium of art into Romanism. The finest
pictures and the noblest churches are Roman,
and Roman is Pagan, and Romanism is
dragged through the medium of art into Pa
ganism, and into a bastard form of Pagan
ism." One can think of many a church erected
for Protestant worship, which is not fitted for
preaching — an invariable and most important
part of our conception of fellowship with God
— and which transforms the simple friendly
meal of the Lord's Supper, where Christ's dis
ciples gather as one family about His table,
into a ceremony much more in keeping with the
partially non-Christian ideas which underlie
the Roman Mass. We must not follow the let
ter of this commandment in scorning the figu
rative arts; they will take their own revenge
upon us, for man is as normally artistic as he
is religious; but we must set ourselves as a
community to developing an art and an archi-

44 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
tecture that are the natural servants of the
spiritual religion of the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ.
Nor is it so easy, as many think, to draw a
sharp distinction between a graven image of
stone that the eye can see and a graven image
of thought which exists only in the mind, and
be perfectly safe with this latter representation
of God. The real difficulty with a graven
image is its rigidity; it is a fixed, and there
fore a limited and confining representation of
Him who is limitless. A growing soul de
mands a growing thought of God; and men
tal images can be as stationary as marble or
bronze. How perilous it is to carry in one's
mind at twenty the same image of God that
stood there at ten! How pathetic to see a
man of forty looking with the eyes of his
heart at a Divine Face that has no more in it
for him than he saw there when he was one
and twenty! Life's experiences to a believing
spirit are so many disclosures of a great
Companion; and each experience ought to put
something more into the Face of that Com
panion which presents itself to the mind's
eye. Thought-images of God are constructed

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 45
by every generation; they represent in some
creed or confession of faith all that they and
their predecessors have discovered of His
character, expressed in the ideas and language
of their age. And these are living things, a liv
ing Image, to contemporaries, or at all events
to those who frame them ; but when passed on
to the next generation, they are often as lifeless
as a carved statue. We worship the God of
our fathers; but we dare not worship our
fathers' image of God; that is idolatry. A
hving God will not allow Himself to be con
fined within the rigid forms of the thought of
any particular age, and passed on in those
forms to its successor. A living God demands
ever fresh attempts by living minds to think
Him out. They must carefully conserve all
the spiritual discoveries of their predecessors;
they must take into account all the Spiritual
discoveries of their own day; they must use
all the intellectual tools their age affords them
in graving the worthiest thought of Him to
whom they give all their heart, soul, mind and
strength. Not all idols are made of wood and
stone; there are idols of the mind — dead
thoughts of God which are not the products

46 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
of a living experience of Him. To harbour
such is to go directly counter to the spirit of
this ancient commandment.
But, above all, this commandment is a pro
test against man-made gods; our thought of
God must be God-given. Rehgion is not
man's search into the invisible, constructing
image after image, and testing which of them
corresponds with the Fact he discovers. Re
hgion is God's search for man, disclosing Him
self to us by everything He does for us and
in us — by the world He made, by the natures
He gave us in His own hkeness, by all His
acts in history, and by all His personal deal
ings with ourselves. Our part is not to search
for Him, but to respond to His search for us ;
not to fancy some imaginary Divine Being we
would hke to worship, but to picture to our
minds Him whom we have found in our ex
periences constraining us to adore Him by all
the unveilings of His goodness He has made
to us or to any man. Hence our image of God
will not be our fancy of the best we can dream
of, but the God-stamped impression on our
minds of the Best we have ever known. It
will not be our own painting of imaginary

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 47
perfection, but some disclosure to us of a
perfection we cannot help adoring as Divine.
Here it is that Jesus Christ fills the place
of the image of God in Christian minds. In
this Man who actually lived in our earth, and
whose memory has come down to us across
the centuries, we find "the fluent Image of the
unstable Best." His image has been before
twenty centuries, and each century has seen
more in Him than its predecessors; but each
bows with utmost reverence and declares it
can conceive of none loftier than He. When
we wish to place before our minds the most
adorable Face to which to direct our worship,
we set in our mind's eye the Face of Jesus
Christ. When we find our consciences com
pelled to obey their highest Ideal, we recog
nise that this ideal is none other than the
Spirit of Jesus. And Jesus is not to us a
man-made image of God. No doubt Jesus
Himself had to co-operate with His Father in
attaining His perfection; but He merely
answered the promptings of that Father Him
self within Him. His will was His Father's
will; His works were His Father's business;
His love was something He received from a

48 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Heart above Him— "As the Father hath loved
Me, I also have loved you." Jesus is for us
God's Self-expression in a human hfe, God's
image of Himself in a Man. Aught that
does not correspond with that image, whether
it be told us by a Bible writer or by the voice
of many Christian centuries, is not for us a
true hkeness of God. We
"Correct the portrait by the living Face,
Man's God by God's God in the mind of man."
And while we find God imaged in Jesus,
Jesus takes care that even this God-made
image shall not bound and limit our thought
of God. In the same breath in which He tells
Philip, "He that hath seen Me hath seen
the Father," He continues, "The Father is
greater than I." We have Jesus' own warrant
for placing ever more in our thought of God,
more even than we find in Jesus. The "more"
will not be different from that which was in
Him, or it would not be truly divine, truly
hke God; but every glimpse of beauty, every
disclosure of truth, every ideal of righteous
ness, that comes to us from any quarter and
is akin to the beauty, truth, righteousness of

THE SECOND COMMANDMENT 49
Jesus, is for us God — God revealing Himself
to-day to us, God making a larger, truer, more
adorable and lovable image of Himself in our
minds, that we may answer Him with a fuller
trust, a warmer love, a completer obedience,
and manifest Him to the world in a diviner life.

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:7: "Thou shalt not take the name of the
Lord, thy God, in vain."
This commandment was primarily a safe
guard for the sanctity of oaths. On solemn
occasions we hear Israehtes calling God to wit
ness that they speak the truth and will surely
perform their promise. We are familiar with
such phrases as: "The Lord do so to me and
more also, if — ," "As the Lord liveth,"
"Saul sware by the Lord to the witch at En
dor." And they were warned that "the Lord
will not hold him guiltless that taketh His
name in vain."
Human society — the relations of man to
man in government, trade, friendship, the home
— rests upon mutual confidence ; and there can
not be trust where there is not truthfulness.
Religion is the foundation of society in the
sense that men's connection with God binds
them to each other; their fear to lie to Him
prevents them from lying to their neighbours,
53

54 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
at least in those instances where they deliber
ately invoke His name. And in a world of lies
it is of incalculable value that there should be
some circumstances under which one can be cer
tain that men are speaking verity. In the
light of the present awful conflict in Europe, of
what worth would it have been to have had the
name of a God, men genuinely feared, taken to
guarantee treaties solemnly sworn! We can
not but share Wordsworth's feeling:
"Earth is sick
And Heaven is weary of the hollow words
Which states and kingdoms utter when they talk
Of truth and justice."
We in this country, who are sincerely anxious
to be fair, as we read the conflicting statements
of partisans, are tempted to conclude that all
national representatives are liars ; and we long
to get the responsible leaders together, put
them Under oath to some Deity they revere (if
there be any such) , warn them "thou shalt not
take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain,"
and then try to ehcit the truth.
The social value of this ancient command
ment is entirely apparent; and we still admin-

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 55
ister oaths to witnesses in court, to officials
entering upon public office, and to citizens tak
ing up their responsibilities as sovereigns of
this people-ruled country. But Jesus criticised
this commandment harshly: "Swear not at
all; but let your speech be Yea, yea; Nay, nay;
and whatsoever is more than these is of evil."
If we take oaths upon some occasions, we imply
that on other occasions we may not be speaking
the truth. No one ought to need to say of a
Christian: "I would believe him under oath."
It is better, to be sure, that we should be able
to believe a man under oath, than not to be able
to believe him under any circumstances ; but a
Christian ought to be invariably trustworthy.
His bare word should be entirely sufficient ; his
Yes is yes, his No, no. Whatsoever is more,
although it may not be of itself sinful, must be
recognised as coming of evil, coming of the
current untruthfulness which makes an oath
advisable. And how widespread the evil is! Much of
the general falsehood is not intentional. Peo
ple are slipshod in their use of language, pass
on unverified rumours, say things because they
sound interesting regardless of their veracity.

56 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
"Speaking truth," says Ruskin, "is hke writing
fair, and comes only by practice; it is less a
matter of will than of habit." We get in the
way of colouring narratives, spicing conversa
tion, embroidering the plain vesture of fact;
and our taste for simple truth is ruined. A
large amount of inaccuracy has become a social
convention. A scrupulous regard for fact is a
serious drawback to entertaining conversation.
One feels that it would be most wholesome if,
into the midst of a group of persons chatting in
the exaggerated and largely imaginative way
that prevails in many social gatherings, some
rough-spoken man, like Dr. Samuel Johnson,
should break with his blunt demand for fact.
In Boswell's Life is this entry : "When he and
I were one day endeavouring to ascertain, arti
cle by article, how one of our friends could pos
sibly spend as much money in his family as he
told us he did, Mrs. Thrale interrupted us by a
lively extravagant sally on the expense of
clothing his children, describing it in a very
ludicrous and fanciful manner, Johnson looked
a little angry and said: 'Nay, madam, when
you are declaiming, declaim, and when you are
calculating, calculate.' "

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 57
And even when we take pains to state fact
and nothing but fact, it is a difficult matter to
be utterly truthful. Jowett of Balliol was fond
of recalling an ancient philosopher who was
afraid of telling lies and used to wag with his
finger instead of speaking. "Afterwards he
gave this up as partaking more or less of the
nature of untruth." It requires no small effort
to fulfil our Lord's commandment to make
our Yea exactly yea, and our Nay precisely
nay. And in the attempt we discover that truth
fulness goes back of the tongue and its speech.
It is a quality of a man's spirit. If there is
straightness of nature, the tongue will not lie ;
if there is crookedness within, no matter how
good our intentions, we shall not speak the
truth. Emerson once wrote very searching-
ly: "Use what language you will, you can
never say anything but what you are. What I
am and what I think is conveyed to you, in
spite of my efforts to hold it back. What I
am has been secretly conveyed from me to
another, whilst I was vainly making up my
mind to tell him it. He has heard from me
what I never spoke." A Christian's entire life

58 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
is named with the name of his Lord, the Lord
of truth; and a deceitful thought, the refusal to
look at distasteful facts, the indulgence of what
is recognised as prejudice, is to take the name
of the Lord, our God, in vain. "Thou desirest
truth in the inward parts" is a psalmist's much
more Christianlike apphcation of this ancient
precept. In the House of Commons Disraeh
once said to John Bright: "Bright, I would
give all that I ever had to have made that
speech you made just now." "And I just said
to him," Bright reports, "Well, you might
have made it, if you had been honest." Where
all life is inspired with true motives, oaths will
be needless. AH men's ordinary speech will
be wholly trustworthy, every Yea, yea, and
Nay, nay.
This commandment is often quoted in
connection with another kind of swearing —
profanity. Happily this is now out of fash
ion, and is considered, among all but a few
very young persons, to be a mark of ill-
breeding. If one compares the conversation
placed upon the hps of well-brought-up and
educated men in the novels of a generation
or more ago, when every gentleman was sup-

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 59
posed to pepper and salt his speech profusely
with curses, we can note a decided advance.
Profanity is a sign of an impoverished vocab
ulary; its users have no command of expres
sions for their strong feelings. Bunyan con
fesses : "I knew not how to speak unless I put
an oath before, and another behind, to make
my words have authority." A larger acquaint
ance with our wealthy English tongue and a
truer sense of the weight of words, as well as
his new Christian conscience, made him realise
that he weakened rather than strengthened his
speech by his invariable curses. Carlyle
wrote of his old Scotch father: "In anger
he had no need of oaths; his words were like
sharp arrows that smote into the very
heart." And he transmitted to his distin
guished son that vivid, forceful, adequate com
mand of language.
Or profanity is a sign of impoverished
thought. Lord Byron remarked of an ac
quaintance: "He knew not what to say,
and so he swore." We are told of Laurence
Oliphant's father that he "got into the way
of using bad words for want of something
to say." Our Lord supplemented this com-

60 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
mandment most helpfully along these hnes
when He said solemnly: "I say unto you
that every idle word that men shall speak,
they shall give account thereof in the day of
judgment." When we have nothing to say,
we must learn not to try to say it. The
babble of words we do not mean is not so
harmless as we sometimes think. We acquire
the habit of insincerity ; we divide ourselves up
into two men, one a fairly substantial and
thoughtful person, unknown to most of those
who meet us, who on rare occasions comes for
ward and speaks ; and the other a lightweight,
very much to the fore in all encounters, who
talks incessantly and is usually considered
by most of our acquaintances to be our en
tire self. The effect of such division is not
only to make us hypocrites, acting a sorry role
in the world with this impostor who in no sense
represents our genuine thoughts and feelings,
but to diminish the size and influence of the
real man within. None of us has more in him
than is required to fill the part in life as
signed him; we cannot afford idle words or
idle deeds. Futilities of speech and conduct
are costly luxuries. What we say must be

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 61
what we mean, or we blaspheme the Name
we bear as truly as if we interjected curses
when we had nothing else to say. "For by
thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy
words thou shalt be condemned."
This commandment occurs to us in still an
other connection. One of the most shocking
facts to Christian consciences at the time of the
outbreak of this present war was the constant
appeal to God on the part of the leaders of
some of the warring nations, and the ascription
of their successes to His favour. We must
make due allowance for wrought-up emotions,
and for the sense of the justice of their cause,
in those who employed these expressions.
Whether they were right or not, we need not
question their sincerity. But to invoke the
name of God, of the Christian God, in the work
of slaughter and destruction, to claim Him as
sanctioning national self -aggrandisement and
the use of force for its accomplishment, is a
sad indication of the widespread ignorance of
what the name of the Christian God really sig
nifies. It is a pity that Christians in speaking
of their God have got out of the way of con
necting Him definitely with the faith of Jesus

62 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Himself. When Paul wished to name Him,
he said most often, "the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ." If men said "Christ's
God," would it be as easy for them to claim
that He is with them, blessing their weapons of
bloody butchery, as they sally forth to make
corpses of their brethren for whose sake Christ
died? It is horrible to think what Mohamme
dans, Jews, Buddhists and heathen of various
faiths and no faiths, must conclude regarding
the character of the God adored by followers
of Christ from the expressions used concerning
Him in this unspeakable business now on in
Christian Europe. "The name of God is blas
phemed among the Gentiles." Would that
some pagan could catch the ear of the warring
nations, and, when they are thanking their God
for help in their work of devastation, speak up
boldly: "Thou shalt not take the name of the
Lord, thy God, in vain; for the Lord will not
hold him guiltless that taketh His name in
vain." Who is our God? Is He force or is He love?
Can we bid a departing company of armed
troops farewell with the words: "The God of
love be with you and bless you"? There are

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 63
circumstances when Christian men feel sum
moned to fight and, if need be, to die in love's
name for the protection of the oppressed and
the unjustly dealt with; but surely no one who
really knows the name of God in Jesus can lift
a rifle or point a cannon or discharge a torpedo
without feeling that the act is in itself inher
ently unchristian. We live in a world where
we cannot be saved by ourselves; so long as
there are nations that appeal to brute might
and use it, it is hard to see how Christians, much
as they condemn themselves, can do anything
else but resist for the defence of their land and
of others weaker than they ; but while they com
mend themselves and their cause to God's jus
tice, they must beware of invoking His name
as blessing their work of slaughter. It sounds
perilously hke blasphemy to assert that He, the
God of Jesus, the God of Calvary, is with a
band of man-slayers on land and sea.
But were this commandment to be phrased
to-day might it not more likely read : "Thou
shalt take the name of the Lord, thy God" ? If
ancient Hebrews were apt to speak of God too
frequently, is not the modern temptation to
mention Him too seldom? Ours is a singularly

64 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
tongue-tied faith. There must always be
a reserve in talking of that which means
most to us; we do not air our affection for
wife or husband in promiscuous company, nor
dwell upon our loyalty to some dear friend in
casual conversation. A faith that did not sur
round itself with proper reticence would be
shallow and cheap. But love and friendship
both crave expression. However undemonstra
tive a person's nature, if his affection has no
way of showing itself, it cannot hve. An unut-
tered faith stands in similar danger of suffoca
tion. Among ourselves thousands of Protestant
Christians will have httle or nothing to do with
causes that are distinctly labelled with the
Christian name. They are interested in social
settlements or philanthropic societies, from
which for obvious and sufficient reasons ex
phcit religious teaching is barred; but they
take no part in the work of the Christian
Church. They can be enlisted for a sewing
class or a fresh air outing; but they have no
zest for work that involves direct speech on re
hgious subjects.' There is a widespread pas
sion for anonymous Christianity. But an un-

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 65
named God becomes a forgotten God. Work
undertaken originally from religious motives
loses its power when one ceases to connect
it openly with God. The spiritual tone and
force gradually evaporate from those who do
not take pains to insure that somewhere their
spirituality shall find full expression. An
apologetic faith that hides its head soon
ceases to possess a believing head worth
hiding. There are time-honoured, and therefore not
indehcate, ways of taking the name of God.
There is the custom of meeting publicly with
other believers once a week and acknowledging
ourselves God's children, grateful for His care,
penitent for our unworthiness, dependent on
His love and ready to receive His message.
Men may say what they will about the relative
unimportance of regular church-going, they
may speak (and it is unfortunate that they
have so much reason to speak) of the un
profitableness of many church services; the
fact remains that one rarely finds a vigorous,
thoughtful, earnest and devoted follower of
Jesus who has abandoned this practice. Chris
tian faith is essentially social, and it does not

66 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
attain normal health unless it finds systematic
social expression. We should not have thought
much of the Christianity of the Dutch settlers
of Manhattan three centuries ago * had they
not built and attended a church. Why should
we expect less of ourselves to-day?
There is the custom commended by many
generations of behevers of daily family wor
ship — surely not an immodest way of parading
our piety to the world, ^The Christian rehgion
is so largely a family matter ; — its chief words
are family words — Father, son, love, home ; its
principal method of self -perpetuation is by
inheritance from parents to children; its first
obligations are within the home circle — "spe
cially they of his own household"; its most
typical rite is a family meal — the Lord's Sup
per; that it craves an utterance in every home.
If we are agreed that a world at war, a world
in almost as terrible a conflict in its industrial
relations, a world oppressing us with a burden
ing feeling of its wrongness, — if we are agreed
that our world to-day needs more genuine
* This sermon was preached on the 300th anniversary ¦
of the settlement of New Amsterdam — the founding of
New York City.

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 67
religion, where shall we begin to inject it, if
not in our own household?
There is, again, the long established usage
of naming God in thankfulness each time we
sit down at table — another by no means osten
tatious manner of expressing faith, but a cus
tom omitted in many homes through diffidence,
or even because it is not considered "smart."
To be sure there is no more reason why one
should thank God before eating than before
walking or bathing or dressing; but it is a
recognised way of taking His name, a form
commended by the personal example of Jesus
Himself and of centuries of His faithful fol
lowers. Never to allude to God is to banish
Him from thought and heart, and to render
life godless.
But, above all, this sobering time calls for an
end of our hampering shyness in taking God's
name and advancing intelligent faith. When
one thinks of the state of the world, and of
the so-called Christian world, one is reminded
of Hosea's solemn utterance: "My people are
destroyed for lack of knowledge." We must
face the fact of abysmal ignorance of the
Christian God throughout the earth. Much

68 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
nominal Christianity has only the faintest con
nection with the rehgion of the New Testa
ment. There is crass superstition; there is a
superficial veneer of Christian words over
pagan ideals and pagan principles; there is a
cynical unbelief among many of ourselves that
the kind of Deity we read of in the Gospels
and talk of in church is the actual God who
is Lord of heaven and earth. There is an
urgent summons for us to name the Invisible
to ourselves; shall we call the Deity on whom
we rely the Father of Jesus Christ? There is
an urgent summons for believers in that Name,
to teach it constantly to the ignorant millions
in our own and other lands. What possible
assurance have we that our American people
would not act as ungodly as any of their kins
men across the seas? Are we Protestant
Christians willing to pay the cost in personal
service, in sacrificial giving, in thoughtful and
toilsome readaptation of our churches to meet
•present conditions, that our vast population
shall really understand and trust in the name
of God? Or shall we wait and be forced to
pay the cost a thousandfold in some pagan
catastrophe hke that now turning Europe into

THE THIRD COMMANDMENT 69
a shambles? Are we prepared to make sacri
fices as great as those of war-cursed nations in
order to maintain and push forward the Chris
tian missionary enterprise at home and
throughout the world, convinced that only the
name of the God and Father of Jesus Christ,
known, trusted, obeyed, will lift our world out
of its savagery into the divine-human life of
Him, who has borne God's name as His Son?
To thyself, to thy household, to thy mighty
metropolitan city, to thy beloved country, to
the world for which Christ died, thou shalt
take the name of the Lord, thy God.

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:8: "Remember the sabbath day to keep
it holy." In order to make the whole of life God's
possession the Hebrews systematically "set
apart" certain sections of it. One nation —
Israel — was holy; one tribe — Levi — was
made the priestly caste ; one building — the tem
ple at Jerusalem— was held sacred as God's
dwelling-place; one part of the harvest — the
first fruits — was dedicated; one day in every
seven was kept free from labour as a religious
festival. A consecrated people, a consecrated
place, a consecrated product, a consecrated
time — these and other similarly sanctified frag
ments of hfe were to them reminders of God's
claims upon the world that He had made.
"Verily ye shall keep My sabbaths," ran one
of their oldest codes of law, "for it is a sign
between Me and you throughout your genera
tions; that ye may know that I am Jehovah
who sanctifieth you." 73

74 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Were we to attempt to devise to-day some
scheme for idealising life, for lifting and
linking it to God, could we hit upon a more
effective method? Suppose there had been
no sabbath, would we not be inventing it?
Does it not seem to fit in with the structure
of our human natures? Husbands and
wives like to recall their wedding anniversary.
It is not that they do not love each other as
truly on the other three hundred and sixty-
four days in the year, nor expect as constantly
and carefully to fulfil their mutual obligations.
But their sentiment naturally marks this day
from other days as commemorating their
wedded happiness. The specially remembered
day has something to do with their loving fidel
ity to each other on all other days. A sab
bath, a day set apart to call to mind the union
of man's life with God, seems as inevitable and
as natural a mode of expressing our rehgious
sentiment. When the Hebrews spoke of the
sabbath as part of the original creation,
made in the same week with sky and earth
and sea, and pictured God Himself as rest
ing on the seventh day, they were expressing
in their way what we feel when we say that

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 75
a specially hallowed day is congruous with the
very fabric of our beings. It is "tangled with
all things, twin-made with all."
Scholars tell us that the Hebrews took
over the habit of dividing time up into
weeks of seven days from their Semitic an
cestors in Babylonia, from whom also came
the idea of holding one of these days as
sacred to the gods, a day of ill-omen on which
to work or journey. But Israel's faith trans
muted everything it received in its heritage;
and what it made out of this day, its ancestors
considered unlucky for work, discloses the kind
of God Israel worshipped, the sort of festival
they thought would please Him. Its sabbath
was primarily a humane day: "Six days thou
shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou
shalt rest ; that thine ox and thine ass may have
rest, and the son of thy handmaid and the
sojourner may be refreshed." "In it thou
shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son,
nor thy daughter, nor thy manservant, nor
thy maidservant, nor thine ox, nor thine ass,
nor any of thy cattle, nor the stranger that
is within thy gates; that thy manservant and
thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And

76 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
thou shalt remember that thou wast a servant
in the land of Egypt." Our Lord gave the
true interpretation of the meaning of the day,
as it was understood by Israel's spiritual lead
ers who had planted it in the consciences of
their people, when He said: "The sabbath
was made for man." Israel's God differed
from the deities of Babylon in His humane
ness ; He cared for the slave, the stranger and
the dumb cattle. A day set apart to Him must
be a humane day ; and the sabbath was an early
step in leading Israel up to the conviction that
God is love.
This accounts for the popularity of the sab
bath in Israel. The great mass of the people
instinctively recognised it as a safeguard
against their exploitation, as a magna charta
guaranteeing them rest. The only persons
who are recorded as disliking it are grasping
traders — "ye that would swallow up the needy,
saying when will the sabbath be gone that we
may set forth wheat, making the ephah small
and the shekel great" — and devotees of amuse
ments, who without a sense of social responsi
bility found the rest day no dehght. The na
tion as a whole clung to it more tenaciously

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 77
than to any other religious practice. Despite
the many restrictions with which the later
rabbis surrounded it, it does not seem to have
been a day of burden and gloom to those who
hved under it. A prominent Jewish scholar
wrote a few years ago: "The sabbath is
celebrated by the very people who did observe
it, in hundreds of hymns, which would fill vol
umes, as a day of rest and joy, of pleasure and
dehght, a day in which a man enjoys some pre
sentiment of the pure bliss and happiness which
are stored up for the righteous in the world to
come." To it such tender names were applied
as the "Queen Sabbath," and "the holy, dear,
beloved Sabbath."
But what meaning has the Hebrew sab
bath for us Christians? Technically none
whatsoever. We are not living under law
with prescribed observances, but in the
Spirit of Jesus Christ. The attempt to make
out that in the New Testament the sabbath
is re-established, and shifted from the seventh
to the first day of the week, is merely to read
into the New Testament what is not there; and
the effort to find some basis for keeping Sun
day as the sabbath by saying that privately

78 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
our Lord, or at least His apostles, gave direc
tions to this effect, although they are not re
corded, is equally fanciful. Listen to St. Paul :
"Let no man judge you in meat or in drink, or
in respect of a feast day, or a new moon, or a
sabbath day ; which are a shadow of the things
to come, but the body is Christ's." The law
of the sabbath was for him on the same
level with the laws as to meats and drinks and
various festivals, a law that had its value as a
tutor to lead to Christ, but is now no longer
needed. Again he writes: "One man es-
teemeth one day above another; another es-
teemeth every day alike. Let each man be
fully assured in his own mind." "The Lord's
day" had its origin entirely apart from the sab
bath. It was not commanded by Jesus, nor by
any of His immediate followers. It was simply
kept for sentimental reasons by Christians as
an appropriate day on which to come together
for worship, because on it Jesus had risen
from the grave, and on it at Pentecost the dis
ciples had received the Spirit. It was not
a day of rest; it could not be when the
Christians were a small minority in the popu
lation and possessed no pohtical power; it was

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 79
a day of work, but after or before working-
hours the Christians met together to revive in
one another the spirit of their living Lord.
Paul was not concerned with giving advice, to
churches that could influence the state to enact
a legal holiday; he was thinking of little com
munities made up of slaves and artisans, who
must live their lives under an altogether in
different imperial government.
But as soon as Christianity became the dom
inant religious force under Constantine, it ob
tained legislation making Sunday a day free
from labour. Its motives were in part the
identical motives that set apart the Jewish
sabbath — the desire to obtain humane relief
for the labouring classes; in part it wished to
secure sufficient leisure for its religious services.
The civihsed world to-day owes this work-free
day to the efforts of the Christian Church.
Whatever men do with it, they ought to recog
nise to whom they are indebted for it.
Under the circumstances in which we find
ourselves at present the individual Christian
faces two problems : how to safeguard the holi
day and how to turn the holiday into a holy
day.

80 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
When we insist on the holiday we remember
that Jesus came not to destroy but to fulfil.
The sabbath as a humane institution, protect
ing labourers from being overworked, was
something He prized. Whether this sabbath
should be kept on the seventh or first day of
each week we feel would be a matter of indif
ference to Him. If New York should become
an even greater Jewish community than it now
is, we might well discuss the question whether
Saturday, and not Sunday, should be the
weekly rehgious festival. As it is, there is
more hkehhood of the world's agreeing on the
first than on the seventh day, and many of our
Jewish fellow-citizens are holding Sunday
services. Which day is of small matter;
but the weekly hohday is a necessary pro
vision in the interest of humanity. Christians
and Jews and all lovers of their fellow-men can
combine in insisting that the community shall
provide that on one day in every seven no man
or woman need work; it may go farther and
say that if special inducements are offered to
him to labour as on the other six days, it will
step in and forbid his working, exactly as it
forbids his doing other unhealthy things.

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 81
And while we are speaking of what we in a
democracy can induce the legislature to enact,
it ought to go without saying that Christian
employers will assure their employees the
weekly rest-day. Unfortunately there are
among ourselves the same two classes, against
whom Israel's prophets had to speak as hostile
to this human hohday: pushing business-men
who keep their factories or their office-forces
on duty for at least a part of Sunday in the
greedy effort for gain, or insist that labourers
shall toil on buildings or excavations or ma
chines to fulfil the time-clause in a contract or
carry out rush-orders; and devotees of pleas
ure, who are regardless of the needs and de
sires of others, and give social entertainments,
or indulge in certain kinds of sport, which
necessitate work on the part of employees.
"The sabbath was made for man," and espe
cially for the man who is not in control of his
own time, and who needs to be protected from
the greed or thoughtlessness of those who
would rob him of his day of rest.
In a complex modern city it is by no means
so easy as in agricultural Israel to select a
single day out of the seven and have every

82 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
one rest together on it. It is certainly desirable
that as many persons as possible shall keep the
same day; only so can its social value, as a day
for families to be together, for friends to see
each other, for fellow-believers to worship in
common, be maintained. More social con
science, more of the humanity that prompted
Israel's sabbath, could reduce, and profitably
reduce, a vast amount of the Sunday work that
is now required. There could easily be more
hours out of the twenty-four when the com
munity could agree to be quiet, and so lessen
the necessity for transit facilities, for the open
ing of shops of various sorts, and for the em
ployment of many men and women in a host
of positions. And this diminution of the
quantity and decrease of the hours of Sunday
work ought to be pushed, not primarily for re
ligious reasons, but for (what are really just
as religious motives) humanitarian reasons.
Small shop-keepers do not want to keep their
business open all day, but they are afraid to
lose customers, if they close while their rivals
are open. Railroad companies keep trains
moving so long as there is any profit in the
traffic, and at times when there is no profit

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 83
to accommodate a small part of the public.
We ought to aid labour-unions, and socially-
minded organisations of all sorts, in safeguard
ing the weekly holiday by legislation, and es
pecially by the creation of public sentiment
which lies behind every enforceable law.
And if we insist on the holiday in the in
terests of humanity, we cannot content our
selves with a merely negative position, saying
"You shall not labour," and give ourselves no
concern with the positive uses to which the
compulsory holiday shall be put. We have av
right to protect men against themselves and
forbid their overworking, particularly as their
overwork probably will force a similar strain
on others ; we have no right to compel them to
worship. We would be glad, of course, to have
every one wish to spend the holiday as a holy-
day, and we can remind them that when the
holyday vanishes the holiday is likely to disap
pear, but so long as some will not keep it as a
holyday, we must agree as a community to a
compromise. The religious element have a
right to demand that they be guaranteed a rea
sonable degree of quiet for the fulfilment of
their worship ; the less religious or non-religious

84 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
elements have a right to be allowed the fullest
indulgence in recreation, provided on the one
hand it does not disturb worship, and on the
other that it does not entail too hard labour,
for that defeats the social purpose of the hoh
day. For those whose calhngs make it impossible
that they shall be given a day free from labour
on the weekly sabbath, the community ought
to insist that some equivalent amount of rest
be assured them at other times. And the
Church must see to it that, if possible, oppor
tunity for religious inspiration is accorded
them at the time when they are free. This re
quires more meetings or services on the part of
our churches, and more workers to conduct
them; and it is a duty, to which in every great
city the Church must address itself.
As worshippers of a God whom we know
to be love, we have even more reason than
the Hebrews for insisting on the holiday as a
divine interest. Indeed, when so many of our
people work in factories, offices, furnaces,
mines and similar shut-in employments, there
is far more necessity for securing free hours
that can be spent in the open, than in agricul-

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 85
tural Israel. The Saturday or midweek half-
holiday seems as religious a cause for us to
champion as the ancient sabbath-rest. If we
can secure regularly a half -holiday for pleas
ure, we shall have more reason to claim the
Sunday for religion.
And this brings us to our Christian task of
transforming the hohday into a holyday. Let
us take our stand with St. Paul and remind
ourselves that as followers of Jesus our whole
life is to be devoted to Him. One day cannot
be more sacred than another, for all are to be
given exclusively to God's will. We cannot
speak, therefore, of something as being wrong
for us on Sunday, but right on Monday. We
must make the best use of each day, and any
thing less than the best is wrong, whether it
be week-day or Sunday; and the best, as we
see it under Christ's guidance, is right on all
days. It is lawful sabbath-day or any other
day to do good.
But here is a day that has been won as a
holiday by the Christians of the past, and that
is hallowed by the remembrance of Jesus's
victory and called "The Lord's Day." There
is no divine law telling us how to spend it, for

86 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
we are not servants but friends. We have to
ask ourselves as intelligent and thoughtful sons
of God how we can most appropriately use the
day. Instead of discussing what is right or
wrong on Sunday, let us think of what is ap
propriate or inappropriate.
The God to whom we keep the day holy is
called "Father." His festival day seems fit
tingly to be a family day.' There are few
enough contacts between parents and children,
between the members of the household. What
more suitable to the day than some simple
family gathering for worship — Bible reading,
prayer, perhaps hymn-singing? Where there
are young children, this is surely the day when
father and mother should try to pass on to
them their inheritance of Christian faith. No
Church and Sunday School training can take
the place of home lessons in rehgion. The
most dehghtful books, the best-loved stories,
the most-prized walks with a usually busy
father, ought to be kept to mark this as the
best day in the week.
Again, this God to whom we hallow the
hohday has brought us into a larger family
—"the household of faith." That family

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 87
gathers in the house of God and enters col
lectively into the Father's larger life. Re
ligion will not long remain vital in the life
that loses touch with fellow believers. It is
all very well to say that we are as near
to God under the blue sky as in a Church
building, that we can worship just as well
by doing some quiet thinking as by singing
hymns and listening to prayers and ser
mons, but the fact remains that the thought
of God fades out of the heart that is not
restamped with it by the weekly reminder
of Him in the house set apart for His wor
ship. A special day is observed by something
appropriate to its meaning. The Fourth of
July demands a patriotic observance as the
nation's birthday. Sunday requires a Church
service as the Church's birthday, the anni
versary of its awakening to the joyous faith
in love's victory in Christ and to the sense of
its spiritual power through sharing His Spirit
of love to set up His Kingdom in the whole
world's life.
Above all, if we make the day holy to the
Father of Jesus Christ, His special interest
is in His most needy children. His chief

88 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
delight is not in the ninety and nine just
persons who are already conscientious, but
in the sinner who is led to repentance, in the
child who is brought to dedicate his life to
righteousness. Unless we provide to the ex
tent of our abihties for some work on Sunday
for the benefit of others who need our sym
pathy, our knowledge, our faith, we do not
spend it suitably as the day of the Lord Jesus,
the day we hallow to His God and Father.
Because we are under no Sabbath law
each of us must settle for himself, as an in
dependent and responsible child of God, how
he shall keep the day holy. John was "in the
Spirit on the Lord's day" and had certain
great experiences; but had James or Peter
or Paul been in the Spirit on the Lord's day
on Patmos their ways of receiving and
showing that same Spirit would have been cer
tainly different. Not by following prescribed
rules, but by surrendering ourselves thought
fully and conscientiously to the control of the
Spirit of Christ, shall we discover how to make
our Sundays most godlike, labour-free days.
We shall differ widely; there will be the unity
of the Spirit.-

THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT 89
And the uses to which we put our Sundays
are searching tests of what we are. Those who
devote them largely to physical exercise, dis
close themselves as seeking primarily to be
healthy animals. Those who set them apart
for a good time, write themselves down as car
ing most for pleasure. Those who use them
for friendly visits, announce themselves as so
ciably minded men and women of this world,
whose horizons are bounded and whose hearts
are satisfied with the associations of earth.
Those who deliberately devote the day to the
Father in heaven, to binding their homes to
Him, to contributing their presence to the wor
shipping company of His children, to accom
plishing some part of His purpose for breth
ren who need what they can supply, judge
themselves children of God, unsatisfied with
out a glimpse of the King in His beauty and
of the land of far distances. The judgment is
all the more significant in an age like ours
when there is no strong social pressure on us
to hallow the day, but rather the reverse; and
when we frankly recognise that we are under
no divine commandment, but acting freely as
trusted friends of Jesus. The holiday comes

90 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
to us as a bequest from the behevers of the
past who won it for humanity's sake, and who
hallowed it as the Lord's day for Christ's sake ;
and the use to which we put it makes it a judg
ment day, our judgment of what we are and
seek.

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:12: "Honour thy father and thy mother."
No one chooses his parents ; and in a demo
cratic age, when the freedom of the individual
to select his own rulers and determine for
himself those to whom he will give his loyalty
and obedience is a fundamental principle, there
is a very different attitude towards hereditary
obligations than under a monarchy. Parents
are frequently regarded as an accident of
birth. Some people are quite certain that, had
they picked their own father and mother, they
would have made other selections. They find
themselves heirs of an undesirable inheritance.
They trace the pedigree of their most hamper
ing characteristics, their least likable faults,
their unloveliest weaknesses, directly to their
ancestors. William Dean Howells has writ
ten: "That swollen paunch you are doomed to bear
Your gluttonous grandsire used to wear;
93

94 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
That tongue at once so light and dull,
Wagged in your grandma's empty skull;
That leering of the sensual eye,
Your father, when he came to die,
Left you alone; and that cheap flirt,
Your mother, gave you from the dirt
The simper which she used upon
So many men ere he was won."
And even where the gifts of heredity are
prized, there is often a maladjustment of tem
peraments to each other that assures almost
constant friction between parents and chil
dren. Sometimes it is due to the utter unlike-
ness of children to parents ; with features and
voice and walk that duplicate father's or
mother's, the nature within appears to have
been born of some other spirit altogether.
Oftener it is their very likeness in disposition
that produces disagreement. Father and son,
mother and daughter, admirable in themselves,
are too alike to get on well together. Two
strong wills are nearly foredoomed to clash;
two impulsive natures are well nigh certain
to produce in each other an explosion of feel
ing and temper; two reserved people are all
but predestined to mutual misunderstandings.
George Eliot, that keen analyst of the effects

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 95
of characters upon each other, says in describ
ing the resemblance and difference between
Adam Bede and his mother: "Family like
ness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature,
that great tragic dramatist, knits us together
by bone and muscle, and divides us by the
subtler web of our brains; blends yearning
and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings
to the beings that jar us at every movement.
We hear a voice with the very cadence of our
own uttering the thoughts we despise ; we see
eyes — ah! so like our mother's — averted from
us in cold alienation; and our last darling
child startles us with the air and gestures of
the sister we parted from in bitterness long
years ago. The father to whom we owe our
best heritage — the mechanical instinct, the
keen sensibility to harmony, the unconscious
skill of the modelling hand — galls us, and puts
us to shame by his daily errors; the long-lost
mother, whose face we begin to see in the
glass as our wrinkles come, once fretted our
young souls with her anxious humours and
irrational persistence."
We provide for divorces between husbands
and wives, who cannot endure living together;

96 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
is it reasonable that there should be no repu
table way by which sons and daughters can
free themselves from obligations to parents
whom they discover to be intolerable?
The difficulties of maintaining the proper
relations between children and parents are
vastly increased among ourselves by two fac
tors. One is the change in social status due to
the acquisition of wealth or of education. Son
or daughter find themselves hving in a dif
ferent world from that to which father and
mother are accustomed, and in which they will
continue to hve so long as life lasts. It is a
world of other ideas and other ideals; several
centuries seem to he between two immediately
touching generations. A great gulf divides
their feehngs, their sympathies, their opinions,
their convictions, even their consciences.
Sometimes we should call the older genera
tion better than the younger ; as often, perhaps,
the children are better than their parents. But
no matter with which the advantage hes, the
difficulty of preserving the right relations be
tween the two becomes acute. We can all
think of tragic situations where father and
mother have toiled and saved, and given their

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 97
children advantages of culture and social posi
tion they never themselves possessed, only to
have a chasm sunder son or daughter from
them. The other is the change in country that
works such havoc with the family ties in hosts
of our immigrant homes. Children, born here
or brought here young, grow up in our atmos
phere, are trained in our schools, imbibe our
ideals and find themselves thousands of miles
away in sentiment and thought and faith from
their parents. Very often they know far more,
have much keener intuitions and brighter
minds, are actually earning more at eighteen
than father and mother can earn, and instead
of children looking up to and being led by par
ents, the relationship is reversed, and the chil
dren lead them into the unfamiliar ways of
the new land of their adoption. It is not only
that son and daughter speak naturally a dif
ferent language and can hardly express them
selves in the parental tongue, but that they
are different in mind and heart, in the very
structure and fibre of their beings. Home
tragedies frequently result; and one scarcely
knows which is the more to blame, or whether

98 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
either is really blameworthy when circum
stances have so widely separated the two gen
erations. To what extent can we apply a command
ment, devised for tribesmen among whom sons
and daughters grew up to follow the callings
and repeat almost exactly the careers of their
ancestors, to conditions where the hves of chil
dren are so totally unhke those in which their
parents were reared?
Has it not been a cardinal error of our in
dividualism to think so often of our obliga
tions as voluntary? Many men regard civic
duties as purely optional; they may be in
terested in politics, they do not feel that they
must. We may burden ourselves with the
woes of our brethren in war-stricken Europe;
but we are sensible of no irresistible moral com
pulsion. The more social conscience into which
God is trying to educate us will certainly rec
ognise obligations in many more relationships
which we have had no choice whatsoever in
forming. Responsibihties are almost never
willingly and freely chosen; they are thrust
upon us. And family ties, with whose forma
tion we had nothing to do, are just those best

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 99
fitted to stretch our consciences and develop
us into the larger, more brotherly-minded chil
dren of God it is our Father's main aim to
produce. Happily very few of us wish to exchange
our parents for others. We may see faults
in them; for love need not be blind; but we
see infinitely more to love and revere. We
cannot forget that in our helpless infancy it
was their devotion that watched our every
breath, kept us alive through numberless
childish ills, soothed our small but very real
sorrows, planned our happiness, bore in pa
tience with our early but often precociously
mature iniquities, thought us wonderful
when to all other eyes we were very ordinary
children, discovered music in our voices,
wisdom in our sayings, beauty in our faces,
saintliness in our actions and a charm in our
companionship, when to everybody else we
were shrill-toned, stupid or forward, plain,
mischievous, troublesome specimens of young
humanity. They may have spoiled us; they
may have disciplined us unwisely ; there may be
a great many things we wish they had done
or had left undone for us in our childhood;

100 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
but they loved us. There is probably not a
life here behind which does not lie very gen
uine parental sacrifice ; and behind many of us
hes a sacrifice comparable only to that supreme
Self -offering on Calvary. Father and mother
scarcely had a thought in which we did not
occur, made no plan that did not include our
welfare or pleasure, forwent many an interest
ing amusement and denied themselves many
much desired benefits that they might give us
advantages, and day and night freely spent
and were spent for our sakes. Not to treat
them with the utmost deference, not to yield
them heartiest and most considerate affection,
is to show ourselves contemptible ingrates.
Many persons are puzzled by finding a spe
cial reward attached to this commandment.
Paul calls it "the first commandment with
promise." Why should honouring father and
mother be recompensed more than fidelity to
God or remembering the Sabbath? It seems
less necessary to offer an inducement to keep
this commandment because it is easier to many
of us than some of the rest. And is it true
that those who respect their parents live longer
than those who do not? Rewards in the Bible

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 101
are always results. This is not a bribe to entice
us to fulfil our filial duties; this is a state
ment by the law-giver of the experience of
men, that children who defer to the maturer
judgment of their elders avoid the life-shorten
ing follies of youth. It is a common-sense
statement which is borne out by the experience
of the race in every generation.
It seems slightly unfair that the Deca
logue should contain a commandment for chil
dren, but none for parents. Paul, when he
writes "Children obey your parents in the
Lord," at once adds, "And ye fathers provoke
not your children to wrath, but nurture them
in the chastening and admonition (the disci
phne and training) of the Lord." One would
like to insert Commandment No. 5 A, "Fath
ers and mothers prove yourself honourable."
Most parents receive all the respect they de
serve ; and there are some who make it exceed
ingly difficult for their children to reverence
them. Not to speak of positive wickedness,
there are so many whose smallness or flippancy
or silliness or emptiness do not render them
easily honoured. There is something, further,
in the spirit of our age that has altered parents

102 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
as profoundly as in other ways it has altered
children. It is a common remark that there
are no more old people. One very rarely
meets man or woman to whom one could apply
the adjective "venerable," or who would them
selves hke to have such an adjective applied to
them. Our grandmothers used to acquiesce in
old age, often accept it as a proud distinction,
and both dressed and acted the part. Their
coevals to-day take the utmost pains not to
seem elderly. Perhaps the advances of medical
science, with its devices for counteracting some
some ofthe cripphnginfirmities of age, may ac
count in part for the change. Surely it is right
that men and women should keep themselves
limber and active and alive in interest that they
may be useful as long as they possibly can. But
is there anything more deadening to respect
than the silly effort to appear more youthful
than one really is? It is a fine thing for par
ents to make themselves companions and com
rades of their children; but "chumminess" won
at the cost of reverence is a questionable gain
for both children and parents.
To be sure, parents do not want to be ask
ing themselves, "How can I make my children

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 103
honour me?" When any of us begins to think
about his dignity, he becomes inevitably less
dignified. Honour comes without seeking to
those whose purposes are sufficiently high,
whose lives are devoted to aims men cannot
help respecting, whose consciences and convic
tions lift them above things petty and con
temptible. True comradeship of the closest
sort need not in the least do away with unfail
ing respect, but rather enhances it when father
and son, mother and daughter are companions
in that which is in itself exalting. And the
surest road to true honour lies in so living with
the Most High, and so taking children into the
life with Him, that their thoughts of God, their
hallowed thoughts, will naturally include you.
Thomas Carlyle exclaims with heartfelt devo
tion: "Oh, (pious mother, kind, good, brave
and truthful soul as I have ever found in this
world, your poor Tom has fallen very lonely,
very lame and broken in this pilgrimage of his ;
and you cannot help by a kind word any more.
But from your grave in Ecclefechan Kirkyard
yonder you bid him trust in God; and that also
he will try to do, for the conquest of the world
and of death and hell does verily he in that."

104 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Robert Louis Stevenson writes to his father:
"I wish that I might become a man worth talk
ing of, if it were only that you should not have
thrown away your pains;" and Mrs. Napier
says of the son: "In the Vailima prayers I
seem to hear again an old melody that I know
well — the echo of his father's words and daily
devotions." How many of the boys and girls
of this congregation hear father or mother
praying with and for them? How many will
link father's and mother's name in reverence
their longest day with that of God, because,
through what they have taught them and
through what they have themselves been
to them, they have come to know and honour
the Most Highest?
The Bible has a method of placing our
duties around us in a series of concentric
circles; and, by training us to be faithful to
those in the smallest and most immediate
circles, of educating us to reach out and include
the wider. The child's first circle is the home
and the lesson to be learned there is honour.
Not obedience merely, but the habit of looking
up to others with consideration and respect for
them as better than we, with deference to their

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 105
judgment and wishes — that is our first devel
opment in character. Unless it is learned in the
first circle, it is likely never to be learned ; and
the life that never considers others, respects
them and defers to their wishes is a pitiably
distorted life. Carlyle was describing a Scot
tish rather than an American home when he
wrote of his early days: "An inflexible ele
ment of authority surrounded us all. We felt
from the first (a useful thing) that our own
wish had often nothing to do in the matter."
We want to educate not to break the will;
and we want the co-operation, the willing
agreement of children, in what we plan for
them. But is there not an opposite extreme in
many homes among ourselves, where children
are allowed to exercise their wishes and whims,
without being taught to consider and respect
the wiser and maturer wishes of their elders?
Children who are not trained to consider — and
that means to respect and defer to the desires
of their parents — grow up warped towards sel
fishness, to become unfit, largely because of
their lack of considerateness, for marriage and
friendship and all the social relationships of
life.

106 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
A wider circle which surrounds the home is
the land with its laws. "Honour thy father
and thy mother" is succeeded by "honour the
king" — respect constituted authority. A home
which does not enforce its demands presents
the state with lawless citizens. Many of those
who deplore want of regard for law and order
are producing httle anarchists in their own
households. Reverence for the will of the
family, a will not arbitrarily and despotically
imposed, but established by wise love over chil
dren who so far as possible are taught to see its
wisdom and to feel its love, is the source of re
spect for the authority of a democracy, where
the individual must submit himself to the will
-of the community which he is given his full
share in forming.
And outside the circle of one's country hes
the more inclusive circle which embraces the
whole race. If the first commandment we learn
to fulfil is "Honour thy father and thy
mother," the last, which occupies us our hfe
long, and which it may require some sections
of eternity for us fully to master, is : "Honour
all men." And unless in childhood we have
learned to look up to somebody and have

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 107
caught that attitude so firmly that we cannot
be bent or twisted out of it by all the circum
stances of hfe that tempt us to look down on
men, we have scant chance of acquiring it later.
We are debarred from intimacies with men;
for we only get near to them as we go up to
them. We are handicapped in our sympathies,
for sympathy begins with appreciation — a
form of honour. We are hkely to pass our
days landlocked in a little puddle of our own
prejudices, while the great ocean of human life
lies outside, waiting to carry us to its many,
many shores. We are seriously, if not fatally,
crippled for the most sacred of human rela
tions — marriage; for wedded happiness can
only exist between two mutally reverencing
beings. The word "honour" in the marriage
service is fully as important as the word "love,"
and there can be no love worthy the name with
out honour. The child unschooled to honour
father and mother will turn out the husband
or wife that wrecks a home. And without this
fundamental lesson we are cut off from all
broadening and enriching contacts with other
people; for we learn from them only as we
look up to them; we draw out their best only

108 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
as we approach them with respect; we tempt
them to show us their sacred things only as we
make them sure that whatever is prized by
them will be invariably revered by us. Yes,
the source of all helpful and happy intercourse
with other human beings whatsoever lies back
in this primary home duty: "Honour thy
father and thy mother."
And the circle of our duties does not stop
with men; the circumference of our contacts
goes out to the unseen and reaches the living
God. Goethe makes Faust say: "The thrill
of awe is man's best quality." Those of you
who have seen Raphael's frescoes in the Vati
can may have noticed that in the "Philosophi
cal School" no face is looking up, while in the
"Theological School" (The Disputa) opposite,
every face is lifted. No man ever gets close
to God save as he goes up to Him. Those who
treat the Deity with the familiarity of an equal,
or even venture to offer him their distinguished
patronage, have not the remotest touch with
the God and Father of Jesus Christ. Jesus
dwelt in His Father's love, but He said "Hal
lowed be Thy name," "I thank Thee, Father,
Lord." That is a striking saying of St. Paul's,

THE FIFTH COMMANDMENT 109
"I bow my knees unto the Father, of whom
every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is
named." The divine name is conferred on
parents; they are to play Providence to their
children, to ban or bless them. They are to
represent the Divine, the honourable and ador
able to them. Father or mother who do not
deserve honour, foster irreligion and every
other unhappiness in a child. Children who
instinctively look up, because the beings they
know first and best command their reverence,
catch the attitude of spirit within whose ken in
due time the Divine will swim, and the honour
they have learned to give those who bore the
fatherly name on earth will give itself fully to
the great Father of all.
"Honour thy father and mother (which is
the first commaridment with promise) that it
may be well with thee," and that thy days may
be long in the earth with its enriching human
relations, and longer still in the heavens with
their hallowed fellowships that abide forever.

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:13: "Thou shalt not kill."
There is almost an element of humour in
preaching against murder to a congregation
of respectable people like ourselves. Did we
really think that the man in the next pew
might possibly be "a gunman" or the woman
across the aisle a prospective poisoner, how
very uncomfortable we should feel! And if
the preacher should say, "I have a special word
this morning for those who have recently mur
dered someone," we should look about us with
a shudder, and wonder what sort of company
we had got into. It is well for us to remember
that there are Christian congregations in some
parts of the world — in Africa, in the Island of
Formosa, among the head hunters in the Phil
ippines — where pillars of the Church are
former man-slayers. From the beginning the
Gospel of Christ has not hesitated to deal with
the most brutal elements of mankind. It sur-
113

114 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
prises us to hear Peter writing in his first
epistle: "Let none of you suffer as a mur
derer." How could Christians need any such
warning? Think out of what stuff the apos
tles had to manufacture Christians! And if
murder appears to be so unthinkable to us
that we smile at the thought of a sermon
preached to us from the Sixth Commandment,
let us not forget that we owe the security of our
own hves in this community very largely to
the work of the Christian Church in the past
centuries, and to the prevalence of Christian
ideals and sentiments throughout our land to
day. If these ideals became weaker in our
own city, who knows what an increase in acts
of violence we should witness? Home Mis
sions is indirectly the most profitable form of
life insurance.
The old Jewish legislation took cognizance
of forms of murder other than deliberate kill
ing. In the Book of Exodus we read: "If an
ox gore a man or a woman to death, the ox
shall be surely stoned, and its flesh shall not be
eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit.
But if the ox was wont to gore in time past,
and it hath been testified to its owner, and he

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 115
hath not kept it in, but it hath killed a man or
a woman; the ox shall be stoned, and its owner
also shall be put to death." The responsibility
of the owners — be they stockholders, or direct
ors, or managers — for accidents, when they
know that they have neglected proper precau
tions, is the modern equivalent of that ancient
statute. The corporation, which in its eager
ness for dividends allows grade-crossings to
remain, or to remain unguarded, which does
not introduce safety-appliances, which breaks
the fire laws in its buildings, which permits un
sanitary conditions to prevail in its plant,
which caters to the desire for speed at the risk
of disaster, which fails to insist on constant and
careful inspection of machinery, workrooms,
tracks, bridges and the like, is repeating the
same perilous experiment of leaving a dan
gerous ox at large. Present-day legislators
are trying to find a way by which they can
make someone as personally hable as these an
cient lawgivers held the ox's owner. Every
preventable accident ought to mean that some
body will be punished; life cannot otherwise
be adequately protected.
There are still other and subtler ways of

116 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
committing murder. Work may be paid so
poorly that life cannot be supported on the
wages. Long ago, Tom Hood wrote The
Song of the Shirt:
Work — work — work,
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work — work — work,
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam and gusset and band,
Band and gusset and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream !
Work — work — work !
My labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw —
A crust of bread — and rags.
That shattered roof — and this naked floor —
A table — a broken chair —
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there.
Oh God ! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap !
And where human lives are used up in our
commercial machinery, it is not easy to fix the
blame. If we hold the employer, he will point
out that his profits are not unreasonable, and
that he is forced to keep his prices down by

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 117
keen competition; if we hold the department
store, where the goods are sold, they, too, will
remind us that business risks are great, and the
pressure of rivals difficult to meet. The fact
is that there is guilt which we all — public,
middlemen, manufacturers — must share, and
which, because our part of it seems a trifling
fraction, we dare not minimize. The whole sub
ject of "the living wage" is complicated, and
must be handled with painstaking study; but
it is for us as Christians to insist that it shall
be handled, that it is the community's duty —
our bounden duty, yours and mine — to see to
it that labour is properly paid. "Thou shalt
not kill."
Or again, work may not be obtainable, and
starvation may face a willing toiler who can
not find employment. We believe in the right
to hve ; we have not been as accustomed to as
sert the right to obtain the means to live, the
right to work. When industries are affected
by a world catastrophe such as that which is at
present convulsing Europe, it is not surprising
that there should be many thousands of unem
ployed men and women; but we have to con
front the situation that without any such dis-

118 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
aster there is normally a large number of wor'lk-
less people every year among us. We have
never thought that it was anybody's obhgation
to find them work; they were expected to seek
it for themselves; and that was much more
possible in our less crowded days. With the
growth of the social conscience and the pres
sure of our vaster population we are commenc
ing to feel that it is the community's duty to
assist people to obtain employment. The prob
lem is exceedingly difficult; among the unem
ployed there are always loafers, incompetents,
and ne'er-do-weels ; men trained to one line of
labour cannot readily be shifted to another;
many jobs are necessarily temporary, and la
bourers must move about if they are to keep
employed. Some of our churches — our own,
for instance — have not been able to solve the
much simpler problem of getting churchless
ministers and ministerless churches together;
and the countrywide and worldwide problem of
unemployment is bewilderingly difficult. But
its solution will be forthcoming only as our con
sciences insist that social machinery shall be
devised by which no wilhng worker need re
main idle. It may not offer him the position

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 119
he would like, but it will guarantee him and
his a hvelihood, provided he is not too lazy to
do a reasonable amount of hard labour. To
the end of time the stimulus of hunger may
have to be resorted to in the case of the slug
gard, and we have Scriptural authority for
such pressure in the apostle's statement: "If
any will not work, neither let him eat"; but
where any will work, the ancient command
ment is addressed to us: "Thou shalt not
kill." Two, often debated, questions are raised in
our minds by this injunction — capital pun
ishment and war. To be sure, the command
ment did not seem to those to whom it was
given to interfere with either. The death pen
alty is prescribed by Israel's lawgivers for sev
eral offences, and Israel's greatest saints were
frequently redoubtable warriors. But "time
makes ancient good uncouth," and we are not
living under the law of Moses, but under the
Spirit of Jesus.
The Christian's interest in the treatment of
the wrong-doer is not retribution — life for life;
nor is it the protection of society by vindicat
ing the sanctity of law and making a deterrent

120 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
example of the criminal. These were Old Tes
tament interests: "Whoso sheddeth man's
blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in
the image of God made He man." But, "For
give us our debts as we forgive our debtors" is
the prayer Jesus puts on the lips of Christian
society. We are to be merciful as our God is
merciful, just as He is just. His mercy is
transforming; His justice is redemptive. His
love is no good-natured sentiment that allows
itself to be imposed on, but a passionate devo
tion that does not cease to strive to make His
children righteous. One who has deliberately
taken another's life cannot be left where he
may do the hke again, nor can he be allowed
to remain without the severest discipline re
quisite to give him a right conscience, self-con
trol and a brotherly heart. But to put him in
an electric chair is simply a short and easy
way for society to rid itself of a menace, and
to absolve itself from attempting the self-sac
rificing labour necessary to make over a mur
derer into a child of God. "He is faithful
and just to forgive us our sin and to cleanse
us from all unrighteousness. Be ye therefore
merciful as your Father is merciful."

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 121
Nor can war ever commend itself to the
Christian conscience. How can anyone point
a rifle, or drop a bomb, or plant a mine, "in
the name of Jesus"? And it is written, "What
soever ye do, in word or in deed, do all in the
name of the Lord Jesus." What we cannot
do in His name, we are not to do at all.
But we must remember an expression which
Jesus used in connection with His command,
"Swear not at all." He was insisting that
among Christians a man's word should be so
reliable that all oaths would be superfluous,
and He said "Whatsoever is more cometh of
evil," meaning that in an evil world an oath
might be expedient, but must be recognised as
due to evil. War cometh of evil, and as Chris
tians we must see to it that we do nothing to
make it come. But when war comes upon a
land, there is nothing for Christians but to take
arms and do their part in defending themselves
and theirs from attack. We cannot be saved
from evil until all others are saved with us;
and while evil persists, driving men to strife,
it is not the part of Christian love, either to the
invaders or to those who look to us for protec
tion, to let the assailants wreak their purpose

122 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
upon us. But let us make clear that slaughter
of our brethren is inherently incompatible with
the mind of Christ; it cometh only of evil.
In a world hke ours we often face merely
a choice of evils ; neither alternative is entirely
Christian. In 1861 our fathers faced the issue
of slavery or war ; and to-day few men, South
or North, regret that war was chosen, the issue
settled, and slavery banished from the land.
Our brethren overseas have been confronted
by what seemed to them a similar choice of
evils; it is not for us to judge them, that we
be not judged; but to hope and pray that this
frightful wholesale killing will once and for
all relegate war to the class of unthinkable so
lutions of differences of opinion, as among our
selves the duel is gone forever.
Jesus dealt explicitly with this ancient com
mandment. "Ye have heard that it was said to
them of old time, Thou shalt not kill ; and who
soever shall kill shall be in danger of the judg
ment ; but I say unto you, that every one who
is angry with his brother shall be in danger of
the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his
brother, Raca (good-for-nothing), shall be in
danger of the council; and whosoever shall say,

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 123
Thou fool (worthless wretch), shall be in dan
ger of the hell of fire." Jesus is, of course, not
giving a new law that is to be enacted into
statutes, as the Mosaic commandments were
made the common law of Israel. He is giving
His followers ideals and standards. "You have
been told not to murder; I tell you not to be
angry with anyone, not to be contemptuous
of anyone as a stupid fellow, not to condemn
anyone as morally worthless." It is His way
of getting at the underlying principle of the
old commandment. "Thou shalt not kill" as
serts the sanctity of a human being because he
is made in the image of God. Jesus tells us
that there are other ways of violating that
sanctity than by putting him to death. One
is losing your temper in dealing with him. You
may not say a word; you may control both
tongue and facial expression; but in thought
you have no use for him. That for Jesus is
ungodliness, because God has use for this man;
God cherishes no such irritated feeling. An
other is lettmg out some rather mild expression
derogatory of the other man's ability. Raca
seems to mean little worse than "You stupid";
it does not imply contempt for a man's charac-

124 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
ter, only for his head or his skill. That, too,
for Jesus is ungodlike, for God has made no
human being good for nothing. A third is
calling a man a scoundrel, a moral reprobate.
Such is the Hebrew significance of "fool."
That is ungodlike, for none is morally worth
less ; there are possibilities of good in the lowest.
Jesus is concerned with our feelings towards
men, for "from within out of the heart of man
proceed murders."
Let us remind ourselves what Jesus has suc
ceeded in accomplishing in rendering human
beings sacred to each other. There is no more
striking chapter in the record of the moral
progress of mankind than that which treats of
the new ideas of the sanctity of human life that
entered the world with the spread of Chris
tianity. In the Roman world, as in the non-
Christian world to-day, an unborn child was
not protected against death by abortion; but
the new feeling that here was an immortal child
of the Father in heaven enacted legislation
which is operative to this day. Nor was there
any sentiment against disposing of a new-born
baby, when its parents did not wish to rear it.
Until very recently a cart went about the

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 125
streets of Pekin gathering up the bodies of
dead infants whose families chose to throw
them out rather than keep them alive. Rome,
for military reasons, sought to insist that all
healthy male babies should be kept; but the
deformed or weakly and all female babies
might be exposed with impunity. The new
Christian conscience battled for centuries for
the lives of little children ; it battles still in the
campaign to safeguard their health, to protect
them from infection, to guarantee the city's
milk supply, to assure even the foundling a
home and an upbringing. And, perhaps more
shocking to our minds, was the passion for the
gladiatorial shows, where men from all parts
of the world fought each other to death or com
bated with wild beasts for the amusement of
the populace. "The extinction of the gladia
torial spectacles," writes Mr. Lecky, "is, of
all the results of early Christian influence, that
upon which the historian can look with the
deepest and most unmingled satisfaction.
Horrible as was the bloodshed they directly
caused, these games were perhaps still more
pernicious on account of the callousness of
feeling they diffused through all classes, the

126 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
fatal obstacle they presented to any general
elevation of humanity. Yet the attitude of the
pagans decisively proves that no progress of
philosophy or social civilisation was hkely, for
a very long period, to have extirpated them,
and it can hardly be doubted that, had they
been flourishing unchallenged as in the days of
Trajan, when the rude warriors of the North
obtained the empire of Italy, they would have
been eagerly adopted by the conquerors,
would have taken deep root in mediaeval life,
and have indefinitely retarded the progress of
humanity. Christianity alone was powerful
enough to tear this evil plant from the Roman
soil." We have still a task of the same charac
ter to perform in doing away with every exhi
bition of brutality for the sake of amusement.
The present war has vastly increased the in
terest in military and naval operations; more
children than ever are playing soldiers and
sailors. Most of such play is harmless enough
and a necessary form of letting children live
through a section, a pitifully long section, of
the race's experience ; and most pictures of bat
tles will help to increase the loathing we have
for the whole butcherlike business of blood-

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 127
shed; but our consciences need to be on the
alert against anything whatsoever that tends
to brutahse and render callous the hearts of
men. Reverence for human beings as children
of God, to be loved, honoured, served — that is
the attitude followers of Jesus are set to make
universal. And as for Christ's own apparently impos
sible ideal which excludes an irritated thought
or expression ; it did not in His own case hinder
Him from feeling strongly and expressing
Himself with ample vigour with regard to
those who stood in the way of the Kingdom
of love. He called Herod a fox and the Phari
sees hypocrites ; He drove the money-changers
from the Temple with a scourge. But all the
while one feels that He respected the manhood
of those He was forced to attack. His very
invective is witness of the higher and better ex
pectations He cherished of them. Honour
men sufficiently as children of God, and we can
speak frankly of that about them in which they
dishonour themselves. Our peril lies in losing
the love that believeth and hopeth all things,
in feeling that some are not worth helping. It
is this giving up of any man as too trying, or

128 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
too dull, or too bad, that Jesus condemns as
the violation of the old statute against mur
der: "Thou shalt not kill."
There is still another apphcation of this
commandment : "Thou shalt not kill thyself."
Many college debating societies have threshed
out the question, "Is suicide ever justifiable?"
We need not discuss the hypothetical question.
To Christians a man's hfe is not his own; it
belongs to God and to those to whom God has
given him. No man has the right to end it for
himself. But there are many more ways of
committing suicide than by cutting one's throat
or turning on the gas jet. We talk sometimes
of "killing time"; but during any section of
time there is an epoch of life, and to kill time is
to slay some part of self and what self should
have done. Or we speak of someone as "throw
ing himself away"; that which he does is not
worthy of him, and under such circumstances
part of a man, and the best part of him, is not
really alive; he is a partial suicide. Or we say
of ourselves, excusing our dulness or want
of poise and patience: "I'm not myself to-day."
What have we done with our self? There are
times when physical weakness or nervous

THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT 129
strain will make it impossible for us to bring
our whole mind and heart and will into action ;
but there are often times when the lower ideals
about us intrude and take possession and we
are not ourselves. Such intrusions are tem
porary suicides ; and the peril is that they may
become permanent.
The most tragic figure in Christian history is
just such a suicide. Judas Iscariot was once
man enough to appreciate Jesus of Nazareth.
He gave Him his sincere loyalty and obedience.
He went the length of attaching himself to that
company of devoted men that moved wherever
the Master went. We have no reason to think
that Jesus did not welcome and trust him, ex
actly as He did the rest. And Judas heard the
parables which Matthew heard, and watched
the acts of self-giving kindness which Peter
saw, and shared the intimate friendship of the
Master which John knew. But there came
these intrusions of other ideals, and Judas did
not close the door to them. Probably his dis
loyalties were very trifling to begin with — a lit
tle something false here and a small disobedi
ence there; and gradually Jesus saw that Judas
was no longer himself. And the killing process

130 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
went on until at last we see a desperate man
knotting a cord about his own neck and making
his own ghastly end. A man's hfe consisteth
not in the things that he possesses, but in that
which possesses him. To have seen one's high
est and not to let it keep complete mastery of
us, is the road to suicide. To have felt the spell
of Jesus Christ, to appreciate Him and yield
Him one's loyalty, but not to let Him keep that
allegiance completely, leads to self-destruction.
"Thou shalt not kill."

THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT

THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:14: "Thou shalt not commit adultery."
The commandment which safeguards hu
man life is followed by this commandment
which protects the family and asserts the sanc
tity of the marriage tie. The connection of the
two commandments suggests that home is the
next most sacred thing to life itself.
In deahng with the Scriptural teaching upon
marriage it is important that we make clear
to ourselves in what sense we accept the Bible
as authoritative. If we consider it, as it is
widely considered among Protestant Chris
tians, a divine book equally inspired in all its
parts, we shall arrive at a very confused ideal
of wedded life. At times the Old Testament
holds up a high standard of what husband and
wife should mean to each other and condemns
severely the vice of impurity ; at other times it
commends, as "after God's own heart," men
whose hves seem to us profligate, and gives ex
phcit teaching that has been used to justify
133

134 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Mormonism; and even the New Testament oc
casionally presents a low ideal. If we wish to
gain a clearly Christian view of marriage, we
are compelled to take the theory that the
Bible is the record of the gradual evolution of
standards, and must be read with discrimi
nating eyes that distinguish loftier from lower
ideals; nor dare we hesitate to affirm that the
Bible writers are by no means unerring guides,
but must be corrected by the supreme Chris
tian authority — the Spirit of Christ in Chris
tian consciences.
Jesus Himself, in handhng the Old Testa
ment, said that Moses in his law of divorce had
compromised the divine intention. And we,
using our Lord's liberty, must confess that St.
Paul was not consistent with his own Chris
tian principles in treating marriage. We may
excuse his personal depreciation of wedded life
by reminding ourselves of the hardships of the
missionary career that made it inexpedient for
him, and particularly of his firm behef that the
world was shortly to end so that home and
family ties appeared not worth forming; but
we have to recognise that he never seems to
have grasped the true union of man and wife

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 135
as comrades in faith and purpose. Instead of
abiding by his own statement that men and
women are equal in Christ, he is bound by his
traditional Pharisaic theology that man is su
perior to woman, because man was made di
rectly in God's image, while woman was only
copied from man. Instead of summing up the
wife's obligation to be, like the husband's, to
love (although Paul himself believed that love
was the fulfilling of the law) , he insists that it
is to obey.
While the Bible, when read with critical
discrimination, contains valuable teaching on
this subject, the Christian ideal is stated satis
factorily only in Jesus Himself. He is con
vinced that marriage is normally the divine
purpose: "Have ye not read that He who
made them from the beginning made them
male and female, and said, a man shall cleave
to his wife ; and the two shall become one flesh."
He swept His keen eye over the convictions
of the past and the experiences of men and
women around Him, and recognised marriage
as the necessary completion and enrichment of
the normal life. But He saw that there were
exceptions. Under a metaphor that sounds

136 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
coarse to our modern ears, and was not meant
by Him to be taken hterally, He speaks of
some as constitutionally not adapted for mar
riage, and of others as deliberately remaining
single for the Kingdom's sake. In the latter
class He may have been thinking of John the
Baptist, or of some of His own disciples ; or He
may be giving us a bit of autobiography and
uncovering His own personal decision. And
it is significant that this choice seemed to Him
a great sacrifice. He appreciated so fully the
glory of the companionship of true husband
and wife, that to forego marriage was to Him
an heroic demand justified only by exceptional
circumstances : "He that is able to receive it,
let him receive it."
And because He prized the wedded tie so
highly any breach of it by divorce was intol
erable to Him. "What, therefore, God hath
joined together, let not man put asunder." The
exception which the Gospel of Matthew inserts
in His saying almost certainly does not come
from Him, but was an interpretation of His
teaching for practical use in the Church of the
second generation. Jesus did not lay down
a law to be enacted by legislatures, nor even

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 137
by Church courts; He held up the Christian
ideal for his followers.
Unfortunately His teaching is much oftener
appealed to in discussions on divorce than on
marriage. His own interest is in the estabhsh
ment of a divine relation between husband and
wife — "those whom God hath joined together."
Jesus was an enthusiast for man; He saw
more in human beings than any one ever saw
before Him ; He believed us capable of higher
things than anyone else dared to believe : "Ye
shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is
perfect." So He believed that human rela
tions could be made divinely ideal. Marriage
was the union of man and woman in all their
godlike capacities; they must be joined to
gether in body, mind, conscience and faith, or
they were not united by God.
The prevalent agitation against the increas
ing evil of broken homes usually concerns itself
with the wrong end of the problem. We need
not so much a new conscience about divorce as
about marriage.
Many marriages are matters of calculation;
wife or husband is considered a desirable con
venience. A man may be anxious to have a

138 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
home of his own, or may feel himself lonely, or
may think marriage would help him in his
business, or may want somebody to care for his
comforts ; a woman may want greater freedom
than is usually accorded an unmarried girl, or
may be eager to leave the parental home, or
may wish to be supported, or may feel a certain
reproach that foolishly attaches to girls who
remain single beyond a certain age, or may
have a craving for motherhood. None of these
motives is bad in itself ; but none is an adequate
reason for marriage. In a recent study of the
Bronte sisters is an interesting proposal that
was made to Charlotte Bronte. It came from
her best friend's brother, a Church of England
curate, who had made up his mind that he ought
to secure a wife. He first asked the daughter
of his former vicar, whom in his diary he char
acterises as "a steady, intelligent, sensible and,
I trust, good girl named Mary." She refused
him, and he enters in his diary "On Tuesday
last received a decisive reply from M. A. L.'s
papa; a loss, but I trust a providential one.
Believe not her will but her father's. Write
to a Yorkshire friend, C. B." Shortly after
occurs the record, "Received an unfavourable

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 139
reply from C. B. The will of the Lord be
done." If the man had only been anything
like as anxious and intelligent in .trying to do
God's will in seeking a wife, as in accepting
piously his well-merited refusals, there might
have been some chance of his forming a Chris
tian marriage. What true union of heart with
heart, purpose with purpose, could there be in
such matter-of-fact proposing with no more
apparent feeling than is usually displayed in
visiting an intelligence office?
Or at the other extreme, marriages are made
by an unthinking sentimental attraction. Dr.
Johnson, in his now seldom read romance,
Rasselas, writes: "A youth and a maiden,
meeting by chance or brought together by
artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities,
go home and dream of each other. Having
httle to divert attention or diversify thought,
they find themselves uneasy apart, and there
fore conclude that they shall be happy together.
They marry and discover what nothing but
voluntary blindness before had concealed."
Judgment, as well as sentiment, must be
wedded. Our much freer American way of
letting young people meet and see much of

140 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
each other is a long step towards helping them
to find out whether, besides sentimental attrac
tion, they are intelhgently drawn together in
purpose and conscience.
Worst of all, perhaps, is the marriage en
tered upon because man or woman resolves
to be married. Girls sometimes are in love
with the idea of being in love; men marry'
because they make up their minds to marry. In
the biography of Tschaikowsky, the Russian
composer, we are told that he had a genuine
love affair with an opera singer who chose to
marry another man. Afterwards he wrote to
his brother: "I have decided to marry; this is
irrevocable," and again, "I have been thinking
of my future ; the result is my firm resolution
to enter into the state of matrimony with some
one or other." The following May he became
engaged to a girl who had fallen in love with
him. He told her he could not love her; but
would be a devoted friend; he described his
character in detail — his irritability, his change
able temperament, his antipathy to people,
his financial condition; and asked her to be
come his wife. She accepted, and after a few
unhappy months they separated. The musi-

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 141
cian wrote: "A few days more and I swear
I would have gone insane." There was no
quarrel; the composer struggled, as he writes,
to recognise all her good qualities, and she
prepared a home for him which he liked and
occupied for a short time. The biographer
simply tells us that there was "an abyss of mis
understandings between the two."
A Christian marriage occurs only when two
hves touch completely. It has in it the vehe
mence and fervour and tenderness, which we
sum up in the special sense of our most sacred
word "love." The passion may come grad
ually or suddenly, but it brings always an ex
perience so transforming that it seems a second
birth. A new world comes into being for
lovers. We may think them blind to each
other's faults, but it is only because love has
opened their eyes to see in each other what
none else, save God Himself, can see. They
idealise each other; but that idealisation is
love's way of reaching and bringing out the
real self within. They honour each other su
premely; each is incomparable to the other's
mind. In each other they find themselves, as
they never found themselves before. A Chris-

142 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
tian can never find himself in another unless
the other possesses at least the capacity for his
loyalties, his ideals, his faith. Lives that touch
at a number of points, but remain utterly re
mote at what is to one the supreme point, are
not divinely joined together. Paul had insight
enough to urge that Christians marry "in the
Lord" — both hves controlled by the Spirit of
Jesus. The Old Testament saying, our Lord
singled out as descriptive of man's attitude to
wards God, is none too strong to describe the
attitude of Christian husband and wife: they
must love with all their heart, soul, mind and
strength. So, and only so, does God, who is
love, join them together.
To be sure the peculiar intensity of the first
affection that unites them may not remain
constantly. The routine of hfe which man and
wife must share will expose in each many un
lovely qualities. They may begin to question
whether, after all, they may not have made a
mistake, whether they really love each other.
But love is for Christians loyalty. God loves
us not because we are invariably attractive to
Him — far from it; He loves us because He
once idealised us, saw our possibilities as His

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 143
children, and remains true to that insight, de
spite all we do to the contrary. It is a tragic
situation when husband or wife must live for
years holding fast to a gleam from the past that
never seems to shine again in the companion
of to-day; but that is the loyalty required of
Christian love; it is the loyalty of Christ to
us, and it is the loyalty of His God and Father.
And a loyalty that will go all lengths is
needed to take husband and wife the much
shorter distances of mutual concession and for
giveness and patience, that must be travelled
even by those whose lives seem supremely
happy. None of us is always at his best ; most
of us come anywhere near it only at rare inter
vals. Temper is but partially in control;
everyone is unreasonable about some things;
each has a full stock of foibles and weaknesses
that must be borne with; there are numerous
chances for wills to clash, even for consciences
to differ. A love that has to be kept alive by
the attractiveness, or even by the responding
affection of the other, will not suffice ; love must
have loyalty within itself that is independent
of present stimulus or response. And there
may come experiences when it will be called

144 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
on to bear, believe, hope, endure all things;
that is love's lot in our world. And only a
love that is capable of an immeasurable loyalty
to the ideal self, which it has once seen and
known and honoured, is adequate for the
strain. To such love the breaking of the re
lation will be as intolerable as to Jesus Him
self. That is Christian marriage. Of man and
woman so united we can say "What God hath
joined together."
The extent to which it is feasible or desirable
to make legislation enforce on an entire popu
lation the Christian ideal is a very complex
question. When so many men and women
marry for motives that make it impossible to
say that they are united by God, it becomes a
question of expediency to determine under
what circumstances man may, and perhaps
ought, to put them asunder. In this country
we are suffering from an overdeveloped and
undisciplined individualism. People feel that
they can marry as they please, and ought not
to be held together if the bond seems irksome.
Much nonsense is talked about the cruelty of
enforced self -suppression. No one ever finds
himself until he loses himself for a larger

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 145
whole ; and society must be held up before peo
ple's consciences as of more importance than
their personal happiness or comfort or con
venience. Obviously the State must do its best to safe
guard marriage, and insist that it is a privilege
open only to those who possess reasonable
health and intelligence, and enter upon it with
proper deliberation; but legislation can pro
duce but clumsy contrivances when the real
fitness is a matter of heart. When barriers to
marriage are enacted, corresponding gates are
opened to immorality. Probably none of us
would wish a more stringent divorce law than
that which stands on the statutes of New York
at present ; many think it too stringent. There
should be uniform laws throughout our land,
for it is absurd to have that which is illegal
in one state made legal for those who have
sufficient money to travel to another. But we
dare not hope for very much from legislation.
We must rely on spreading the Christian social
conscience, the conscience that in loyalty to
children will endure almost everything from
their father or mother; and, where the endur
ance point is past, will certainly not ask for

146 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
more than separation; the conscience that in
loyalty to that which love has once revered will
be willing to suffer and wait and hope for
years, and to forgive with the amazing forgive
ness of that Old Testament prophet who took
back his wife, and the mother of his children,
after she had spent years in a life of shame.
We are far from that social conscience yet;
but as Christians we must set our eyes toward
it for ourselves and our land.
Nor is it easy to determine to what extent
the Church should try to put into her rules the
ideal of Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew shows
how very early the Church felt impelled to
adapt the ideal to circumstances. Our Lord
has not left us a fixed law, but a living Spirit.
When a marriage has been irreparably broken,
and we are deahng with the person who seems
to have been more sinned against than sinning,
and when no injustice is being done to children
and the ideal of marriage itself is not being
flouted and degraded, jt is a fair question
whether it is the mind of the Spirit of Christ
not to further and bless a second attempt to
establish a true wedded life. Shall we say
that the evangelist who adapted the words of

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 147
Jesus to the Church situation of his day was
not inspired by the Spirit of the Master? And
has not the Church of to-day the same right to
be freely led by the same Spirit? Our main
task is to train Christians who will not marry
save when so divinely impelled that of them we
have a right to say: "What God hath joined
together let not man put asunder." But, in
a world of imperfect knowledge and faulty
consciences, it may be also the Church's duty
to help the bitterly disappointed and cruelly
abused to realise the divine ideal in a second
attempt at marriage, when the first has proved
a hopeless failure.
Jesus gave this ancient commandment an in
terpretation all His own when He told His
followers that for us an impure look or thought
was to be shunned as adultery. And Jesus
has succeeded in giving the world in His faith
and ideals its strongest purifying force. Ori
gen, centuries ago, could answer the objections
of the heathen Celsus by appealing to well
known facts : "The work of Jesus," he wrote,
"reveals itself among all mankind where com
munities of God founded by Jesus exist,
which are composed of men reclaimed from a

148 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
thousand vices; and to this day the name of
Jesus produces decency of manners." We have
constant need to insist on that decency. Chris
tians cannot be too careful in refusing to pa
tronise amusements, or to have anything to
do with papers or books, that are not absolutely
clean. Information about all sorts of disgust
ing vices is not conducive to pure thinking.
There are some things we can well afford to
know nothing about. Of such practices, all too
common in his day, Paul writes "let them not
even be named among you as becometh those
set apart."
A recent teacher has foUowed Christ's
method of applying an ugly word to what
many of us are tempted to think trivial, in
order to bring home to our consciences its in
trinsic evil. Dr. Cabot of Boston has pointed
out that the essential sin in prostitution is
treating a person impersonally — as a mere
thing. And he wishes us to label all im
personal treatment of people prostitution.
How widespread that sin is among the most
respectable! The relation of employers and
employed are often impersonal — housekeepers
think of a maid merely as cook or waitress, not

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 149
as a sister in the family of God with aspira
tions, feehngs, ideals, convictions; manu
facturers regard those who sit at their
machines as so many hands, and make no
effort to deal with them as minds and con
sciences and souls ; employees regard their em
ployer or foreman merely as "the boss," with
no consideration for the man ; all of us accept
a great quantity of services from a number of
people without letting any outgo of ourselves
reach them. This is as essentially prostitution,
as the impure thought is adultery; it is the
degradation of personality. We can all feel
whether we are dealt with as persons or as
things — mere factors in the convenience or
advance or life-background of another. And
what we feel, others can feel in their dealings
with us. Purity between lives is safeguarded
only by reverence for the child of God in every
man and woman. The shame of thousands of
women in our own city is but the outcome of
the impurity of heart that fails to personahse
every touch of life with hfe. And who of us
is guiltless? For us, believing men and women, the glory
of human wedlock shines most brilliantly

150 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
when we use it, as generations of believers
have used it before us, as a symbol of God's
relationship to man. "Thy Maker is thy
Husband." For the divine union exalts and
sanctifies the human tie. "Christ loved the
Church and gave Himself for it that He might
present it to Himself a glorious Church, not
having spot or wrinkle or any such thing,
even so ought husbands to love their wives,"
writes a Christian apostle. It was God's mer
ciful and unalterably loyal love for His peo
ple that led Hosea to forgive and take back
Gomer, his faithless wife. The divine Hus
band became an irresistible ideal for the human
husband. We take all the wealth we have
discovered in our richest home experiences,
and let it be to us a suggestion of what we may
expect from God. We think of the devotion,
the patience, the tenderness, the trust, the aUe
giance, given us by our nearest and dearest; and
we look up to the heavens in faith and expect
nothing less, when we say to ourselves, "God
is love." And so far from faUing us, we dis
cover that our highest anticipations, based on
human affection, are too smaU. God outdoes
man's or woman's best ; and he sends husband

SEVENTH COMMANDMENT 151
and wife back from their experience of Him
to fill the cup of their mutual obligations with
a fuller measure, because of the overflowing
heart they have found in Him. We learn
love's meaning first in our most tender human
relations ; but the highest definition these give
us proves inadequate when we try to put into
it all that God's devotion means to us.
"Hereby perceive we love, because He laid
down His life for us." The Calvary of long
ago o'ertops the loftiest summit of devotion
we know anywhere else. And from our ex
perience of divine redeeming love we draw in
spirations for that tender loyalty which crowns
the union of man and wife.

THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT

THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx: 15: "Thou shalt not steal."
The Decalogue runs in a suggestive se
quence; one after another follow command
ments safeguarding life, family, property. It
surprises some to find the sanctity of posses
sions placed beside the sanctity of life and
home. Religion is interested not in things but
in persons; yes, but property is essential to
persons. No man can realise his personality
without possessions. Just as marriage is held
sacred for the sake of persons for whose per
fecting home is necessary, property is pro
tected because of its value for the characters
of men. Like life itself, property is indispens
able to train human beings into true children of
God. Two fundamental religious convictions un
derlie the Bible's attitude towards possessions.
The first is that all things belong to God, and
their human owners hold them only as His
representatives for the time being. When
155

156 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
David passes over to Solomon the materials he
has collected for the buUding of the Temple,
he is represented as saying: "Thine, O Lord,
is the greatness, for all that is in the heaven
and in the earth is Thine. Both riches and
honour come of Thee, and Thou rulest over
all ; and in Thine hand it is to make great and
to give strength unto aU. All this store that
we have prepared to build Thee an house for
Thine holy name cometh of Thine hand, and is
Thine own. O Lord, keep this forever in the
imagination of the thoughts of the heart of
Thy people, and establish their heart unto
Thee." This prayer connects God's owner
ship with the fleeting character of human life :
"For we are strangers before Thee, and so
journers, as aU our fathers were," so that man's
proprietorship of anything must be temporary.
"We brought nothing into this world, neither
can we carry anything out." God's it was, and
His it remains. Ajs Job said when possessions
and family were gone: "The Lord gave and
the Lord hath taken away."
The second is that God gives the earth to
mankind as a family, and it is therefore family
property: "The earth hath He given to the.

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 157
children of men." The Old Testament horizon
is limited usuaUy to Israel; aU possessions be
long to the nation, and each Israelite is en
titled to his share in the national heritage. In
theory a man's land could not be taken in per
petuity from him and his, but must be returned
in the Year of Jubilee. In order to remind
owners that their fields were not primarily
theirs but the nation's, they were bidden not to
reap their harvests thoroughly, but to leave
the gleanings for the poor. When economic
pressure created a landless and dependent
class, the prophets protested that the religious
ideal of brotherhood was infringed upon : "Je
hovah will enter into judgment with the elders
and princes of His people. It is ye that have
eaten up the vineyard ; the spoil of the poor is
in your houses. What mean ye that ye crush
my people, and grind the face of the poor?"
and again, "Woe unto those who join house to
house, who add field to field, till there is no
more room, and ye are settled alone in the
midst of the land." Their indignation is not
so much that a few have amassed great wealth,
although there are protests against wasteful
luxury and display, but that many of the peo-

158 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
pie are without property, and the possession-
less cannot develop morally as they would had
they their share in the national domain. After
the Exile Nehemiah insists that the well-to-do
shall restore to every Israelite his small an
cestral holding, so that none shall be without
the means to have a home and a hvelihood.
The New Testament discloses these two con
victions firmly imbedded in Christian minds,
but God's fatherhood of all men takes away
the barriers that usually confined Old Testa
ment thought to Israel. Earth and its contents
is the Father's house with bread enough and
to spare for His children. God gives men all
things richly to enjoy, so that they are meant
to possess and take pleasure in things. Jesus'
personal poverty has been over-emphasised;
for the greater part of His adult life He
worked as a carpenter, and enjoyed a comfort
able home in Nazareth ; and although later His
special task prevented Him from foUowing a
remunerative calling, He gladly accepted the
hospitality of the relatively wealthy, lived in
some disciple's house in Capernaum, and re
ceived the gifts of generous and grateful ad
herents. He heartily delighted in life's good

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 159
things, so that critics found a basis for calling
Him glutton and winebibber.
In His teaching, too, men are to recognise
that the title to things is vested primarily in
the brotherhood, whose collective prayer is,
"Give us this day our daily bread." No Chris
tian is expected to ask for himself what he
does not as eagerly seek for everybody else.
So strong was this sense of brotherhood in the
early days of Christian enthusiasm that men
freely placed their possessions at the disposal
of the Christian community. No one was com
pelled to give up his property, and his right to
keep it was recognised; "While it remained,"
Peter says to Ananias about his possession,
"did it not remain thine own and after it was
sold, was it not in thy power?" There was no
deliberately planned communism; but, moved
by the spirit of brotherhood, "none said that
aught of the things which he possessed was
his own"; and, in that sense, "they had all
things common."
Jesus laid stress on two principles connected
with the tenure of property. One was that
His foUowers' hearts must be detached from
things: "A man's life consisteth not in the

160 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
abundance of things which he possesseth." It
was that detachment rather than a love of pov
erty that made Him urge the young ruler to
seU aU that he had. Riches are in His mind
perils; they are apt to render their possessors
self-sufficient, self-important, self-indulgent—
the opposite of the spirit which rules in the
Kingdom of Heaven. A man with large wealth
almost invariably trusts in it to help him
through crises, instead of putting his confi
dence in something higher. He is hkely to be
come domineering, because many persons defer
to him, and to feel that his wealth entitles his
opinion to consideration. He is under great
pressure to indulge himself, to think much of
his own comfort, pleasure, convenience, and
to be unbraced for daUy personal sacrifice and
hard labour. Jesus emphasises the danger in
the striking metaphor: "It is easier for a
camel to go through a needle's eye than for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Of
which passage Coleridge once wrote: "Often
as the motley reflexes of my experience move
in long processions of manifold groups before
me, the distinguished and world-honoured com
pany of Christian Mammonials appear to the

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 161
eye of my imagination as a drove of camels
heavUy laden, yet all at full speed, and each in
the confident expectation of passing through
the eye of the needle, without stop or halt, both
beast and baggage." ,
The other principle is that of stewardship of
everything that a man possesses. Whatever
a Christian owns must be used for the service
of human need, through which alone he serves
his Lord: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of
these My brethren, ye did it unto Me." Ob
viously Jesus presupposes that a Christian has
some private property; if there were nothing
which he caUed his own, what could he use in
the service of the brotherhood as their trustee
under God? Jesus, no less than the Old Testa
ment, considered property necessary to the at
tainment of personality as a child of God.
When St. Paul is handling a thief, he teUs him
first to labour that he may have; the possession
of property is essential to training his con
science in responsibility. And second, he is to
labour to have that he may give to him that is
in need. The thief's Christian training is not
complete untU he is serving the brotherhood.
And such service is not charity in the sense of

162 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
gratuitous generosity on the part of the giver;
it is justice, for possessors owe their brethren
whatever they need, so far as it hes in their
power to meet that need. "Whoso hath the
world's goods, and beholdeth his brother in
need, and shutteth up his compassion from him,
how doth the love of God abide in him?"
To sum up, from the Christian point of view
aU property belongs primarily to God, and sec
ondarily to society as the family of God, whose
duty it is to see that each chUd of the Father
has a share of his own in the famUy heritage,
which he is to use as his Father's steward for
the needs of the family, recognising their claim
upon him and his.
In that summary, there are three sets of du
ties — God's, society's, the individual's. Let us
examine them in order.
1. God as Father is under obligation to
provide for His children, and to see to it that
there is enough in His world for everybody.
As Christians we beheve that God can be re
lied on to do His duty. When we pray, "Give
us this day our daUy bread," we are confident
that He answers with a supply sufficient for
His whole household. If it be in His power

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 163
and He faUs to provide for us, we can say to
Him: "Thou shalt not steal." He lays no
duties on our consciences which He does not
lay upon His own, for He asks us to be per
fect as He is perfect. If, then, there is want,
we must put it down to our bad management,
not to a genuine lack. We are not encouraged
to pray: "Give us this day our daily cake";
it is not a wise father's part to pamper his
chUdren; but we are encouraged to ask with as
surance for bread for all, our bread. Many
economists go on the assumption that large
masses of men must live on the verge of starva
tion always ; and most of us are brought up to
beheve that want is the inevitable lot of
millions. Wealth and poverty are, to be sure,
relative terms, and there will always be richer
and poorer people ; but no Christian can assent
to the notion that earth is so constituted that
many must necessarily be nearly starving.
That would argue a niggardly God, and we
\ believe in One who openeth His hand and sat-
I isfieth the desire of every living thing. In a
world where sickness, accident and death are
present we shall always have the poor with us,
as Jesus said ; but poverty, in the sense of ac-

164 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
tual want among the weU and capable, must
always appear to the Christian as a human
blunder and sin, man's defeat of God's inten
tion. 2. It is society's duty to see that each indi
vidual born into the world has a portion of the
famUy heritage that he can caU his own. This
in the eyes of the Bible writers is a religious
necessity. A man without private property
cannot serve God through his feUow men, for
he lacks the means adequately to express him
self. A certain amount of things is needed for
self-attainment. The great' movement which
begins Israel's history was a labour movement
on the part of people who felt that as slaves
without possessions they could not exercise
their rehgion. "The Lord spake unto Moses,
Go in unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus
saith the Lord, Let My people go, that they
may serve Me." The divine plan for humanity
is the education of men into independent and
rehant sons of God; that cannot be so long
as they are economicaUy dependent. If a man
is a slave, whose work or idleness is not in his
own power, who has no chance to use his con
science in his labour, and cannot express his

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 165
personality in initiative, in perseverance, in
thrift, in loving service, he is hindered from at
taining Christian manhood. And Israel, born
into national life in this struggle for industrial
freedom, took care to safeguard in its laws
each man's right to work, and to protect him in
the possession of his tools : "No man shall take
the mill or the upper mill-stone to pledge ; for
he taketh a man's life to pledge." That with
which a man earns his hving must be as sa
credly kept his, as the community protects his
life. Unless a man is assured his chance to
work and the means with which to work, there
is no guarantee that he can keep any private
property, and private property is essential to
his hfe in fellowship with God.
Under modern conditions it is by no means
easy to devise a system by which society can
secure each man his chance to work and guar
antee his owning something. When a man
earns his living by operating a machine, or
working in a mine, or selling goods over a
counter, or keeping books in an office, which
belongs to others, it is not so simple to safe
guard his chance to labour, as when he merely
had to be protected from the loss of a couple of

166 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
miUstones. The Bible sets forth no economic
programme, and aU attempts to read into it
socialism or communism, or any other indus
trial theory are mistaken; but it lays down re
hgious principles which each age must use its
conscience and intelligence to embody in the
social organisation of its day. And it is our
duty as Christians to appreciate that private
property is indispensable to rehgion, that no
man can be a steward save as he can call some
thing his own, and that this private tenure of
possessions is not secure save as men and
women are guaranteed the means and oppor
tunity to labour. The Christian criticism of
tilings as they are is not that a few have vast
possessions, but that far too many have none.
Men and women of large means can be trained
to be good stewards, although a large fortune
constitutes a very serious problem for its pos
sessor, and we ought to recognise that, as a
Christian, he faces one of the hardest tasks
allotted to any man. But persons with noth
ing cannot be trained in responsibUity. It is
difficult to give them a share in the civic con
science. Possessing no stake in the country,
they do not feel an obligation for its welfare,

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 167
and having nothing to lose, they welcome any
change and are always open-eared for radical
agitation. Furthermore, Christianity has little
meaning for them, and its adherents appear
to them hypocrites. It inculcates brotherhood ;
but where for them is there brotherliness in a
community, rich in possessions and opportuni
ties, that offers them no sure chance to earn
a living and maintain for themselves and theirs
a home? It proclaims that God is Father, and
His fatherliness is to be known in His care
for His chUdren; but where can they feel God's
personal interest in them when they have no
lot in the family inheritance?
Christ nowhere teaches that all men are to
have equal shares of anything; His parable of
the talents presupposes an uneven distribution
of possessions; but under existing conditions
far too many have no part at aU in the house
hold's goods. A chUd born into a Christian
world must be assured the chance to labour that
he may have, that he may give. Until society
secures the right to private property for every
sane and healthy man and woman, we are steal
ing from them, depriving them of their due
share in God's endowment of the famUy of

168 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
man. And society needs to be told, "Thou
shalt not steal."
Further, it is society's duty to insist that no
possessor shaU employ his means in a way that
is harmful to the general good. It must im
press on every private owner that his property
is primarily the f amUy's ; and that it is his only
in so far as his control of it is for the famUy's
interest. We aUow a man to build his own
house, and accord him fullest liberty in de
signing and arranging it that he may express
his individuahty; but we insist that its plans
shall not violate the fire laws or menace the
public health. We face in the social control
of private property the dehcate problem of
affording the individual sufficient hberty to ex
press his unique self (and that must imply
freedom to do a good many things that seem
to conventional minds foolish or even wicked) ,
whUe we safeguard the interests of society as
a whole. There are wide differences of opinion be
tween those who lay the stress on social rights
and those who emphasise individual freedom.
As Christians we have no ready-made solution
to offer; the proper harmony of both prin-

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 169
ciples wUl doubtless take us a long while to
establish, exactly as in political organisation
we are slowly harmonising vigorous personal
initiative on the part of leaders and private
citizens with adequate democratic control. But
as Christians we must hold up the two prin
ciples: society's duty to accord every man
private property for self-expression as a chUd
of God, and society's duty to insist that each
chUd recognise the prior claims of the whole
family and use his property for the well-being
of his brethren.
3. The individual's duty is first of aU to re
member that whatever he owns is given him by
God through society. We could own nothing,
except by our sheer physical force to take and
keep it, were it not for the community's pro
tection of our rights through its laws. And if
we are allowed the use and enjoyment of pos
sessions, it is because we are presumed to em
ploy them for the good of the brotherhood. A
man's income, and all that it enables him to
purchase, is in a very real sense a salary paid
him by society for the services that he is sup
posed to render. It makes no difference how
that income comes to him, whether through in-

170 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
herited wealth, or the labour of others, or
through his own efforts ; it is a portion of the
family's riches placed at his disposal, and so
ciety is justified in making that outlay on him
only in so far as he makes a commensurate re
turn in usefulness to his brethren.
It is a searching and sobering question for
our consciences whether you and I are worth
our keep to the family of God. We must to
tal up what it costs to feed, clothe, educate,
house, amuse, inspire us; and ask ourselves
whether we perform an adequate service in
view of the salary society aUows us. There
are many of us who are freed from laborious
drudgery because others attend to this for us.
We are released from the hardest physical
strain and, the dirtiest and most disagreeable
labour, while others remain hewers of wood and
drawers of water — fishermen braving the perils
and exposures of winter off the banks of New
foundland, lonely lightship-keepers tossing
day and night on the waves, drivers of the gar
bage wagons in our city streets, "sandhogs"
subjected to the diseases and confined to the
unpleasant surroundings of toil underground
and under our rivers. Is our release from

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 171
such tasks justified by the beneficent achieve
ments of our liberated time and energy? If
one rides in an automobile, while the majority
of his fellow-citizens are compelled to use less
swift and comfortable means of transit, his
contribution to the public good must be cor
respondingly greater, or society is not war
ranted in the larger expenditure it is accord
ing him. For everything that we use or en
joy — the clothes on our backs, the comforts
of our dwellings, the leisure at our disposal,
the amusements that entertain us, the intel
lectual stimulus and training given us, the re
hgious inspirations we receive — we must make
a corresponding payment in service to the fam
Uy of God's children. "Thou shalt not steal."
In thinking of our income, we are entitled to
distinguish between what we spend upon our
selves and what we devote to the service of
others. We can leave the latter aside for the
moment; it is what we use for ourselves and
our families, for food, rent, pleasures, educa
tion, inspiration, that is society's salary to us
for personal services rendered. If we are not
worth that before the bar of our consciences,
there, is nothing for us but to curtail our ex-

172 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
penses. To spend more than one reaUy earns
is just thieving, and it must be labelled by its
proper name. No law may lay its hand upon
us, and hale us to a court, and place us behind
prison bars with striped clothing; but the
stripes are there in the eyes of a just God, and
will more and more appear to the eyes of the
enhghtened consciences of men.
What we set aside for gifts to public causes
is society's trust to our wisdom and conscience
to expend in its name, and in God's name, from
whom society's wealth comes. It behooves us
to look carefully at the sources of this wealth.
No Christian wishes to be generous with money
that has been gained by underpaying the la
bour of those who produced it, or by selling
goods of a character or at a price that made
their sale no genuine public service. Under
present circumstances conscience has to func
tion at long range, and go far afield to post it
self upon the conditions under which wealth is
produced. It does not matter whether we meas
ure our income in millions or in a very few dol
lars, we cannot escape the obhgation of inquir
ing how it is created. Thou shalt not steal,
even when the theft is unintentional; and no

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 173
sanctification of money by its dedication to the
holiest uses can remove the social wrong of its
unjust acquisition.
In the gifts which a Christian makes out of
that which is his own by God's gift through
society, he has the final perfecting of his char
acter through his possessions. That is a strik
ing saying of our Lord's, "Make to yourselves
friends by means of the mammon of unright
eousness ; that, when it shaU fail, they may re
ceive you into the eternal tabernacles." In a
world as yet so imperfect as ours no money is
gained in entire brotherliness ; the best business
is doubtless harsh and unkind to someone, so
that its earnings may be called "mammon of
unrighteousness." Christ bids us take it and
employ it to make friends, to'establish relations
of helpfulness between ourselves and those
who need what we have; and adds that these
relations will persist in the final and lasting
order of things. We began by insisting that
property was essential for developing person
ality ; here Christ is pleading that we shall turn
property into personal relations, for people
last, while things perish. We grow our char
acters not in contact with things but with other

174 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
men; property becomes a means of enlarging
ourselves only as it makes those selves touch
helpfully other selves.
Into what sort of friendships are we putting
our mammon of unrighteousness? There is a
friendship for men that expresses itself in
kindness for their bodies; and Christians wUl
certainly not be slower than others to give to
relieve the physical wants of the hungry and
the sick. There is a stUl higher friendship
with them that brings us into touch with their
minds ; and Christians have not been remiss in
giving liberally to the institutions that educate
and train inteUigence and skill, or that supply
wholesome pleasures. But we must recognise
to-day that there are many persons without
distinctive Christian convictions who are wiU
ing to be friends of the bodies and minds of
their brethren, but who wiU go no farther —
possibly because they are not certain of any
thing more within themselves that they can
offer in friendship. This leaves us, believers
in the faith of Jesus, with a special duty to be
friend the spirits, the consciences of our
brethren. We should not be content to see
them comfortable and clever, but no more;

EIGHTH COMMANDMENT 175
healthy in body and rich in intellect, but pau
pers in character. We must present ourselves
to be friends of their faith by dedicating our
gifts that none of God's chUdren, here at our
side in our own land or at the ends of the earth,
shaU be strangers to our most enriching Friend.
It is as Christ's mutual friends that we shall
come closest to each other and go most deeply
into each other's hearts. And in such friend
ship, whether we see each other face to face in
the flesh or not, we are already sharing eternal
tabernacles, abiding together in the secret place
of the Most High, and occupying mansions in
the one Father's everlasting house.

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:16: "Thou shalt not bear false witness
against thy neighbour."
Every community has to take measures to
insure the truthfulness of witnesses before its
courts, and perjury is everywhere punished
among civilised men. One of Israel's codes
contains the foUowing enactment: "If the
witness be a false witness, and have testified
falsely against his brother; then shall ye do
unto him as he had thought to do unto his
brother; so shalt thou put away evil from the
midst of thee. And those that remain shall
hear, and fear, and shall henceforth commit
no more any such evU in the midst of thee.
And thine eye shall not pity; life shall go for
hfe, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for
hand, foot for foot." It sounds harsh; but
when one thinks of the frightful role in the
world's history played by lying informers, and
of the absolute necessity of truthfulness in
testimony if human justice is to be adminis-

179

180 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
tered, one cannot help admiring this sincere
attempt to root out false witness.
Every court of law is but a small organised
division of the great tribunal of public opinion,
that world-court to which a few weeks ago
President Wilson referred for accurate assess
ment the conflicting protests of Belgians and
Germans in the present war. And in this court
every one of us is constantly at the bar, on
the witness stand, and upon the bench; at the
same time on trial, testifying and judging.
Every expression of our opinion of other peo
ple is testimony, and must be as conscientiously
given as the statements we are prepared to
make under oath.
The Bible is primarUy interested in char
acter, and the decisions of this court of public
opinion not only register but mould character.
The name men give us is something to which
instinctively we live up or down; few persons
are very much better or worse than they are
expected to be. Zacchaeus was labelled grasp
ing and dishonest by his feUow-townsmen in
Jericho, and he fulfilled their anticipations ; he
was treated as a son of Abraham by Jesus,
and responded to that faith. To injure a man's

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 181
reputation is to rob him not only of his posi
tion in the minds of others, but of his own
stimulus to well-doing.
And further every witness before this court
is himself on trial, and his evidence concern
ing others is a verdict which he passes upon
himself. What we see in men, what we. draw
out of them, what we say of them, is a very
telling indication of what we are. The
thoughts we cherish and the words we utter
are aU the whUe making us, so that our wit
ness about others affects not them only, but
ourselves. No wonder, then, that the Bible takes up
this question of our talk about one another
time and again in the most specific and definite
ways. One psalmist asks the question, Who
shall dwell with God? and answers among
other things, "He that slandereth not with his
tongue." Just before he has said, "He that
speaketh truth in his heart," so that right
thoughts and feelings, as well as just words
about others are in his mind. Slander, in the
New Testament, goes by the suggestive Greek
word, "back-biting" ; it consists in saying about
others what one dares not say to them. Di-

182 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
ogenes, being asked what bit sorest, answered
"Of wildbeasts the back-biter, of tame the
flatterer." Slander and flattery go together;
he who overpraises to one's face is likely to
underrate out of earshot; both are forms of
false witness against one's neighbour.
And the Bible has much to say of that com
mon form of slander that we call gossip. One
of the oldest codes enacts this law: "Thou
shalt not go up and down as a talebearer
among thy people." George Meredith has said
that gossip is a beast of prey that does not
wait for the death of the creature it devours.
It is a very prevalent form of murder; there
are many conversations like that reported in
Pope's Rape of the Lock, where "at every
word a reputation dies." Mrs. Grundy lives
on from generation to generation; she is stiU
the chief talker in most social meetings, be
they conversations from the fire-escapes in
tenements or in the most select drawing-rooms ;
and she appears perhaps as frequently in
trousers as in petticoats. Omit the personali
ties from the talk of most of us, and what
would be left? The Book of Proverbs calls
the gossip by the suggestive name of "the whis-

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 183
perer." His words are "dainty morsels," for
men find them appetising; and though they
are "soft" (for the Hebrew word for "dainty"
means "soft"), they have a most penetrating
way of getting into the very centre of our
minds where they lodge — "they go down into
the innermost parts."
It takes two both to gossip and to flatter, ,y
and the listener is as culpable as the talker.
"Take heed how ye hear," said Jesus. We
often blame other men's tongues when the con
demnation belongs equally to our own ears.
We get what we are interested in when we con
verse, or we soon find a way of stopping or
changing the conversation. What others think
of saying to us is a fairly accurate measure
of the impression we have made upon them.
Most of us are greedy for praise, and clumsily
or deftly (for skill in the art varies) fish for
compliments, and draw men on to false wit
ness. The wisest of the wise
Listen to pretty lies,
And love to hear 'em told.
Doubt not that Solomon

184 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Listened to many a one,
Some in his youth, and more when he grew old.
If people gossip to us, let us search and try
our hearts. It takes no skill to show when
one is bored ; and if gossip and flattery do not
bore us, we are radicaUy diseased and need
nothing less than a new heart and a right
spirit. It is surprising how many of us faU into
the habit of "running down" other people. It
is a cheap and easy way of ministering to our
own vanity. To behttle others seems relatively
to exalt us. Most of us are aware of being
inconspicuous nobodies; we know that we are
very little people — pigmies in ability and puny
in character. It is a hard and painful process
to force ourselves to grow; it is much simpler
to attempt to reduce others to our dimensions ;
and we do it aU the time. If someone is being
heartily praised, we break in with our "Yes,
but — ." The weak spots in others have a
fatal fascination for us ; our eyes are glued to
them. Of the whole Achilles we notice only
the heel. Tennyson has sketched the typical
"runner down" in Vivien, who contributed not

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 185
a httle to the breaking up of the Round Table.
She "let her tongue
Rage like a fire among the noblest names,
Polluting and imputing her whole self,
Defaming and defacing till she left
Not even Lancelot brave nor Galahad clean."

One of the most difficult clauses for most of
us in the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corin
thians runs: "Love thinketh," that is "impu-
teth no evil."
Another phase of false witness against which
the Bible warns is connected with controversy.
The Book of Proverbs again and again links
a fool with contention. It seems to be next
to impossible to disagree with others and do
justice to them. The mere fact that they dif
fer from us argues to our conceit that there
must be something wrong either with their
brains or their consciences, or oftener with
both. It is very rare that a serious difference
of opinion does not bring with it personal de
preciation. Think of those whose views we do
not hke, and how many of them do we hon
estly admire? And particularly when our own

186 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
reasoning is not very strong, we find ourselves
tempted to disparage our opponents. Rich
ard Hooker, who in the midst of a contentious
age won for himself the adjective, "the judi
cious Hooker," in replying to one of his dis
putants says: "Your next argument consists
of railing and of reason ; to your railing I say
nothing; to your reasons I say what follows."
And on another occasion he made the state
ment: "There wUl come a time when three
words uttered with charity and meekness shall
receive a more blessed reward than three thou
sand volumes written with disdainful sharp
ness of wit." How seldom one picks up a
pamphlet or a newspaper article combating
opinions which does not abuse those who hold
them ! Sometimes the abuse is clever ; it makes
the adversary appear ridiculous; but it is not
just; it is false witness. After John Wesley
had read a tract upon an interpretation of the
astronomy in the early chapters of Genesis,
he entered in his Journal: "Is it well thus to
run down aU that differ from us? Dr. Pye
is an ingenious man, but so is Dr. Robinson
also; so are twenty more, although they un
derstand Moses in a quite different manner."

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 187
There must be controversies ; it is only through
the friction of inteUects that we light the torch
of truth. Occasions occur when we have to
contend with aU our mental might for our
convictions. But at such times we need to say
to ourselves most emphatically: "Thou shalt
not bear false witness against thy neighbour."
We are bidden speak the truth in love ; and if i
we cannot speak it in love, we must keep silent.
Truth spoken in any other way is uncon
vincing. The Bible cautions those whose sense of
humour may lead them too far in playing with
the truth about other people. "As a madman
who casteth firebrands, arrows and death, so is
the man that deceiveth his neighbour and saith,
Am I not in sport?" Truth about men is so
sacred that it is irreverent to trifle with it,
exactly as we shrink from joking in the things
we say about God. In the good stories which
we teU concerning other people, we have to
check ourselves and be sure that there is no
malice in them. By no means all humour is
entirely kind ; and while many men are helped
by being laughed at, love, and only love, can
laugh helpfuUy.

188 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
And this brings us to Jesus' reinterpretation
of this ancient commandment. "Judge not,"
He said, "that ye be not judged." In our more
thoughtful moods it may seem strange that He
had to say, "Judge not." There is scarcely
anything which we men are less fitted to do.
To the end the closest of us remain compara
tive strangers to each other. We know next
to nothing of the real significance of the lives
that are lived at our side. Some of you may
have read the striking description Heine gives
of the hfe of Immanuel Kant in the old city
of Koenigsberg: "He lived an abstract, me
chanical, old-bachelor existence, in a quiet re
mote street. I do not beheve that the great
cathedral-clock of that city accomplished its
day's work in a less passionate and more reg
ular way than its countryman, Immanuel Kant.
Rising from bed, coffee-drinking, writing, lec
turing, eating, walking, everything had its'
fixed time; and the neighbours knew that it
must be exactly half-past four when they saw
Professor Kant in his grey coat, with his cane
in his hand, step out of his house door, and
move toward the little lime-tree avenue, which
is named after him — the Professor's Walk.

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 189
Eight times he walked up and down that walk
at every season of the year, and when the
weather was bad, or the grey clouds threatened
rain, his servant, old Lampe, was seen anx
iously following him with a large umbrella
under his arm, like an image of Providence.
Strange contrast between the outer life of the
man and his world-destroying thought! Of a
truth, if the citizens of Koenigsberg had had
any inkling of that thought they would have
shuddered before him as before an executioner.
But the good people saw nothing in him but a
professor of phUosophy, and when he passed
at the appointed hour they gave him friendly
greetings — and set their watches." And we
know as httle of the inner life of those of
whom day after day we catch sight and form
our superficial judgments.
Jesus was not forbidding such superficial
judgments. He knew that so long as men live
together they must form opinions of one an
other. We have to "size up" men's abUities,
dispositions, trustworthiness, in connection
with the positions they fill. We have to esti
mate their value as friends. We have to make
up our minds how they will feel or think about

190 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
this, that or the other matter, in which we have
dealings with them. Life is a constant series
of such judgments. Jesus judged the men
whom he chose to be His foUowers; and the
amazing thing is that He valued them so
highly. Recall His expectations of Simon
Peter — "on this rock" ; of James and John —
"the cup that I drink, ye shaU drink"; even
of Judas Iscariot, for we have every reason to
suppose that he, too, was selected in the faith
that he would be loyal. "Love believeth aU
things, hopeth aU things." And when Jesus
said, "Judge not," He was speaking to would-
be good men, and warning them against what
is perhaps the commonest and worst fault of
good people — allowing themselves to become
censorious and to undervalue men and women.
A sincerely good man, whose long public
hfe constantly forced him to form judgments
of other men — Mr. Gladstone — once wrote:
"Nothing grows upon me so much with
lengthening life as the sense of the difficulties,
or rather the impossibilities, with which we
are beset whenever we attempt to take to our
selves the functions of the Eternal Judge (ex
cept in reference to ourselves where judg-

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 191
ment is committed to us) , and to form any ac
curate idea of relative merit and demerit, good
and evil, in actions. The shades of the rain
bow are not so nice, and the sands of the sea
shore are not such a multitude, as are all the
subtle, shifting, blending, forms of thought and
of circumstance that go to determine the char
acter of us and our acts." And he adds, "But
there is One that seeth plainly and judgeth
righteously." The difficulty is that we are all
the whUe usurping God's place, and passing
judgments on those whom we are not called,
on to justify or condemn. Any unnecessary
expressions of opinion about other people are
to be avoided as perUous infringements on
God's prerogative.
And it is here that good people are so often
very far from good. Maurice once wrote to
his mother: "Of aU spirits I believe the spirit
of judging is the worst, and it has had the rule
of me I cannot tell you how dreadfully and
how long. Looking in other people for the
faults which I had a secret consciousness were
in myself, where I should have been sure to
find them all ; this, I find, has more hindered
my progress in love and gentleness and

192 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
sympathy than all things else. I never knew
what the words 'Judge not that ye be not
judged' meant before; now they seem to me
some of the most awful, necessary and beauti
ful in the whole Word of God." A recent
novelist has described one of her characters as
foUows: "Discrimination was the note of her
being. For every Christian some Christian
precepts are obsolete. For Lady Lucy that
which runs, 'Judge not,' had never been alive."
And when circumstances compel us to form
and express judgments about other people, we
must clearly recall that in our limited human
way we are attempting one of God's functions,
and must remind ourselves how our Father
judges. In Luke's account of Jesus' words the
^sequence runs : "Be ye merciful even as your
Father is merciful. And judge not." The
critical attitude is essentiaUy ungodlike. It is
worth remembering that so keen an analyst of
character as Shakespeare puts upon the hps of
his worst vUlain, lago, the sentence: "I am
nothing if not critical." And the only cure for
the critical spirit is a very large dose of love.
We have to discriminate or we have no taste,
but it must be love's discrimination. Landor

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 193
once, repenting of some censures he had passed
on Milton, said to Southey, "Are we not some
what like two little beggar-boys who, forget
ting that they are in tatters, sit noticing a few
stains and rents in their father's raiment?"
"But," replied Southey, "they love him." And
love qualifies us, as it qualifies our God, for
judging, where we must judge. "Nothing,"
says Faber, the hymn-writer and good phy
sician of souls, "deepens the mind so much as
the habit of charity. Charity cannot feed on
surfaces. Its instinct always is to go deeper.
Roots are its natural food."
And this explains why Jesus added : "Judge
not, and ye shall not be judged." It is not
that God in an arbitrary fashion will pay us
for being charitable in our opinions with an
equal charitableness in judging us; but that
the constant use of love in our estimates of
others wiU actually alter us, deepen our na
tures, broaden our sympathies, feed us with di
vine impulses, and develop in us godlike char
acters that cannot be condemned. "With what
measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you
again," because the measure we use becomes
our capacity, and God is always giving us just

194 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
as much as we can contain. To be generous
in our opinions of others is to enlarge our own
natures to receive the generosity of God; to
forgive is to have room for the inflow of His
forgiveness, to judge with His love is to be
capable of taking in His fulness and becoming
like Him who cannot be harshly judged.
Then Jesus adds the saying about first
casting out the beam from our own eye before
we can look at the mote in our brother's eye.
In other words, be strict with yourself and
you will be lenient in your judgment of others.
Most critical persons are hypocritical; they
overrate themselves and then underrate others.
There is a very deceptive modesty that takes
the form of running ourselves down in our
talk with others in order to have them exalt
us in reply, and tickle our vanity. All talk
about our own merit or demerit, save to God,
is probably to be avoided; but that does not
mean that we are not to take ourselves in hand
and give ourselves a rigid and searching
scrutiny. "Why considerest not thou the beam
that is in thine own eye?" said Jesus. It is to
be carefully considered, scanned, hated, cast
out, however painful the operation of re-

THE NINTH COMMANDMENT 195
moval is. Severity with self is the only safe
guard of love with others.
And there is stUl one other enlargement of
the meaning of this ancient commandment
which we owe to Jesus. Who is the "neigh
bour" against whom we are forbid to bear false
witness ? Jesus called "neighbour" anyone who
needed what He had to bestow. It is always
easier to undervalue those we have never
seen than those who are close at hand. The
death of a thousand soldiers in Poland or at
Tsing Tao means less to us than a single life
lost on our own subway. Our valuations vary
inversely with the distance of the person we
are valuing. We feel pained that some relative
or friend is without the stimulus of our Chris
tian faith ; we sometimes feel that a Chinaman
or a Hindu can get on with religious inspira
tions considerably less. It is the commonest
thing to hear nominal Christians declaring that
other faiths (of which usuaUy they know very
little) are quite good enough for the inhabi
tants of Asia or Africa, whUe they consider
the faith of Christ none too good for them and
theirs. It is a pathetic form of bearing false
witness against our neighbour. What does

196 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Christ, sincerely accepted, make out of even
semi-civilised men in a single generation?
What are the results of Christianity in the
second and third generations? Let us be just.
We have no occasion to depreciate the religious
and moral inspirations given by other faiths;
we are not likely to overestimate the worth
of such unused Christianity as permits its
nominal devotees to slaughter each other; but
we must not be unfair in our judgments of
the capacities of races as yet unchristianized;
and above all we must not be unjust to the
transforming influence of Him, whom we caU
our Saviour. What are other men to us Chris
tians — men at our side, men in the ends of the
earth? Brethren, for whose sake Christ died.
What is Christ to us? Each must answer out
of his own experience. Not to beheve that aU
men are capable of attaining sonship with God
through Him, and that He is able to supply
their every need out of His fulness, is the
most serious and most thoroughly unchristian
form of bearing false witness against both our
earthly and our Heavenly neighbour.

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT
Exodus xx:17: "Thou shalt not covet anything that
is thy neighbour's."
The Ten Commandments are represented as
spoken at Sinai to tribesmen on the point of
invading the land of Canaan and capturing the
towns, vineyards and possessions of its inhab
itants. One wonders that it never occurred to
any of them that this injunction, "Thou shalt
not covet," had an immediate apphcation to
their greedy desire to expropriate the Canaan
ites. A Hebrew would have answered
promptly that the dwellers in Canaan were not
neighbours; only feUow-Israelites were neigh
bours. But unhappily, Christians, to whom in
theory aU men are neighbours, have not felt
that this commandment forbade a nation cov
eting the territory, or trade, or prestige of an
other. Some "place in the sun" which is occu
pied by a neighbour people has been and stUl
is the underlying motive that sends a nation
to war. So universally has a stronger people
199

200 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
dispossessed a weaker, a civUised nation used
its superior inteUigence and improved appli
ances of fighting to seize the lands of a less civ
Uised, a vigorous race mastered a decadent or
backward race, that we are at a loss to fancy
how otherwise the world's history might have
run its course. Coveting has been taken for
granted; it has been labeUed national ambi
tion, and held up as part of the creed of every
patriot. It has been assumed that a country
was justified in wanting and in taking every
square inch of the earth's surface over which
it could plant its flag. Whatever may be said
to condone the actions of the past, the awak
ened conscience of to-day wUl surely insist
that a land, be it the PhUippines, or India, or
Korea, or Belgium, or Bohemia, or Poland, or
any other country with a national conscious
ness, belongs to its own inhabitants. It may
not yet be ready to keep itself unhelped, but
it must not be held by another land against
its own wUl and used for another's interest..
Only as this ancient commandment, "Thou
shalt not covet anything that is thy neigh
bour's" is graven on the hearts of nations have
we a lasting basis for peace. No patriotism

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 201
without it is Christian, or, for that matter, even
truly Jewish, according to an international
apphcation of the Decalogue. No satisfactory
world-tribunal wUl be erected to adjudicate
the differences of nations until the social
conscience of the represented powers feels
the imperative of this ancient moral prin
ciple. WhUe the Israelites did not apply this com
mandment to their dealings with other peoples,
the Bible is full of instances of individuals
who are censured for breaking it — Achan with
the Babylonish mantle, the shekels of silver
and the wedge of gold among the booty of
Jericho, David with Bethsheba, the wife of
Uriah the Hittite, Ahab with Naboth's vine
yard, and a host more. But it leaves us to
define for ourselves what coveting is forbid
den. "Covet earnestly," it bids us, "the best
gifts." How shaU we distinguish the two
kinds of coveting — self-seeking from laudable
ambition? This commandment has been used to stifle
social restlessness. It has been interpreted to
mean that a man must be content with what he
and his already possess; they are not to de-

202 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
sire the advantages and comforts of the more
fortunately circumstanced. This is a very
convenient application for the "haves," but
hardly satisfactory to the "have-nots." We
must recall that the Bible regards everything
as primarily family property, and that the in
dividual's ownership is conditioned upon the
judgment of the family that he renders a com
mensurate service, or that he needs his por
tion for his good. One may rightly covet for
the disinherited a larger share in the house
hold's goods, and for some of the wealthy a
fuller bearing of the household's burdens.
Such social coveting is nothing but love. But
the personal desire of some individual to take
from another that which he now owns and
make it his own is never a worthy aim. No
man is entitled to set up his private opinion
that it would be better for him to have that
which is now another man's, and better for
the other man to be without it. These are
social judgments, which the community, not in
dividuals, is entitled to pronounce. What
any man lawfuUy holds, he holds from the
community under God ; if the community takes
it. from him — weU and good; if some private

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 203
person casts longing eyes upon it and wants
it for himself, that is coveting a neighbour's
possessions. And the Bible shows us in a hundred ways
how readUy men set their hearts on that which
is another's, and how by so doing we degrade
ourselves. Time and again it links covetous
ness with uncleanness. In the commandment
itself wanting a neighbour's house or ox is set
side by side with wanting his wife. We con
demn the foul desire of the would-be adul
terer; and the Bible tries to make us feel the
foulness of all desires for that which belongs
to others.
St. Paul's letters repeatedly contain hsts
that run: "Fornication, uncleanness, passion,
evU desire, and covetousness ;" "no fornicator,
nor unclean person, nor covetous man." There
is a genuine kinship between these vices. In
the chronology of morals it often happens that
the hcentious young man becomes in middle
age the money lover; covetousness has been
caUed "promoted vice, lust superannuated."
The desire to possess and enjoy what is an
other's is the same dirty desire whether its
object be another man's wife, or his po^i-

204 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
tion, his fortune, his reputation, his busi
ness. And it is here that competition is most
clearly seen as an immoral motive. Men may
vie with each other for business efficiency;
that is coveting earnestly the best gifts.
Rivalry between workmen as to who can do
the better job, or finish it more rapidly, is an
entirely legitimate and praiseworthy rivalry.
Firms may contend in the endeavour to render
the community better service, and that is love's
contest. But the moment a workman deliber
ately sets out so to fulfil his work that he
supplants some other workman, or a firm con
sciously attempts to get the customers of an
other firm, unclean covetousness enters and de
grades the motive. In commercial competi
tion the Christian must distinguish sharply
between coveting the best gifts with which to
serve and coveting that which is a neighbour's.
The great painters and poets have confirmed
the Bible's feeling that covetousness is un
clean. Giotto, for instance, paints Envy as a
figure of a woman partiaUy bestiahsed with
fingers terminating in claws ; and in the Faerie
Queene Spenser teUs how

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 205
"Malicious Envy rode
Upon a ravenous wolfe, and still did chaw
Between his cankered teeth a venomous tode,
That all the poison ran about his jaw.
All in a kirtle of discolored say (serge)
He clothed was, ypainted full of eies,
And in his bosom secretely there lay
An hateful snake, the which his tail uptyes
In many folds, and mortal sting implyes."
There is something essentially sub-human in
setting longing eyes on that which is somebody
else's; it is brute-like to do that.
This commandment is the climax of the law ;
it goes deeper than any of the other com
mandments. Jesus had to take some of the
others and deepen them for His disciples in
order that they might feel that a hateful feel
ing was murder and a lustful thought adultery ;
but He did not need to touch this command
ment. It went down of itself into men's secret
thoughts and feelings ; they might refrain from
theft or uncleanness; but if the covetous de
sire was there, they were condemned. "Thou
shalt not covet anything that is thy neigh
bour's" is simply the negative of "thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself."
And it was the searching character of this

206 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
commandment that made it play a significant
role in one of the greatest religious experiences
in the Bible. Saul of Tarsus, the devout boy,
brought up in the strict faith and morals of
his fathers, and surpassing his feUow students
in Gamahel's classroom in earnestness, could
listen to aU the other nine commandments
with his withers unwrung; but the tenth
probed far into his conscience and left him
writhing. "The law said, 'Thou shalt not
covet,' " he teUs us in a frank chapter of auto
biography, "and sin wrought in me aU manner
of coveting." One cannot help wishing that
he had not been so general, but had drawn
aside the veU of reticence and told us specifi-
caUy what he longed after. It is not hkely
to have been money, for his chosen career was
not that of a wealth-seeker ; but money can do
so many fine things that Saul may have wished
for a fortune. It may have been sensual pas
sion; and this wiU account for his strong words
about buffeting his body and keeping it under.
There is a crater of emotion in this man that
becomes active in his Christian days in glow
ing devotion and fiery indignation; and it may
easily have been volcanic with other passions

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 207
at an earlier period. Or it may have been the
much more spiritual lust for reputation and in
fluence and power. Pride and coveting are
close kin ; and this brUliant student with great
gifts of leadership and utterance must have
had no smaU battle with self-conceit and the
desire to be in the prominent places held by
others. Perhaps his phrase, "all manner of
coveting," is meant to cover his desire always to
be in the first place of recognition and praise
and influence, and the jealous chafing of his
spirit when others were more thought of and
spoken about and followed. And it was his
inability to cope with covetousness that ship
wrecked his sincere attempt to work out his
own righteousness. He thought he was rea
sonably successful with the other command
ments ; but with his own feelings, longings, am
bitions, he could do nothing. "When the com
mandment came, sin revived, and I died."
How thankful we must ever be for this
honest man's confession of his mastering diffi
culty! How close he comes to us all! "AU
manner of coveting" — let conscience work for
a moment and recall how we craved the ad
miring words spoken to another, and envied

208 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
his charm, his abUity, his capacity for evoking
affection; how we set our heart on the com
forts, or the social prestige, or the personal
popularity we saw someone else enjoying, and
begrudged them to him in our selfish wish to
have them for ourselves ; how we have actuaUy
schemed to get ahead of another in a friend's
trust or esteem, in an official position, in a
lucrative opportunity. There is hardly a busi
ness office that does not witness coveting —
one man wishmg himself in another's shoes;
or a home that does not see a covetous love
wishing its dear ones to outdistance in favour
or power some other's beloved; or a meet
ing where a covetous desire to outshine an
other is not evident in the course of one or a
dozen persons present; or a social entertain
ment that does not display a covetous craving
for attention or applause or honour. "AU man
ner of coveting" — one need not specify, for
conscience will itemise the detaUs for every
one of us. There is always someone suffi
ciently near us in abUity or social position or
similarity of gifts to constitute him a rival,
and provoke the green-eyed njonster within us.
"Sin revived, and I died."

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 209
And to Paul in his extremity came One
whose outstanding distinction lay in having no
place whatsoever for covetousness, One who
was self-emptied ; and in trustful loyalty to
Him Paul became alive. But he hardly knew
himself; it was not he that lived; he could
not recognise himself with covetousness no
longer dominant ; it was the uncovering Christ
alive in him.
Although so free from personal desires that,
as one sympathetic interpreter tells us, the
Prince of this world found nothing in Him,
Jesus knew the perils of acquisitiveness in His
brethren. What a man wants, He felt, he
serves. He saw men wanting money, want
ing it no doubt for a great many mixed mo
tives, lofty and base, just as men want it to
day; and that desire made them in His eyes
worshippers of mammon. With fine power of
analysis He unbared the subtle results that fol
lowed in character: a hardening, for a suc
cessful money-maker has to suppress his finer
sympathies, and the result is a Dives living
sumptuously while a Lazarus, neglected, lies
not far away; a self-sufficiency, for money can
do so many things that its possessors uncon-

210 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
sciously settle down with a comfortable sense
of security — "Soul, thou hast much goods laid
up for many years ;" a self-indulgence, because
even the most generous of well-to-do persons
has an almost overwhelming temptation to be
kind to himself, what would be luxury in
others appears ordinary avoidance of mean
ness in him, and everything in men's expecta
tion says to him: "take thine ease, eat, drink,
and be merry." "How hardly shaU they that
have riches," said the frankest and most plain-
spoken of masters, "enter the Kingdom of
heaven." Fine as may be the aims to which we
would put wealth, its possessor must reahse
that he owns perUous stuff ; in a thousand ways
it may ruin him. And to long for money, high
as is the purpose in which we wish to employ
it, is a most dangerous longing. "The love of
money is the root of aU kinds of evil," says
the truest interpreter of the Lord's mind.,
But it is also just to remember that whUe
Jesus spoke of money as unrighteous mam
mon, — "unrighteous", perhaps, because in a
world so unlovingly ordered as ours its acqui
sition and possession can hardly fail to be with
out injustice to someone, or because it is so

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 211
likely to injure its owner — He also insisted
that it had a very important moral bearing. "If,
therefore, ye have not been faithful in the un
righteous mammon, who will commit to your
trust the true riches?" The proper handling
of money is an essential part of man's educa
tion. Sir Henry Taylor, in his Notes on Life,
has written: "So manifold are the bearings
of money upon the lives and characters of man
kind, that an insight which should search out
the life of a man in his pecuniary relations
would penetrate into almost every cranny of
his nature. He who knows, like St. Paul, how
to spare and how to abound, has a great knowl
edge ; for if we take account of all the virtues
with which money is mixed up — honesty, jus
tice, generosity, charity, frugality, forethought,
self-sacrifice, and of their correlative vices,
it is a knowledge which goes near to cover the
length and breadth of humanity, and a right
measure in getting, saving, spending, giving,
taking, lending, borrowing, and bequeathing,
would almost argue a perfect man." Small
wonder, then, that in Jesus' judgment a right
handling of money is a conclusive test of fit
ness for the possession of true riches.

212 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
And in Jesus' mind this Tenth Command
ment was indissolubly connected with the First,
so that the Decalogue for Him began and
ended on the same note. A man whose heart
was set on acquiring wealth, no matter what
lofty purpose he had in mind for it, was put
ting another god up beside the living Father
on the throne of his hfe. He was giving some
thing else a consideration, a trust, a service,
that belonged to God alone. "Ye cannot serve
God and mammon." And in entire accord
with the Master, Paul constantly caUs a cov
etous man an idolater.
We are back, then, where we started — to
Luther's definition of what it means to have
a God: "Whatever thy heart chngs to and
relies on, that is properly thy God." Our
danger lies in putting things or people in God's
place, longing for and pinning our faith to
something less than the Most High. We have
to remind ourselves again and again how
meagre was the outfit of Jesus — He had prac
tically nothing but a conviction and a charac
ter; and how entirely sufficient that outfit
proved. To be sure He did not hesitate to
employ everything that happened to be at His

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 213
disposal, but He was always detached from
it; His heart was never set on it as indispen
sable. If someone invited Him to a banquet
He accepted, and enjoyed so heartily what
was offered Him that critics called Him glut
tonous and winebibber. If art could make
His message carry, He took pains to be su
premely artistic, and clothed His thought in
phrases of undying beauty. If the affection
and loyalty of men could further His cause,
He used to the fuU the friendship of a Peter,
an Andrew, a John. But He longed for noth
ing as essential to His purpose and life. If
men's hospitality turned to rejection and the
tragic prosecution of the last days, if He could
no longer get a hearing for His most beautiful
parable and was reduced to silence, if one
disciple turned traitor and the rest ran away,
there was no diminution in His confidence, no
regretful longing for other means to accom
plish His end, but complete contentment with
the stern and awful necessity of enduring the
cross. If He had the righteous and loving God,
that seemed to fill His every need. The only
covetous cry was the prayer for Him: "My
God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

214 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
"Ye cannot serve God and . . ." To have
God means that God has aU of us. Coveting
anything apart from Him is to lose Him.
Honesty compels most of us to admit that we
are not conscious, as Jesus was, of this most
real reinforcement of ourselves from outside.
God is to us an idea rather than a factor, a
force. Jesus would tell us that covetousness,
a divided heart, doomed us to spiritual numb
ness and rendered God beyond our feeling.
We want the righteous God, and at the same
time we want our own way; we want our
Father's "weU done", and we want to stand in
with our neighbours ; we want to do His wUl,
and we want to get on in the world ; we want
to spend and be spent for the Kingdom, and
we want to be reasonably comfortable and
amused while we are doing it. James would
caU us "double-minded," and Jesus would
explain the doubleness by two deities — God
and mammon.
If we covet God, He must be coveted with
our entire natures in order to be had. There
can be no side desires; the whole current of
our being must set just one way. An occa
sional wistfulness for higher things, a stray

THE TENTH COMMANDMENT 215
trust in love, a partial resolve to seek right
eousness, a fitful aspiration for justice, a
thought once in a while of the will of the Most
High — these will never give us God.
f Night sucks them down, the tribute of the pit,
Whose names, half-entered in the book of life, '
Were God's desire at noon.
"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all",
or there is some undevoted particle of the self
coveting somewhat discordant with God, who
is love; and that is idolatry^ To give one's
whole self to Him with the completeness of
Jesus' consecration is so to find God, and to
be satisfied in Him, that there is no fractional
longing left to covet aught unrelated with His
will. God is all in all. "Whom have I in
heaven but Thee? And there is none upon
earth I desire besides Thee."
But this is only to face ourselves with the
problem that baffled Saul of Tarsus. How is
it in our power to concentrate our love and
leave no fractional desires straying off on
unhaUowed ends? Jesus Christ proved the
solution of Saul's problem. After the spell of
His mastering Personality had been cast over

216 THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
him, Paul said, "One thing I do," "To me to
hve is Christ." God, when He comes to us
through the Figure of Jesus, claims and cap
tures as much as in us is. Jesus engrosses a
whole man, fiUs the entire horizon. We covet
His hfe with God, His life with men, His gifts.
And we are so covetous of Him that we covet
nothing else.
Our safety from aU other coveting lies in
constantly looking off to Him, and letting
Him draw out our every desire and confidence
and fasten them on Himself.
"Thou, O Christ, art all I want;
More than all in Thee I find."
Then God through Him possesses us entirely,
and we seek Him with our whole hearts, and
find Him. "The Lord is my portion, saith my
soul" ; "I have no good beyond Thee."