THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18885, 6 December 1924, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.

THE BASIS OF MORAL TRUTH.

BY D.J.A.

1 may perhaps be permitted to cherish the hope that no one will assume from the above heading that I claim to have written the- Ten Commandments. I wish to make this clear at the outset, because modern scholarship has fallen into the habit of disturbing people's belief!, as to the authorship of certain ancicm; writings. Homer's " Iliad. " was in this sad case, for there were critics who : denied the existence of the Greek poet, but, fortunately, it found a friend in that excellent journal, Punch, which announced that this poem had not been written by Homer, " but by another chap of the same name." That' dictum, of course, settled the question forever. There have been a quite considerable multitude of persons who have rejoiced in the name Moses, but not one of them seems sufficiently distinguished to have written these immortal laws, so that in this case Punch's solution does not apply; nor is this the whole of the matter, since even the original Moses does not quite account for them. And yet, if the latest, most learned, and most profoundly scientific study "of this code may be received as trustworthy, these laws, perhaps not just in their present form, but in their integrity, must be regarded as the work of Moses. That is the last word of' Old Testament scholarship, the word, to bo precise, of Professor Charles, whose reputation is international and unique. But as I have already remarked, Moses may have written these laws, but , even so colossal a personality as that of the great Hebrew leader does not sufficiently account for them. Whence Came The Commandments. Here was a nation of slaves who had escaped from their captivity, marched to the Red Sea, crossed a narrow neck of its shallow floor by virtue of a most, providential gale of wind, which had driven back its waters, trekked down the seaboard of the Sinaitic Peninsula, and at last had camped in the mountainous district of Horeb. To these people, low in morality, fiercely sensual, deeply ignorant, amazingly lacking in either ethical or political wisdom, Moses is recorded to have given these laws. From whence did he obtain them ? Not from the wisdom of Egypt, for there is nothing that even faintly resembles them in the writings of that nation. Not from Babylon, for though modern research has uncovered for us the archives of that great State, there is no trace of these laws to be found among them. Not from the code of King Hammurabi, a contemporary of Abraham, whose laws have been re-discovered in our time. That there are faint resemblances goes without saying, but anything like a parallel or even a primitive adumbration of these laws is not to be found. Nor does the mystery end with this, for if we examine the laws of the later peoples, the Persians, the Greeks, even tho Romans, we fail to find a code at once so brief, so authoritative, so final that it can stand upon an equality with these few terse sentences in which" the Hebrew leader summed up the foundations of social well-being and moral truth. For, strange to say, it was just this that Moses did. Daniel Webster, perhaps the greatest legal mind America ever produced, declared that every good law the world possesses has grown out of these ten commandments, nor is he alone in this testimony. One might quote Lord Chief Justices who. have said the same thing, and though much of our legal edifice in modern times has been erected upon the codes of Justinian, there is in our law a deeper stratum which runs right back to these ten commandments. Great developments have, of course, marked the course of law through the ages, but it remains true that these commandments are not a mere standard of ethical right, but are the absolute morality. Obeyed, they produce every kind of social and moral well-being; disobeyed, they become the knell of doom. "Thou Shalt Hot Covet." Advanced as we are, it is not easy to obey them even yet. St. Paul, who declared that in all things concerning the law he had been blameless, acknowledged that one at least of these commandments found his weak spot and reduced him to dismay and confusion. For the law said : " Thou shalt not covet." He felt quite a good little Pharisee until these words got up and hit him—then he collapsed. Our modern civilisation is unfortunately in precisely the same position. Even the Christian Church of our time quails before this command. Indeed, the modern church has so accustomed herself to think of God as a great servant who answers her prayers, guides her destinies, and provides lor her needs, that she is in grave danger of forgetting that her acknowledgement of God is meaningless unless she obeys his commands. There is a type of religion, aesthetic or emotional —the sort of piety found commonly among the negroes of the Southern States of America—which is slushy with sentiment, but which is devoid of ethical elements, that has been the bano of mankind. Of one of these negro churches it is related that on a certain Sunday a strange minister, who was about to open his service, felt a gentle tug at his coat tails. Looking downward and backward he beheld tho leading deacon standing on the pulpit steps, and evidently wishing to speak to him. He stooped to listen, and the whispered message which he received was: " Please, be so kind as not to preach on de commandments. It t'rows a dampness on do meetin'." Inspiration in a Desert Place. These ten commandments, embodying as they do the elements of national and social well-being, and setting forth' for all time the absolute standard of moral truth, challenge all men and each nation; and if it seems to us a strange thing that these commands issued from the mind of a man who lived in a primitive age, if it is unaccountable that this code did not rise amid some matured civilisation, but in a desert place and from a horde of recently manumitted nomads, let us not fail to note the existence in tho life of humanity of a curious element which men have agreed to name inspiration. It is confined to no age, it appears only rarely, is perhaps specially characteristic of certain peoples, and is the peculiar mark of that mental development which, whether it appears in the sphere of art. literature or religion, is incomprehensible and has received therefore the name of genius. To speak of its achievements as discoveries is to be guilty of misnomer, since illuminations would be the better word. To attempt to distinguish between its illuminations and actual revelations is to undertake a task for the accomplishment of which only psychologists and theolo- j gians are equipped. We do not, cannot, understand it, but wherever we meet it, it shines upon us a light from the hidden glory. When the blue, vision-filled eyes of Joan of Arc j still gaze out at me, after 25 years, from among the vine leaves in Bastien le Page's great picture, when nearly forty thousand voices still sing to me Handel's "Hallelujah," as they sang it years ago in the Crystal Palace, when Kipling's "Glory of the Garden" thrills me, I know that I have stood face to face with the absolute truth.

And if I have mot and bowed my very soul before such inspiration, shall I not stand in an oven greater awe as I behold an illumination which has revealed to humanity the moral potentialities of tho life of mankind? 0 yes, Moses wrote these commandments, but it was a Moses whoso face shone, a Moses who had beheld a glory brighter than the rising iron.