was worse than a midnight darkness; it was a mistaking of darkness for light. These eight injunctions not only excluded ethical commandments, but, being set up as the chief requirements of the nation's God, they challenged a deference and won an obedience wholly unmerited. They thus not only neglected, they distorted, inverted and perverted man's moral judgment. Whatever this God Yahwe might have been, two things are perfectly plain. Injunctions about not seething a kid in its mother's milk and the like could never have been represented as emanating from him had he been conceived as the infinite Creator of the universe; still less, however, had he been identified with the power inherent in righteousness.

When we compare the second and third versions of the Decalogue with the first, we find that the Jewish people had evolved from midnight to the clear ethical dawn. And when we compare the second with the third, we feel that if the second version marks the dawn, the third heralds the forenoon of ethical religion. The writers of Deuteronomy, apparently having no other motive than national expediency, made bold to bring the Decalogue into line with the best moral judgment of their age; and only when they had done this did they, in the reign of Josiah, allow the Book of the Law to be discovered in the Temple. But unhappily in the English Book of Common Prayer it is the second version—that of the 20th chapter of Exodus, and not that of the 5th of Deuteronomy-which has been accepted as the Ten Commandments; it is a form which was already obsolescent among the Jews six hundred years before Christ. As compared with introducing into the Prayer Book either version of the Decalogue, the importance of choosing the Deuteronomic form would have seemed insignificant

at the time. Now, however, whenever the Prayer Book is revised, the substitution of this in place of the Exodic form would be an incalculable ethical gain.

The moral differences are seen in the fourth and tenth commandments. In Exodus the fourth had stood:

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

The revisers in the time of Josiah struck out the fantastic, mythological, supernaturalistic reason here given for keeping the seventh day holy. They made the commandment read :

Keep the sabbath day to sanctify it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: 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 thy stranger that is within thy gates; that thy manservant and thy maidservant may rest as well as thou. And remember that thou wast a servant in the land of Egypt, and that the Lord thy God brought thee out thence through a mighty hand and by a stretched-out arm: therefore the Lord thy God commanded thee to keep the sabbath day.

They had found better reasons for sabbath observance than that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and rested the seventh. They could never have dropped this reason had it not ceased to be to them convincing. But it had ceased to be so, because they had found deeper

foundations for the observance of the sabbath. These they discovered in national expediency and universal humanity. The day was now to be kept for the purposes of education in the nation's upward history and for discipline in humility, and out of considerateness and kindness to working men and beasts of burden. Is it not veritably a difference from dawn, if not from midnight, to noonday, through which the Jew had passed from the time when he kept the sabbath because the Creator had rested after making heaven and earth, and now, when his God enjoins him to keep it in order that menservants and maidservants might rest as well as their masters? Now masters were to remember that they also had once been servants and that they had once been delivered from slavery. From gratitude and humility, as well as from a sense of human tenderness and responsibility, they were to keep the day of rest.

If philosophic monotheism means the recognition of the power one worships as the Creator of heaven and earth, then the 20th chapter of Exodus is more monotheistic than that in Deuteronomy. For the writers of Deuteronomy struck out the only passage which could have been interpreted as cosmic theism, and inserted in its place an absolutely humanistic and social reason for observing the day of the Lord their God. This comparison between the two Old Testament versions of the fourth commandment must convince everybody who appreciates the national responsibility of the Anglican Church as a moral educator that at least the Deuteronomic version must replace that of Exodus in the Prayer Book.

A similar minimum of revision is required in the tenth commandment. The version from Exodus which the Prayer Book sanctions reads, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's

wife, nor his manservant," and then goes on to enumerate other labourers. Here is a survival of primitive and semi-barbarous ideas. Covetousness is made to cover an unrestrained craving of the reproductive instinct as well as an anti-social desire to own the property of others and control other human beings as wealth-producers. Such a grouping together implies that women are the legal and rightful property of men; only on this presupposition could the wife have been classed in the tenth commandment among possessions and servants as a part of the house. It is assumed that the husband owns the household, and through it the wife. But as far back as in the days of Deuteronomy, Jewish statesmen had outgrown this primitive point of view. Accordingly they revised the tenth commandment, and put it in a form which places the wife apart and in a category distinct from that of household goods. The Deuteronomic version runs, "Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbour's wife; neither shalt thou covet thy neighbour's house"-and then proceeds to specify details of property.

Perhaps the Deuteronomic version of the fourth and tenth commandments would have been adopted by those who constructed the Anglican Prayer Book if their work had not been done hurriedly and under pressure of a great political uncertainty-not to say personal danger. Yet one cannot help fearing that no such ethical evolution. had been going on in the reign of Henry VIII. as regards respect for working people and for women as must have been undoubtedly taking place in that of King Josiah. But however much we may have reason to regret the low standard of English morals in the sixteenth century on these two points, there can be no doubt that now for a century England has been leading the world to a new recognition of the moral personality of women and of all

labourers. And this new insight must soon lead at the least to substituting for the Ten Words of Exodus those of Deuteronomy.

Let us then consider the fitness of the Deuteronomic Decalogue as a summary of the elements of ethical religion. This version embodies the teaching of the prophets of the eighth and seventh centuries before Christ. It is the garnered fruit of the labours of Amos, Isaiah, Micah and Hosea, who gave the ethical trend to politics, patriotism and religion. Especially in Micah, who lived about a century before the publication of Deuteronomy, do we find the teachings which inspired the great ethical movement of the seventh century. The Ten Commandments as they appear in the 5th chapter of Deuteronomy are but an aphoristic formulation of the spirit of such a passage as this in Micah :

Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? The voice of the Lord crieth unto the city, and the man of wisdom will see thy name: hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it. Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable? Shall I be pure with wicked balances, and with a bag of deceitful weights?

What a spiritual revolution, achieved through a process of moral agitation, from the injunction that a kid shall not be seethed in its mother's milk to the identification of humility before one's God with not cheating in trade, and