purely practical problem, and thus it ceases to be a puzzle. It is not an ethical self-contradiction, it is not an inherent antinomy of the moral life; it involves only an unfulfilled achievement. At the consummation of human perfection there will be a complete harmony between private judgment and positive law, and hence no longer any dilemma as to the seat of moral authority. It may not seem to my readers an unnecessary repetition, if I close this chapter by bringing together the injunctions which I have tentatively suggested as desirable revisions of the Decalogue. As I review them, I have a strong sense that under a rational religion of duty many ancient rules of conduct will rightfully lose their authority, for the occasion will pass away which required them ; and · that, with the deepening of experience and with change of circumstance, new principles of conduct must perforce be adopted. But I am at the same time strengthened in the conviction that men will never cease to hear within them the voice of the Social Conscience uttering ten elemental Words of life, different in form, perhaps, from these, but identical in meaning :— 1. I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods before me. 2. Thou shalt not make a god of pleasure, wealth, station, or any outward gain; neither shalt thou worship any Being, however powerful, except for its human wisdom and goodness; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous god, visiting through transmission of blood, through the teaching and example of parents and by public opinion, the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and in all these ways showing mercy unto thousands in them that love me and keep my commandments. 3. Thou shalt not take the names of the Lord thy God in vain; for he lowers respect for Righteousness who taketh its names in vain. 4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it sacred to the higher destinies of man. labour and to recreation. of the Lord thy God. Six days shalt thou devote to 5. Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. 6. Thou shalt do no injury to the mind or body either of thyself or another, unless the general welfare requires it to be done by thee. 7. Thou shalt not commit adultery; neither shalt thou even so much as desire anyone whom for the sake of the common life thou shouldst not have. 8. Thou shalt not steal; neither shalt thou take or keep from another anything which the social welfare requires that he should possess. 9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour; neither shalt thou misrepresent or withhold from him any fact or any conviction of thine own which it were best for the social life that he should know. 10. Thou shalt not desire to own anything which it would be best for the community that others should possess. CHAPTER III THE LORD'S PRAYER TO WHOM ADDRESSED ONLY one passage from the Bible takes precedence over the Decalogue in the rank and office assigned it by the makers of our national manual of religious services. The rubric enjoins that the Lord's Prayer, like the Ten Commandments, shall be committed to memory by every confirmand. But, what is more, it is to be repeated twice every morning and twice every evening, throughout the year, in every church of England, by people as well as by priest. It appears twice in the Communion Service, once in each of the rites of Baptism, and once in the ceremonies of Confirmation, of Marriage, of the Visitation of the Sick, of Burial, of the Churching of Women, of Commination, and of the Ordering of Deacons and Priests and the Consecration of Bishops, and in the Accession Service. This pre-eminence given to the Lord's Prayer is not based on an error of judgment as to its significance compared with other passages of the New Testament. Everybody agrees that it is, in the words of Tertullian, a breviarium totius evangelii; or, as Cyprian characterised it, cælestis doctrine compendium. It stands in the New Testament as the Decalogue in the Old, so that the question whether we shall allow it in the future to hold the same place in England's manual of moral edification resolves itself into whether the New Testament message shall overtop that of the Old, together with the question -which we have perhaps settled affirmatively in the first chapter-whether brief summaries are to be retained as an educational device. If the New Testament message and a compendium of it are to continue to hold their ascendency, it must be entirely on grounds of national expediency. From this point of view, no question as to the authorship of the whole or of any part of the Lord's Prayer can enter in, to modify our decision. Were it proved that Jesus Christ was not the author of it, but that it was a form already current in his day, or were it shown that he (as some used to think) simply compiled it, its intrinsic value, if it had any, would not be diminished. Nor, on the other hand, were it to be historically verified that it originally emanated from the lips of Jesus, would this increase its value. Such verification might enhance the worth of Jesus, but not vice versa. The value of a gift precious in itself can increase our debt to the giver, but our general debt to the giver can add nothing to the inherent worth of a gift. The fact that the Lord's Prayer appears only in two of the Gospels-and neither of these the earliest — is irrelevant, from the point of view of its present usefulness. Nor is its significance in the least lowered because contradictory settings are given to it in Luke and Matthew. It can make no difference to its value for us that Luke represents it as having been given by Jesus at the request of one disciple, who asked, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples," and that according to Matthew it was given as a part of the Sermon on the Mount. It would make no difference, were scholars finally to decide that its setting in Luke is the more likely one, and that it was inserted later into the Sermon. The fact is also of no bearing that in Luke and Matthew the forms of it differ. It cannot concern us that, as the Revised Version shows, in Luke the third and seventh petitions are absent. If these are of direct help to us, and are worthy on that account to hold the eminence in our scheme of national redemption which they have hitherto held, their authority would in no wise be weakened because they lack the sanction of Luke. The case is the same with the word "our" before "Father." Even if the earliest form omits this pronoun, there may be the same reason for our retaining it which perhaps justified those who first inserted it. Likewise with the words, "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever." Nor should any doubt as to what any phrase originally meant deter us from independently attaching to it the interpretation which it might most serviceably bear for us. For instance, as to the meaning of the word "daily" before "bread": the question for us is not whether the oldest tradition was correct which interpreted the Greek word as meaning constant or continual, or whether it originally meant "the bread of our need" or "our bread of riches." The problem is only as to what we find that it will be best henceforth for us to say and mean. The Revised Version leaves "our daily bread" in the text, but in the margin prints the remark that the meaning in the Greek is "our bread for the coming day." Now, to ask only for our bread for the coming day is a very different thing from asking for our daily bread; and when we are in the way of revision, if the Lord's Prayer is to be retained at all, it might be very desirable that the people of a nation should be taught to ask daily only |