"Ten Commandments" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... church by the Hanseatic merchants. The east end is decorated by a wooden table, richly carved, and the reredos is designed by the great Christopher himself, no doubt for partial expiation of his sin in making the church externally so hideous. It consists of a marble panel, on which are engraved the Ten Commandments. On the left hand stands Aaron in full pontificals, as set forth in the Book of Leviticus or that of Numbers. On the right hand, in more humble guise, stands Moses, facing the people, in his hand a rod of gold. With this he points to the Commandments, which contain ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... who lives up at staircase No. 5; or, if you should make a blunder in the twilight, Mrs. Dyer has too much good sense to be jealous for a mere effect of imperfect optics. But don't try to write the Lord's Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments, in the compass of a halfpenny; nor run after a midge or a mote to catch it; and leave off hunting for needles in bushels of hay, for all these things strain the eyes. The snow is six feet deep in some parts here. I must put on jack-boots to get at the post-office with this. It is not ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... in front of the pulpit. Next came the pastor, habited, like our Scotch ministers, in gown and bands, when the regent instantly ceased. The pastor began the public worship by giving out a psalm. He next offered a prayer, read the ten commandments, and then preached. The sermon was an half-hour's length precisely, and was recited, not read; for I was told the Waldenses have a strong dislike to read discourses. The minister of La Tour is an old man, and was trained under an order of things unfavourable to that higher ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... refers, of course, to the Ten Commandments that came through Moses. In a postscript you will find the names of the bright chicks who sent in the whole text in its complete form. Please give ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... longer going to keep silence when events like those this afternoon take place. Undoubtedly my stay in Lost Chief will be short. But while I'm here I am going to stand openly and vehemently for the ten commandments." ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... the clergy was also undertaken, and was much needed. In 1551 Bishop Hooper found in his diocese of 311 clergymen, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, ten could not say the Lord's Prayer in English, seven could not tell who was its author, and sixty-two were absentees, chiefly ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... chapel-of-ease, he had caused a great deal of dissatisfaction in the mind of his hearers; but when the young vicar, still strongly imbued with the beauties of Oxford architecture, had looked round blankly on the great square pews and galleries, and then at the wooden pulpit, and the Ten Commandments that adorned the east end, he was not quite so sure in his mind that his position was as enviable as ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... the first of the Ten Commandments, the whole of which he set to canons during his stay in London. Three grand concerts formed a feature of the ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... thing which he thinketh God biddeth by his angel, God hath by his own mouth forbidden. And that is, you know well, in the case that we speak of, so easy to find that I need not to rehearse it to you. For among the Ten Commandments there is plainly forbidden the unlawful killing of any man, and therefore of himself, as (St. Austine saith) all the church teacheth, unless he ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... and soldiers were bearers and formulators of the truth, and that the Church was only a follower and supporter of that truth, this truth having to wage War in consequence, i.e. the disobedience of all God's ten Commandments—not to speak of the New Testament—which truth must be condemned by the Church as untrue. Following to the extreme the ideals of Patriotism and Imperialism, the Churches partially did not shrink even from preaching War as a legal thing. The court preacher of the Kaiser, ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... unless it can be saved from this still greater peril that threatens it. The secession of the Southern States in 1860 was a small matter compared with the secession of the Union itself from the great principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, in the Golden Rule, in the Ten Commandments, in the Sermon on the Mount. Unless we hold, and hold firmly to these great fundamental principles of righteousness, of social, political, and economic wisdom, our Union, as Mr. Garrison expressed it, will be "only a covenant with death and an agreement ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... accompanying sketch for a "Holy City," or "a New Jerusalem," which accounts for the twelve gates according with the original number of the tribes of Israel, and the ten streets which diverge from each gate are symbolic of the Ten Commandments, wherein they were commanded to walk; the twelve circular areas I thought to be properly dedicated to the Twelve Apostles of Christianity, under the idea that when the Jews are again called together it will be under the new covenant of Christianity, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... she and her nobles left the chapel and retired to her privy chamber. Two days after this, a proclamation was issued, forbidding the elevation of the host. It was also ordered that the Gospels and Epistles, the Creed, and Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Litany should be used in English. Her respect for the Bible, and her desire to have it spread throughout her realms, was still more clearly shown on the occasion of her progress from the Tower to Westminster, the day before her coronation, ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... there is so much in your way of preaching. It has that kind of good comradeship which I think was so remarkable in Christ. His style was not the ten commandments' style—thou shalt and thou shalt not—but that reasoning, brotherly way of 'What man is there among you that would not do the kind and right thing?' You used it this very morning when you cried out, 'If our ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... to him; my boy won't refuse to give me some explanation," she said, when Frank had freed his mind with as much warmth as if Jack had broken all the ten commandments. ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... distinguishing mark of the dialogues themselves that the results arrived at are arranged in carefully systematized groups. We are familiar enough in the West with similar classifications, summed up in such expressions as the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments, the Thirty-nine Articles, the Four Cardinal Virtues, the Seven Sacraments and a host of others. These numbered lists (it is true) are going out of fashion. The aid which they afford to memory is no longer required in an age ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... a cloth factor, who had been a widower six weeks, thought it would be hard to manage, though he quite agreed to the expedient, saying, 'It would be truly good if man and wife had one Creed and one Paternoster; as concerns the Ten Commandments it is not so pressing.' (A sentiment that he could hardly have wished to see put ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... learnt that God was He who made the world in six days,' said the townsman. 'God was He who delivered unto Moses the ten commandments. Is not this the same ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... may console. A belief in karma not only consoles, it explains. As such it is not suited to those who accept things on faith, which is a very good way to accept to them. It may be credulous to believe that Jehovah dictated the ten commandments. But the commandments are sound. Moreover it is perhaps better to be wrong in one's belief's than not ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... affairs. I claim that women should vote because society will never know its last estate and true glory until you accept God's edict and God's command—long raked over and covered in the dust—until you bring it out, and lift it up, and read this one of God's Ten Commandments, written, if not on stone, yet in the very heart and structure of mankind, Let those that God joined together not be ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of forbidding good Works. For their published writings on the Ten Commandments, and others of like import, bear witness that they have taught to good purpose concerning all estates and duties of life, as to what estates of life and what works in every calling be pleasing to God. Concerning these things preachers heretofore taught ...
— The Confession of Faith • Various
... and laughed, and chattered broad Irish together as they used to do for fun in old Kilanbaggan Castle, before Lucia was a weary wife, and Valencia a worldly fine lady, and Scoutbush a rackety guardsman, breaking half of the ten commandments every week, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... beautiful piece of workmanship—inlaid with costly woods and carven very curiously. It would not only play a great variety of tunes, but would whistle like a quail, bark like a dog, crow every morning at daylight whether it was wound up or not, and break the Ten Commandments. It was this last mentioned accomplishment that won my father's heart and caused him to commit the only dishonorable act of his life, though possibly he would have committed more if he had been spared: he tried to conceal that music-box from me, and declared upon ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... and accidents, the Decalogue of Chivalry has none the less been regnant in some millions of souls which it has made pure and great. These ten commandments have been the rules and the reins of youthful generations, who without them would have been wild and undisciplined. This legislation, in fact—which, to tell the truth, is only one of the chapters of the great Catholic Code—has raised the moral ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... laws, language, and literature, binding hostile races together, and proclaiming the sovereignty of intelligence,—the [Greek: nous kratei] of the old Ionian philosophers,—with that higher sovereignty which Moses based upon the Ten Commandments, and that higher law still which Jesus taught upon ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... lest the Christian religion grow contemptible. Thus other women by her example may be warned and keep themselves from lawless and adulterous beds." So far from being harsh, this decision to allow of no royal exceptions to the ten commandments was probably the kindest, strongest, and most wide-reaching protest that could be made against an unhappy and probably growing evil. This is of a piece with many other passages in his life, but hardly worth dwelling upon because the lawless loves, which in that day were too lightly ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... rebellious, requires every command and incentive to submission. The first of the ten commandments, insisting on the duty owing to the Creator, and the fifth, on that belonging to our parents, are the sources of all order and good arrangement in the minor relations of life; and on obedience to them ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... An act for the protection of crown forests was highly necessary, but no laws are of value unless the machinery exists for enforcing them, and at the present moment the stringent enactment against the destruction of trees may be evaded like any of the Ten Commandments, because there is absolutely no staff, nor special officers for the supervision of woods and forests. This important subject requires a separate department, and nothing can be more simple if administered by persons qualified by education for the development of trees suitable to the island. ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... gladiatorial games of Rome, human sacrifice, or slavery, were fruitful of so much pain that they were bound in time to perish. In contrast with these cruel customs, the prohibitions of the Jewish law, the Ten Commandments, for example, were so humane, so productive of security and concord and a deep-rooted and lasting satisfaction, that they persisted and became the parent of much of our present day morality. An increasing ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the debt of old sins by leading good lives now. But it may not be. If a man owes money he is not excused the debt because now he pays his way. Our sins are the great debt of ten thousand talents. God's law is written in the ten commandments, and we have broken them a thousand times. We cannot pay. The king in his mercy forgave the servant. So God forgives us through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ. He paid the debt which we cannot pay, He bore our sins, the sin of Adam born with us, and the actual sins of our lives, on the ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... that, by a strange forgetfulness, this same Commandment is not reestablished in its place even in the catechism for older persons,—of course through inadvertence. However, it is of no consequence, as the real number of Ten Commandments is made up by the division of the last into two; so that there really are ten. And in a country where so many pictures are painted and statues made, perhaps this Second Commandment might be open to misconstruction, if not prohibited ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... we may seek to define the precise point on which Pope's morality differed from that of many other writers who have expressed their general approval of the ten commandments. A healthy strain of moral feeling is useful, though we cannot point to the individuals whom it has restrained from ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst; For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be— By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea; On the road to Mandalay, Where the old Flotilla lay, With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay! O the road to Mandalay, ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... Lord spake unto you out of the midst of fire: Ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice. And he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even ten commandments; and he wrote them upon two tables of stone." Deut. iv, 12, 13. "And the Lord said unto Moses, Write thou these words; for after the tenor of these words I have made a covenant with thee and with Israel.... And he wrote upon the tables the words of the covenant, the ten commandments." ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... in its three medallions the Feeding of the Multitude, the Institution of the Holy Communion, and the Agony in the Garden; and on the E. wall are illuminated, by Castell, of London, the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Creed. The pulpit and font are of Painswick stone, with serpentine marble shafts; and the chancel rails, stalls, open seats, together with an exquisitely worked south porch, ...
— The Forest of Dean - An Historical and Descriptive Account • H. G. Nicholls
... little silence. The professor, who is looking as guilty as if the whole ten commandments have been broken by him at once, waits, shivering, for the outburst that is so ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... country in particular, and of a most enlightened and chivalrous affection for himself: then, with the addition of a wild girl to fall in love with him, and a series of adventures in which they break all the Ten Commandments in succession (always, you will observe, for some sublime motive, which must be carefully analysed in its progress), I have as amiable a pair of tragic characters as ever issued from that new region of the belles lettres, which I have called the Morbid Anatomy of Black Bile, and ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... for another nip, after having thickly threatened to knock seven bells and the ten commandments out of the black at the wheel for faulty steering, when Jerry appeared before him and blocked the way to his desire. But Jerry did not block him as he would have blocked Lerumie, for instance. There was no showing of teeth, no bristling of neck hair. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must follow after profit with some conscience and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Esther, 20 pp. Abridgment of the Old Testament, 140 pp. Abridgment of the Gospels, 48 pp. Abridgment of the Acts, 60 pp. Lessons for Children. Bickersteth's Scripture Help, abridged. Lyttelton on the Conversion of St. Paul. The Ten Commandments. Ecclesiastical History. Dialogues on Grammar. The Alphabetarion, 120 pp. The Greek Reader, 156 pp. The Little Philosopher, 72 pp. The Child's Assistant, 60 pp. The Child's Arithmetic, 48 pp. Adams's Arithmetic. History of Greece. History of Rome. History of ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... human heart in all its workings, notably beer-drinking bishops and brewers, declare that a prohibitory measure rouses opposition in mankind. When the law says, "Thou shalt not," the individual replies, "I certainly shall!" This is rather an unkind cut at the ten commandments, which were given by divine authority, and which make a lavish use of "Thou shalt not!" These brave souls, who feel such a desire to break every prohibition, must have a hard time keeping out of jail. No doubt it is with difficulty that they restrain themselves from climbing ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... institution of the week, the first ordinance imposed by God upon man. For in the fourth of the ten commandments which God gave through ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... other people's. Still, in most other countries, as a fashionable woman, she would have been esteemed a model of devotion to the duties of a wife and a mother, for she paid a personal attention to her household, and had actually taught all her children the Lord's prayer, the creed, and the ten commandments. She attended church twice every Sunday, and only staid at home from the evening lectures, that the domestics might have the opportunity of going (which, by the way, they never did) in her stead. Feminine, well-mannered, rich, pretty, of a very positive social condition, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Ten Commandments were dictated to Moses by God. But God has not told you so. You only believe the statement of the unknown author of the Pentateuch that God told him so. You do not know who Moses was. You do not know who wrote the Pentateuch. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... hath his measuring-lines, and his canons, which are called the Ten Commandments; they are written in our flesh and blood. The contents of them is: "What thou wouldest have done to thyself, the same thou oughtest also to do to another." For God presseth upon that point, and saith, "Such measure as thou ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... say that she was a witch, and and that she broke all the ten commandments, and put the sacraments under her feet; and listen,—they said that she mixed poison in her husband's drink, ...
— Peter the Priest • Mr Jkai
... relished much the doctrinal part," he frankly confesses, "Paul's Epistles and such like Scriptures I could not away with." His Bible reading helped forward the outward reformation he had begun. He set the keeping the Ten Commandments before him as his "way to Heaven"; much comforted "sometimes" when, as he thought, "he kept them pretty well," but humbled in conscience when "now and then he broke one." "But then," he says, "I should repent and ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... pillory, branded them, slit their nostrils, and mutilated their ears. JOHN COTTON, pastor of the church of Boston, England, was told that if he had been guilty only of an infraction of certain of the Ten Commandments, he might have been pardoned, but since his crime was Puritanism, he must suffer. He had great trouble in escaping on a ship bound for ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Chinamen, or Sandwich Islanders, or the Norwegian, Russian, or Italian in its benefits? Yet they do all share in it as soon as they become citizens. How absurd we should think the assertion that it was not the Lord's intention to hold the people of the United States under the law of the Ten Commandments, as they were given to the Jews alone, some four thousand years before the United States existed as a nation. Massachusetts never abolished slavery by legislative act; never intentionally abolished it. In 1780 that State adopted a new Constitution with a Bill of Rights, declaring "All men born free ...
— An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony • Anonymous
... to do evil in this instance, for not one in a thousand took the trouble to verify their facts, or even their quotations, when speaking of, or quoting Raeburn. The libel, to put it briefly, represented Raeburn as a man who had broken every one of the ten commandments. ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... or moral commandments by which the Ottawa and Chippewa nations of Indians were governed in their primitive state, were almost the same as the ten commandments which the God Almighty himself delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai on tables of stone. Very few of these divine precepts are not found among the precepts of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, except with regard to the Sabbath day to keep it holy; almost every other commandment ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird
... should be. Duties and virtues are expressions of the Rational Social Will, and that will is a mere abstraction except as it is incorporated, with a wealth of detail, in human societies. It would be hard for the small boy to classify, under any ten commandments, the innumerable company of the "don'ts" which he hears from his mother during the course of a week. He can leave such work to the moralist. But he is receiving an education in the moral law, as an expression of the social will, through the whole ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... the servant of the people. If Wall Street can not stand the enforcement of law, so much the worse for the Street. It's no affair of mine. I didn't make the laws of the State any more than I made the law of gravitation. Nor did I write the Ten Commandments, but I have an abiding faith that they will stand when the last stone in the Stock Exchange building shall have crumbled into dust. I refuse to believe that the only way to save Wall Street is by a sworn officer of the ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... been used in argument at some previous meeting, it hung together, and good work might still have been done with the legs. A gentleman with a complexion like a blast furnace, and a facial expression which looked like a wholesale infraction of the Ten Commandments, was ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... this combination of ignorant conceit, brutal lust, and cunning, this greater than Cloten, who, after strangling an innocent woman, can say:[16] "Oh, come! Let's go and play in the pond." Most attractive characters are the five[17] conspirators, men whose home is "east of Suez and the ten commandments." They live from hand to mouth, ready at any moment to steal a gem-casket or to take part in a revolution, and preserving through it all their character as gentlemen and their irresistible conceit. And side by side with them moves the hero Charudatta, ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... that should be baptized and afterward brought into the Church and publicly catechized by the minister, and should before the fourteenth year of his or her age give a distinct account of the creed, the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments," should receive from the minister a certificate which would entitle such children to exemption from paying all levies until the age of eighteen.[4] The neighboring colony of North Carolina also was ...
— The Education Of The Negro Prior To 1861 • Carter Godwin Woodson
... them we have discovered a chapter they never heard of; we tell them what it says. The old wise people tell us they knew all about it. Our discovery is a mare's-nest to them; but to us it is very real. The ten commandments and the old "Thou shalt" we have heard about long enough and don't care about it; but this new law ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... to themselves, had sought by all the machinery of local law to emphasise and perpetuate their own superiority. The very word "equality" was an offence. Society went back to Egypt and India for its models; to break caste was a greater sin than to break any or all of the ten commandments. White and coloured children studied the same books in different schools. White and black people rode on the same trains in separate cars. Living side by side, and meeting day by day, the law, made and administered by white men, had built ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... history; they are now a legend. The Book of Job was then an inspiration; it is now a poem. The reported interviews between Abraham and Jehovah were then thought to have been real; now they are treated as the visions of an excited brain. The ten commandments were then believed to have been delivered to Moses by the Supreme Being; now they are regarded as the work of a wise law-giver. Kings and Chronicles are now authentic histories written by honest men; then those records of events were attributed to ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... yer, old boy (throwing himself in chair), I kin allow how it comes easy for ye to run this bank, for it's about as exciting, these times, as faro was to ye in '49, when I first knew ye as Jack Oakhurst; but how the Devil you can sit opposite that stiff embodiment of all the Ten Commandments, day by day, damn it! that's wot GETS me! Why, the first day I came here on business, the old man froze me so that I couldn't thaw a deposit out of my pocket. It chills me to ...
— Two Men of Sandy Bar - A Drama • Bret Harte
... boyish experiences and to the Colonel, the subject of his Sunday-school lesson was taken from the Summary of the Ten Commandments in the Church of England Prayer Book, where they were divided into two parts, the first four relating to our duty to God, and the remaining six to our duty towards our neighbour. It was surprising how these questions and answers learned ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... American slavery, we ask, DOES THE BIBLE SANCTION SUCH A PRINCIPLE?[A][A]? To the law and the testimony. First, the moral law, or the ten commandments. Just after the Israelites were emancipated from their bondage in Egypt, while they stood before Sinai to receive the law, as the trumpet waxed louder, and the mount quaked and blazed, God spake the ten commandments from ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... you do not intend to die the eternal death. So says our Lord. "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments." "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul, and thy neighbour as thyself." There the ten commandments are, and kept they must be; and if you break one of them, it will punish you, and you cannot escape. And the man who wrote the 119th Psalm knew that, and said, "With my whole heart have I sought thee: oh let me not go wrong ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... parentheses, was added. The Second Congregational was always called "The Orthodox." The church building was a fine example of early architecture. The steeple was high, the walls were white, the pews were square. On a tablet at the right of the pulpit the Ten Commandments were inscribed, and at the left the ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... it, but subtracted nothing. Wisdom and experience have increased the admiration of it. Time and criticism have not shaken it. It stands with ordinance and law, charter and constitution, prophecy and revelation, whether we read them in the history of Babylon, the results of Runnymede, the Ten Commandments, or the Sermon on the Mount. But, however worthy of our reverence and admiration, however preeminent, it was only one incident of a great forward movement of the human race, of which the American Revolution ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... she has to go upon," said Sanchia; but the old lady retorted, "Nothing of the kind. She's got the experience of all Nature behind her, from the poultry-yard to the House of Lords. You'll find that the Ten Commandments are rigidly enforced among the cocks and hens. If a member of the zenana breaks bounds there, she rues it. How else do you suppose this world is to be peopled? Read the history of marriage, my dear. You'll find that the more primitive your man the more complicated his marriage laws. Why, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... Egypt Appearance before Pharaoh Miraculous deliverance of the Israelites Their sojourn in the wilderness The labors of Moses His Moral Code Universality of the obligations General acceptance of the Ten Commandments The foundation of the ritualistic laws Utility of ritualism in certain states of society Immortality seemingly ignored The possible reason of Moses Its relation to the religion of Egypt The Civil Code of Moses Reasons for the isolation of the Israelites The wisdom of the Civil Code Source ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... story, had taken a mean revenge with the aid of the barman, and, as Dad unfastened the wrapping, there appeared, not the shellfish in its vermilion armour, but something smooth and black—an empty beer-bottle! Dad stared and blinked. A look at the Duchess revealed a face like the Ten Commandments. The situation was too abject for words; he grinned vacantly ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... moralities have been trimmed to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he rules out of the sphere of the confession the violation of matters of purely ecclesiastical regulation. Nothing is to be regarded a sin except that which is a violation of one of the Ten Commandments. To make that a sin which God's law does not make sin, is only the next step to ecclesiastical regulations to the level of divine commands, we lower divine commands to the level of ecclesiastical regulations. Even Private Confession, therefore, useful as it is, when properly understood ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the Ten Commandments, but scraped one out ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... Of all the Ten Commandments, the one broken most by the negro was: Thou Shalt Not Steal This was due mostly to the insufficent food the slaves obtained. Most of the planters expected a chicken to suddenly get heavenly aspirations once in a while, but as Mr. Fields says, "When a beautiful 250 pound hog suddenly tries to ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... of the sins of idolatry and misbelief, both of a deadly nature; and, upon the whole, I think I had not then broken, that is, absolutely broken, above four out of the ten commandments; but, for all that, I had more sense than to regard either my good works, or my evil deeds, as in the smallest degree influencing the eternal decrees of God concerning me, either with regard to my acceptance or reprobation. I depended entirely on the bounty of free grace, holding all the ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... gives me back my word, why, I do not say." He dipped his hand toward the ash-pan. "Human nature is full of freaks. A man will commit all sorts of crimes, yet stand by his word. Not that I have committed any crimes against the ten commandments." ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... put the Ten Commandments on something stronger than stone if he meant them to be ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... their God, because he "brought them out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." This was "the doing of the Lord,"—"the testimony of Jesus Christ." And so it is an important and precious truth to us at the present day.—"The preface to the Ten Commandments teacheth us, that God is the Lord (Jehovah) and our God."—This great historical fact is the controlling motive to acceptable obedience to the moral law. To this, among other truths of the gospel, every faithful minister will "bear ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... gem, which throws up an indefinite number of short spikes, each crowned with a greenish yellow triangular sort of cup, deliciously scented. I am acquainted with no flower that excites such enthusiasm among ladies who fancy Messrs. Liberty's style of toilette; sad experience tells me that ten commandments or twenty will not restrain them from appropriating it. L. cruenta is almost as tempting. As for L. leucanthe, an exquisite combination of pale green and snow white, it ranks with L. Skinneri alba as a thing too beautiful for words. This species has not been ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle
... myself. Pray, Doctor, train your battery now upon Mr. Palma, and since he assails you with Greg, minus quotation marks, require him to avow his real sentiments concerning that sentence in 'De Profundis': 'That purely political conception of religion which regards the Ten Commandments as a sort of 'cheap defence' of property and life, God Almighty as an ubiquitous and unpaid Policeman, and Hell as a self-supporting jail, a penal settlement at ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... remains of Cornish consist of a few songs, verses, proverbs, epigrams, epitaphs, maxims, letters, conversations, mottoes, and translations of chapters and passages of Scripture, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, King Charles’s Letter, etc. They are found in the Gwavas MS. (Brit. Mus., Add. MS. 28,554), a collection made by William Gwavas, barrister-at-law, and ranging in date from 1709 to 1736; in the Borlase MS. of the date of about 1750, in the handwriting of Dr. William Borlase, ...
— A Handbook of the Cornish Language - chiefly in its latest stages with some account of its history and literature • Henry Jenner
... even boasted that he is the most modest man in the country)... Thus he has the right to shout, "First, last and forever I am for the people. I am against all bosses. I have no sympathy for politicians. I am for strict economy, liberal improvements and justice! I am also for the—ten commandments" (his intuitive political sagacity keeps him from mentioning any particular one).—But a sublime height is always reached in his perorations. Here we learn that he believes in honesty—(repeat "honesty");—we are even allowed ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... him, that they may keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and judgment' (Gen. xviii. 19). Of this Covenant, the outward sign was the rite of circumcision. Renewed with Moses, and followed in traditional opinion by the Ten Commandments, the Sinaitic Covenant was a further link in the bond between God and His people. Of this Mosaic Covenant the outward sign was the Sabbath. It is of no moment for our present argument whether Abraham and Moses were historical persons or figments ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... replied, 'True, Satan has let down all the nets of the Sea of Ardishai[1] for us.' I prayed for them, and they left me, serious. Then I prayed for them alone. Soon my little sister Raheel came in, who is under Papal influence. I talked with her about prayer to the saints, and opened to the ten commandments, and began to read; but she did not want to hear. My heart yearned over my poor sister, and I prayed with her. ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... justification, and life eternal, or when, in the Gospel [in the New Testament], Christ Himself, since He has appeared, promises the remission of sins, justification, and life eternal. Moreover, in this discussion, by Law we designate the Ten Commandments, wherever they are read in the Scriptures. Of the ceremonies and judicial laws of Moses we say ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... of a real man than of an inhabitant of Lilliput, where it is a matter of no importance whether or not one lives in obedience to the Ten Commandments. We can regard him with amusement as a liar, a forger, a glutton, and a slanderer of his kind. If his letters are the dullest letters ever written by a wit, it is because he reveals in them not his real vices ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... begin with the Ten Commandments. "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." The Bryan campaign from beginning to end has been marked with such a flood of blasphemy, of taking God's name in vain, as this country, at least, has never known before. "Thou shalt ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... party in England to ask the assistance of men of genius, but to follow the guidance of men of character." This was strikingly illustrated in the career of the late Francis Horner—a man of whom Sydney Smith said that the Ten Commandments were stamped upon his countenance. "The valuable and peculiar light," says Lord Cockburn, "in which his history is calculated to inspire every right-minded youth, is this. He died at the age of thirty-eight; possessed of greater ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... hours for sleep and recovery, while the German has sixteen hours off duty for recovery and sleep. The Allies keep their treaties, and do not ask a German prisoner to fight against his brother. The Allies obey the laws of right and wrong, but the Ten Commandments are a great handicap in time of war. Is there any one who supposes that six million of Allied soldiers, working sixteen hours a day, are as fresh and as fit as six million Germans, working only eight hours a day? That is why the situation is so perilous. ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... among his best-paying parishioners, and they've put the screws to Bulkon—who doesn't see the point, anyhow. I tell you that there are too many pillars of the church with downtown property to rent, for you to keep either them or their pastors in line. They'll find moral issues to fight the ten commandments on, if they have to. You ought to know ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... boy, who do not even Know yet the Ten Commandments of the Mark! Here is your sabre, and the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... and dignitaries of the town and vicinage (who are they now?), and sigh for the queer, old, clumsy reading-desk and pulpit, grown dearer from the long and hopeless separation; and wonder where the tables of the Ten Commandments, in long gold letters of Queen Anne's date, upon a vivid blue ground, arched above, and flanking the communion-table, with its tall thin rails, and fifty other things that appeared to me in my nonage, as stable as the earth, and as sacred as ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... over the best men we can think of. Oh, how he got David, and spoiled a wonderful record being made by the "man after God's own heart." All in a trice he tripped David and led him to break six of the ten Commandments at once—five to ten inclusive! And he got Moses for a bad fall, and Elijah and Abraham and Jacob. He simply crept up unseen and caught ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... action by the Legislature. The consumption of alcohol by persons in charge of motor vehicles is but one illustration of the way in which an old vice may become such a great evil in altered circumstances that stern measures have to be taken. Stealing was reprehended in the Ten Commandments, and so was covetousness. Theft was always punishable at common law; but, soon after company promotion became a feature of our commercial life in the latter part of the nineteenth century, firm action had to be taken by the Legislature to protect the public from the effects of a ...
— Report of the Special Committee on Moral Delinquency in Children and Adolescents - The Mazengarb Report (1954) • Oswald Chettle Mazengarb et al.
... cruelly administered. It began with the dominion of the strong over the weak, and when the former was recognized as the community, it was called the authority of good over evil. Man took the reins of government from the hands of the Almighty, and amended the Ten Commandments with statute law. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... sins, in the order of the ten commandments, or the Decalogue, and the other five of the Roman Catholic Church. The priest frequently interrupts this self-accusation with leading questions concerning the most minute particulars of the act which is the subject of accusation. For example, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... the meaning of the words had not changed during the lapse of time, the revelation would be as perfect to them as it was to the original recipients. So, too, if God, instead of speaking the words of the ten commandments, had, in some way which should authenticate the reality of the revelation, called up in the mind of Moses the ideas corresponding to the words, and he had faithfully written them down; those words ...
— Thoughts on a Revelation • Samuel John Jerram
... down the edge of the metal, shook his head, and the Judge went on: "What good does any religion do? I've broken the ten commandments, every one of them—and I get on. No one bothers me, because I keep inside the general statutes. I've beat God at his own game. I tell you, Cap, you can do what you please just so you obey the state and federal laws and pay your debts. ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Because He justifies the ungodly. On what condition does He justify the ungodly? "To him that worketh not, but believeth on him." Here is the work of the soul to be saved; Paul says to cease working at the task, and believe on, depend on, Him—He justifies the ungodly. God gave men ten commandments to keep. God's word says, "The man that doeth them shall live by them."—Gal. 3:12. But all men have failed to keep them; "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."—Rom. 3:23. To illustrate: A father gives a little boy ten rows of corn to work out and says ...
— God's Plan with Men • T. T. (Thomas Theodore) Martin
... common machinery of thought; and it was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity that they remained entirely without practical sanction in the form of success or of happiness. The "categorical imperative" was a shadow of the ten commandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets of the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccountably imbedded in the old man's mind, he regarded as the evidences of an inward but ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... time since the knife came into my hands has this terrible word entered my thoughts. Stolen? Then I am, in short, a thief, a common thief? In the Holy Law, in the Ten Commandments, are written, in big letters: "THOU ...
— Jewish Children • Sholem Naumovich Rabinovich
... female relatives who were one and all school-teachers, who had watched over your vocabulary (unsuccessfully) as they hung over your morals; if you had been taught, not in so many words, but insidiously, that breaking the Ten Commandments (any one or the entire ten), split infinitives, and chewing gum, were one in the sight of God, or the devil—then you could realize the complete metamorphosis when, in addition to the earrings and the bar pin, the green ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... "chants religieux," of which M. Bordier's collection reproduces twenty-five, are partly poetical paraphrases of the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, etc., and partly original compositions on a variety of themes, such as patient endurance of insult, etc. They display great familiarity with the Holy Scriptures, and sometimes ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... she replied, "my mother heard they wanted me to be a witness; and last night she called me to her room, and asked me to tell her the Ten Commandments; and then we kneeled down together, and she prayed that I might understand how wicked it was to bear false witness against my neighbor, and that God would help me, a little child, to tell the truth ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... seen two interesting mediaeval relics. On the north side is part of a fourteenth-century reredos, probably that which stood behind the high altar. It was found at the back of the present altar, concealed behind the regulation panels on which the Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments were painted. It had evidently been itself partially repainted in a rougher style than the original. The painting represents the Resurrection. The portrait of an abbess is to be seen in the left-hand corner; above ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: A Short Account of Romsey Abbey • Thomas Perkins
... smaller documents, which one or more redactors embodied in it. The earliest things committed to writing were probably the ten words proceeding from Moses himself, afterwards enlarged into the ten commandments which exist at present in two recensions (Exod. xx., Deut. v.) It is true that we have the oldest form of the decalogue from the Jehovist not the Elohist; but that is no valid objection against the antiquity of the nucleus, out of which it arose. It ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... he had learned to write clearly, he bought a large sheet of paper, and printed on it the ten commandments in Chinese characters. Then he hung it on the outside of his door. People who passed read it and made comments of various kinds. Several threw mud at it, and at last a proud graduate, who came striding past his silk robes rustling grandly, caught the paper and tore it down. ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... is shining down, upon the golden letters of the ten commandments. Why does the Bride's eye read them, one by one? Which one of all the ten appears the plainest to her in the glare of light? False Gods; murder; theft; the honour that she owes her mother;—which is it that appears to leave the wall, and printing itself in glowing ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of people in this city of New Orleans to whom society gives the ten commandments of God with all the nots rubbed out! Ah! good gentlemen! if God sends the poor weakling to purgatory for leaving the right path, where ought some of you to go who strew ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... confess that knaves are often seen in fine linen, and honest men in the most shabby old rags; and still, notwithstanding the exceptions, knavery is a very hazardous game, and honesty, on the whole, by far the best policy. Still, most of the Ten Commandments remain at the core of all the Pandects and Institutes that keep our hands off our neighbours' throats, wives, and pockets; still, every year shows that the parson's maxim—"non quieta movere "—is as prudent for the health of ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a book of etiquette would be shocked to hear the least expression of levity touching the Ten Commandments. But the Commandments do not always prevent such virtuous scoffers from dealings with their neighbor of which no gentleman could be capable and retain his claim to the title. Though it may require ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the next few days in reading her newly bought literature. It seemed plausible to her that if God gave the Ten Commandments as a perpetual covenant, the seventh day should still be kept. The more she read the more she was convinced. By the time Robert returned she had begun to count herself a seventh-day keeper. Robert Davis was surprised ...
— Around Old Bethany • Robert Lee Berry
... looking for it. These men who pose as intellectuals never believe that any one else has brains. They fool themselves. There's one thing no man can afford to do, East of the sun or West of the moon. You can steal, slay, intrigue, burn—break all the Ten Commandments except one, and have a chance to get away with it. There's just one thing you can't do, ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... ground; and similar decrees were made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth century the Greek Church seems to have relaxed its strictness somewhat, but the Roman Church grew more severe. St. Anselm proved from the Scriptures that the taking of interest is a breach of the Ten Commandments. Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, made the taking of interest purely and simply theft. St. Bernard, reviving religious earnestness in the Church, took the same view. In 1179 the Third Council of the Lateran decreed that impenitent money-lenders should be excluded ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the ideal of a life of regulated service in place of one of lawless gratification was set up. What monasticism had done for the religious life in dignifying labor and service, chivalry did for secular life. The Ten Commandments of chivalry, (1) to pray, (2) to avoid sin, (3) to defend the Church, (4) to protect widows and orphans, (5) to travel, (6) to wage loyal war, (7) to fight for his Lady, (8) to defend the right, (9) to love his God, and (10) to listen ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... have performed their whole duty. Such parents do not perhaps know, that Martin Luther wrote his Small Catechism especially for family use. Let them take their Church books and turn to the Catechism, and they will find that Luther heads the Ten Commandments with the words: "In the plain form in which they are to be taught by the ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... a child of his age within ten miles who can't tell you that there are ten Commandments. "Did you never read the Bible, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... go and commit suicide again. Don't you know flesh and blood can only stand so much? When an intelligent young fellow like you goes beyond that, he is committing suicide. Bless your soul, my ambitious friend, the ten commandments ain't all the law of God. His laws are also written all over this long body of yours, and you came near paying a pretty penalty for breaking them. You won't ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... Dean refrain from endorsing this open expression of murderous sentiment in its fullest form; a clergyman ought always to keep up some decent semblance of respect for the Gospel and the Ten Commandments—or, at least, the greater part of them. So he placed the tips of his fingers and thumbs together in the usual deliberative clerical way, gazed blankly through the gap, and answered with mild and perfunctory disapprobation: ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... ten commandments of the Decalogue, you will find that nearly every one of them is a "Thou shalt not." If you read the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, with its beautiful picture of love, you will find that most of the characteristics of love are in the negative, what love "does not, thinks ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... If they belong to the post-apostolic age it is idle to insist on their Inspiration, and to claim that this "authentic anonymous addition to what Mark himself wrote down" is as much the work of GOD "as were the Ten Commandments written by His own finger on the tables of stone." On the other hand, if they "ought as much to be received as part of our second Gospel as the last chapter of Deuteronomy (unknown as the writer is) is received as the right and proper conclusion of the book ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... too deeply imbued with that in my babyhood to shake it off now, even if I wished to do so; but I don't, Bob, I don't. I'm proud of my mother, and, moreover, I remember her teachings. There's one little verse I used to repeat to her every Sunday night, along with the rest of the ten commandments, 'Honour thy father and thy mother,' etcetera. It seems to me that running away is rather flying in the face of that. Doesn't it strike you in ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... gives him no information as to the mill work or the procreative activity. The wheels are, on the one hand, the organs that grind out the child (producing the child like meal), and on the other hand they are the ten commandments whose mundane administration is the duty of the father, by means of strict education and punishment. In passing over the plank, the wanderer places himself above the ten commandments and above the privileges ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... error also—to show that it has already been tried—so that no patent of invention can be claimed upon it by those perverse persons who are not satisfied without constant change, and who seem to imagine that the ten commandments might be ...
— Farm drainage • Henry Flagg French
... seeds blow through the air, as anything small and light obeying a natural law. She did not in the least understand social conventions. She was not troubled with one thought of right or wrong; she neither meditated nor remembered. How wonderful. The ten commandments and the catechism that she knew by heart, all the hymns she had sung and all the sermons she had heard, did not exert the faintest restraining influence. They had no real meaning for her probably, and she could not therefore ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... literature. But in politics Ireland has no secrets. All her cards are on the table, decipherable at the first glance. Her political demand combines the lucidity of an invoice with the axiomatic rectitude of the Ten Commandments. There is no doubt about what she wants, and none about why she ought to have it. In that sense the case for Home Rule is made, and this book, having justified its title, ought to come to an end. But convention prescribes that about the nude ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... individual, following that retreating horizon which we name the West, found an escape from convention and from social law. Beyond the Mississippi or beyond the Rockies meant to him that "somewheres east of Suez" where the Ten Commandments are no longer to be found, where the individual has free rein. But by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the return to reality. The pioneer sobers down; he finds that "the Ten Commandments will not budge"; he sees the need of law and ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... be thankful for having entered into this department of work. A large amount of Christian instruction was imparted; many of the boys showed remarkable aptitude in committing to memory portions of Scripture, such as the ten commandments and the parables of our Lord. Much general knowledge was acquired, a number of the pupils became better fitted for their secular calling, and the goodwill of the people was secured. Once, when thirty miles ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... remarked that, if some keen American lawyer would really put his mind to the evasion of the Ten Commandments, the High Heavens themselves might be cheated. This saying would have shocked the Honourable Hilary inexpressibly. He had never been employed by a syndicate to draw up papers to avoid these mandates; he revered them, as he revered the Law, which he spelled with a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... spiritual life, the laws of civil life, and the laws of moral life are set forth in the ten commandments of the Decalogue; in the first three the laws of spiritual life, in the four that follow the laws of civil life, and in the last three the laws of moral life. Outwardly the merely natural man lives in accordance with the same ...
— Heaven and its Wonders and Hell • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of this "knowingly" a premium is placed on ignorance. The unwisdom of thus beforehand placing a premium on ignorance has always been more or less clearly recognized by the framers of legal codes even as far back as the days of the Ten Commandments and the laws of Hamurabi. It is the business of the Court, of those who administer the law, to make allowance for ignorance where such allowance is fairly called for; it is not for the law-maker to make smooth the path of the law-breaker. There are evidently law-makers nowadays so scrupulous, or ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... all things. And John goes further, "God is love." And you remember the profound remark which Paul makes elsewhere, "Love is the fulfilling of the law." Did you ever think what he meant by that? In those days men were working their passage to heaven by keeping the ten commandments, and the hundred and ten other commandments which they had manufactured out of them. Christ said, I will show you a more simple way. If you do one thing, you will do these hundred and ten things, without ever thinking about them. If you love, you will unconsciously ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... much-needed work. But before I finally desert the illusions of rationalism for the actualities of romance, I should very much like to write one last roaring, raging book telling all the rationalists not to be so utterly irrational. The book would be simply a string of violent vetoes, like the Ten Commandments. I would call it "Don'ts for Dogmatists; or Things I am ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... to their daily habits, others to their government as a nation, all tending to keep them separate from other nations. For transgressions of such laws as these, or for infirmities of human nature, regarded as stains, cleansing sacrifices were permitted. For offences against the Ten Commandments, there was no means of purchasing remission; no animal's, nay, no man's life could equal such a cost; there was nothing for it but to try to dwell on the hope, held out to Adam and Abraham, and betokened by the sacrifices and the priesthood, ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... his skull to find out my game," he thought with amusement. "By the time he reaches the office, he'll have worked it out that I'm more far-sighted than the rest of them, and am making character; that I'm trying to do business by the Ten Commandments will never occur to him." He returned to the table and resumed his task, paused and sat gazing absently at ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... great disappointment, for it was an all but inviolable rule with her never to engage a servant who could write. But I have known her ladyship break through it, although in both cases in which she did so she put the girl's principles to a further and unusual test in asking her to repeat the Ten Commandments. One pert young woman—and yet I was sorry for her too, only she afterwards married a rich draper in Shrewsbury—who had got through her trials pretty tolerably, considering she could write, spoilt all, by saying glibly, at the end of the last Commandment, ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... after all we owe the ten commandments to a Jewish woman's wit, strategy and love, and an Egyptian woman's compassion and disobedience, for the stern command that "Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river" was not given to the army, the navy or the church, ...
— Fair to Look Upon • Mary Belle Freeley
... with my own money. It was only a little pocket-handkerchief, but such a handkerchief! On it was printed, in bright blue, a picture of General George Washington, in full regimentals, with his sword in his hand, flanked by the Ten Commandments, and with a scroll labelled ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... their shire towns, and the kings of England in their order, and other things. This carried me through my facts, and, being repeated deliberately, with long intervals, often eked out the first two bells. Then came the Ten Commandments, the thirty-ninth chapter of Job, and a few other passages from Scripture. The next in the order, which I seldom varied from, came Cowper's Castaway, which was a great favorite with me; its solemn measure and gloomy character, as well as the incident it was founded ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... arithmetic may, we are assured, be sufficiently acquired by spending a few hours a week at a new and complicated edition of the Royal Game of the Goose. There wants but one step further, and the Creed and Ten Commandments may be taught in the same manner, without the necessity of the grave face, deliberate tone of recital, and devout attention, hitherto exacted from the well-governed childhood of this realm. It may, in the meantime, be subject of serious consideration, whether those who are accustomed only to ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... and shot for. And don't you agree with me, sir, that good taste itself should be a sort of religion? I don't mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and refinement, between excess and restraint—that one can have and keep just as the pagan Greeks ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... frames of about six inches square. The fire-place was filled with moss, and its mantel-shelf had its china sheep and sheperdesses, and a small looking-glass, the whole being surmounted by a gun hung transversely. The Lord's Prayer and the Ten Commandments worked in worsted, were suspended in a wooden frame between the windows, which had white muslin blinds, and opened on hinges, like a door. A cupboard made to fit the corner, in a manner to economise room, was filled with china mugs, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... wide-spread evil. I recognize that it is not only in Germany, but in France, England, and America, that the ethically hysterical have assumed that modesty and health and common-sense are characteristics of the intellectually mediocre. That the neglect of all, and the breaking of some, of the Ten Commandments is essential to the creation of art or literature, or necessary to a courageous freedom of living, is a contention with which I agree less and less the more I know of art, literature, and life. But, as I have remarked elsewhere in this volume, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... as an enigma, a living Sphinx. Man is a hundred times more of an enigma and a Sphinx. A healthy woman that is not hysterical may be either good or bad, strong or weak, but she has more spiritual simplicity than man. Forever and all times the Ten Commandments are enough for her, whether she live according to their tenets, or through human frailty set ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... cried the captain, who had found what he wanted; "if it had to wait for they, it would never go on at all. It goes on by government, and management, and discipline, and the stopping of younkers from their blessed foolery, and by the ten commandments, and the proverbs of King Solomon. You to teach your father how the world goes on! Off with your ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... positively anxious, in the present condition of things, about what will happen when some of us come to the gates of Heaven.—I very much doubt if a knowledge of the ten Commandments will pass us in—and even if we do get in, and secure a mansion, and it is really as beautiful as described, how uncomfortable many of us will feel who have not been made familiar with the subject of beauty ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... be roused by intellectual qualities or by moral beauty. We know that sometimes we meet people possessing every virtue and grace under heaven, and yet for some unknown and incomprehensible reason we could no more fall in love with them than we could fall in love with the Ten Commandments. I don't, of course, for a moment accept the silly romantic notion that men and women fall in love only once in their lives, or that each one of us has somewhere on earth his or her exact affinity, whom we must sooner or later meet or else die unsatisfied. ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... fall back upon his own resources. By practice he found out that it was not best to steal; that society lived more happily and peacefully when the property of each individual was respected. Similarly, God gave him the work of formulating each of the ten commandments. Slowly the moral treasure grew. The jurist gave law, the poet sang songs, the prophet poured out his rhapsody, the patriot and martyr died for principle, and the roll of the heroes lengthened. At last the pages of Jewish history were ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... if ever, gave the matter a thought; but he subscribed generously when asked by the rector, and he kept the Ten Commandments scrupulously, so far as his home life was concerned. He respected the Church, as something which stood for solidity and the security of property, like Consols and the Mansion House, and he regarded Dissenters in much the same light as he did outside brokers, as persons ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... winters; but she had never learned, in all that time, to know her Mother, Nature, her Father, God, nor her brothers and sisters, the children of the world. She had lived friendless and unfriendly, keeping none of the ten commandments, nor yet the eleventh, which is the greatest of all; and now there was no human being to slip a flower into the still hand, to kiss the clay-cold lips at the remembrance of some sweet word that had fallen from them, or drop a tear and ...
— Timothy's Quest - A Story for Anybody, Young or Old, Who Cares to Read It • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... assumed. In the year 1703 a new altar-piece, in the Corinthian style, was erected in front of Bishop Fox's fine stone screen, which it completely concealed. A wooden framework of classical pillars, with figures of Moses and Aaron on either side, and the Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Ten Commandments in the spaces between them, the whole surmounted by flaming censers and a circle of flying cherubs, made up a composition not at all bad in itself but utterly out of character with the Gothic work behind and around it. At ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... church-town, by reason that he an' his father couldn' be left in a room together wi'out comin' to fisticuffs: an' by all accounts was fashion's favourite in the naughty city, doin' his duty in that state o' life an' playing Hamlet's ghost among the Ten Commandments. ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Law as relates to diocesan episcopacy also fell into what President Cleveland would call "innocuous desuetude." But they adopted the decalogue of Moses with as much reverence as did their fathers before them. They knew as well as the poet Lowell that "The Ten Commandments will not budge," but that, vitalized by the life of Christ, those commandments stand "the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 5, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 5, May, 1886 • Various
... their action with it, as full of adulterated motives and of fresh and original ways of not doing as they would be done by as they could think up—a little innocent spool of thread—wreaking all their sins and kinds of sins on it, breaking every one of the ten commandments on ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... shooting foxes; and I cannot tell you the horror I have of the crime, even down to the present day. But, now I think of it, I did receive two other scraps of religious training. My governess taught me the Ten Commandments by making me say them after her when I was eating bread and sugar for breakfast before going to church on Sunday. The thought of them always brings back the flavour of bread and sugar. And the other scrap I got from a clergyman to whom I was sent on ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... will dated May 11, 1820 (as appears from the church tablet), gave L50 to the vicar and churchwardens of this parish, and directed that the interest should be given every year on 21st December, in equal proportions, to ten poor men and women who could repeat the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments before the vicar or such other person as he should appoint to hear them. The interest is applied according to the donor's orders, and the poor persons appointed to partake of the charity continue to ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... commandment, Mrs. Eddy insists, is an injunction against adulterating Christian Science, although she also admits the meaning ordinarily attached to it. In the Journal of November, 1889, there is a long discussion of the ten commandments by the editor, in which he takes up both personal chastity and the Pure Food laws under the command, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... by the Philistines, then restored to the Hebrews, and became of greater veneration than before. It will be remembered that, among other things, it contained the rod of Aaron which budded and was the cause of his selection as high-priest. It also contained the tables of stone which bore the Ten Commandments. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... And he did not feel guilty; it seemed as if he had no conscience. Something stilled that hitherto relentless foe to vice which virtue calls conscience and his whole being throbbed with the delights of the sin that is condemned in the ten commandments. Stealing? "Thou shalt not steal." But he did not feel that he was stealing, so where was the sin? Despising only the level to which his fortunes had fallen he saw without a conscience, without a moral fear. It all seemed so natural that he should take home a turkey, the cranberries ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... and Strange Punishments inflicted on the Breakers of the Ten Commandments. With curious Plates. 4to. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 185, May 14, 1853 • Various
... again," and a settlement agreeable to both parties arrived at and embodied in a treatise known as /The Institution of a Christian Man/. It consisted of four parts, the Apostle's Creed, the Seven Sacraments, the Ten Commandments, and the Our Father and Hail Mary. Two separate articles dealing with justification and purgatory taken from the Ten Articles previously issued were appended. The bishops submitted /The Institution/ to the judgment of the king, inviting ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... unintentionally scandalized, and it happened thus. When he said, "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" the old gentlemen, not in the least knowing what point of the ceremony we had arrived at, stood most amiably beaming at the ten commandments. Upon which, the clergyman said again, "WHO giveth this woman to be married to this man?" The old gentleman being still in a state of most estimable unconsciousness, the bridegroom cried out in his accustomed voice, "Now Aged P. you know; who giveth?" To which the Aged ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... sin-beaten Christian, this book abounds with consolation, and instructions how to overcome the devices of Satan, who will plant the Ten Commandments, like ten great guns, to destroy thy hopes. "Learn to outshoot the devil in his own bow, and to cut off his head with his own sword. Doth Satan tell thee thou prayest but faintly and with cold devotions? Answer him, I am ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan |
