Virgin and child...360

Zoroaster’s teaching...362, 376

SECTION III.—­ITS MORALITY FALLIBLE.

How much may fairly be included under the title “Christian Morality”?  Some of the more enlightened Christians would confine the term to the morality of the New Testament, and would exclude the Hebrew code as being the outcome of a barbarous age.  But the Freethinker may fairly contend that any moral rules taught by the Bible are part of Christian morality.  By the statute 9 and 10 William III, cap. 32, the “Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament” are declared to be “of divine authority,” and there is no exclusion indicated of the Mosaic code; this statute is binding on all British subjects educated as Christians, and enacts penalties against those who infringe it.  By Article VI. of the Church of England, Holy Scripture is defined as “those canonical books of the Old and New Testament, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church,” and a list is subjoined.  In Article VII. we are instructed that the “Commandments which are called moral” are to be obeyed, but that the “civil precepts” of the Mosaic code ought not “of necessity to be received in any commonwealth;” from which we may conclude that the Church does not feel bound to enforce, as “of necessity,” polygamy, prostitution, murder of heretics, and slavery.  She does not venture to designate such precepts as immoral, but she does not feel bound in conscience to enforce them, for which small concession we must feel grateful.  Passing from the law of the land to the Bible itself, we find that the Mosaic code must certainly be recognised as divine.  Jesus himself proclaims:  “Think not that I am come to destroy the law and the prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil,” and this is emphasised by the declaration:  “Whosoever, therefore, shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven.”  The Broad Church party will be very little, if this be true.  Turning to the Old Testament, we find that some of the most immoral precepts are spoken by God himself, immediately after the “Ten Commandments;” surely that which “The Lord said” out of “the thick darkness where God was,” from the top of Sinai “on a smoke, with the thunderings and lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet,” can scarcely be reverently designated as “the outcome of a barbarous age”?  Yet it is under these circumstances that God taught that a Hebrew servant might be bought for seven years; that a wife might be given him by his master, and that the wife and the children proceeding from the union belonged to the master; that the servant could only go free by deserting his wife and his own children and leaving them in slavery (Ex. xxi. 1-6).  It was under these circumstances that God taught that a man might sell his daughter to be a “maid servant” (the translator’s euphemism for concubine),