"Don't make an ass of yourself. I can see where this thing is bound to lead us, if you can't; vote the other way when the question is put."
A moment or two of silence ensued, and then Deacon Bates put the question to vote. A strong response of "Ay!" was soon followed by an equally noisy "No!" and some one called for a rising vote. Up rose Judge Cottaway, Squire Woodhouse, Broker Whilcher, Mr. Radley, Principal Alleman, Mr. Buffle, Lawyer Scott, Dr. Fahrenglotz, and Captain Maile, nine in all, while for the negative there were but seven votes, Mr. Bungfloat and young Banty keeping their seats during both votes, the former with a helpless expression of countenance, and the latter with a contemptuous smile.
"The ayes have it," said the leader, and Builder Stott, who, until that moment, had listened at the key-hole, hurried off to Dr. Humbletop's class-room and stated that the club was determined on carrying free speech into the ground and the club with it.
"Mark my words," said the builder, "the Scripture Club is as good as dead."
The discussion was opened by Judge Cottaway, according to the special request of the founder of the club, and the old jurist spoke as follows:
"Estimated according to the rules of evidence, the requirement for righteousness never ends in the Holy Scriptures, and never can end while the Church hold the revealed will of God as an authoritative rule of guidance. The law was the topic of lawgivers, prophets, the Psalmist, the wise Solomon, and all of them regarded it as the only substitute for the personal presence and command of God. Christ never failed to hold it up for reverence and obedience, excepting when minor points of it were of less vital importance than that of those for whose direction it was given."
"That's it, exactly," interrupted Mr. Jodderel. "The law was made for man, not man for the law, and when man can't live according to the law, the law must give way, as it did by express command when Christ condemned the Jews for rebuking the disciples when they plucked corn on the Sabbath day."
"I imagine that it was more for the sake of rebuking hypocrisy than to defend the improvidence of his disciples that Christ spoke as he did on the occasion referred to," said the judge. "But he declared the binding force of the law more than once, and he not only urged it upon the people, but increased its scope and severity by explaining that obedience should not be only to the letter, but to the spirit of the heavenly commands. Mercy, love, and compassion are not at all inconsistent with the closest application of the law, though men have strangely come to imagine that they are. In this same matchless sermon we are studying you will find his definition of some methods of violating the seventh commandment. The spiritual rule from which Christ deduced these conclusions may be applied to all the other commandments with results equally startling. 'Thou shalt not steal,' is the simple letter of the eighth commandment, but according to the new method prescribed by Christ for the translation of the law according to Moses, to deprive a man of his peace, of his patience, of his faith in mankind, even if done in ways permissible in business circles, is as truly theft as is the depriving a man of his money by actual robbery. And as I am a member of the bar, as I have been a law-maker, and an adjudicator of legal questions, I feel that I am severe upon no one more than my own old self, when I say that to recover the amount of a debt by legal means which compel the debtor to part with property of value several times greater than that of the property upon which the debt is based, is theft of the most heinous description, for even under the most merciful construction of the most careless law, the only theft at all pardonable is that of small amounts in cases of dire necessity; whereas my experience in legal collections is that not once in a hundred times are they made excepting of men in the direst distress, and of utter inability to pay."
"But Christ mercifully forbore to give such interpretations to all the commandments," said Mr. Jodderel, "and I have always thought his refraining from doing so was one of the sure proofs of his divinity. Of course he saw the people around him—his own disciples, even—doing hundreds of things that were wrong; but he knew their natures were too feeble to live up to the holy ideas which were natural enough to Him, so he said little, except to exhort them to sin no more."
"Very true," said the judge, "but since then the Christian world has had the benefit of nearly twenty centuries of growth under the instructions of Christ. Men have grown less animal, more intellectual; less brutal, more spiritual. The passions and appetites that once seemed uncontrollable have come more and more under restraint under the influence of generations of right living. Men nowadays endure physical discipline from which the ascetics of Christ's time, or even of the middle ages, would have shrunk with fear. The world is lamentably full of wickedness and weakness, but it has now what it did not have when Moses gave his law—it has in every community one or more men who show by right living what a perfect control man may exert over his lower faculties, or, rather, over the lower developments of faculties which in the clearer light of to-day develop into noble virtues. But the stronger sins die hardest, so to-day we find, in communities where murder is unheard of, Sabbath-breaking unknown, profanity unspoken, and the greater crimes mentioned in the Decalogue seldom or never brought to light—in such localities we find the greed of gain made the excuse of unfair dealings between man and man; it stirs up strife more vicious than that which took place when the civilized world was one grand camp, and when to kill a man for his possessions was a deed praiseworthy rather than otherwise, especially when the victim might, with any excuse, be called an enemy."