(Let me remark here that I had my sermon in mind before I looked for the text; but a more expressive and beautifully apposite one I never saw!)
The Preacher of old is right; this sore travail was laid upon us, a most useful exercise; but we have lazily evaded it and taken other people's judgment as to our duties.
That would-be Empire Builder, Moses, legislated for his people with an unlimited explicitness that reflects small credit on their power to search out by wisdom.
His cut and dried rules went down to most delicate selection of ovine vicera for the sacrifice—"the fat and the rump, and the fat that covereth the inwards and the caul above the liver, and the two kidneys"; and into careful dietetics, which would cut out from our food list the hare and rabbit, the lobster, the crab, the turtle, the clam, oyster and scallop, indeed all shellfish.
The "fowls that creep, going upon all four," whatever they may be, are also considered an abomination; but locusts, bald locusts, and grasshoppers are recommended by name. Even in clothing we are carefully forbidden to use a garment of linen and woolen, yet among our pious Puritan ancestors "linsey-woolsey" was a very common and useful cloth.
All these secondary Mosaic directions have long since been relegated to their place in archaeology; at least by the Christian churches, but the ten commandments are still held as coming direct from God; and form the main basis of our ethics. Yet while tacitly accepted they are not studied, and few people have remarked how the pressure of social development has changed their weight and relative value.
At first they stood, imposing and alike, an even row, to break anyone of which was held an equal sin. Few persons now would hold disrespect to a patently disrespectable parent as wrong as murder; or a failure to "remember the Sabbath" as great a sin as adultery. Experience has taught us something, and those who have undertaken that sore travail—to seek and search out by wisdom—have found that some things are much more wrong than others—and why.
I met once a very pious man; dark, gloomy, violently virtuous. He looked like one of Cromwell's deacons; but was in fact a southerner and an Episcopalian. Mention was made of an enlightened jury, somewhere in the west, who had acquitted a man who stole bread for his starving children.
"Good!" said I; "good! we are at last learning to discriminate in our judgment of right and wrong."
He glowered at me forbiddingly. "There is no room for judgment," he said; as if he were Fate itself. "There is a Commandment which says, 'Thou shalt not steal!'"