And they inherit man's great centuries- Plato's clear light that calms us while it thrills, With breath sublime, From Nile re-echoing to the Roman hills. Dark days I see, when faith and grace are gone When honor's prize With honor dies, When priests and women rule, for manhood sleeps. Religion is like empire; they alone Are fit to keep it who create their own; While worship borrowed from a foreign sky Serves only to deceive and stupefy (For tyrants' use And priests' abuse) Brave men, and at the last will surely die. So is my question answered; I must fight To bring some civilizing vision home To these rough German brutes, of what was Rome, That they may see The mystery, Ere all dissolve in froth and bloody foam. What will the world be, when at last the dawn Kindles, the sadness of the night is gone? Decaying Egypt could not well foresee What Greece, decaying Greece what Rome should be; And sudden change As great as strange, Will startle men again and make them free. In this assured belief I fight forlorn For men whose parents' parents are unborn; For men who never will be told that I (And some few others) did not weakly cry, But conquering fears Shed blood for tears And dared to fight unthanked, unpaid to die. BUDDHA'S WIFE Now the Future Buddha .. thought to himself, "I will take just one look at my son". . . Within the chamber. . . the mother of Rahula lay sleeping, . . . her hand resting on the head of her son ... "If I were to raise my wife's hand from off the child's head, and take him up, she would awake, and thus prevent my departure. I will first become a Buddha, and then come back and see my son."' So saying, he descended from the palace. -Introduction to the Jataka, Warren's translation. The best-loved man that ever trod The ancient earth, is he who taught That by denying wife and God Man's peace is won, nirvana bought. Through fifty sacrificial years He lived his sweetly even life, To all he brought nirvana's rest, So could not spare a single heart For Buddha, like the Jewish saint- She wore her life away in sorrows, She, more than others, knew the price At which the world might be redeemed; And gave him to her faithless lord, His faithless father, bade him prove A faithful, follower of the Word, Forgetting home and mother's love. What shall she have for recompense And what is his reward? That still That all his myriad following From Singapore to Kandahar, From Lion Island to Peking, Cares little what his teachings are. Oh, tragedy the soul to flay, That through all near and distant lands Though many study, preach, and pray Scarce one is found who understands! There may be persons who believe One woman's deep-devoted soul Would, in eternal justice' sieve, Outsift this more diluted whole. No! He must sacrifice-'twas known Who strives for light-not self alone, (Small task!) but son and wife and mother, Preparing thus the perfect day When, to nirvana fully grown, We put all loves of earth away And know, at last, as we are known. THE DECALOGUE, A PROBLEM IN ETHICAL DEVELOPMENT* WILLIAM FREDERIC BADÈ Among the earliest aids to memory used by the ancients were ten-finger memorials, or decalogues. They are formularies employed in given circles to summarize those practices upon which the social conscience laid most emphasis. The makers and codifiers of Israel's laws likewise made use of this device.1 But no social conscience ever has, or had, a static content, and that of Israel was no exception. The religion of Israel knew more than one decalogue, and at least two variant editions of the same decalogue. They may be regarded as products of different cultural environments, as well as the successive points of emphasis of different stages of ethical-religious development. One may raise the question, too, whether particular religious groups, like the Rechabites, may not have had their own set of commandments.2 Copyright, 1914, by William Frederic Badè. 1 The gradual displacement of oral by literary tradition seems to have brought the number twelve, also, into favor for mnemonic purposes, for it seems probable that there were dodecalogues. One such is found in Dt. 27:14-26, as Gressmann has pointed out. Cf. Göttinger Bibelwerk, II, 1, p. 235 f. 2 The writer is indebted to Prof. C. B. Bradley for the suggestion that pentalogues probably were employed before decalogues. A Rechabitic pentalogue may be contained in Jer. 35: (1) Thou shalt not drink wine. (2) Thou shalt not build a house. shalt not sow seed. (4) Thou shalt not own a vineyard. shalt not own or till a field. (3) Thou (5) Thou Considerations like these suggest the difficulties that present themselves when one attempts to find a definite place for the decalogue in the ethical development of the Hebrews. Whoever assigns a place to it in the scheme of development, thereby assumes the responsibility of fixing the period of its chronological origin. About this, however, there still is much diversity of opinion, although its Mosaic origin, in any of the forms in which it has come down to us, may be regarded as abandoned by most Old Testament scholars. Further investigation, we believe, will establish as certain that the decalogue embodies within itself the products of different developments that did not have the same origins. In other words, the decalogue is itself the outcome of a long and complex development. That commands against the use of images in worship and against stealing should have had a simultaneous origin is incredible to a student of ethical origins. 3 If this be true, an inquirer into the origin of the decalogue must seek to determine whether there was a sufficiently long pre-Mosaic Hebrew ethical development to have made possible the compilation of such a set of precepts in the fourteenth century B.C. For it is only the form and arrangement of the decalogue, not the origination of the ethical obligations it expresses, that could at best be attributed to Moses. The wrong of murder, theft, false witness, and adultery required no special revelation even in his days. Such acts had been penalized in the Hammurabi Code a thousand years earlier, and are among the commonplaces of prayers and confessions in other early literature of Egypt and Babylonia. Hebrew tradition itself assumed that the religion of Jahveh had stigmatized such acts as sins from the remotest antiquity. 3 To mention only a few: Kuenen, W. R. Smith, Wellhausen, Stade, Smend, Baentsch, Marti, Holzinger, Cornill, Oort, Addis, S. A. Cook, Montefiore, Guthe, Thomas, Steuernagel, Matthes, McNeile, H. P. Smith, G. F. Moore, Bertholet. Among defenders of the Mosaic origin are König, Lotz, Driver, Kittel, Wildeboer, Sellin, Eerdmans. |