THIRD COMMANDMENT

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 February 1940, Page 2

THIRD COMMANDMENT

CONSTANT AND FLAGRANT TRANSGRESSIONS.

Perhaps no commandment, of the Decalogue, writes Bishop Hensley Honson, has been, and still is, more con- r stantly and flagrantly transgressed than the third —“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord Thy God in vain.” Divine authority has been boldly claimed for doctrines and procedures which have no deeper roots than human wisdom and interest. Ignorance has marvellously misconceived, and fanaticism has grossly misapplied, even such knowledge of God as He hasvouchsafed to give men through nature, through conscience, through the Gospel, and now increasingly through science. The dogmatic audacity which lakes God’s name in vain is no peculi.um of a Church or an epoch. Every Protestant sect has repeated the persistent blunder. Even the unshackled individualism of the present age cannot escape it. Zealots still proclaim their Shibboleths, political and religious, "in lhe name of the Lord.” Sabbatarians, teetotallers, pacifists, and all the mingled multitude of fundamentalists parade their panaceas with pretensions to more than human wisdom. The unprecedented facility with which opinions can be propagated, and personal reputations created, in modern communities greatly aggravates the ancient evil.