never be more than tolerable players; and you and I would like to
play our game in life to the noblest and the most divine advantage.
Yet if the Jews took a petty and huckstering view of conduct, what
view do we take ourselves, who callously leave youth to go forth
into the enchanted forest, full of spells and dire chimeras, with
no guidance more complete than is afforded by these five precepts?

HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER. Yes, but does that mean to obey?
and if so, how long and how far? THOU SHALL NOT KILL. Yet the
very intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled
by killing. THOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY. But some of the
ugliest adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under
the sanction of religion and law. THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE
WITNESS. How? by speech or by silence also? or even by a smile?
THOU SHALT NOT STEAL. Ah, that indeed! But what is TO STEAL?

To steal? It is another word to be construed; and who is to be our
guide? The police will give us one construction, leaving the word
only that least minimum of meaning without which society would fall
in pieces; but surely we must take some higher sense than this;
surely we hope more than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we
wish mankind to prosper and go on from strength to strength, and
ourselves to live rightly in the eye of some more exacting
potentate than a policeman. The approval or the disapproval of the
police must be eternally indifferent to a man who is both valorous
and good. There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in the
condemnation of the law. The law represents that modicum of
morality which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind; but what
is that to me, who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent
judge? I observe with pleasure that no brave man has ever given a