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I'm not altogether a fool,' says gentle
Moses. 'And I'll see what I can do to oblige you, if only for the sake
of your dear mother.'"
The bishop, at the end of this narration, could not help smiling.
"That," continued Keith, "is how Moses gets talked over by the
Pharisees. That is how sins are manufactured and classified. And from
that preposterous old Hebrew system of right and wrong they jump
straight into our English penal code. And there they sit tight," he
added.
"Is that your quarrel with what you call the upstairs god system?"
"Precisely! It affects me by its unsanitary tendency to multiply sins;
that is to say, when it transforms those sins into legal crimes. How
would you like to be haled before a Court of law for some ridiculous
trifle, which became a crime only because it used to be a sin, and
became a sin only because some dyspeptic old antediluvian was envious
of his neighbour's pleasure? Our statute-book reeks of discarded
theories of conduct; the serpent's trail of the theologian, of the
reactionary, is over all.


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