ABSTRACT
IT was not merely because the seventh commandment was negative, but because it was abstract, that David found it so hard to keep. If the seventh commandment (like Uriah’s wife) could have had deep blue eyes or could have been beautiful to look upon, and, on a particular day in a particular place, could have been bathing in a garden, David would have found keeping it a very different matter. The tendency to make a statue of purity as a lovely female figure carries us a little farther in moral evolution than the moral statement that Moses had managed to get, and it was farther towards the concrete, but it was not far enough for a real artist or man who does things.
