New York, Nov. 24—On occasion I have recalled with merriment the story of the man who walked dejectedly from church one Sunday having been subjected to a thunderous reiteration of the Ten Commandments. As he reaches his car, his face suddenly brightens, and he looks up at his wife triumphantly: “I’ve never made any graven images!”
The story loses its flavor, but not its bite, one week after Jonestown. “You shall not have other gods besides me. You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth”—how natural it now seems that this should have been the very first commandment. And how regularly over the centuries we have been reminded of its awful relevance. There was “the mad attempt of Caligula to place his own statue in the temple of Jerusalem [which] was defeated by the unanimous resolution of a people who dreaded death much less than such an idolatrous profanation,” recorded by Gibbon, who in a later volume went on to write of the Fatimite caliphs, among them “the famous Hakem, a frantic youth, who was delivered by his impiety and despotism from the fear either of God or man, and whose reign was a wild mixture of vice and folly.”
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