Is Morality ‘caught or taught’? Both, I would say. We are clearly going to hear a lot of the M-word in the months ahead, for Mr. Blair and Mr, Major are now represented as rival Moseses bearing the tablets of righteousness and leading their errant followers into the Promised Land. So perhaps it is with Moses the great Lawgiver that we should begin.

How do we see the Ten Commandments? As God’s law, surely. How was it given? In the way the Exodus story describes it, with God writing the text as if with a celestial pen? Most Scripture scholars prefer to see it as a narrative way of displaying a divine truth. The Chosen People, children of the one true God, but often sinful and fickle, grope their way through a whole series of temptations and falls, finally make their priorities of commitment to God and neighbour, and, guided by Moses, draw them up in the charter-like form which we call the Ten Commandments,

So God ‘wrote’ the commandments, not mechanically by hand, but by inspiring the consciences of his sometimes wayward believers. Thus it is with all Scripture: the Spirit of God moves human agents to tell his story. The important thing is that the commandment priorities were not recognised and accepted without tears, the tears of failure. And for the concrete situations of life they needed buttressing by the many clauses of the Law. Morality needs refining as life moves on.

So we can be taught morality, just as we can be taught history. The past sheds light on the present. But we ‘catch’ morality when we see how we cannot evade decisive choices in our daily lives. Morality is then not just a system above us, but a living force within us. Unfortunately one generation back it became fashionable to forget history, and start from scratch. Let people catch things their own way, they said. Past experience was ignored because, as it had often failed, it was derided. But, as we see from the Israelites, we become moral through failure! And so 1960's Flower Power became 1990's Hay Fever. In morality as in everything else Christianity is essentially a memory religion. Let us never forget it!

DS.