Whatever happened to the Ten Commandments? It is true, of course, that any one of them is trotted out on occasion to bolster an argument or to nail an offender with the rebuke, "Shame on you! Remember the Fourth (or Fifth or Sixth?) Commandment!" But what of the Ten Commandments as a whole? (The Decalogue, as biblical scholars and liturgists refer to it?) Rudyard Kipling, England’s poet laureate of a hundred years ago, sang in his rollicking poem, Mandalay:

Ship me somewhere east of Suez,
Where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments
An’ a man can raise a thirst.

But two centuries earlier in a more serious mood, the Parish Register of a little church in Lancaster, Nottinghamshire, cited these lines:

Have no other gods before me;
Unto no image bow the knee;

Ta…