Christ did not in the least abrogate the Seventh Commandment when he said to the woman _taken in the act_ of adultery: "I do not condemn thee. Go and sin no more." In my opinion He wished to teach the lesson that the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of her accusers were also crimes. All men that are drunkards are not equally culpable, deserving of hell-fire and to be swept there by quoting the Hebrew scriptures: "No drunkard shall inherit eternal life." The special circumstances must be considered, and God only is competent to do this. Whenever I hear these ready quotations, whenever I am tempted to use them in my dealings with my erring fellow-men and women I recall what George Eliot wrote in _The Mill on the Floss_. All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment safely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality,--without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human.