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Sobering words from F.D. Maurice about the curses at the start of the Commination service: “The Service draws no distinctions, enters into no refinements; it pronounces, in the words of God’s law, that he who takes any one of these courses, whatever his motives be for taking it,
whatever the pleas to his conscience may be for it, whatever contrivances he may use not to bring his doings exactly within the letter of the prohibition, does yet, assuredly, put himself at a distance from god, and choose another service than His.
He may fancy the molten image may promote his devotion; he may have much provocation to curse his father or mother; he may find it highly convenient to his own interest, and he thinks, to the public interest, to remove his neighbour’s landmarks;
he may smite his neighbour secretly with the tongue or the pen, and not with the sword; he may propose to himself most religious ends in all these acts; every one of them may be done for the sake of advancing some principle which he believes to be necessary,
or denouncing some error which he believes to be fatal. The result is the same: he is at war with the righteousness of the universe, he is out of fellowship with the living and true God.”
