Skull Test

These are the Ten Commandments:* 1) Thou shalt have no other gods before Me. 2) Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image. . . . 3) Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. . . . 4) Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy. . . . 5) Honor thy father and thy mother. . . . 6) Thou shalt do no murder. 7) Thou shalt not commit adultery 8) Thou shalt not steal. 9) Thou shalt not bear false witness. . . . 10) Thou shalt not covet. . . . Even after this present rereading, how many people can repeat all the Ten Commandments? Few, very few, witty Walter B. Pitkin, Associate Professor of Journalism of Columbia University, recounted last week. Doubtless he could not do so himself. Yet for some time Professor Pitkin has been asking people of all grades of intelligence to recite the Ten Commandments, not necessarily exactly, but at least in substance. The first group he queried--and the idea of questioning arose by accident from discussion--included eleven persons between 35 and 60 years of age, all in professions except a Sunday school teacher. None knew all ten. Their average was 5.72. Next he tested 48 people--14 college professors, 18 newspaper men and women of high rank, 10 literary men and women and 6 prominent business men. Most were college graduates and all between 35 and 60. Only one, Professor William P. Montague of the Columbia University philosophy department, knew them all. The professor's average was 6.07; the journalists' 6.5; the litterateurs' 5.88; and the business peoples' 4.4. Professor Pitkin was startled by this showing. So he turned to what he considered another pole of culture, to sophisticated college students, to the unkempt, dizzy bohemians of Greenwich Village. He even had himself admitted to the stuffy interiors of theatres. Here among the scorned of the show world, in dismal surroundings, he found the best record of all. True, none knew all Ten Commandments. Yet one knew nine, two knew eight. Their average was 7.1 Commandments each.

*The Old Testament gives two slightly different versions of the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Collating and dividing these Laws into Ten have been a bitter problem. Jews have one method (the Talmudic) ; Reformed (Calvinistic) churches and the Orthodox Eastern Church another (the Philonic, after Phile Judaeus, 20 B. C. to 54 A. D.) ; and the Church of Rome and the Lutherans a third (the Augustinian, after St. Augustine, 354-430 A. D.).