James 2:11

11. For It is not meant that you have committed each and every mentionable act of transgression. The ten commandments are but so many specifications under the one law of love; they are but specifications of various ways in which that one whole law can be violated. Every specific violation is a violation of that one whole law. He The same one undivided divine Authority is promulgator of the one law, which so branches into ten specifications. Violating any one specification impinges against that entire authority. It denies the supremacy of God. It is treason against the government of the universe.

No adultery You may be as chaste as “the icicle in Dian’s temple,” yet, if you murder, your virtue will not save you. There is to be no balancing of account with heaven between your vices and your virtues. Every vice breaks the whole law.

A modern American poem described a western steamboat pilot who closed a life of profligacy with being blown up in order to save the lives of the passengers on board his boat. It assumes that his self-sacrifice in death would atone for his profligate life, and concludes by declaring that Christ would not severely judge “the man who died for men.” But the death was scarcely less profligate than the life. It was simply that same desperate recklessness of life, acting under an impulse of professional pride, as he would show in a fray for supremacy or advantage in any other matter. No such act could atone for the crimes against temperance, chastity, the rights of his fellow men, and the laws of God, which, as described in the poem itself, formed the staple of this bad hero’s existence. The writing of such poetry is as profligate and demoralizing as the life it heroizes.