It is surely very difficult to analyse what this shadow of sin upon the world may be, because there is so large an element of subjectivity mingled with it.  So much of it seems to depend upon the temper and beliefs of the time, so much of the shadow of conscience to be the fear of social and even legal penalty.  Not to travel far for instances, one finds Plato speaking in a guileless and romantic fashion of a whole range of passions and emotions that we have grown to consider as inherently degrading and repulsive.  Yet no shadow of the sense of sin seems to have brooded over that bright and clear Greek life, the elements of which, except in the regions which our morality condemns, seem so intensely desirable and ennobling.  In ages, too, when life was more precarious, and men were so much less sensitive to the idea of human suffering, one finds a light-hearted cruelty practised which is insupportable to modern ideals.  Those wars of extermination among the Israelites, when man and woman, boy and girl, were ruthlessly and sternly slain, because they were held to belong to some tribe abhorred by the God of Sabaoth; or when, in their own polity, some notorious sinner was put to death with all his unhappy family, however innocent—­no shadow of conscience seems to have brooded over those destroyers:  they rather had the inspiriting and ennobling sense of having performed a sacred duty, and carried out the commands of a jealous God.  Viewing the matter, indeed, as dispassionately and philosophically as possible, it is hard to justify the ways of a Creator who slowly developed and matured a race, keeping them deliberately ignorant of light and truth, in order that they might at last be exterminated, in blood and pain, by a dominant and righteous race of invaders.

It would seem, indeed, as though the sense of sin did not reside in the act at all, but only in the sense that the act is committed in defiance of light and higher instinct.  Even our own morality, on which we pride ourselves, how confused and topsy-turvy it is in many respects!  How monstrous it is that a hungry man should be punished legally for theft, while an ill-tempered and unjust parent or schoolmaster should be allowed, year after year, to make the lives of the children about them into misery and heaviness.  Life is full of such examples, where no agency whatever is, or can be, brought to bear by society upon a notorious wrecker of human happiness, so long as he is prudent and wary.

It is the slowness of it all that is so disheartening; the impossibility that dogs the efforts of the high-minded, the kind, the just, of prevailing against tradition and prejudice and stupidity; the grim acquiescence in sanctioned oppression that characterises a certain type of respectable virtue; the melancholy ineffectiveness of kindly persons, the lamentable lack of proportion that mars the work of the enthusiastic faddist—­these things tempt one at times, in moments of despair and