of moralisation.  The wrath of heaven may visit not the innocent violation of some tabu, but cruelty and injustice.  In the historical books of the Old Testament, though Uzzah is stricken dead for touching the ark, and the subjects of King David afflicted with pestilence because their ruler took a census of his people, Jehovah is above all things a righteous God, who punishes bloodshed, adultery, and social oppression.  So in Greece the Furies pursue the homicide and the perjurer, till the name of his family is clean put out.  Herodotus tells us how the family of Glaucus was extinguished because he consulted the oracle of Delphi about an act of embezzlement which he was meditating.

International law was protected by the same fear of divine vengeance.  The murder of heralds must by all means be expiated.  When the Romans repudiate their ‘scrap of paper’ with the Samnites, they deliver up to the enemy the officers who signed it, though (with characteristic ‘slimness’) not the army which the mountaineers had captured and liberated under the agreement.  To destroy the temples in an enemy’s country was an act of wanton impiety; Herodotus cannot understand the religious intolerance which led the Persians to burn the shrines of Greek gods.  Thus religion had a restraining influence in war throughout antiquity, and in the Middle Ages.  The Pope, who was believed to hold the keys of future bliss and torment, was frequently, though by no means always, obeyed by the turbulent feudal lords, and often enforced the sanctity of a contract by the threat or the imposition of excommunication and interdict.  In order to make these penalties more terrible, the torments of those who died under the displeasure of the Church were painted in the most vivid colours.  But in the official and popular Christian eschatology, as in the terrestrial theodicy of the Old Testament, there is little or no moral idealism.  The joys or pains of the future life are made to depend, in part at least, on the observance or violation of the moral law, but they are themselves of a kind which the natural man would desire or dread.  They are an enhanced, because a deferred, retribution of the same kind which in more primitive religions promises earthly prosperity to the righteous, and earthly calamities to the wicked.  Values, positive and negative, are taken nearly as they stand in the estimation of the average man.

But there is another religious tradition, which in Greece was almost separated from the official and national cults, and among the Hebrews was often in opposition to them.  The Hebrew prophets certainly proclaimed that ‘the history of the world is the judgment of the world,’ and often assumed, too crudely as it seems to us, that national calamities are a proof of national transgression; but the whole course of development in prophecy was towards an autonomous morality based on a spiritual valuation of life.  Its quarrel with sacerdotalism was mainly directed