and those who refuse to do so are punished, or are crushed.  If society were perfect, the imperfect tendency would carry itself out till the two sets of laws were identical; but perfection so far has been only in Utopia, and as far as we can judge by experience hitherto, they have approximated most nearly in the simplest and most rudimentary forms of life.  Under the systems which we call patriarchal, the modern distinctions between sins and crimes had no existence.  All gross sins were offences against society, as it then was constituted, and, wherever it was possible, were punished as being so; chicanery and those subtle advantages which the acute and unscrupulous can take over the simple, without open breach of enacted statutes, were only possible under the complications of more artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily understood.  Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of things, it would, on the whole, be true to experience, that, judging merely by outward prosperity or the reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is, as the administration of such rewards and punishments was left in the power of mankind.  But theology could not content itself with general tendencies.  Theological propositions then, as much as now, were held to be absolute, universal, admitting of no exceptions, and explaining every phenomenon.  Superficial generalizations were construed into immutable decrees; the God of this world was just and righteous, and temporal prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by him immediately by his own will to his subjects, according to their behaviour.  Thus the same disposition towards completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too, was found generating the same evils; the half truth rounding itself out with falsehoods.  Not only the consequence of ill actions which followed through themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of nature, earthquakes, storms, and pestilences, were the ministers of God’s justice, and struck sinners only with discriminating accuracy.  That the sun should shine alike on the evil and the good was a creed too high for the early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were no greater offenders than their neighbours.  The conceptions of such men could not pass beyond the outward temporal consequence; and, if God’s hand was not there it was nowhere.  We might have expected that such a theory of things could not long resist the accumulated contradictions of experience; but the same experience shows also what a marvellous power is in us of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our cherished convictions; and when such convictions are consecrated into a creed which it is a sacred duty to believe, experience is but like water dropping upon a rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in thousands of years.  This theory was and is the central idea of the Jewish