73 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



probably to be found in all advanced societies. Plato wished to 

 banish the poets from his Republic because he feared the influ- 

 ence of the immoral stories they told of the gods. But his very 

 protest shows that he and the members of his circle had risen 

 above the moral plane of these stories ; and, in fact, it is clear 

 from the writings of the period, especially those of JEschylus, 

 Sophocles, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes, not to speak of the 

 Stoics, that the moral conduct of men was determined at that 

 time, not by the example of the gods, but by such social consid- 

 erations as influence us at the present day; it would no doubt 

 have been thought ridiculous if, for example, a man had adduced 

 precedents in the lives of Zeus or Hermes or Aphrodite in de- 

 fense of conduct condemned by the laws and usages of Athens. 

 A similar ineffectiveness of divine precedent may be observed in 

 Christian societies of our own time, who listen Sunday after Sun- 

 day, devoutly but with complete ethical indifference, to proced- 

 ures represented in the Old Testament as based on divine com- 

 mand, but foreign to our modes of thought. I once heard from a 

 learned clergyman an argument of an hour to show that Abra- 

 ham's purpose to offer his son could not reasonably be regarded 

 as an example for us, since Abraham was certain that he had the 

 divine command, while we are not warranted in believing that we 

 enjoy personal direction from God of that sort. The occasion of 

 the discourse was the shocking history of a citizen of Massachu- 

 setts, who, aided and abetted by his wife, sacrificed his child in 

 obedience to a supposed command from God. But people gener- 

 ally disposed of the matter more simply by saying that the man 

 was crazy, and so he was adjudged to be in a court of law ; the 

 general feeling was that no sane man could thus go counter to the 

 ethical principles of our time. The command to exterminate the 

 Canaanites, though it may be vaguely regarded by many as 

 having been right at that time, would not now be pleaded by the 

 general of an army or by a minister of war as authority for 

 wholesale slaughter of enemies. Theoretically these things are 

 widely looked on as divine ; but the popular instinct, with easy 

 illogicalness, decides that for some reason or other they do not 

 belong to our times. The explanation, of course, is simple : these 

 procedures were the product of half -barbarous communities, or at 

 any rate of a period when men saw nothing wrong in them ; they 

 were repudiated by the moral sense of the later Jews. Slavery, 

 recognized as lawful in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, is 

 now condemned by the civilized world ; and the New Testament 

 teaching on this subject is explained, by those who hold the bibli- 

 cal ethics to be absolutely correct, as a wise reticence : the apostle 

 Paul, it is said, refrained from interfering with the social insti- 

 tutions of his time, and trusted to the regenerating power of the 



