220 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



And so man was cast from the Garden of Eden. 

 Here we must recollect there were at first but two 



educated and learned ex-priest of Hieropolis, skilled in all the know- 

 ledge of the Egyptians ? 



" The contradictions in the ideas and precepts of morality and 

 religion are even more startling. These oscillate between the two 

 extremes of the conception of the later prophets of a one Supreme 

 God, who loves justice and mercy better than sacrifice, and that of 

 a ferocious and vindictive tribal god, whose appetite for human blood 

 is as insatiable as that of the war-god of the Mexicans. Thus we 

 have, on the one hand, the commandment, ' Thou sbalt do no murder,' 

 and on the other, the injunction to commit indiscriminate massacres. 

 A single instance may suffice. The ' Book of the Law of Moses ' is 

 quoted in 2 Kings xiv. as saying, ' The fathers shall not be put to 

 death for the children, nor the children for the fathers ; but every 

 man shall be put to death for his own sin.' In Numbers xxxi., 

 Moses, the ' meekest of mankind,' is represented as extremely wroth 

 with the captains who, having warred against Midian at the Lord's 

 command, had only slaughtered the males, and taken the women of 

 Midian and their little ones captives; and he commands them to 

 ' kill every male among the little ones, and every woman that hath 

 known man by lying with him ; but all the women children that 

 have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.' 

 . . . The same injunction of indiscriminate massacre in order to 

 escape the jealous wrath of an offended Jehovah is repeated, over 

 and over again, in Joshua and Judges, and even as late as after the 

 foundation of the Monarchy, we find Samuel telling Saul in the name 

 of the Lord of Hosts, to ' go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy 

 them, slaying both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, 

 camel and ass,' and denouncing Saul, and hewing Agag in pieces 

 before the Lord, because this savage injunction had not been literally 

 obeyed. Even under David, the man after the Lord's own heart, we 

 find him torturing to death the prisoners taken at the fall of Rabbah, 

 and giving up seven of the sons of Saul to the Gibeordtes to be 

 sacrificed before the Lord as human victims. It is one of the 

 strangest contradictions of human nature that such atrocious 

 violations of the moral sense should have been received for so many 

 centuries as a divine revelation, rather than as instances of what may 

 be more appropriately called ' devil worship.' 



" Nor is it a less singular proof of the power of cherished prepos- 



