ngly conclude with an
enumeration first of the features of Jewish religious life connected
with the law or the priestly system, and then of those features of it
which lie outside that system.

1. The priestly religion is founded on a sentiment which forms but
little part of the faith of early peoples, namely the sense of sin.
The prophetic denunciations of Israel's backslidings have at last
found entrance, and the people is found submitting to a system which
implies that the whole of its past history was sinful and mistaken,
and that there is a constant need for supplicating forgiveness. Every
prayer begins with a long confession of national sin, in which the
present generation also shares. "We have sinned with our fathers,"
they say. This view is spread over the historical books in the
sweeping judgments passed on individual monarchs, on periods of the
national life, and especially on the whole of the Northern Kingdom
(cf. Nehemiah ix.). The old confidence in the presence of Jehovah
with his people has now departed. The earlier Israelites never
doubted that Jehovah was in the midst of them; that could be taken
for granted except when events proved the contrary. But now Jehovah
has grown greater and more awful, while the people have become
painfully aware of their deficiencies and cannot assume that he is
with them, but must take steps to secure his presence. This is no
doubt connected with the growing sense of an individual position and
responsibility in religion. To the nation or the tribe it is natural
to feel that its cause is just and that its God is with it; but the
individual, thrown upon his own inner world for his alliances, is
less apt to feel that confidence. Now the religion preached by the
prophets is essentially one for the individual. Ezekiel especially
felt himself responsible for the fate of individuals, and laboured to
awaken his fellow-countrymen one by one to a sense of their danger
and responsibility; he taught that each man had to see to his own
salvation, that each man would receive the fruit of his own acts. All
this tends to a deeper feeling and a more anxious mood in religion,
and helps to explain how the sense of sin, on which religious
progress at its higher stages depends so much, was fixed so strongly
in the Jewish mind. That the Jews underwent a radical change in their
disposition is proved by the fact that they submitted to the yoke of
the law: for it may be questioned if any people ever