ces of utility.

This transfigured form of restraint, differing at first but little from
the original form, admits of immense development. Accumulating
traditions, growing in grandeur as they are repeated from generation to
generation, make more and more superhuman the early-recorded hero of the
race. His powers of inflicting punishment and giving happiness become
ever greater, more multitudinous, and more varied; so that the dread of
divine displeasure, and the desire to obtain divine approbation, acquire
a certain largeness and generality. Still the conceptions remain
anthropomorphic. The revengeful deity continues to be thought of in
terms of human emotions, and continues to be represented as displaying
these emotions in human ways. Moreover, the sentiments of right and
duty, so far as they have become developed, refer mainly to divine
commands and interdicts; and have little reference to the natures of the
acts commanded or interdicted. In the intended offering-up of Isaac, in
the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, and in the hewing to pieces of
Agag, as much as in the countless atrocities committed from religious
motives by various early historic races, as by some existing savage
races, we see that the morality and immorality of actions, as we
understand them, are at first little recognized; and that the feelings,
chiefly of dread, which serve in place of them, are feelings felt
towards the unseen beings supposed to issue the commands and interdicts.

Here it will be said that, as just admitted, these are not the moral
sentiments properly so called. They are simply sentiments that precede
and make possible those highest sentiments which do not refer either to
personal benefits or evils to be expected from men, or to more remote
rewards and punishments. Several comments are, however, called forth by
this criticism. One is, that if we glance back at past beliefs and their
correlative feelings, as shown in Dante's poem, in the mystery-plays of
the middle ages, in St. Bartholomew massacres, in burnings for heresy,
we get proof that in comparatively modern times right and wrong meant
little else than subordination or insubordination--to a divine ruler
primarily, and under him to a human ruler. Another is, that down to our
own day this conception largely prevails, and is even embodied in
elaborate ethical works--instance the _Essays on the Principles of
Morality_, by Jonathan Dymond, which recognizes no ground of moral
o