as teachers in suffering for it.
They, and those who oppose them, have alike a sacred
cause; and the fearful spectacle arises of earnest,
vehement men, contending against each other as for their
own souls, in fiery struggle. Persecutions come, and
martyrdoms, and religious wars; and, at last, the old
faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its altar, and the
new rises out of the ashes.

Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of
religions, natural and moral; the first, indeed, being in
no proper sense a religion at all, as we understand
religion; and only assuming the character of it in the
minds of great men whose moral sense had raised them
beyond their time and country, and who, feeling the
necessity of a real creed, with an effort and with
indifferent success, endeavoured to express, under the
systems which they found, emotions which had no
proper place there.

Of the transition periods which we have described
as taking place under the religion which we call moral,
the first known to us is marked at its opening by the
appearance of the Book of Job, the first fierce collision
of the new fact with the formula which will not stretch
to cover it.

The earliest phenomenon likely to be observed connected
with the moral government of the world is the
general one, that on the whole, as things are constituted,
good men prosper and are happy, bad men fail and are
miserable. The cause of such a condition is no mystery,
and lies very near the surface. As soon as men combine
in society, they are forced to obey certain laws under
which alone society is possible, and these laws, even in
their rudest form, approach the laws of conscience. To
a certain extent, every one is obliged to sacrifice his
private inclinations; 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 op