en breach of enacted statutes,
were only possible under the complications of more
artificial polities; and the oppression or injury of man
by man was open, violent, obvious, and therefore easily
understood. Doubtless, therefore, in such a state of
things, it would, on the whole, be true to experience,
that, judging merely by outward prosperity or the
reverse, good and bad men would be rewarded and
punished as such in this actual world; so far, that is,
as the administration of such rewards and punishments
was left in the power of mankind. But theology could
not content itself with general tendencies. Theological
propositions then, as much as now, were held to be
absolute, universal, admitting of no exceptions, and
explaining every phenomenon. Superficial generalizations
were construed into immutable decrees; the God
of this world was just and righteous, and temporal
prosperity or wretchedness were dealt out by him
immediately by his own will to his subjects, according
to their behaviour. Thus the same disposition towards
completeness which was the ruin of paganism, here, too,
was found generating the same evils; the half truth
rounding itself out with falsehoods. Not only the
consequence of ill actions which followed through
themselves, but the accidents, as we call them, of nature,
earthquakes, storms, and pestilences, were the ministers
of God's justice, and struck sinners only with
discriminating accuracy. That the sun should shine alike
on the evil and the good was a creed too high for the
early divines, or that the victims of a fallen tower were
no greater offenders than their neighbours. The
conceptions of such men could not pass beyond the
outward temporal consequence; and, if God's hand was not
there it was nowhere. We might have expected that
such a theory of things could not long resist the
accumulated contradictions of experience; but the same
experience shows also what a marvellous power is in us
of thrusting aside phenomena which interfere with our
cherished convictions; and when such convictions are
consecrated into a creed which it is a sacred duty to
believe, experience is but like water dropping upon a
rock, which wears it away, indeed, at last, but only in
thousands of years. This theory was and is the central
idea of the Jewish polity, the obstinate toughness of
which has been the perplexity of Gentiles and Christians
from the first dawn of its existence; it lingers among
ourselves in our Lit