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
distinction 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 open breach of enacted statutes, became 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 generalisations 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 consequences 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 sa