religion makes very little
attempt to correct the current standard of values. Its rewards are
wealth and prosperity; its punishments are calamity in this world and
perhaps torture in the next. It is not, however, incapable of
moralisation. The wrath of heaven may visit not the innocent violation
of some _tabu_, but cruelty and injustice. In the historical books of
the Old Testament, though Uzzah is stricken dead for touching the ark,
and the subjects of King David afflicted with pestilence because their
ruler took a census of his people, Jehovah is above all things a
righteous God, who punishes bloodshed, adultery, and social oppression.
So in Greece the Furies pursue the homicide and the perjurer, till the
name of his family is clean put out. Herodotus tells us how the family
of Glaucus was extinguished because he consulted the oracle of Delphi
about an act of embezzlement which he was meditating.

International law was protected by the same fear of divine vengeance.
The murder of heralds must by all means be expiated. When the Romans
repudiate their 'scrap of paper' with the Samnites, they deliver up to
the enemy the officers who signed it, though (with characteristic
'slimness') not the army which the mountaineers had captured and
liberated under the agreement. To destroy the temples in an enemy's
country was an act of wanton impiety; Herodotus cannot understand the
religious intolerance which led the Persians to burn the shrines of
Greek gods. Thus religion had a restraining influence in war throughout
antiquity, and in the Middle Ages. The Pope, who was believed to hold
the keys of future bliss and torment, was frequently, though by no means
always, obeyed by the turbulent feudal lords, and often enforced the
sanctity of a contract by the threat or the imposition of
excommunication and interdict. In order to make these penalties more
terrible, the torments of those who died under the displeasure of the
Church were painted in the most vivid colours. But in the official and
popular Christian eschatology, as in the terrestrial theodicy of the Old
Testament, there is little or no moral idealism. The joys or pains of
the future life are made to depend, in part at least, on the observance
or violation of the moral law, but they are themselves of a kind which
the natural man would desire or dread. They are an enhanced, because a
deferred, retribution of the same kind which in more primitive religions
promises earthly pros