perity to the righteous, and earthly calamities to
the wicked. Values, positive and negative, are taken nearly as they
stand in the estimation of the average man.

But there is another religious tradition, which in Greece was almost
separated from the official and national cults, and among the Hebrews
was often in opposition to them. The Hebrew prophets certainly
proclaimed that 'the history of the world is the judgment of the world,'
and often assumed, too crudely as it seems to us, that national
calamities are a proof of national transgression; but the whole course
of development in prophecy was towards an autonomous morality based on a
spiritual valuation of life. Its quarrel with sacerdotalism was mainly
directed against the unethical _tabu_-morality of the priesthood; the
revolt was grounded in a lofty moral idealism, which found expression in
a half-symbolic vision of a coming state in which might and right should
coincide. The apocalyptic prophecies of post-exilic Judaism, which were
not based, like some political predictions of the earlier prophets, on a
statesmanlike view of the international situation, but on hopes of
supernatural intervention, had their roots in visions of a new and
better world-order. This aspiration, which had to disentangle itself by
degrees from the patriotic dreams of a stubborn and unfortunate race,
was projected into the near future, and was mixed with less worthy
political ambitions which had a different origin. The prophet always
foreshortens his revelation, and generally blends the city of God with a
vision of his own country transfigured. We see him doing this even
to-day, in his Utopian dreams of social reconstruction.

And so it has always been. We remember Condorcet foretelling a reign of
truth and peace just before he was compelled to flee from the storm of
calumny to die in a damp cell at Bourg la Reine; and Kant hailing the
approach of a peaceful international republic while Napoleon was
preparing to drown Europe in blood. Apocalyptism is a compromise between
the religion of rewards and punishments and the religion of spiritual
deliverance. It calls a new world into existence to redress the balance
of the old; but its discontent with the old is mainly the result of a
moral and spiritual valuation of life. Greek philosophy has really much
in common with Hebrew prophecy, though the Greek envisaged his ideal
world as the eternal background of reality, and not under the form of