ven there. As a recent writer has well said, 'Law then
presented itself to men's minds as something venerable and
unchangeable, as old as the city; it had been delivered by the founder
himself, when he laid the walls of the city, and kindled its sacred
fire.' An ordinary man who wished to strike out a new path, to begin a
new and important practice by himself, would have been peremptorily
required to abandon his novelties on pain of death; he was deviating,
he would be told, from the ordinances imposed by the gods on his
nation, and he must not do so to please himself. On the contrary,
others were deeply interested in his actions. If he disobeyed, the gods
might inflict grievous harm on all the people as well as him. Each
partner in the most ancient kind of partnerships was supposed to have
the power of attracting the wrath of the divinities on the entire firm,
upon the other partners quite as much as upon himself. The quaking
bystanders in a superstitious age would soon have slain an isolated
bold man in the beginning of his innovations, What Macaulay so relied
on as the incessant source of progress--the desire of man to better his
condition--was not then permitted to work; man was required to live as
his ancestors had lived.

Still further away from those times were the 'free thought' and the
'advancing sciences' of which we now hear so much. The first and most
natural subject upon which human thought concerns itself is religion;
the first wish of the half-emancipated thinker is to use his reason on
the great problems of human destiny--to find out whence he came and
whither he goes, to form for himself the most reasonable idea of God
which he can form. But, as Mr. Grote happily said--'This is usually
what ancient times would not let a man do. His _gens_ or his _phratria_
required him to believe as they believed.' Toleration is of all ideas
the most modern, because the notion that the bad religion of A cannot
impair, here or hereafter, the welfare of B, is, strange to say, a
modern idea. And the help of 'science,' at that stage of thought, is
still more nugatory. Physical science, as we conceive it--that is, the
systematic investigation of external nature in detail--did not then
exist. A few isolated observations on surface things--a half-correct
calendar, secrets mainly of priestly invention, and in priestly
custody--were all that was then imagined; the idea of using a settled
study of nature as a basis for the discov