So much of it seems to depend upon the temper and
beliefs of the time, so much of the shadow of conscience to be the fear
of social and even legal penalty. Not to travel far for instances, one
finds Plato speaking in a guileless and romantic fashion of a whole
range of passions and emotions that we have grown to consider as
inherently degrading and repulsive. Yet no shadow of the sense of sin
seems to have brooded over that bright and clear Greek life, the
elements of which, except in the regions which our morality condemns,
seem so intensely desirable and ennobling. In ages, too, when life was
more precarious, and men were so much less sensitive to the idea of
human suffering, one finds a light-hearted cruelty practised which is
insupportable to modern ideals. Those wars of extermination among the
Israelites, when man and woman, boy and girl, were ruthlessly and
sternly slain, because they were held to belong to some tribe abhorred
by the God of Sabaoth; or when, in their own polity, some notorious
sinner was put to death with all his unhappy family, however
innocent--no shadow of conscience seems to have brooded over those
destroyers: they rather had the inspiriting and ennobling sense of
having performed a sacred duty, and carried out the commands of a
jealous God. Viewing the matter, indeed, as dispassionately and
philosophically as possible, it is hard to justify the ways of a
Creator who slowly developed and matured a race, keeping them
deliberately ignorant of light and truth, in order that they might at
last be exterminated, in blood and pain, by a dominant and righteous
race of invaders.
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