Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/787

 THE GENESIS OF ETHICAL ELEMENTS 77 1

Now, this holy and righteous God, who championed absolute justice without weakness and without caprice, was the discovery of a handful of men, namely the Reforming Prophets. Amos, with the idea that Jehovah is an upright judge unbribable by firstlings or praise ; Hosea, whose Master hated injustice and falsehood and required, above all, righteous conduct ; Isaiah, whose Lord would have mercy only on those who relieved the widow and the fatherless — these were the spokesmen of a minority that finally destroyed the national character of the old religion and founded ethical monotheism. The folk were not in sympathy with the leaders who sought to impose this higher deity, and only amid continual struggles with the recalcitrant backsliding Hebrews was the moral reform carried through.

It is again to an elite that we can trace the ethical tendencies in the old Greek religion. The gods of the Greeks were mere nature gods, and had at first little interest in the conduct of their worshipers. Like all superior human beings, they demanded cleanness and comeliness in those who would approach them acceptably. Defilement, at first physical in character, debarred from intercourse with the god until certain purificatory rites had been performed. But after a time the idea grows up that not liturgical impurity alone, but moral guilt as well, debars from public worship. Wrongdoing is conceived as leaving a smirch or stench most abominable to the senses of the gods. This offensiveness could be removed, if at all, only by moral means, that is, by expiation, atonement, or reparation. Through such regulation of the terms of admission to public worship the gods were utilized to promote peace and obedience. Later, indeed, some of this ground was lost, and the philosophers, like Xenophanes and Heraclitus, found public worship in Greece useless and superstitious.

Now, the belief that the guilt of a worshiper gave offense to the god, and that only in innocence could men approach the altar, was not due to the slow spontaneous clarifying of the popular consciousness or to selection and survival among the various notions men formed of the godhead. It was the discovery of an elite. The doctrine seems to have radiated from the masters of