Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/85

 matter. Hence, too, there is nothing illogical to the clan mind in the sacrifice of an innocent man as a compensation for the sin of a guilty member or of the group; such a sacrifice only becomes illogical when the idea of individual intention and personal responsibility is clearly realised. Hence, also, as the clans lose their communal character (for example, by their land ceasing to be common property, and their ties of kinship being weakened by artificial expansion) and are broken down into their component families and individuals, ideas of inherited guilt survive into the new social conditions, and are misapplied to purely individual life in a manner which can only issue in a conflict between personal intention and corporate responsibility. It is by this kind of survival that we find inherited guilt the leading ethical doctrine of the Athenian drama in its earlier period—for example, in the Seven against Thebes, in the Orestian trilogy, in Œdipous Tyrannus. It has been observed that the subtle Greek gradually altered the old and gross conception of inherited guilt into a personal liability to commit fresh offences, and so to incur divine vengeance. In this way his growing individualism avoided such a direct repudiation of inherited sin as the less subtle Hebrew found himself compelled to utter. But even conceptions od impersonal responsibility so considerably removed from the oldest and purest life of the clan as the ethics of the early Athenian drama are enough to show the gulf which separates our modern analyses of intention, and consequently our ideas of personal character, from days in which the individual was morally merged in his group. Indeed, the survival of such conceptions in the highly-intellectual atmosphere of Athens is altogether a more remarkable fact than the condemnation of belief in inherited guilt, the ethics of the Decalogue, by Ezekiel