Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/756

736 probably to be found in all advanced societies. Plato wished to banish the poets from his Republic because he feared the influence of the immoral stories they told of the gods. But his very protest shows that he and the members of his circle had risen above the moral plane of these stories; and, in fact, it is clear from the writings of the period, especially those of Æschylus, Sophocles, Plato, Xenophon, Demosthenes, not to speak of the Stoics, that the moral conduct of men was determined at that time, not by the example of the gods, but by such social considerations as influence us at the present day; it would no doubt have been thought ridiculous if, for example, a man had adduced precedents in the lives of Zeus or Hermes or Aphrodite in defense of conduct condemned by the laws and usages of Athens. A similar ineffectiveness of divine precedent may be observed in Christian societies of our own time, who listen Sunday after Sunday, devoutly but with complete ethical indifference, to procedures represented in the Old Testament as based on divine command, but foreign to our modes of thought. I once heard from a learned clergyman an argument of an hour to show that Abraham's purpose to offer his son could not reasonably be regarded as an example for us, since Abraham was certain that he had the divine command, while we are not warranted in believing that we enjoy personal direction from God of that sort. The occasion of the discourse was the shocking history of a citizen of Massachusetts, who, aided and abetted by his wife, sacrificed his child in obedience to a supposed command from God. But people generally disposed of the matter more simply by saying that the man was crazy, and so he was adjudged to be in a court of law; the general feeling was that no sane man could thus go counter to the ethical principles of our time. The command to exterminate the Canaanites, though it may be vaguely regarded by many as having been right at that time, would not now be pleaded by the general of an army or by a minister of war as authority for wholesale slaughter of enemies. Theoretically these things are widely looked on as divine; but the popular instinct, with easy illogicalness, decides that for some reason or other they do not belong to our times. The explanation, of course, is simple: these procedures were the product of half-barbarous communities, or at any rate of a period when men saw nothing wrong in them; they were repudiated by the moral sense of the later Jews. Slavery, recognized as lawful in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, is now condemned by the civilized world; and the New Testament teaching on this subject is explained, by those who hold the biblical ethics to be absolutely correct, as a wise reticence: the apostle Paul, it is said, refrained from interfering with the social institutions of his time, and trusted to the regenerating power of the