This evolution of moral ideas is most clearly traced in the religious history of the Jews. In their earlier conceptions Jehovah is represented with all the traits of a jealous and capricious Oriental sultan. The one virtue in his eyes is implicit obedience; the one unpardonable crime, anything that looks like disrespect. David is the man after God’s own heart, though he commits crimes of the foulest description, and treats as nullities the moral commandments against adultery and murder. But when he takes a census of his people Jehovah is offended, and, with a total disregard of justice, visits his anger, not on the offender, but on the innocent people whom he decimates by a pestilence. In like manner, Abraham is favoured because he is ready to obey the inhuman command to sacrifice his son; while Saul loses Jehovah’s favour because he hesitates to massacre his captives in cold blood. The first ideas of a higher moral sense appear with the prophets in the troubled times of the later kings—when poor little Palestine was being ground between the upper millstone of Assyria and the nether one of Egypt. Sufferings and persecutions, anxieties and tribulations, wrought a ferment in the Jewish mind from which new ideas were generated. Sacrifices had been duly offered, and yet the enemies of Jehovah waxed and his chosen people waned. It must be that He was offended with them because He required something better than the blood of bulls—justice and mercy. So taught the popular preachers of the day—men like Isaiah and Amos—and by degrees their words found acceptance. It was not, however, until the Captivity that these ideas of morality were wrought into the Jewish nation so as to become, so to speak, flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood, as they have remained ever since. Whether it was contact with the more advanced moral ideas of religions like those of Buddha and Zoroaster, or, more probably, their sufferings from the cruelty and injustice of their conquerors, the Captivity certainly made them a new nation, attached ardently to morality and monotheism—thus effecting in a few years, and by purely human agencies, what, according to received beliefs, centuries of miraculous dispensation had failed to accomplish. How speedily and how effectually the work was done appears from that most interesting narrative of the domestic life of a middle-class Jew of Nineveh, the Book of Tobit. The simple piety and homely household virtues are almost identically the same as those of many a Jewish family living to-day in London or Frankfort. From that time forward Jewish morality maintains a high level, and in the age immediately preceding Christianity it had attained great purity and spirituality in the school of the early doctors of the Talmud, and of the Jewish colony of Alexandria. The Sermon on the Mount, beautiful as it is, is but an admirable _résumé_ of maxims which are to be found in the works of Philo and other Jewish teachers,