Still, it may be argued, before gods were, before religion was evolved, morality was; and this may be shown by the origin and nature of justice, which throughout is entirely independent of religion and religious {xxii} considerations. On this theory, the origin of justice is to be found in the resentment of the individual. But, first, the individual, apart from society, is an abstraction and an impossibility: the individual never exists apart from but always as a member of some society. Next, justice is not the resentment of any individual, but the sentiment of the community, expressing itself in the action not of any individual but of the community as such. The responsibility both for the wrong done and for righting it rests with the community. The earliest offences against which public action is taken are said to be witchcraft and breaches of the marriage laws. The latter are not injuries resented by any individual: they are offences against the gods and are punished to avert the misfortunes which otherwise would visit the tribe. Witchcraft is especially offensive to the god of the community. In almost, if not quite, the lowest stages of human development, disease and famine are regarded as punishments which fall on the community as a whole, because the community, in the person of one of its members, has offended some supernatural power. In quite the lowest stage the guilt of the offending member is also regarded as capable of infecting the whole community; and he is, accordingly, avoided by the whole community and tabooed. Taboo is due to the collective action, and expresses the collective feeling of the community as a whole. It is from such collective action and feeling that justice has been evolved and not from individual resentment, which is still and always was something different from justice. The offences punished by the community have always been considered, so far as they are offences against morality, to be offences against the gods of the community. The fact that in course of time such offences come to be punished always as militating against the good of society testifies merely to the general assumption that the good of man is the will of God: men do not believe that murder, adultery, etc., are merely offences {xxiii} against man's laws. It is only by ignoring this patent fact that it becomes possible to maintain that religion is built upon morality, and that we are discovering religion to be a superfluous superstructure. It may be argued that the assumption that murder, adultery, etc., are offences against God's will is a mere assumption, and that in making the assumption we are fleeing "to the bosom of faith." The reply is that we are content not merely to flee but to rest there . . . 211-238 CHRISTIANITY