For their dread and shame sprang from their consciousness of their own evil, and their aspiration from an instinct which whispered that evil, though deeply ingrained in, was not essential to the being of man. Their sense of sin was very poignant, more so than in the case of any other people. The Hindus had a conception of merit, but a very poor and weak conception of sin. They were more impressed by life’s suffering than by the taint of which it was only the consequence. But the Hebrews felt the shame and the curse of that taint as no people ever felt it. They had quite a vocabulary to express the many shades and degrees of the feeling of it; yet in their speculations they were led to believe that this taint was not inherent in their nature nor ineradicable from it. There was a time when sin was not; there might be a time when it would not be. The dominion of evil was an interlude, and though terribly prolonged in human experience, it might have an end. That was the central ideal of the Fall which they pictured on the first page of their Bible, and conserved in their seventh-day Sabbath.[115] In the fact of man’s creation they felt that his redemption was involved, and so the Hebrew dread of and longing for God were reconciled by a hope that though to man belongeth shame, to God belongeth mercy as the God of salvation. There was another and a better covenant than that which had been concluded with their ancestors at Sinai, or with the first father of their tribes long before. It was made not with Moses or Abraham for Israel, but for all nations with a Divine Mediator, who, behind all that was of man, though yet the seed of the woman, would, in a way that neither Moses nor any of the prophets could understand, eventually make an end of sin.