Formerly I never read the account of the deception Jacob practised on his father at the instigation of his mother, and at the expense of his brother; or the imprecations of the 109th Psalm; or the account of the way in which David, for the purpose of appeasing God (Who was supposed to be terribly afflicting an innocent people for the mistaken zeal on His behalf of a deceased king), gave up seven innocent men, sons and grandsons of Saul, to be hanged by those whom Saul had sought to injure; without wishing, as I believe almost everybody does, every time he hears these passages read, that, by some process of beneficent magic, they could be made to vanish from the Sacred Volume, and be heard of and remembered no more for ever. But now they appear to me in quite a different light, and I regard them with quite different sentiments. Now I am very far indeed from wishing that they could be made to vanish away. I have been among people who are, at this moment, thinking, feeling, and acting precisely in the way described in those passages; and so I have come to regard them as containing genuine, primitive, historical phases of morality and religion, and as giving to the record, and just for this very reason, no small part of its value. This primitive morality, which has been kept alive all along, or to which men have again reverted, in the East, belongs to the stage in which subtilty, although it may, as in the instance before us, palpably mean deception, has not yet been distinguished from wisdom; when men think they are serving God by being ready to inflict any and every form of suffering, and even, if it were possible, annihilation itself, on the man who rejects, or who does not support, their ideas of morality and religion; and when the current conception of responsibility is made to include the family and descendants of the evil-doer. These very misconceptions and aberrations are in conformity to the existing sentiments and daily practice of the modern Oriental. With him deception is a perfectly legitimate means for obtaining his ends; nor, in his way of thinking, is any infliction too severe for misbelievers and blasphemers of the Faith; and in the custom of blood-feuds the innocent descendants of the man who shed blood are answerable for the misdeed of their forefather. These, then, and similar mistakes, the contemplation of which is so painful to us, were honestly made, and were even consequences of deliberate and careful efforts to act up to moral ideas under the conditions and in conformity with the knowledge of the times.