We may say, then, that we find a high degree of morality in early Greece, a still higher at a still earlier period in Babylon, and both are obviously indigenous and natural products. And both reveal the phenomenon that marks an early stage of social morality: as the tribe or the family are one flesh, one corporate unit of life, so the members are collectively responsible, and “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.” This was the familiar law of old Hellas, and we may say of the ancient Mediterranean society; the first to make the momentous protest against it, and to proclaim the responsibility of the individual conscience, was Theognis for the Hellenes and Ezekiel for the Hebrews. The Babylonian, advanced in moral thought as he was, had not escaped the bondage of the older clan-faith: in an incantation-hymn to Marduk,[152.2] the man who is seeking deliverance prays “may the sins of my father, of my grandfather, my mother, my grandmother, my family, {153} my whole circle of kindred, not come near me, may they depart from my side.” One other characteristic of early moral thought and feeling is that the sense of sin is not wholly ethical according to our modern criteria, but is partly regarded as something external to the will and purpose, something inherent in certain acts or substances of which the performance or the contagion renders a man a sinner. Thus in the Babylonian confessional liturgy and hymns of penitence, while there is much that would appeal to the most delicate moral consciousness, and is on the same level with the most spiritual passages in the Hebrew psalms, there is also a strong admixture of what is alien and non-moral. The confessional formula[153.1] asks a man, for instance, “whether he has sat in the chair of a person under a ban,” that is, “a man forbid,” a person impure and under a curse; “whether he has met him, has slept in his bed, has drunk from his cup.” In one of the penitential hymns that might be addressed to any god, “to the god that I know, and to the god that I do not know,” as the formula expresses it, we find such sorrowful confessions as “without knowing it, I have eaten of that which is abominable in the sight of my god: without knowing it, I have trodden on that which is filthy in the sight of my goddess”; “my sins are many, great is my transgression.”[153.2] This must be taken quite literally: contact with unclean things or with unclean persons, eating of forbidden food, is put in the same category with serious offences against social morality, and all these expose a man equally to the power of the evil demon and to the loss of his God’s protection. And this is a half-civilised development in Babylonian psychology of the primeval savage {154} law of tabu: nor, as I think, is there yet any proof that the people of the Mesopotamian culture ever attained to the highest plane of ethical enlightenment; the later Zarathustrian religion of the Persian domination is strongly