But we must not, I think, hope to be able to trace with any exactness the part played by religion in constructing the various departments of the social fabric {129} of Babylonia; for when we get our first glimpse of that society it is already so far advanced, so complex in its civilisation, in a sense so modern, that its embryology is likely to escape us. Nevertheless, it is interesting for our purpose to study the earliest material, the code of Hammurabi, to watch what light it throws on the correlation of religious and secular life. Some parts of it are missing, but we may be allowed to pass a temporary judgment on that which is preserved, and which appears to be the greater part of the whole corpus.[129.1] The code, as I have mentioned, is inspired by the god, safeguarded by the god, and the legislation is in that sense theocratic; but as compared, for instance, with the Jewish books of the Law, it impresses us as the work of a cool-headed lawyer, of secular utilitarian principles, bringing legal acumen to bear on the problems of a complex society. At certain points it is still on the barbaric plane: the principle of “an eye for an eye” is enacted; the sense of individual responsibility for wrong-doing is not yet so far developed but that vicarious punishment is still allowed; a man’s son or daughter might be put to death for his own offence. But in many respects it reveals an advanced moral and intellectual view, and the religious atmosphere is absent where we should most expect to find an infusion of it. In the enactments dealing with the fees due to a physician, we seem to discern that medicine has become a free and secular science. Still more important for our purpose are the clauses concerning homicide, for it is particularly in regard to homicide that religious feeling has been most operative in the {130} early legislation of society, and the evolution of our modern morality concerning this offence has been at times retarded by religion. Only one clause in the code happens to deal with deliberate murder, and only murder in special circumstances, those in which Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon: Hammurabi would have impaled Clytemnestra: a few other clauses are concerned with culpable homicide and unintentional. Hammurabi being himself a master-builder, is severe with bad architects who build houses so weakly that they fall in and kill the owners: in such a case he kills the architect. But he is singularly equitable and mild with a man who is drawn into a quarrel in which blows are passed, and who unthinkingly wounds or kills his opponent; if he can take an oath that he acted “without knowledge or without will,” he has only to pay the physician if the man is wounded, and half a mina of silver if the man is killed and was of free birth. Here there is no mention of the blood-feud, and Babylonian society seems wholly to have escaped from that dangerous principle of tribal barbarism.[130.1] Neither is there any hint of