Such dependence as this on rules and forms and rites is of course disastrous to all true morality. It fosters the idea that morality consists in the performance of certain outer acts, instead of being the attitude of the soul toward the good and the right inwardly discerned. It substitutes an outer standard for the individual conscience. Conscience disused loses its power of discrimination and becomes atrophied. The ethically indifferent is made the all-important, and thus all moral values are confused. What confusion resulted in Israel is revealed in the denunciations of this rigid, mechanical legalism by the Prophet of Nazareth: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.”[411] “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth.... To eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man.”[412] The Sermon on the Mount announces the awakening of the true prophetic spirit in Israel after a sleep of five hundred years. [Sidenote: An intolerant nationalism] A sinister phase of the orthodox religious-ethical system of the postexilic age was its narrow, intolerant nationalism. To be an enemy of Israel was what was believed to constitute wickedness, and to excite the wrath of Yahweh, just as later in the ethics of certain systems of Christian theology the unbeliever or pagan, merely because of his unbelief or paganism, was regarded as wicked and as deserving of eternal punishment. In psalms which date from this period these enemies of Yahweh are cursed with a fierce hatred which spares not even the children, but pronounces happy him who shall take up and dash the little ones against the stones.[413] Nowhere in history do we meet with a more fanatically intolerant nationalism. [Sidenote: The relation of the synagogue to the moral evolution]