In the moral and religious evolution which we have been tracing it has been seen that the utter indifference of the Cosmos to human good and evil, right and wrong, was the theme of Job; that in Ecclesiastes the same was again declared, and the suggestion made that if God helped or afflicted men it must depend on some point of etiquette or observance unconnected with moral considerations, so that man need not omit pleasure but only be punctilious when in the temple; that in Jesus Ben Sira's contribution to his fathers' "Wisdom," the moral character of God was maintained, moral evil regarded as hostile to God, and imaginary sanctions invented, accompanied by pleadings with God to indorse them by new signs and wonders. Such signs not appearing, and no rewards and punishments being manifested in human life, the next step was to assign them to a future existence, and this step was taken in "Wisdom of Solomon." There remained but one more necessity, namely, that there should be some actual evidence of that future existence. Agur's question had remained unanswered-- "Who has ascended into heaven and come down again? Such an one would I question about God." To this the reply was to be the resurrection from death claimed for the greatest of the spiritual race of Solomon. CHAPTER XIII. EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS (A SEQUEL TO SOPHIA SOLOMONTOS). In a Theocracy the birth of a new God was not the mere new generalization that it might be in our secularized century,--a deification of the Unknowable, for instance,--of not the slightest practical or moral interest to any human being. Judea was the bodily incarnation, even more than Islam is now, of a deity who said, "I am the Lord and there is none else; I form the light and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things." The denial of such a deity, the substitution of one who required neither prayers, sacrifices, nor intercessions, could not be merely theoretical. It must involve the overthrow of a nationality which had no bond of unity except a book, and the institutions founded on that book. Nor did the theocratic principle admit of a mere philosophical opposition to its institutions. He who touched that system was dealing with people who, in the language of "Sophia Solomontos" were "shut up in a prison without iron bars." The natural advent of the anti-Jahvist was in the Temple and with the words-- He hath sent me to herald glad news to the poor, He hath sent me to proclaim deliverance to captives, And recovering of sight to the blind, To set at liberty them that are bruised.