When the prefects Tatian and Proculus fell into disgrace, Lycia, their native land, was deprived of the autonomy it had hitherto enjoyed as a Roman province, and its inhabitants were disfranchised and declared incapable of holding any office under the empire. So, too, when Joshua discovered some of the spoils of Jericho hidden in the tent of Achan, not only the thief himself, but also “his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his sheep, and his tent, and all that he had,” were brought into the valley of Achor, and there stoned with stones and burned with fire. About this time, however, such holocausts of justice were suppressed among the Jews, and a law enacted that henceforth “the fathers shall not be put to death, for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers, every man shall be put to death for his own sin;” or, as Jeremiah expresses it figuratively, the children’s teeth were to be no longer set on edge by the sour grapes which their fathers had eaten. Yet the persistency of time-honoured custom and its power of overriding new statutes are seen in the fact that, several centuries later, at the request of the Gibeonites, whom it had become desirable to conciliate, David did not scruple to deliver up to them seven of Saul’s sons to be hanged for the evil which their father had wrought in slaying these foes of Israel. It would have been a parallel case if Bismarck had sought to win the friendship and favour of the French by giving into their hands the descendants of Blücher to be guillotined on the Place de la Concorde, or, after having made a political pilgrimage to Canossa, should surrender the children of Dr. Falk to be racked and burned at the stake by the ultramontanes. According to the current orthodox theology, treason against God, committed by our common progenitor, worked “corruption of blood” in the whole human race, all the children of men being attainted with guilt in consequence of the act of their first parent. This crude and brutal conception of justice is the survival of a primitive and barbarous state of society, and it is curious to observe how the most highly civilized peoples, who have outgrown this notion and set it aside in the secular relations of man to man, still cling to it as something sacred and sublime in the spiritual relations of man to the deity. Only the all-wise and all-powerful sovereign of the universe is supposed to continue to administer law and justice on principles which common-sense and the enlightened opinion of mankind have long since abrogated and banished from earthly legislation. Thus the divine government, instead of keeping pace with the progress of human institutions, still corresponds to the ideals of right and retribution entertained by savage tribes and the lowest types of mankind.