In proof of the power of anathemas, Chassenée refers to the cursing of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, causing it to go upon its belly for all time; David’s malediction of the mountains of Gilboa, so that they had neither rain nor dew; God’s curse upon the city of Jericho, making its strong walls fall before the blasts of trumpets; and in the New Testament the withered fig-tree of Bethany. The words of Jesus, “Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire,” he interprets, not merely as the best means of getting rid of a cumberer of the orchard, but as a condemnation and punishment of the tree for its delinquencies, and adds: “If, therefore, it is permitted to destroy an irrational thing, because it does not produce fruit, much more is it permitted to curse it, since the greater penalty includes the less” (_cum si liceat quid est plus, debet licere quid est minus_). An English professor of divinity, Richard Chevenix Trench, justifies the withering of the fruitless fig-tree on the same ground or, at least, by a similar process of reasoning: “It was punished, not for being without fruit, but for proclaiming by the voice of those leaves that it had such; not for being barren, but for being false.” According to this exegesis, it was the telling of a wilful lie that “drew on it the curse.” The guilty fig is thus endowed with a moral character and made clearly conscious of the crime for which it suffered the penalty of death: “Almost as soon as the word of the Lord was spoken, a shuddering fear may have run through all the leaves of the tree, which was thus stricken at the heart.” As regards the culpability and punishableness of the object, the modern divine and the mediæval jurist occupy the same standpoint; only the latter, with a stricter judicial sense, insists that there shall be no infliction of punishment until the malefactor has been convicted by due process of law, and that he shall enjoy all the safeguards which legal forms and technicalities have thrown around him and under whose covert even the vilest criminal has the right to take refuge. The Anglican hermeneutist, on the contrary, would justify the curse and admit the validity of the anathema, although it was only the angry expression of an unreasonable impatience disappointed in not finding fruit at the wrong season, “for the time of figs was not yet.”