The fact that Ezekiel defines righteousness in terms of outward conduct has led to his being accused of the error of legalism in his moral conceptions. He has been charged with resolving righteousness into “a sum of separate _tzedāqôth_,” or virtues. But this view strains his language unduly, and seems moreover to be negatived by the presuppositions of his argument. As a man must either live or die at the day of judgment, so he must at any moment be either righteous or wicked. The problematic case of a man who should conscientiously observe some of these requirements and deliberately violate others would have been dismissed by Ezekiel as an idle speculation: “Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all” (James ii. 10). The very fact that former good deeds are not remembered to a man in the day when he turns from his righteousness shows that the state of righteousness is something different from an average struck from the statistics of his moral career. The bent of the character towards or away from goodness is no doubt spoken of as subject to sudden fluctuations, but for the time being each man is conceived as dominated by the one tendency or the other; and it is the bent of the whole nature towards the good that constitutes the righteousness by which a man shall live. It is at all events a mistake to suppose that the prophet is concerned only about the external act and indifferent to the state of heart from which it proceeds. It is true that he does not attempt to penetrate beneath the surface of the outward life. He does not analyse motives. But this is because he assumes that if a man keeps God’s law he does it from a sincere desire to please God and with a sense of the rightness of the law to which he subjects his life. When we recognise this the charge of externalism amounts to very little. We can never get behind the principle that “he that doeth righteousness is righteous” (1 John iii. 7), and that principle covers all that Ezekiel really teaches. Compared with the more spiritual teaching of the New Testament his moral ideal is no doubt defective in many directions, but his insistence on action as a test of character is hardly one of them. We must remember that the New Testament itself contains as many warnings against a false spirituality as it does against the opposite error of reliance on good works. II