"The savage," says Sir John Lubbock, "is nowhere free. All over the world his daily life is regulated by a complicated, and often most inconvenient set of customs (as forcible as laws), of quaint prohibitions and privileges.... The Australians are governed by a code of rules and a set of customs which form one of the most cruel tyrannies that has ever, perhaps, existed on the face of the earth." ("Origin of Civilisation," p. 304.) "The lives of savages," says Mr. Lang, "are bound by the most closely-woven fetters of custom. The simplest acts are 'tabooed.' A strict code regulates all intercourse." ("Custom and Myth.," p. 72.) Now, unless this system is clearly understood, Mosaism will remain a riddle. It is to be observed that Ezra, far from having relaxed the reign of terror of the Great Taboo of savage survival, had enlarged the number of petty faults and superstitions; and the Levites and Pharisees at the date of Christ, far from considering all this a comedy, were the most stiff-necked of believers. It results that a new religion that proposed to ignore the chief edicts of the Taboo must have come from some strong outside influence. The two great foes of the savage, as Mr. Frazer shows in his able work, the "Golden Bough," were the ghost and the necromancer. The first was deemed all-powerful, and the second sought to use this power to help the tribe and injure its rivals. His art was that of the farmer, the warrior, the doctor--in fact, in his view, pure science. And the laws and ordinances were a Great Taboo, acts forbidden or enjoined to control the ghosts. Let the Deuteronomist himself tell us what Israel was to expect if she kept these laws and ordinances. Yahve, it is said, "will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee, and he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine and the flocks of thy sheep.... The Lord will take away from thee all sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt which thou knowest upon thee, but will lay them upon all them that hate thee.... Moreover, the Lord thy God will send the hornet amongst them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed." This was the religion of Moses. The ghostly head of the clan would give abundant flocks and fertile ground to those who fed him with burnt-offerings, but failing these, would send "the blotch, the itch, the scab" (Deut. xxviii. 27), the victorious foeman--and change the fertilising rain to the "powder and dust" of the desert.